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"FacebookPinterest\n\n About eight months ago, I was tasked with an assignment: Starting in South Carolina, I would follow Governor Mitt \"Tin Man\" Romney on the long trail, from winter to summer of his life's most important year. My job was to get as close to the candidate as possible on a mission of the spirit: to search for signs of genuine life, to spy out those remnants of the candidate's humanity not yet blown to smithereens in the psyops war between the campaign and the press. In that time, I have learned a few things. Those things are these.\n\nMore on Mitt:\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined\n\n Thanks to his campaign's all but unprecedented restrictive vigilance in the media-access department, trying to penetrate the veneer of the Romney brand is like trying to split a billiard ball with a butter knife. Getting anywhere close to him will require you to suffer repeated, soul-depleting exposures to his campaign anthem, Kid Rock's \"Born Free.\" You will also endure an uncountable number of citizens reciting this sentence verbatim: \"I like his business background, and I think he's got the best chance of beating Obama.\" You will hear people applauding with dire fervor for huge transnational oil-bearing tubes, for voter-identification laws, for Mitt Romney's plan to defund PBS: \"Big Bird is gonna have to get used to cornflakes.\" In lieu of actual access, you will be reduced to spending many stageside hours formulating new descriptions of the governor's hair and speculating on which side he dresses to. (The evidence suggests it's the left.) You will come to sort of adore Ann Romney and to believe her when she says that when Mitt wondered aloud whether he was the right man for the job, she asked her husband, \"Can you save America?\"\n\n You will become fluent in the governor's facial habits: \"The Face in Repose,\" heavy browed, eyes sitting back in cautious little caverns. \"The Sainted Aunt,\" his pissed-off look, head canted, blinking crossly, lips tightened to a peckish-peevish dash.\n\n You will see a nation's worth of people in khaki pants and blue blazers, a couple of African-Americans, and white people. Lots of white people. You will meet a classmate of the candidate's who will offer intel like \"He got people to cheer at football games\" and feel like you scored a scoop. You will meet a baby wearing a button reading ENJOY CAPITALISM. And in the end, you will shell out a sum exceeding your monthly mortgage payment to touch him, and in hysterical desperation to try to know an unknowable man, you will conclude that it was worth it.\n\n\n\n Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Hear Mitt's Singing Voice\n\n unless you're Megyn Kelly, your search for Romney begins where mine did, on the stump. So where is the candidate now? Somewhere far away on a warm, dry bus, while we are in some rain and some mud. Icy BBs of precip slant down on the venue, Harmon's Tree Farm, a roadside Christmas-tree brokerage west of Columbia, South Carolina. The folk cower under romney for president signs, which wilt on their heads to resemble the swooping wimples of Renaissance nuns. A band is set up on a trailer, jamming \"You Shook Me All Night Long.\" It's sort of cool that people in the virtual age still want a glimpse of the candidate in the flesh, when his voice hasn't been digitally processed to demiurgic sonority or his face cosmetically treated to resemble whittled foam latex. They want to see the man.\n\n Now the bus is here. The bus is here! Mitt himself is riding shotgun. Or standing shotgun, bending under the sun visor to wave at the crowd in a queenly manner. He clambers to a microphone dais in front of an age-browned barn. In person, he looks a little narrower, a little wind-gnawed. More human, less off-puttingly perfect than reported in the press.\n\n I have been forewarned that, on the stump, Romney's humanity is rarely manifest. As you know from 10,000 news-analysis pieces, Mitt's father, George Romney, ruined his own presidential bid by speaking candidly\u2014if clumsily\u2014against the Vietnam War, and the media tell us that the son now guards his candid sentiments as though they were doubloons.\n\n Well, the media are full of beans, because right off the bat, Romney hits us with some unscripted juice. \"My, oh my, you guys are great to be out here with this rain,\" he says. He has declined the use of an umbrella and is getting rained on with the rest of us. He grins, jaw like a crescent moon. \"This guy here with the orange shirt\u2014boy, that thing is turning a diff...a deeper color of orange here this morning.\"\n\n The man's shirt is turning a deeper color of orange due to moisture saturation, is the phenomenon that Mitt Romney is pointing out. Is there an emotional clue here? Not to his essential self, perhaps, but the remark does suggest a man who does not often behold damp textiles, who perhaps comes from a land where the laws of materiality and hydrology are different from our own. But the orange-shirt remark is all the candor Mitt's giving up this morning. From here, he declaims a replica of the speech he's been reciting two or three times a day for weeks.\n\n If you've somehow dodged Romney's stump speech until now, its rather flavorless nubs are these: \"1.7 million jobs lost in the private sector. Oh, by the way, [Obama's] added 135,000 jobs in the governmental sector.... Get rid of Obamacare and return health care to the individuals.... Maintain a strong military.... Come out of poverty by virtue of our belief in free trade, free enterprise.... Spent my life in the private sector. I know how the economy works.... Return to the principles that made us the hope of the earth.... Pursuit of happiness... Prosperous future...