Dispatch #18

The Republican Party Convention ended last night with the nomination of Mitt Romney and his acceptance speech. Political conventions in the modern era are theater, mostly bad, sad, sometimes interesting, occasionally weird and embarrassing—as Clint Eastwood’s bizarre speech was last night—but usually interesting only for their badness and sadness. Nothing substantive got said last night nor for the entire week. No surprises. For those who know the facts, these partisan performances reek of self-serving cynicism and hypocrisy, or more generously, typical political expedience; for those ignorant of the facts, these rallies afford simplistic moments of value, vision, and high rhetoric.

Mitt Romney did succeed in re-establishing his fundamental humanity, his well-intended, okay-guyness, though I can’t say he managed to transcend the limitations of his class origins. But the real Mitt Romney, even a super-rich one, has never been the problem. The problem is that Mitt Romney has not, perhaps cannot, create a believable political persona that both derives from his real personhood and the ideological demands of the Tea Party, whom he continues to placate. To appeal to that section of the electorate he needs to win, he would have to champion his moderation and pragmatism; he can only hint at it and carefully calculate his gains, which will be modest.

Given the indifferent performance of the economy, Barack Obama should be doing much worse in the polls than he is, but he manages to retain a slight but discernible lead. By now, most voters have pretty much decided for whom they are going to vote in November. Without an October “surprise” or some clear downward trend in the economy, Romney will lose. The presidential debates do represent an opportunity for candidate Romney, a last chance to shine, but given the extreme demands of his Republican partisans and the conflict they generate with his own personality, by turns stiff and bland, he is not expected to best Obama on the debate stage, whose “cool,” whose media savviness, is documented in the headlines. A strong Mitt showing there would be a different kind of October surprise.