Leslie Savan | The Nation

With Mitt Romney producing strange statements like “The trees are the right height” and “I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” Chris Matthews has been flabbergasted at how the likely Republican nominee “doesn’t speak our language.” Now, in anticipation of tonight’s Academy Awards, where the The Artist, a film about a silent movie star, is competing for Best Picture, Matthews debuted a trailer for a movie of his own: Mitt: Better Off Mute.

Sake, a pug, is carried in a backpack by his owner Tate Hausman of Brooklyn during a protest aimed at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in New York, Tuesday Feb. 14, 2012. (AP Photo/Ginger Tidwell)

So far Mitt Romney has come off as weak, weird and willing to say anything to be elected. But lately, a new meme has been taking hold. “Mitt is Mean!” read the protest signs outside the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York this week. The “Dogs Against Romney” are howling that Romney once drove his family from Boston to Canada with their Irish setter, Seamus, in a carrier strapped to the roof of the car. (“Dad, gross!” one of his sons cried, as he saw diarrhea sliding down the back window. The mild-mannered Mitt has always insisted, though, that the pooch “enjoyed” the twelve-hour, breezy ride.)

Now a Santorum ad running in Michigan says that Mitt is even meaner to human right-wingers. “Romney and his super PAC have spent a staggering $20 million brutally attacking fellow Republicans,” says a voiceover as a Mitt lookalike (“Rombo”) fires an automatic weapon loaded with mud at a Santorum cardboard cutout. Mitt keeps missing his target, and the mud eventually backfires onto his crisp white shirt.

Mitt does have a mean streak, but it hasn’t always been obvious, if only because he packs it behind a frozen smile and an Auto-Tune laugh. Bland on the outside, roiling on the inside, he’s almost the definition of passive-aggressive: expressing “negative feelings, resentment, and aggression in an unassertive passive way.” Mitt regularly attacks, lies or infuriates people, all the while professing to be blissfully unaware of any negativity. “I know the Speaker’s angry. I don’t know why,” Romney said patiently as pro-Romney ads carpet-bombed Newt Gingrich in Iowa. The former Massachusetts governor won’t even own up to the normal aggression expected of politicians. On why he didn’t run for a second term, he gets all Eddie Haskell-y, saying, “But that would be about me.”

When asked about Santorum’s humorous ad, Romney laughed, a lot, and said, “My campaign hasn’t run any negative ads against Rick Santorum.” Maybe not. But the pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future has been hitting Santorum with a barrage of attack ads that paint him as a big-spending Washington insider. In fact, third-party, Super PAC destruction machines like Restore Our Future—run by the creator of the Willie Horton ad, Larry McCarthy—are perfectly engineered for passive-aggressive pols: they, like Colbert or Romney, can displace the source of aggression from themselves onto someone else and thus can technically deny all responsibility. Why, if he coordinated in any way with Restore Our Future, Mitt says, they’d send him to the “big house” (and not the one he’s enlarging in La Jolla).

Look, it’s hard to run for president, and it’s particularly hard not to come across as phony when you have to appeal to such a wide range of mutually hostile political types. But just about everybody who has followed the 2012 campaign has noticed something about Romney’s personal delivery that makes them think he’s lying, even when he’s not. He’s a flip-flopper, yes, but so are most pols. Just as John McCain’s campaign in 2008 bared his true soul as a reckless gambler with a touchy sense of self-importance, Mitt Romney’s campaign is baring his psyche, and it is sorely divided.

His whole emotional tug-of-war appeared last week in one word, the only word, in fact, that Romney ad-libbed during his speech at CPAC. “I was,” he said, “a severely conservative Republican governor.”

Romney’s press secretary, Andrea Saul, said on CNN that her boss simply meant he was a “strict conservative,” even insisting that strict and severe mean the same thing. Perhaps Romney was thinking of the “strict father” in the linguist George Lakoff’s formulation: while liberals seek “nurturing parent” types in their politicians, Lakoff says, conservatives are drawn to all-powerful, authoritarian daddy figures. The kind, you might say, who dole out severe punishments, like trying to cut women off from contraception and passing legislation that would force women seeking abortions to first receive vaginal ultrasound probes. (Yes, Virginia Republicans, there is an Invasive Government. It exists as certainly as you do.)