\" Blork blah blargh.\n\n The speech's only thing resembling a distinctive from-the-heart gesture comes at the closer, when Romney says, \"I love the hymns of America.... O beautiful for spacious skies / For amber waves of grain.\"\n\n One is baffled. One imagines that if an eighth-grader, assigned to write a presidential stump speech, turned in cribbed lines from \"America the Beautiful,\" he would probably be given a C.\n\n Is that being too hard on Mitt? Aren't campaign speeches always empty emissions of flag-scented nonsense?\n\n By way of comparison, I've dug up Obama's stump speech from the '08 campaign. Here's one of the vaguer, cheaper bits of empty pander-dander Obama served us: \"Now is not the time for fear. Now is not the time for panic. Now is the time for resolve and steady leadership. We can meet this moment. We can come together to restore confidence in the American economy. We can renew that fundamental belief\u2014that in America, our destiny is not written for us, but by us. That's who we are, and that's the country we need to be right now.\"\n\n I dunno. For a bunch of empty horseshit, it does actually make me want to go out and, what, buy a Ford or something, to be part of a patriotic good-doing American Us. Not sure what it says about Romney, who, when addressing a nation as broken as the one Obama was speaking to, wants us to put our hands over our hearts and think about wheat.\n\n But perhaps Romney sincerely finds succor and redemption in century-old patriotic schlock. I'm trying to formulate this idea into a question that can be shouted from the rope line. As Romney descends the stage, I shoulder forth. For a moment, from a distance of perhaps a dozen thoras, I do glimpse a snatch of graying temple fur, some silver globules on the lacquered hair helmet, but then the bus door gasps open. He is gone.\n\n\n\n Empty as a Walnut Shell\n\n In Mitt's eighteen-year political career, he has never bested an opponent in the \"regular dude\" portion of an electoral competition. With the appealingly Clampett-like Rick Perry bowing out this week, there was a chance Mitt could have maybe benefited from the race's authenticity vacuum, but Newt Gingrich has beaten him to the punch. Or rather Newt's ex-wife did, alleging Newt once proposed a marital arrangement whereby he would keep the splendid alabaster Callista on hand for side nookie.\n\n When CNN's John King asked him about it in the South Carolina debate, Newt tore him the most passionate of new ones, bringing down the house and jacking up his poll numbers. So tonight they're packed in like Vienna sausages to see him at Whiteford's Giant Burger, in the western South Carolina town of Laurens. The place teems with folk whose builds would suggest that this isn't the first time they've seen the inside of Whiteford's Giant Burger. Hairdos: Ozark shag, high and tight, Mandrell supernova, Pentecostal yanker-braid, blue-gray \"blowup\" perm-nimbuses that look capable of supporting a novelty bat. Hard-core Baptist situation here.\n\n So what gives?\n\n \"Well, Newt's strayed, I'll give you that, but everybody does,\" a prim, elderly lady tells me, by way of explaining her fondness for Gingrich. In other words, everybody\u2014even a buttoned-up Carolina matron\u2014can relate to the concept of cheating on your steady. Not everybody can relate to a guy to whom $374,000 constitutes \"not very much\" money, who claimed the family dog liked being strapped to the roof of a speeding station wagon, and who is inexplicably prickish to people who bake him cookies. (\"They don't look like you made them.... No, no. They look like they came from the local 7-Eleven.\")\n\n \"Mitt is as empty as a walnut shell,\" another, older matron to my left is opining to a member of the British press.\n\n Romney must be wholly bewildered to be losing out, in one of the reddest states in the union, to a candidate whose serial adulteries have transformed in the weird political ether of winter 2012 into a political strength. Quite amazing that Romney, who it seems has not even a skeletal pinkie digit anywhere in his closet, somehow sets everyone ill at ease. Numerous Romney biographies would seem to confirm that Mitt is, to his very marrow, the walking article of unimpeachable human kitsch our presidential candidates are supposed to be, yet everyone seems to hate him for it.\n\n The Gingrich bus arrives. \"I see his white hair!\" cries the woman I'm chatting with. And there they are. Gingrich, the solid little fireplug, and Callista, looking ever more vector-drawn, aerodynamic, Pixarish.\n\n Then Newt opens his mouth, and you understand why it's curtains for Mitt in South Carolina. Here in the Whiteford's Giant Burger, with a zillion other things on his mind, Gingrich extemporizes a speech about an anniversary promotion offering Giant Burgers at 1957 prices that seems positively Ciceronian compared with Mitt's fumbling, wet-orange-shirt, trees-are-the-right-height attempts to persuade us that he lives in the same dimension we do.\n\n Now he's going on about the Port of Charleston, and here is the coup de gr&amp;amp;#xE2;ce. A toddler waddles over and, while Newt's talking, tugs on his pants or something. Newt stops his speech, smirks down at the little guy, and asks, \"Hello, do you have a mommy? What? You're Johnny Cash? Jordan Cash? Thank you, Jordan Cash.