I come to bury Mitt Romney today, not to praise him. Others, I imagine, will do the praising in sufficient measure and with far greater reach than me, anyway. Surely he can expect encomiums from the mainstream media, which was his intent when he announced this past week that not only was he retiring as Utah’s junior senator, but that for the last two years he had also been secretly working with journalist McKay Coppins of the Atlantic to craft a “final political testament” of sorts.
Everybody loves a repentant sinner, I suppose. And yet on the basis of Coppins’s excerpt published this week I see little serious repentance in Romney, only — in this act of essentially hiring out a journalist to praise him for posterity’s sake — an enduring folly that epitomizes Romney’s own fatal personal flaw: his unjustified belief in himself, his belief that he is excused from the concrete political deeds of his life by a latter-day guilty conscience and his inherently “good” native character. Not that Romney lacks genuine virtue — by all accounts he is one of the most personally honorable men serving in Washington. But Mitt Romney, clearly, is also a man with regrets.
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