The $23 Million "Man Crush"

I’m not completely sure what to make of the fact that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney outraised other Repug candidates for president at the end of the previous quarter.

I mean, I know absolutely zero about where this man stands on anything, though I will readily admit that I don’t pay as much attention to the Repugs as I do to the Dems.

Even this fine column by Amy Sullivan in Washington Monthly is about the stupid “perception games” that utterly dominate our politics (pertaining to Romney’s Mormonism in this case), stuff that I think John Edwards, for one, is trying to escape, along with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to a lesser degree.

But I guess many of the big Repug donors are swooning for Romney a la Roger Simon from a recent column in “The Politico,” the Drudge-lite blog brought to us by our corporate media under the guise of partiality.

I suppose it bears repeating that it’s infinitely more important to find out where these people come down on the issues that matter than whether or not they look good in a suit or appear to be genuine when handling sandbags to help reinforce a flooded riverbank or tossing out the first pitch in a little league baseball game (and speaking of ceremonial rites of spring, it’s good to see that the Phillies upheld tradition by losing again on opening day).

Regarding Romney, I recall how he claimed that he was going to get to the bottom of the Big Dig tunnel collapse last year that killed Milena Del Valle and injured her fiancée Angel, though Romney ended up using some unfortunate language in the process. And he compounded that by stating describing Del Valle's death, as noted here by Media Nation, as “something” that “happened” that would give Romney grounds to remove Massachusetts Turnpike Authority chairman Matthew Amorello, which Romney did (God, Mitt, you’re just such a compassionate guy, aren’t you?).

And I’m still waiting for Romney to have his supposed “JFK moment” where, in true statesman-like fashion, he proclaims that it’s more important to represent this entire country than a sect of it encompassed by his religion (and even if he did, he still would have no shot at winning over the fundie zealots who have been engrained in the belief that Mormonism is paganism, though I had to laugh at Sullivan’s remark that they might vote for Romney by default in the general election if he won the nomination against HRC, since that Southern 30 percent Repug “base” considers Clinton to be “the bride of the devil”).

So, with John McCain running all over Iraq with 100 soldiers, 3 Blackhawks and 2 Apaches to cover his ass, Rudy G. whining to the media to leave his personal life alone (heh, heh, heh), and Dubya today kicking and screaming like the intellectual dwarf that he truly is, it looks like Mitt Romney is the Repug “man of the moment” (and, as is so often the case with the Repugs, I see no military experience as a representative of the party that wants to wage the war in Iraq indefinitely).

Next year could actually be fun.

Update: In fairness to the commenter, I should point out that the Pew site is very good, and if this person wants to support Romney, fine. However, Mitt tows the Repug line through and through as you might expect, particularly on the Iraq war, and that tells me all I need to know.

Update 4/4/07: And Mitt keeps such good company, doesn't he?