\"\n\n And he sends the toddler toodling off. When the speech winds down, I talk with a woman named Pam DeLong, who is a Tea Partier here in Laurens. She is for Newt because he's for real, he's a smarty, and because of stuff like the Jordan Cash moment. \"When that little boy came over, he stopped and talked to him, and he was so natural, and then he just went back into his speech without missing a beat. Romney couldn't do that. Newt knows what he's talking about. He doesn't let things fluster him, which is why I think he'd be the best guy to take on Obama.\"\n\n In other words, Newt is an ideal candidate because when an infant pestered him, he hacked it, took it like a man, a pro. If it were Romney? And an infant started fucking with him? You know it would be bad, some pediatric version of the time he sang \"Who Let the Dogs Out\" to black teens in Florida. \"Hello, little organism different from myself. I will now make noises that I believe are comprehensible to your kind.\"\n\n\n\n Baboons, Moon Quakers, and Other \"Facts\" from the Romney Family Vault\n\n After sampling as a mere civilian a half dozen of Romney's stump speeches\u2014each of them as indistinct and flavorless as a backgammon lozenge\u2014I feel no closer to the man. So I resolve to connive my way into his personal space using media clout. In late February, I secure a spot on Mitt's press bus in Michigan, setting me back a surprisingly whopping $404.80 for a mere three days of jitneying to campaign events. But given that in primary seasons past a seat on the campaign bus has generally been a surefire route to face time with the candidates, it seems worth the bucks.\n\n Out in front of the Grand Rapids Marriott this morning is parked the big white suppository of a tour bus that will ferry us tonight 140 miles north to a campaign event in Traverse City. The ladies and gents of the press are pre-mustering in the marble lobby. They're all of them over in the little lounge area, chatting and having a personal-electronics orgy. They seem like inmates of a not very fun sleepaway camp where you endure the same program of activities day in, day out, growing ever more desperate for the teensiest divergence from the standard routine.\n\n Head counselor of our camp is a youngish Secret Service guy named Todd. Todd has a blond buzz cut and is apple-cheeked, and has a really winning, youthful smile. He turns out to be supercool. He sometimes gives us candy, and lets the Fourth Estate bring hooch and brewskis on the bus.\n\n Early on I ask a campaign person when I'll get to talk to the candidate. I'm told that Romney may be taking questions at some point, or possibly he may not. I ask the other media folk, some of whom have been on the bus for months, whether they ever get exclusive, non-pool access to the candidate. The question is met with quizzical laughter.\n\n One guy boarding the bus who is far too handsome and besuited to be a print journalist\u2014broadcast, for sure\u2014turns out to be Ari Shapiro of NPR. He and Michael Barbaro of The New York Times are the undisputed cool kids of the bus. Rolling out of Grand Rapids, some television ladies toward the back are giggling about something toilet-related, but mostly people are getting on the Internet, filing, busting their asses.\n\n Meanwhile, I study up on the candidate we're all chasing. Herewith, things I learned while reading The Real Romney, by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman:\n\n Romney prefers to eat only the tops of muffins, the logic here being that during cooking the butter and unhealthful lipids have melted down into the base. Good idea.\n\n Romney's mother was a Hollywood hopeful until George Romney successfully pressured her to quash those hopes to make more time for whelping.\n\n Romney is partly named for Mormon scrillionaire J. Willard Marriott.\n\n Mitt was a mediocre student and a dismal athlete.\n\n I knew that Mitt had some relatives in Mexico. I did not know that they were the offspring of Mitt's great-grandfather Miles P. Romney, who fled to Mexico during the great polygamy crackdown following the Civil War. It was not Miles's idea but a direct order from church leaders, who thought it important that Miles live in a place where he could ball a full harem with impunity.\n\n Mitt has said this about polygamy: \"I must admit, I can't imagine anything more awful than polygamy.\" This is a failure of imagination. I can, in a split second, imagine lots of things more awful than polygamy. One, two, three, go! The Holocaust, guzzling a bucket of pus, a baboon fucking a human baby. I could quite easily go on but shall not.\n\n Detroit, where George ultimately moved, was once home to a polygamists' prison where Miles Romney would have been incarcerated if he'd been brought to justice for that scene he had going down Mexico way.\n\n Five was the number of Miles Romney's wives.\n\n Following the pus-and-baboon motif: An Arizona newspaper editor once described Miles Romney as \"a mass of putrid pus and rotten goose pimples; a skunk with the face of a baboon, the character of a louse, the breath of a buzzard and the record of a perjurer and common drunkard,\" in addition to recommending his hanging.\n\n In college, Mitt kept a picture of his father on his desk, and even back in the day neither cussed nor drank.\n\n Mitt once did the moonwalk.\n\n In 2005, Romney rather cynically effaced his identity as a pro-choice, gay-friendly centrist and became a social conservative. One of the more appalling elements of the transformation: He reversed an earlier avowal that he hoped stem cells might cure Ann's multiple sclerosis.