Alex Pareene - The Rude Guide to Mitt

The Rude Guide to Mitt

By Alex Pareene

Copyright Salon Media Group, 2012
Cover illustration and design by Ben Wheelock

To Seamus

In 1983, Bain and Co. vice president Mitt Romney packed his five sons, from 13-year-old Tagg to toddler Craig, into a white station wagon in preparation for a nonstop drive from Belmont, Mass., to a cabin in Grand Bend in Southern Ontario, on the shores of Lake Huron. In moderate traffic, its a 12-hour trip, though Romney is an impatient driver, prone, according to journalists whove ridden with him, to aggressive passing and running of red lights. Romney promised to stop only for gas -- hed mapped out where hed be filling up in advance -- and to allow his wife, Ann, to go to the bathroom.

The station wagon was packed too full to fit the family dog, Seamus, an Irish setter. So instead of asking a family member or neighbor to look after him, Romney put him in his crate and strapped him to the top of the car. Hours into the trip, traveling at alarming speed down a western New York interstate with only a makeshift windshield crafted by Romney of materials unknown for protection from the elements, Seamus the dog began shitting himself in terror.

Tagg Romney first noticed the excrement streaming down the rear windshield. He pronounced it gross. His father stopped to hose the dog off and the trip continued, Seamus still strapped to the roof in his carrier.

When they got to Romneys parents cabin, across the lake from his original home state of Michigan, the dog ran away. That is according to the New York Observer, relying on off-the-record conversations between unnamed Romney sons and reporters.

When the Boston Globe first told this story in 2007, it was supposed to be a slightly heartwarming and amusing example of Romneys rational approach to problem solving. The story came from the Romneys themselves, and they seemed to remember it as a sort of family-oriented sitcom situation -- stern dad wont stop this car for anything until Mom, the real boss, tells him to -- and not as the tale of the time we tortured our dog. (Not to mention that refusing to stop when your children are hungry or need to go to the bathroom is not actually that endearing, either, but it probably stops short of traumatizing, because they werent locked by themselves in small cages.)

The alien weirdness of Willard Mitt Romney is all-encompassing. He not only thinks its perfectly fine to put a dog in a crate strapped to the top of a speeding car for a 12-hour nonstop trip, but he repeats the story years later with a chuckle. Millionaires, Mormons, unimpressive scions and ideologically fungible panderers have run for president before, in spades, but only Romney combines all those elements in one robotic package, topped off with appropriately immobile hair.

What binds all these pervasively odd traits together is the pure, instrumentalist mind-set of the practiced corporate manager. Romney, a hugely successful founding member of the new corporate consulting class, sees in every challenge the same pat morality play, of maximizing utility, curbing costs, and fattening executive bonus packages. In this sense, the Romney campaign resembles nothing so much as a proposed leveraged buyout of the American electorate, with a genial, Casual Friday polod psychotic behind it all.

Every Romney profile attempts to locate the real man inside the presidential-looking, well-coiffed shell. (The sole independent book-length biography of the guy is titled The Real Romney.) If his authentic interior self even exists, it doesnt really matter when determining what kind of man he is. Its disturbingly easy (and fun) to imagine Romney as a repressed lunatic, masking his murderous conduct behind a steady stream of cliched feel-good homilies, like the protagonist of Jim Thompsons The Killer Inside Me -- or maybe the Reaganite dad-murderer in the classic Donald Westlake satire The Stepfather. But secret psycho diagnosis is more suited to the great institution-makers of Mormonism and modern capitalism -- epically, historically deranged figures like Brigham Young or Andrew Carnegie. Romney is more like a Mormon Waylon Smithers. Or maybe a witless Sidney Falco, the gruesomely amoral publicity agent that Tony Curtis portrayed in the classic Alexander Mackendrick film The Sweet Smell of Success. Falco is a character who lives in moral twilight, as his far more evil mentor, J.J. Hunsecker, notes at one point -- and moral twilight is seemingly the permanent condition of the incorrigible corporate fixer Mitt Romney: the kind of guy who thinks strapping an undefended animal to the roof of ones car is entrepreneurial, creative and innovative.

As the Seamus story spread, Romney seemed blindsided by accusations of cruelty. He blamed PETA for the uproar, insisting the group had long nursed a vendetta against him because he once went hunting (for quail). He insisted Seamus liked it on the roof of a speeding car, and scrambled up there every time we went on trips. Besides, the dog was sealed in an airtight container, he told Chris Wallace. (But not shit-tight, apparently.)

Ann Romney, defending her husband, said he allowed Seamus to sleep in their bed, so, you know, how could Mitt mistreat the gallant setter? (She also said he enjoyed riding in the car with his head out the window, which would seem to contradict her husbands story that he always gleefully climbed to the roof when it was time for a drive.)

If Seamus did run away in Canada, the Romneys version of the rest of his life suggests they found him. Seamus, according to Ann, lived to a ripe old age. But not with Ann and Mitt and their boys in Boston. No, they apparently, at some point, gave the dog to Romneys sister Jane, because he, in the words of the Canadian Press, had a penchant for wandering away from the Romneys Boston home.

I cant imagine why.

How does a man who thinks the story of cold indifference to the mortal panic of a supposedly beloved companion end up a presidential contender? Lots of money and a famous name, mostly. But the story of Mitt Romney is also the story of one mans heroic triumph over the fact that nearly everyone not similarly brainwashed by American corporate managerial propaganda finds his mode of thinking and public persona repulsive and frankly terrifying. Despite the fact that only a tremendous asshole could treat a dog like that (12 hours!), Mitt Romney just might end up president some day.

This is the story of that tremendous asshole.

Mitt Romney was the youngest child born to George and Lenore Romney. He was a miracle baby -- Lenore was not supposed to be able to get pregnant again, and once she did, the baby was not supposed to survive -- and because she did, and he did, they doted on him. He grew up practically on the knee of the father he worshiped, and got lots of love and toys. It was all probably sickeningly lovely.

George Romney was a famed businessman, a mostly self-made success. (He received a small settlement from the government of Mexico, where he was born, due to the whole fleeing from the revolution thing his family was forced to do when he was a child, but wasnt born rich and never graduated college.) Hed turned around the American Motors Corp. in part through canny marketing of the compact Nash Rambler -- i.e., the one damn American car that wasnt 300 feet long and that didnt get four miles to the gallon.

From AMC he went into politics, becoming the governor of Michigan, where he instituted an income tax and generally made himself prominent on the national stage in preparation for a presidential run. Teenage Mitt -- gawky, non-athletic -- followed Dad into meetings and even to the 1964 Republican National Convention, where George famously walked out on Barry Goldwater.