Has anyone, this week, been seeking out Mitt Romney’s views on the Gaza crisis? Have there been calls to put him on a plane and have him sit down with Benjamin Netanyahu or Mohamed Morsi, and sort things out? Hillary Clinton handled that instead, and we seem to have a ceasefire, while the urgent questions about Romney have been whether that was really him, photographed blurrily, pumping his own gas, or what he and Ann thought of Jacob imprinting on Renesmee in the new “Twilight” movie—which they saw over the weekend—and which vampire coven reminded them most of the Republican primary field. Last month, Romney was talking about the near-psychic bond he had with Netanyahu; that may have been nice for them, but it hardly seems to matter anymore to anyone else. By the time there was a ceasefire deal, on Wednesday, the Romney radar was alive to reports of a trip to Disneyland with his wife and grandchildren, sourced back to park visitors who tweeted pictures. Has a candidate ever shifted so swiftly and unceremoniously from the realm of the auto bailout to that of Luigi’s Flying Tires? Looking at the pictures of Ann and Mitt sitting in the sun at the center of one of said tires, right where a hubcap should be, the tricky thing isn’t dispelling the idea that it was all a Photoshop hoax, but instead trying to imagine them anywhere else, like in the White House, or even on a stage in Ohio.
A little more than two weeks after the election, Mitt Romney has not so much vanished as been rendered a camp object—an electoral oddity, like a button from a last-century race with the name of a defeated Vice-Presidential candidate you can hardly remember learning (Charles W. Fairbanks, John W. Bricker). There has been no decent interval for him and his campaign, no gap between rejection and ridiculousness. By this time, four years ago, John McCain and Barack Obama had sat down and talked in an office building in Chicago, and released a joint statement about working together. That didn’t quite happen, but McCain never really stopped talking, or even—as in the past couple of weeks as he has pushed and pushed, beyond credibility, his complaints about Benghazi and Susan Rice—stopped shouting.
No one seems to care what Mitt Romney has to say about Susan Rice. The main concern of people in the Republican Party for which he was a standard-bearer seems to be that he still plays any role at all. He embarrasses them. If he has a presence in the Party now it is an awkward penumbra. Even his moment in the headlines last week, when he was heard talking about how Obama had bought the loyalty of women, minorities, and young people with “gifts,” was as a disembodied voice. He didn’t even get to show his face when insulting the electorate. Republicans “don’t need to be saying stupid things,” Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, said in response. The implication seems to be that they really don’t need Romney to do anything at all.
It’s early, of course; maybe Romney will decide to devote himself to fighting global warming and make an Oscar-winning film; that move has worked before. Obama, at a press conference, said that he was sure that he and Romney would meet soon, and would exchange ideas. (“I do think he did a terrific job running the Olympics.”) Anyone who goes from being one of two candidates who could be President to being the one who will not be is the less for it, but even by the standards of recent losers, Romney’s deflation came quickly. Part of that is structural. McCain, Kerry, and even Dukakis had jobs to go back to. George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter had Presidential libraries to build. Al Gore’s departure was delayed by the Florida recount and Supreme Court case, and then it seemed right, given possible questions about the election’s legitimacy, to be quiet for a while. Mondale had already been Vice-President, and a longtime Senator, and he at least carried his home state. Bob Dole might be a parallel—making Viagra commercials has some of the oddness of “Twilight”—if he hadn’t had so many Senate terms before that, and hadn’t already been a losing Vice-Presidential candidate (losing on the top ticket, in that way, was a step up). What really sets Romney apart is how quickly his own party has stopped pretending to like him. The G.O.P. has to fully own up to their candidate, though, before they can be allowed to forget him.
There are other things that embarrass Republicans. Romney’s get-out-the-vote app didn’t work. He really thought he would win, and was unprepared when he didn’t. The same is true of a lot of Republicans, though. And we haven’t even got to the tell-all campaign-memoir stage yet, where we get to hear what made Paul Ryan sulk or Ann Romney mad.
But how embarrassed are you allowed to be at the candidate your own party nominated, and hailed, and whose worst gaffes—including the “gifts” line—are clumsy expressions of your actual policies? At a certain point, you can’t treat the electorate like visitors at a theme park who can pretend that as long as the giant mouse (or elephant) is smiling at them everything will be all right.
“When you’re in a hole, stop digging. He keeps digging,” Lindsay Graham said of Romney, on “Meet the Press.” “We’re in a death spiral with Hispanic voters because of rhetoric around immigration. And candidate Romney, in the primary, dug the hole deeper.” He wasn’t a lone figure with a shovel; there was a whole big-donor-powered earth-mover working with him. But that, now, is the G.O.P.’s problem, not his. While Graham and others are working on their death spiral, Romney seems happily fascinated by the twirling of Luigi’s Magic Tires. And it’s better that he is.
Photograph by David Burnett.