\n\n A point Romney's biographers repeatedly stress is that he isn't ever truly comfortable around people he considers outsiders and is most at ease with fellow members of his faith. That is, he seems to divide the world into two groups: his in-group and the suspicious, hostile world at large with whom it is dangerous to be too honest. Which perhaps is fine when it comes to matters of Mormonism, but I'd aver that this ethos creeps into his political discourse, too. A rather disquieting example is Romney's recent quote that politicians should only discuss matters like income inequality \"in quiet rooms,\" not within earshot of the rabble to whom the issue matters most direly. Hmm. And this is probably a stretch, but one does wonder, too, if Romney's mutability doesn't take unconscious justification from the protean doctrines of the LDS Church, which has had to do quite a bit of scrambling and renouncing and denying the existence of the many, many curious ideas on which the faith was built.\n\n What renounced weird ideas? Well, this stuff, from the next book in my stack, about the theology of Mitt's Mormon faith, The God Makers by Ed Decker and Dave Hunt: e.g., how before we're born we're all gods floating around in space, only when we get crammed into our baby bodies\u2014\"the infant tabernacle\"\u2014our brains get banged around and we can't remember our divinity. Or Joseph Smith's belief that the moon is inhabited by really tall Quakers who live to be a thousand years old. Or Brigham Young's claims that people live on the sun. Or polygamy? How'd they get started on that? Because \"an angel of God, with a drawn sword, stood before [Smith] and commanded that he should enter into the practice of that principle, or he should be utterly destroyed.... It need scarcely be said that the Prophet found no one any more willing to lead out in this matter in righteousness than he was himself.... None excelled or even matched the courage of the Prophet himself.\" Of course, none of this explains the totality or even a fraction of what Mitt Romney believes, but it does explain why Smith, despite having some forty wives, still endeavored to fuck everything in sight.\n\n\n\n Ann Romney, Snake Handler\n\n Out, out through a nowheresville of pines. Ari Shapiro and Todd the Secret Service man are sharing ercise information. Shapiro is rather annoyingly accomplished and perfect. He defies all we hear about the ugliness of radio people. Olive-skinned with eight-inch eyelashes. He does parkour, the European sport of jumping off buildings. He also performs with the band Pink Martini and will be playing Carnegie Hall this year.\n\n Road vibrations tremble the blubber in my cheeks.\n\n \"We are seriously in the middle of nowhere,\" says Ari Shapiro, whose lush vocal timbre makes even his offhand remarks sound practiced and slick.\n\n Indeed: forests lined with snowmobile tracks. Tire museums in yards. Now some barns. \"Look at this quaint old barn,\" says Shapiro. \"It's so...American. I love the hymns of America.\"\n\n Closing in on Traverse City, someone says, \"It's one of the fanciest towns in Michigan, if not the fanciest.\"\n\n \"That's like saying, it's the warmest town in Alaska,\" someone else quips. The rally is being held in a hotel ballroom downtown. The press is ushered in through a side door, led behind a forest of TV camera tripods and into a cordoned media corral where everybody props open their laptops and starts fervently checking out the World Wide Web.\n\n Okay, showtime! Mitt and Ann Romney have taken the stage. Mitt's looking good. Glad to be on home turf. For this member of the press, it's thrilling to hear a new opener to the stump speech: \"You know, this young lady next to me, she and I used to spend a little time at Manistee,\" he says. \"I know there are some young people in the room, but I actually kissed her there.\" The young people in the room do not begin clutching their skulls and shrieking at this news, but it was good of him to warn us. Quickly defaults back to the field-tested warm-up material, namely the old tale of how he connived Ann away from a high school pal. The limelight is forked over to his lady. A soul clue here for sure. Mitt can't be pure robot. Ann, multiple granny though she is, is still a tamale. Looking real good up there. A hell of a tan for February. The Romneys were down in Daytona Beach, Florida, today. Maybe she scored the bronzing there.\n\n \"I love being in Michigan,\" Ann says, in a way that, comparatively speaking, seems almost fiercely genuine and real. The crowd seems to sit a little more easefully in its skin when Ann's on the mike. Then she cuts loose with a fusillade of hillbilly knowledge lost on those who have never grubbed after reptiles and minerals along the Michigan coast. \"I liked to go on the road and catch the blue racers and scare my brothers. I draped them around my neck and wrists.\" Can you picture it? Have you seen old pictures of Ann? She was the absolute stonest of fos. Dude, young Ann, with a blue racer\u2014which, it turns out, is a blue or gray snake (Coluber constrictor foxii) reaching sixty inches in length\u2014draped about her neck. Yowza. \"And who loves Petoskey stones?\" she asks. The crowd roars for Petoskey stones. \"There are some people in the country that don't know what Petoskey stones are.\"\n\n \"Let's kill 'em!\" one is tempted to bawl, even though one has no motherfucking idea what a Petoskey stone is, but that's how utterly winning old Ann is. Whatever team she's on, you want on it, too.\n\n Romney claims the mike again. Stump speech ensues. \"...Obamacare: We're getting rid of that... Get America on track... Twenty-five percent... Get that pipeline... Increase purchases of ships, increase our purchases of aircraft, add 100,000 troops of personnel, and finally give our veterans the care they deserve... I love the hymns of America.