Welcome to the Vitus Capital Blog!
Notes to myself, possibly of interest to others.
-- Bill Northlich

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Romney - Is there a there there?

A few posts back, we reported (gloated about?) Romney's uber-cluelessness about what he actually says.

Vitus has been in a position of having to get up in front of a corporate audience to speak, and have nothing to offer but vapid, content-free verbal boilerplate. Most "business" leaders are familiar with this performance. Romney certainly must be, and he seems to have assumed that, NP, he can just "My Fellow Americans blah, blah" his way to the White House. It seems to work in business, so wtf? The scary thing is, maybe he can.

But as Krugman says, the Romney World Tour is getting surreal.  Yesterday, Vitus tweeted:

But. What if  is actually as dim-witted as he seems? Yikes...

Jonathan Chiat has a piece which sets out to find actual substance in Romney's gathering record of persenting random strings of words as insight.  The substance in this instance is that if one digs, one can discover that Romney believes in the Cultural Determinism of John Galt:  Palestinians are poor because their culture does not admit of "success" in business, building, creating.

But then Chiat deconstructs his own observation and gives evidence that Romney's views appear to have the sophistication of naught but a high-schooler 's discovery of Ayn Rand.  Sort of like Paul Ryan.

However, it takes a longish and interesting but not tightly argued article to present these issues.

The point (there is one) is that it is really hard to determine what, as Krugman says, is actually going on inside Romney's head.

What if the answer is:  Nothing.  Well, that is scary.  Maybe more scary than the mental movie magazine  flipping from page to page in Sarah Palin's head. With Palin, what you see is what you get.  With Romney, you don't see anything except an Avatar with nice hair, representing - what?  Senator Iselin in Manchurian Candidate comes to mind.

No comments:

Post a Comment