Most strict-to-severe conservatives are on to Mitt’s strange locution. “The word ‘severely’ is almost always used colloquially in a pejorative or clinical sense (‘severely unhappy,’ ‘severely handicapped’),” Allahpundit writes, “yet he’s using it here in a boastful way, as if to say that he can be as strident and unreasonable as he thinks the crowd needs him to be to give them comfort on his ideological bona fides as nominee.”

Eric Erickson adds, “It sounds more like a critique of conservatives from the left than that of a conservative himself.”

He’s right: it is a critique of conservatives. “Does Romney Even Like Republicans?” Jonathan Chait asks in New York magazine, writing, “His constant discomfort on the trail is the agony of suppressed contempt.”

Chait chalks it up, as others have, to the defeat of Mitt’s father by right-wingers in his 1968 run for the GOP presidential nomination. When George Romney, then governor of Michigan, said he had supported the Vietnam war because the military had given him a “brainwashing,” he was being honest, courageous even, admitting he’d been had by US propaganda. But the severe conservatives of the day made like he was a Manchurian Candidate, and effectively ended his political career. (Then we got Nixon.) Chait writes, “young Mitt wrote to his father… ‘How can the American public like such muttonheads?’ ”

Mitt couldn’t say that publicly, of course, not if he wanted to avenge his dad’s failed bid for the Republican nomination. But he has been hating on muttonheads and avoiding unequivocal honesty (not to mention courageous stands) on fraught subjects ever since.

For the non-passive, simply aggressive Republican, this is like meeting their straw men and finding that they is us: their probable standard-bearer is a weak, effete elite (like Kerry) who is uncomfortable in his own skin (like Gore) and would look idiotic in a combat helmet (like Dukakis). The only upside to Romney for the right is that, as David Frum found Grover Norquist telling the CPAC crowd, Mitt’s such a weak sister that he’ll do whatever they tell him to do. (“We just need a president to sign this stuff,” Frum quotes Norquist saying. “We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.”)

But maybe Norquist shouldn’t be so cocky. On the off chance that Romney actually wins the presidency, all the anger at right-wingers that he’s been keeping out of sight, riding on top of the car, so to speak, could explode. He does not like sharing with allies who seem to threaten his ego. Remember how, after Romney demolished Gingrich in the final Florida debate, he fired his new debate coach, reportedly because the media was crediting the coach for Romney’s victory?

Apparently, Mitt Romney likes firing people whether they serve him badly or very well.

Stephen Colbert, the all-but-declared candidate for the president of the United States of South Carolina, and Jon Stewart, the man in charge of the Colbert Super PAC, are not technically, legally, or otherwise coordinating campaign plans—as they stated at one point in perfect unison last night. But in a frenzy of non-coordinatism, these two citizens united to get Stephen on the SC ballot, even though the ballots have already been printed and write-ins aren’t permitted. How? By running an ad equating a vote for Herman Cain, who dropped out of the race in last month but is still on the ballot, as a vote for Stephen Colbert.

Here’s how it went down on Tuesday’s Daily Show:

And here’s the Colbert=Cain=America ad in full:

It’s only fitting that Cain, whom Rachael Maddow earlier revealed as not a candidate but a brilliant performance artist, play host to performance artist Colbert’s frankly parasitic campaign. After all, the comedic Republican primary, with its clown car full of jokesters (from Romney saying that the $374,000 he made in speakers fees last year is “not very much” to Gingrich’s blowing audible racist dog whistles during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day debate) is as funny as anything out of Comedy Central.

Now, to top it all off, Herman Cain will appear with Colbert in South Carolina on Friday to tape a segment for The Colbert Report. “On Stephen Colbert’s endorsement of himself as Herman Cain, I find it very clever and humorous, as it should be,” Cain told Fox411. “Anyone who finds what Mr. Colbert is doing offensive, should simply lighten up. To be perfectly clear, I will not be assuming Stephen Colbert's identity. We are very different when it comes to the color of our—hair.”

