Mitt Romney, Mary Sue

Twilight. The Hunger Games. Fifty Shades of Grey. These three books have swept across the country over the last few years, creating legions of adoring fans, primarily among young to middle-aged women. For literary critics, it is clear that their success is based neither on plot strength, nor on their poignancy, but rather on the lack of character dimension. All three novels rely on an overly-idealized, plain-yet-beautiful, flat protagonist, a character who the reader can easily pretend to be. These characters, known in the literary world as “Mary Sues,” are so underdeveloped and under-described that it is easy for the reader to feel connected with the protagonist and step into their shoes.

Mitt Romney does not make a good Mary Sue. He is too rich and too Mormon. He has constantly changing opinions about fundamental political positions. Yet, the political and business elites running Mitt Romney’s campaign continually attempt to make him appear, on a personal level, to be a common small business owner, the political neophyte, or just a “cool guy.” The Republican Party, for the first time in recent memory, has chosen to run away from their candidate’s personal history. They mention his “business success” without ever mentioning the high-powered work that he did at Bain Capital. They shy away from any mention of his time as governor of Massachusetts, except occasionally as evidence that he can act in a bipartisan manner. And nobody, of course, mentions that he has been effectively running for president for the last five years. Jon Huntsman, one of Romney’s opponents in the Republican primaries, noted that Mitt acted like a “perfectly lubricated weather vane,” referring to Romney’s well known tendency to hold nearly every possible position on the same issue.

In effect, the Romney strategy is to forget about all of the candidate’s greatest successes, in order to paint him as this year’s rendition of “Joe Sixpack.” It is easy to see why this is an attractive strategy. As Romney noted in his now infamous “47%” gaffe, many people vote based on whom they like better. The Romney campaign wants those votes. They want those votes so much, in fact, that they never mention a specific policy, never stray from a message about the evils of the President, and try hard to make their candidate appear to be one of the small business owners he so often references. Mitt Romney is trying to be a Mary Sue. He is trying to be so uninteresting that he has to be liked. It is certainly an audacious strategy to have a candidate with so much experience hide so much of it.

This attempt has not worked well for the Romney camp. It’s not easy for one of the 0.1% richest men in the country to pretend he’s a common guy. Instead of discussing how their candidate can make America better, the Romney campaign spends its time explaining away his record. What Romney’s advisers have yet to learn is that most people, on the left or right, would rather have a president who can fix the economy, take a strong role in foreign policy, and control the government than a president they can have a beer with. This should be Romney’s strength. Instead of pretending to be an Average Joe, Romney should develop some actual policies, stand by them, and explain their utility to the American people. It’s what they’ve been waiting for.

I don’t know what Romney actually believes, and I don’t know how he would actually govern. Still, I have a hard time believing the race would currently favor Obama, with a weak economy and a disliked President, if the Republican candidate chose a stronger literary role model than the one-dimensional everyman. With a record of bipartisanship in a liberal state, major policy initiatives, business successes, and leadership experience, Mitt Romney should be an ideal candidate for the Republican Party; the fact that he is far behind in a bad economy shows that his campaign strategy has been failing. Never before in our political history have we seen a candidate do so little with so much opportunity.