\"\n\n Well, okay, he's spelled out a few things and delivered the requisite attacks on Obama. Yet the speech still feels like a Frankenstein monster that has yet to be zapped with the lightning bolt. Or so it feels to me. But to the large bald guy behind me, the speech is fully zapped, or more accurately, he's zapping it for the rest of us, bellowing, \"Hey-yo!\" \"Hear, hear!\" and \"Waaaaugh!\" A kind of walrus roar.\n\n When Mitt gets to O beautiful for heroes blork... and calls for a show of hands of vets in the room, the Exploder roars, \"Bravo! Bravo!\" and claps a paw to the shoulder of an older gent who's got his arm raised. The veteran looks frankly terrified to be made the object of a sudden manhandling. \"Thank you for your service,\" says the Exploder.\n\n \"What?\" says the veteran, cringing.\n\n \"Thank you!\" the man booms.\n\n Romney's speech wraps. By way of introduction, the Exploder snaps a business card into my hand. The card reads \"Jim Savage 'Day Maker' \" alongside the header \"American Bald Eagle\" and a painting of an eagle glowering through a diaphanous American flag.\n\n \"That's an American bald eagle,\" he clarifies, stabbing the card with a digit. \"They call me the Bald Eagle.\" So why is the Bald Eagle so keen on Romney? \"He's had the experience to run a business, and the government's a business, and it's out of control. I'm a patriot.\" I should but don't press the Bald Eagle on his point about government being a business. I know this is the linchpin of Romney's campaign and everything, but it seems to me that the point of a business is to make money, and the point of a government is to look after citizens. But the larger thing I'm curious about is the weird metaphorical limberness of the word business in this campaign. According to Romney, \"Corporations are people.\" The dominant message of nearly every speech is that Obama hasn't done enough to look after corporations and Business, a word used almost interchangeably for \"the People\" in this campaign. How is it that Business, during this election, is somehow the wellspring of all that is golden and pie-and-hot-dog scented in these United States? Wasn't it Business that got us into this mess?\n\n The Bald Eagle goes on to tell me that he has ten grandchildren, and he is \"scared to death\" that they might not see the same good fortune he did: \"I lived the American dream, and I achieved it, and it makes me sick.\"\n\n Bald Eagle made his fortune selling insurance, and by 40, he was retired. He bought six Arabian horses, two of which he hitched to a chariot that led the Michigan State Spartans out of the tunnel before home football games. Otherwise, he spent his riding around on a yacht. \"I wouldn't have had that yacht in Communist China. I'm a patriot,\" he says, with earnest vehemence. Before meeting the Bald Eagle, I'd figured that this notion\u2014that the accrual of personal capital is both a valorous and patriotic pursuit\u2014was a feeble way of justifying politicians' bald advancement of theirs and their campaign donors' interests, not something people sincerely believed. But I guess I sort of get it now: that America is a wondrous land where no queens or Communists can keep an Aflac man from attaining his maximum of democratic liberty, in this case embodied in a yacht. And even if you haven't yet got a yacht, who better to put your faith in than a man who could buy a fleet of schooners and not break a sweat?\n\n I thank the Bald Eagle for the conversation. He salutes me and says, \"See the people, tell the story. Climb to the top of the pile. God bless.\"\n\n\n\n Searching for Croutons of Truth in a B.S. Salad\n\n Back at the bus, the massive news is that an AP reporter has dug up a wire story about Mitt's visit that day to the racetrack at Daytona. The story, buried deep on the sports wire, contains the now infamous quote: \"I have some great friends who are NASCAR-team owners.\"\n\n A sports journalist evidently got the quote down at the track. The AP reporter, whose name is Kasie, well aware of the shitstorm the quote potentially poses for Romney, tracks down the sportswriter's number and calls him as he's eating dinner somewhere to be sure the quote is solid, unedited, and national-press-bus-consumption-grade stuff. \n\n When he e-mails her the audio file, Kasie calls out to the bus, \"Asked if he follows NASCAR, [Romney] said, 'Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some great friends who are NASCAR-team owners.' The quote is whole and altogether. No ellipses!\"\n\n \"Wow,\" says Barbaro of The New York Times. \"Can we use it?\"\n\n \"You can use it,\" says Kasie.\n\n Within seconds, everybody has gobbled it up: the Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Good Morning America, some bloggers, NPR. Ari Shapiro is already recording a spot citing the quote for tomorrow morning's broadcast, which he records under his jacket in the seat behind me: \"...he may have done some damage by drawing attention to his wealth once again.\"\n\n Some television person is saying, \"We definitely want to make sure that this gets into all the shows tomorrow.\"\n\n \"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!\" someone shouts.\n\n Just to be clear, the thrill here doesn't have the feel of a liberal-media feeding frenzy so much as the joy of people who, after many days of being force-fed the same \"I love the hymns of America\" wheat paste all day every day, have finally filched a good crunchy crouton from their minders. You see, if the campaign's job is to get the press to reiterate its contrived fictions, the media's job is to contrive our own fiction\u2014not necessarily one that countermands or calls attention to the campaign's flimsy stagecraft, just one that makes the horse race more entertaining for the viewers at home. What Sophocles knew, what every Hollywood hack knows, is that a story is not a story without tragic flaws and dramatic obstacles. And the NASCAR quote is a perfectly simple and juicy plot point in our tale about the man who would be president if he could only shut up about his enormous wealth.