I picked up the March 2008 issue of GQ partially because I noticed the teaser headlines in the lower left corner:

FEEL MY VOTE! >The Inside Story of Hillary’s Trail of Tears >Is Mitt Romney A Robot? We Ask Him To Produce Emotions

It was late February when I picked it up, some time after Romney had departed the race, and I was scratching my head – did this magazine run a piece slamming Romney after he was no longer a candidate?

The article itself isn’t excessively critical or too derisive; clearly some editor felt that mocking Romney for being a robot was the catchiest angle to promote the story. (The story was posted on GQ’s web site on February 1, and Romney left the race on February 7.)

I feel for Robert Draper, who wrote up the lengthy profile; I had a profile of Wes Clark that couldn’t fit in NR because his campaign imploded before I could finish the piece.

I chuckled at this nugget:

Romney, too, could be hilarious, his advisers assured me: During a debate prep session, one aide apparently asked him a sharp question about Mormon quirks, to which, feigning indignation, Romney replied, “Well! See if you get your own planet when you die and go to heaven!”

And I can’t believe this anecdote didn’t get more attention:

The conventional method for humanizing a mechanical politician like Romney is to surround him with his family. And certainly Ann Romney provided a welcome soft touch on the campaign trail. One evening at an event outside Cedar Rapids, the former first lady of Massachusetts described to an audience of 900 Iowans how Mitt had responded when she told him she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. “He told me, ‘Sweetheart, I don’t care if you ever cook another meal,’ ” Ann said as her husband stood by her side. “He told me, ‘I’ll eat cereal the rest of my life.’ ” The crowd gasped in awe.