NOEMIE EMERY of the Daily Standard writes (excerpts)
There was Mitt Romney, who was inauthentic as a politician and as a conservative, against six or so others whose authenticity was only too evident: ….Romney is also authentically not a conservative, at least in the eyes of the truest believers who make up his party’s base.
“Politics is [his] second language, and he . . . speaks it awkwardly,” said Michael Gerson. “His ploys are too obvious, his humor forced, his instincts unreliable.” He doesn’t take smoothly to small talk with strangers, alarms don’t go off in his head to warn that today’s phrase is tomorrow’s damaging sound bite, he can’t gauge the “feel” of an audience and provide an endearing response. He is the opposite of, say, Bill Clinton, described in Sally Bedell Smith’s biography as “capable of constant emotional scans of everyone in the room in real time while he was thinking,” and able to recognize, quantify, and respond to the emotional state of his listeners.
Romney …. saying he likes to be able to fire people, saying his father once moved a factory out of a town that he was speaking in; telling a man who was out of work and who would be soon out of money that he too has been unemployed for some time. It would not have been hard to put off the renovation of his multimillion-dollar beach house in California (or cancel the car elevator that would be installed), but he went ahead anyhow,
Now he presents himself as an authentic pragmatic conservative, who sells himself as the market requires, who governs based on his business experience, who moved a blue state as far to the right as was humanly possible, and whose skills at financial management uniquely equip him to achieve the conservative goals of cutting back spending, reforming entitlements, and reviving a broken economy. This makes him an operational conservative, whose works bend the world in a rightward direction, but without the ideological grounding underneath.