\n\n \"It's pretty fascinating, how this works,\" reflects Barbaro. \"It's twelve people on a bus.\"\n\n Shapiro is retaking his piece: \"...he may have done some damage by drawing attention to his wealth once again.\"\n\n It's fun listening to Ari. \"Your voice is insane,\" somebody says.\n\n \"I like how you go down on damage, not up.\"\n\n Within two hours, \"Mitt Romney: I have some friends who are NASCAR team owners\" is headlining innumerable blogs. By the following day\u2014ratified by just about every newscast, opinion page, and late-night comic in the land\u2014the quote is firmly bedded in the historical record of how the 2012 horse race went down.\n\n\n\n In Which I Fall in Man-Love with the Candidate\n\n Today is primary day in Michigan, and with the polls tight and Romney in need of free advertising, he is going to do the unthinkable. He is going to risk it all and talk to the press, known in industry parlance as an \"avail.\" The avail is happening at a campaign HQ outside of Detroit. The conceit of the morning is that the volunteers are grinding for election day, but really everyone's just here to see Mitt. The space\u2014an office realm of blue low-nap carpeting, folding plastic furniture\u2014is tiny. The press crowds in. I'm jammed against a wall. Each of my feet is wedged under the butt of a different reporter. With a few minutes to go until he arrives, the journalists start madly colluding as to which questions to ask him. We know our time with Romney probably won't top five minutes' worth of evasions and sound bites, and so it's to everyone's advantage to hone the queries as a group, to try to provoke answers everyone can use.\n\n What's my question? Jesus, I haven't got a question. Why? Because to even ask Mitt a question seems like a weird and not wholly ingenuous thing to do. For example, I'd have a hard time asking Romney something like this consensus-approved non-question: \"Do you understand that references to your wealth are hurting your campaign?\" A loose translation of the query might be, \"Hey, are you a fucking moron?\" The main motive of this non-question is to solicit an evasive non-answer which will serve to deepen the tragic plight of our bumbling protag. Hey, Romney is so out of touch he doesn't even realize how out of touch he is! \n\n Actually, I guess there is something I'd like to ask him, something I think a lot of us would like to know. If I weren't absolutely certain that the rest of the press pool would pummel me for taking up valuable avail time, I'd go: \"Uh, yeah, you really have weather-vaned quite a bit over the course of your career\u2014you know, abortion, gay rights, health care, etc. And it really does seem as though the one thing that's stayed consistent about you is your relentless ambition, which I and lots of other people suppose is a kind of by-proxy redemption of your father's failed bid for the presidency. I know you loved your father enormously, and so that makes sense. But if your father was important enough to inspire you to run for president, why does his centrist legacy seem to affect your own Weltanschauung not at all? George Romney once lamented that the GOP was increasingly regarded 'too much as a business party.' He also, according to Kranish and Helman, wrote a letter to Goldwater on the subject of civil rights in which he said, 'The rights of some must not be enjoyed by denying the rights of others,' a philosophy hardly consonant with your stance on gay marriage or, for that matter, your conviction that it's okay for enormously wealthy people like yourself to be tad at a lower rate than working folk. Is he wrong or are you?\"\n\n Mitt finally arrives. He's wearing 1969 Gap jeans. He rounds the room, grippin' 'n' grinnin'. \"Good to see you here this morning,\" etc. His head's a little larger this close. I am surprised to find my heart is skittering girlishly to be so near to him. Really, he's pretty dreamy. Preternaturally handsome. And the furrows in his hair helmet are so perfectly spaced.\n\n Then, as abruptly as he entered the room, Romney starts legging toward the door whence he came, and the press starts going, Urk, urgle, what about the press avail? We were promised an avail! And an aide pinches him on the elbow and says, \"Do you want to take some questions from the press?\" And Romney goes, \"No.\" That's kind of funny, right? And it's sincere! And kind of cool! Here is the brilliance of Romney, Master Strategist of Low Expectations: He is so legendarily nonhuman, so unfailingly awkward, such a geeky, Eisenhower-era dorkwad, that when he betrays even the faintest spark of wit, your heart, my heart, goes pitter-pat.\n\n \"No.\" Man, he is one cool dude.\n\n He comes over. Immediately it's like the open outcry at the hog-futures pit. An unintelligible din of queries. This one gets through: \"Do you think that your specific comments about your own wealth\u2014whether it was the Cadillacs line or the NASCAR-team-owners line on Sunday\u2014do you realize how those are hurting your campaign?\"\n\n \"Yes,\" Romney says. \"Next question.\" Pow! \n\n My nascent, unanticipated love for Romney solidifies when a bird smashes into the window and everybody jumps, and Romney\u2014in the middle of fielding a question about Santorum, says totally off the cuff: \"He's trying to get in. Do not let him in.