I interrupt my regular Friday posting of the week’s OpinionList to bring you this article on Netflix’s documentary “Mitt.” Here are the 10 things that I learned:
1. Ann Romney often sits with legs open or propped on coffee tables, when wearing riding pants, in a very un-Ann Romney-like way.
2. Running for President is hard. Only those who believe that they can make a difference or who believe that God thinks that they can make a difference end up running. Mitt is convinced of both, which explains why he ran, both, in 2008 and 2012. Will he still be convinced in 2016? Probably.
3. If he does decide to run in 2016, I hope that he continues to take advice from CNN’s Alex Castellanos.
4. Mitt dislikes the media as much as we do, but for different reasons. Mitt complains that they harp on the same thing over and over again (like he’s a flip-flopper when he’s not). We wish that they would harp on the truth over and over again, so that Republicans could not get away with their distortions and outright lies.
5. Ann Romney is no fan of Candy Crowley, and that’s confirmed even before Crowley corrects Mitt at the debate.
6. Mitt is definitely stiff. He’s even stiff with his grandchildren. Just watch when he meets up with them after a campaign trip at a gym. As each one runs up to him, he briefly takes him/her in his arms says their name (as if someone were whispering it in his ear) and puts them back down. He looks like he’s doing a greeting line at a kindergarten during a campaign stop.
7. Mitt is the least stiff with Ann. At some point he even puts his head on her breasts groaning. No, it wasn’t sexual.
8. But sexual they have been as evidenced by the bunch of kids they have.
9. Mitt Romney is a nice-enough guy. But he’ll never be able to connect with voters. That’s because he doesn’t like to put himself out there, so when he does it he’s stiff. It’s useless to tell him to be himself, because it seems that he, himself, is not sure of who he is. He strictly adheres to an image of himself that he would like to portray and that makes him, you guessed it, stiff.
10. “Mitt” makes Mitt a bit more likable. But, even if I had watched it before the election I still would not have voted for him, and not just because he’s stiff. In fact even if President Obama were stiffer than Mitt, I still would not have voted for Mitt. Why? Mainly because he wasn’t stiff in the one area where he should have been: holding on to his principles.
As you can see, I didn’t learn much from watching “Mitt.” Frankly, I couldn’t care less.
