.jpg)
“I feel bad for Romney,” Nicholas Lemann says, “in the sense that he’s so unable to deal with things in the political storm.” If you let Mitt Romney’s post-forty-seven-per-cent ads tell it, though, he’s the compassionate one. In one, he says, “President Obama and I both care about poor and middle-class families. The difference is my policies will make things better for them.”
Lemann joins Dorothy Wickenden on this week’s Political Scene podcast to discuss his profile of Romney (available to subscribers) and whether or not Romney will be able to dig out of this hole.
Likening the scrutiny that Romney has faced after Mother Jones released a video in which he said that forty-seven per cent of Americans thought of themselves as “victims” to the controversy that then-candidate Obama faced in 2008, Lemann says that he “can’t imagine Romney having the rhetorical ability, the connect-with-the-public ability to pull himself out of something like that.” He continues:
Lemann writes in his article that “Romney is very deeply a product of a series of interconnected, tightly enclosed worlds, with their own rules: Mormonism, business school, management consulting, private equity. Understanding him requires understanding the subcultures that produced him.” With this perspective in mind, Romney’s remarks to fundraisers in Boca Raton feel less like a slipup. “If you’re a management consultant or strategic consultant, what you’re taught is the first thing to do is a competitive market-share analysis,” Lemann says.
With the first Presidential debate less than a week away, the pressure for Romney to turn his image around is higher. Romney may be able to look Presidential, Lemann says, but it will be difficult for him “to come out ahead.”
You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or XML, and become a fan of the Political Scene on Facebook.
Illustration by Barry Blitt.