\" Meaning Santorum, maybe? It's not quite a Gingrich-and-the-infant virtuoso move. But still, I'd have thought that a bird, an earthly bird smashing into the window, would have totally thrown Mitt the Martian from his birdless planet off his game.\n\n Subtract a few points, maybe, for the following answer. Asked what he would say to a voter who lamented, \"I just don't think we know Mitt Romney.\"\n\n He says he \"wrote a couple of books. So, if someone really wants to get to know me better, they can take a read of the books.\"\n\n Then comes a seemingly innocuous Q: \"I know how much some of these states have been squeakers. Have you been satisfied with how your campaign has been run so far?\"\n\n A: \"I've been very pleased by the campaign and its organization. The candidates sometimes make some mistakes.\"\n\n Q: \"You say you've made some mistakes. I'm curious as to what you're talking about.\"\n\n A: \"Oh, I can't imagine you would have a hard time coming up with an answer to that.\"\n\n The avail wraps. Heading back to the Suppository, a New York Times photographer says, \"Man, that was great. That was awesome.\"\n\n \"Amazing,\" says another photog.\n\n And I'm all, \"Yeah, I know. I really feel like seeing him up close, he actually for once seemed like a human being. And when that bird flew into the window\u2014\"\n\n And the two photographers look at me, and they're all, \"Uh, we were being sarcastic.\"\n\n Back on the bus, the prevailing sentiments are these:\n\n \"Good avail, good avail.\"\n\n There is some temporary excitement about Romney having used the word wheelhouse.\n\n \"Nah, he'd used it before.\"\n\n \"He used the word kidnap in reference to Santorum. That was good.\"\n\n But what's the day's crouton? What's everybody going to feed on?\n\n \"Is he saying he made mistakes?\" someone asks, going over the tape.\n\n \"Yes, he absolutely said he made mistakes.\"\n\n So Ari Shapiro behind me is recording a spot that goes, \"Today, Mitt Romney took responsibility for his campaign's shortcomings.\" Which, have a look at the transcript above, he hardly did; but this, in part, is why the whole campaign&amp;amp;#x2013;Fourth Estate tango is a silly ercise in deceptive Kabuki. Had Romney played the game better, he'd have said, \"No, we have never made a single mistake. The campaign is perfect. To ever mention mistakes in my presence is biased and inappropriate.\" Instead, romney admits mistakes reads the afternoon headline in The New York Times.\n\n\n\n The 1-Percenter Reach Around\n\n Having failed\u2014both as a member of the lumpen public and the credentialed press\u2014to observe anything resembling a candid moment suggestive of Romney's actual nature, one begins to suspect that he doesn't get real with folks merely for the asking. You've got to shell out serious bucks for it. And so I've paid $1,000 to come and try to hang with him here in Oklahoma City. My hope is that tonight among friends in the reddest state in the nation (not a single county went for Obama in 2008), Romney might let down his hair some, or at least permit the helmet to soften a degree or two.\n\n The fund-raiser is taking place at the home of one Harold Hamm, an oil honcho who is the energy chairman for the Romney campaign. Harold Hamm holds the number 30 spot on Forbes magazine's inventory of the most loaded Americans. He has about 11 billion bucks, more than one billion of which he lost last week in a single day of trading. Dag. Lost over a billion bucks in a day! Roughly the GDP of Grenada. Man, how does that feel? I'd like to ask him, but I probably won't get the chance. My pathetic, risible thousand doesn't actually get me into Harold Hamm's house. It only gets me onto his yard. For $5,000, you get inside. You are guaranteed to be able to touch Romney and to have a pic snapped with him. That's VIP access. I have general access. No picture. If you want to do some Romney touching, you have to finagle it yourself.\n\n The surrounding area of the Hamm home isn't superfancy. It's a zone of brick ramblers and nonbrick ramblers, but ramblers, ramblers far as the eye can see. I suspect I could make some cash in this neighborhood selling welcome mats embroidered SECOND STORIES ARE FOR QUEERS.\n\n On the Hamms' sumptuous lawn, I wind up chatting with a lady in a cowboy hat whose earrings are little silver oil towers. She is an oil person and coughed up for the indoor-access VIP ticket, which means she got to occupy the outskirts of Romney's aura. How was it?\n\n \"My whole vibe from him was: He's a nice guy,\" she says. \"He's standing there, and he doesn't know how he got there, and I thought it was really nice how he wanted to know everybody's first name. But he was kinda nervous. He's just a man.\"\n\n I ask her how she feels about Romney and/or this year's Republican field. \"I don't really trust any of them,\" she says with a sigh.\n\n Romney's in the yard. Romney's in the yard! Not in the general-population yard yard but over there, on a little stage behind some rope. Governor Mary Fallin is talking now, introducing Romney with these exact words: \"The overpower, overreaching federal government, and how it is overstepping and businesses and frankly even into our personal freedom and personal lives and we don't like that here in Oklahoma so we know that [Romney] is the man who can help transform our nation to create the type of strong, vibrant economy that we need as a nation to be competitive in the global economy.\"\n\n Okay, Mitt baby. Soul time. Come on. I paid for it. Give me some juice.\n\n \"Thank you, Governor, that's better than I can say it,\" says Mitt.\n\n He does not give me some juice. He delivers a room-temp Ronald-Reagan-shining-city-on-the-hill bootleg, but salts it a bit more heavily with hey-fellow-1-percenter reach arounds.