kalikshama
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http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/03/19/120319crat_atlarge_menand
Money Pol
Does Mitt Romney really love you?
by Louis Menand
MARCH 19, 2012
Once, when winters were cold and the world seemed large, creatures roamed the earth who were permissive on social issues and at ease with big government, yet remained ever faithful to the gods of business and finance. Their principles were abstract but broad-minded: tolerance, free trade, and a belief in something called the American Way. Their personal tastes were conventional. They were surprisingly allergic to indecorum, and disinclined to question the status quo. But they were not small-town or provincial; they were Wall Streeters, not Main Streeters. Their vista was international. They were private-sector types who answered the call to public service. They were liberal Republicans. Nelson Rockefeller was such a creature. So were Prescott Bush, William Scranton, Charles Percy, John Lindsay, Mark Hatfield, Elliot Richardson, and George Romney.
Then, one year, a powerful meteor struck the planet, and, virtually overnight, the entire species was wiped out. The meteor’s name was Ronald Reagan. Political paleontologists, looking back at the fossil record, can detect signs pointing to the organism’s imminent extinction that predate the Reagan era. Richard Nixon, for example, showed that a pro-business, big-government Republican, by appealing to suburban anti-Communism and white working-class resentment, could take a populist road to the White House. Men like Rockefeller and Romney despised Nixon; but they could never beat him. Liberal Republicans did not like to get into the political mud.
Everything in Michael Kranish and Scott Helman’s biography “The Real Romney” (HarperCollins) confirms the view that until 2005 Mitt Romney was a liberal Republican cryogenically preserved from the pre-Reagan era. He was a liberal on social issues, such as abortion and gay rights; a champion of government programs, such as universal health care; an anti-protectionist, “open door” internationalist; a private-sector multimillionaire who was also a personal square, completely uninterested in life-style “experimentation”; a reflexively patriotic, flag-pin-in-the-lapel sort of fellow; a wealthy man possessed of the slightly daft notion that although he had been born to privilege, every American has the opportunity (and the wish) to live as he does; a patrician with a deep sense of noblesse oblige. Since 2005, Romney has made himself interesting by getting a lot of people, including those who might vote for him and those who definitely will not, obsessed with whether, and to what extent, and in spite of anything to the contrary he might be saying on the campaign trail, he is still that person.
Kranish and Helman are journalists at the Boston Globe, and their book is based on reporting done by them and by other members of the Globe staff. Despite its title, which hints that an exposé awaits the buyer, the biography is balanced, informative, and not unsympathetic. It’s a well-written and useful resource for Romneyana great and small.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/03/19/120319crat_atlarge_menand#ixzz1psBIZzjr
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Good article about Mitt Romney in The New Yorker - 
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