It looks like Cain will finally get his Colbert bump, and vice versa. Cain was in on the joke, according to his spokesperson, Kathy Hoekstra, who told Fox, “Colbert’s people got in touch with us late last week…. The endorsement of course comes as a pleasant surprise.”

But wait a minute. I hate to break up the party, but after watching the Cain ad again, I’m beginning to think that Colbert may have finally outsmarted himself. Did you notice that at about twenty seconds into the spot the announcer cites Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow—Colbert’s former PAC!—and at the end identifies it as “responsible for the content of this advertising”? Legally, the ad was supposed to have come from Stewart’s PAC, The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC. Unless the Tomorrow, Tomorrow references were bloopers on the announcer’s part (and, really, who bloops twice?), then they appear to be in direct violation of federal law!  

My prediction: Colbert planned it that way. The idea is that if Cain (i.e., Colbert) performs poorly in Saturday’s primary, all Colbert has to do is blame his ever-faithful production assistant “Jimmy” for making him look illegal, or at least terribly sloppy. And next thing you know, Colbert will pull out of the race to spend more time with Sweetness, his gun.

Don’t cheat by reading the words, but guess which video below is by MoveOn and which is by a pro-Gingrich PAC?

Today, a few million dollars worth of ads like the first one began flooding South Carolina, and the twenty-eight-minute film When Mitt Romney Came to Town was released.

Whether or not Newt Gingrich, who came in a disappointing fourth place in the New Hampshire primary, will tamp down his almost Occupy-like attacks on Romney (for “looting companies” and leaving behind “broken families”) may be of less consequence now that a pro-Gingrich Super PAC is doing it for him. “A story of greed,” the narrator of one of the film’s trailers intones. “Playing the system for a quick buck. A group of corporate raiders, led by Mitt Romney. More ruthless than Wall Street. For tens of thousands of Americans, the suffering began when Mitt Romney came to town.”

Meanwhile, the last-place finisher and even more desperate Rick Perry, is staking his hopes on the town of Gaffney, South Carolina, where he says Bain Capital has killed 150 jobs. “There’s a real difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism,” says the Texas governor, actually coining a clever phrase. “I don’t believe that capitalism is making a buck under any circumstances.”

Up until New Hampshire, it wasn’t easy for these 1 percenters to take it to the .1 percent that Mitt so well personifies. Attacking Romney is to attack winner-take-all capitalism itself, the very core of GOP ideology. And indeed, Gingrich and Perry have faced scathing criticism from fellow Republicans. The Club for Growth calls Newt’s attack “disgusting.” Limbaugh says Newt “sounds like Elizabeth Warren.” Romney surrogate John Sununu labels the attacks “socialist.”

For his part, Romney insists that the slights against him are based on “envy” and (what else?) “class warfare.” Such matters, he says, are better discussed “in quiet rooms.”    

Romney is nauseating enough to (almost) make you want to fall into the big, earthy arms of Grandpa Newt.

Why did Gingrich go there, and why now? Never underestimate the force of a Newt snit. If Gingrich could shut down the entire US government after then-President Clinton snubbed him on Air Force One, you can imagine the blowback after a Romney PAC of killer ads in Iowa crushed his presidential ambitions. (Those are the ads Romney said he didn’t see before he said he saw them.)

A month ago, the first time Newt Bained-out, saying Romney should “give back all the money he earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain,” he quickly retreated under fire. But this time, someone besides Calista had his back—his old friend, billionaire wing-nut and casino mogul Sheldon Adelstein, who plopped down $5 million to the Gingrich-supporting PAC Winning Our Future.

Had Newt been in Mitt’s loafers, who knows, he who insists that Freddy Mac paid him $300,000 as a “historian” might well have acted as Romney did at Bain and then accuse his critics of envy.