\n\n He says: \"If a Democrat were here, they'd say, 'No one should live like this.' Republicans say, 'Everybody should live like this.' \"\n\n He says, \"Success does not make us poorer. The better [Harold Hamm] does, the lower the prices of energy and the more we can afford as a people.\"\n\n He says, of Americans, \"Rather than being guided by the circumstances of our birth or government telling us what to do, we're guided by our dreams.... As I watch this president, the reason his policies have failed is that he doesn't understand the power of dreams.\"\n\n Maybe this is it. Maybe this is as essentially human as Mitt gets. I mean, in five months he's given me no reason to suppose he doesn't whisper these sorts of things to Ann in the confidence of their California- king-size. If that's the case, I am concerned. It's distressing not only that the son of a bajillionaire governor whose aspirations to the presidency he inherited with his father's jawline would accuse the mid-race kid of a decidedly unrich single mom of failing to \"understand the power of dreams.\" It is that Romney is able, in one breath, to make such reverent sounds about the American Dream, about American lives \"not being guided by the circumstances of our birth\" and then also to characterize any public talk of income inequality as a form of lesser treason. One would think that somebody selling himself as a clear-eyed economy mechanic would recognize America's inequality problem for what it is: the nonideological symptom of an economy that isn't firing on all cylinders.\n\n Here's what most economists say: Widening income inequality is bad for social mobility, a.k.a. doing better than your parents, a.k.a. the American Dream. From the end of World War II through the late 1970s, the American dream was growing, social mobility was increasing. (This, by the way, from a statistically fastidious book by Drs. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, an epidemiologist and health researcher, respectively.) Around the time Reagan took office, the trend reversed and has been shrinking ever since, so that today the top 1 percent controls 40 percent of the nation's wealth.\n\n Okay, okay, I know I'm supposed to be giving you some fluffy yoga observations about Romney's inner self here, but please let me beg just a second more to share with you another teeny tidbit from Pickett and Wilkinson. The point they make is that inequality is not only bad for people in that most of us wind up with less money\u2014it's that inequality correlates with a panoply of public-health ills, including drug use, obesity, incarceration, depression, infant mortality, diminished trust in our fellow citizens, and on and on and on. In other words, inequalities in wealth and income are bound up in profound and complex ways with the health of the nation. And how someone who wants to be president of us all can forbid from public discourse all talk of this stuff, or dismiss it as \"the bitter politics of envy,\" calls into serious question the nature of Mitt Romney's deeper self.\n\n Mitt's still talking. Praises Oklahoma for curtailing union power with \"right to work\" legislation: \"...That's one of the reasons your unemployment rate is so low. Look, I take my model from states like Oklahoma.... Look at the states that are growing and adding jobs. They have right-to-work.... They have low tas...plentiful energy...entrepreneurial spirit...\" Blork bleeble blargh.\n\n Does Mitt Romney know that Oklahoma, the sort of state in whose image he intends to remake the nation, ranks forty-fifth in median household income (Hamm's billions notwithstanding) or that a recent Pew study rated Oklahoma one of the three worst states in terms of social mobility? My guess is that he does. But he also knows the more important truth, that the candidate with the tidiest narrative wins. And his narrative is very tidy: that making money is a good and patriotic undertaking, that those who make the most of it are the best and wisest people in the world, and that Romney shall save us because he knows what's good for him and Harold Hamm, and what's good for him and Harold is good for us all.\n\n On some level, he must know that the world's more complex than this, and that these past three decades have been very good to people like him and Harold but not so good for everybody else. It's a big, ugly truth to have to willfully ignore. Not that it's his fault. Romney's presidential bid would combust the instant he stopped talking about America as though it is a pretty hologram in a block of cut glass and that its only flaws, easily effaced, are a few thumbprints Obama left on the crystal. Still, it is lamentable that if you ever hope to get elected, your most closely guarded secret is your honest, unairbrushed vision of the nation you want to run.\n\n As I shoulder my way to the rope line, I'm thinking how emotionally fatiguing it would be to spend all day, every day telling America it can be rescued by rich men and hymns and keeping secret for the quiet room his real worries for the land he wants to govern. Secrets are exhausting. Coming down the rope line, Romney looks exhausted. Haggard, bleary. He grasps my hand. A really good grip: firm, but not a knucklebuster, choked up solidly into my hand-crotch of thumb and forefinger, wholly avoiding one of those awkward fingertip-clutching situations. His skin is dry and warm. I look him in his hooded eyes. \"You must be very tired,\" I say.\n\n \"Heh, heh.\" Two popcorn emissions of dry, synthetic jocularity. \"I'm doing all right.\"\n\n Wells Tower is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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