But whatever his motivation, Gingrich has opened up a crack in the Republican Party between what he poses as good capitalism—“We went in, we invested, and lost money”—versus the no-risk, heads-I-win, tails-you-lose kind he says Romney practices. As Newt told Chuck Todd this morning, “My point is there’s a big difference between financial manipulation and capitalism.” Newt’s all for the free market, he said earlier this week, but “I’m not nearly enamored of a Wall Street model where you can go in and flip companies, have leveraged buyouts, basically take out all the money, leaving behind the workers.”

But it must feel good for him to let loose and finally sound an authentic populist note (as opposed to the Tea Party kind that favors the financial elite). As Gingrich told Todd, “I’m middle class, my dad was an Army officer, I grew up in a middle-class background, I have middle-class values. I find powerful, rich people rigging games very distasteful.”

All this season Gingrich, Perry, and the other un-Mitts have had to stand on stage and bear Romney’s insufferable sense of noblesse oblige—his $10,000 bets, his pathetic denial that he’s a politician like the rest of them (“Run again? That’d be about me,” he said, explaining why he didn’t go for a second term as Massachusetts governor—which Newt memorably dubbed “pious baloney”), his manor-born inability to relate to everyday human struggle (he proudly shared his multimillionaire father’s advice: “Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win an election to pay a mortgage”).

Worse, Mitt doesn’t just flaunt his status, he does it with a passive-aggressive, mortgage-obsessed mean streak. Referring to his 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy, Mitt said at Sunday’s debate, “I was happy that he had to take a mortgage out on his house to ultimately defeat me.” He boasts of his pettiness—and with a blissful unconcern that many of the citizens he hopes to lead might have contemplated such a desperate move at some point in their lives.

Mitt’s evident pleasure in needling others over money is what makes it seem that his line “I like being able to fire people” isn’t as out of context as some Beltway insiders have made it out to be.  

Former RNC chair Michael Steele and others have compared it to the notorious Romney ad that shows Obama saying “if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose”—when, in fact, Obama was quoting McCain. Attributing someone else’s quote to your enemy is outright lying; talking about liking to fire people is more like showing your Freudian slip.

Here’s Romney’s full statement::

I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep people healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. If someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I’m going to go get somebody else to provide that service to me.

Sure, Romney was talking about firing an insurance company, not his employees. But who talks about “firing” their insurance company anyway? You might want to get rid of them or tell them to go to hell, but only the very wealthy are in a position to have a second insurance company cover them should they “fire” the first. And most people with a pre-existing condition couldn’t purchase individual insurance at all—at least they couldn’t before  “Obamacare” came along, the care that Romney vowed in his victory speech that he’d repeal.

Jon Huntsman, the only other Republican candidate astute enough to choose a rich daddy, tried to get a little mileage from Romney’s gaffe, quipping, “Governor Romney enjoys firing people, I enjoy creating jobs.” But he has his limits. Asked on Morning Joe about Romney’s record at Bain, Huntsman said, “Well, I’m not gonna quibble with Bain Capital because you can quibble with my record in manufacturing in business.” His business, by the way, is his father’s multibillion-dollar chemical conglomerate, where, it seems, quite a few quibbles might be found.

Rick Santorum has been careful about keeping his trap shut about Bain too, and Ron Paul, unflappable in the armor of his ideology, would have none of Gingrich’s and Perry’s attacks, saying they just “don’t understand” the free market.

Republican voters, and the nation, may be stuck with Romney, at least until November. But thanks to Newt’s hurt ego (and an Occupy Wall Street–charged atmosphere), something may be changing a bit inside the GOP. All of last year they were haggling over the limits of government—should it be cut off at the knees or at the throat?

Now, however, the rift lurking inside the Republican coalition over the limits of capitalism is suddenly out in the open.

CORRECTION: I was afraid I was giving Rick Perry too much cleverness credit: he did not, as I wrote, coin the phrase "vulture capitalism." There's a 1978 quote of it in the OED, notes lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, and it's in the title of Greg Palast's latest book, The Vultures' Picnic, published last November.