Guest Post by Steve-O-in NJ.

[This is a comment posted by Steve-O in response to the post, “KABOOM! I Have To Take Back Every Positive Thing I Ever Said About Mitt Romney.” Properly it would be a Comment of the Day, but I decided that in both theme and length it deserved to be a free-standing guest post. I know comments are usually written with less precision than the authors might apply if they knew they were going to be highlighted—I know my comments are—so I did edit Steve’s work a bit, not substantively, and I hope he approves. JM]

I don’t know if this is even worth talking about very much, since Romney is headed toward the door and will exit as an also-ran. In his day, he amassed quite an impressive resume, certainly much more impressive than Barack Obama’s. He did a reasonably good job as governor of Massachusetts. That’s why it strikes me as odd that he did not run an effective presidential campaign, nor did he seem to grasp that campaigning on the national stage in 2012 was very different than campaigning 20, 10, or even 5 years before that.

The other side had one goal, and they stuck relentlessly to it: destroy Mitt Romney, by all means fair or foul. Positive campaigning has been pretty much dead since the days of Bush the Elder. It’s negative campaigning that moves the numbers, and Romney didn’t seem to grasp that. He tried to run a gentlemanly campaign when the other side and the media were prepared to fight as dirty as possible. This country didn’t give a damn about his resume or his plan for fixing the economy, at least not enough. They wanted things to be better, but Mitt just couldn’t make his case.

He also handled Obama with kid gloves. Maybe he was hoping people would see him as the accomplished businessman and politician he was, compared to Obama, who didn’t have much going for him except his color. Maybe he was afraid that if he tried to attack Obama vigorously, he would be slimed as a racist, and, should he lose, that brand would end his career.

Romeny actually did have one opening, after he bested Obama in the first debate, but he never capitalized on it, for reasons that are not entirely clear. It’s obvious that he came away from the campaign embittered by his unfair treatment by the media, who not only targeted him, not only threw insults at his religion and other attacks below the belt, but attacked his family as well, poking fun at his oldest son and implying that his wife was heartless because she owned a horse which she rode partly to help her multiple sclerosis. No, none of that was fair, but Mitt Romney also was not up to the challenge of countering these attacks. You would think that someone well aware of the way Robert Bork had failed as a Supreme Court nominee by simply maintaining a dignified silence, and how Clarence Thomas had prevailed where Bork failed by attacking his opposition back would understand that he had to fight to get elected when the strategy being used against him was “the politics of personal destruction.”

I think it stuck in his craw that another successful businessman, arguably less classy than him, did manage to win the White House, in part by fighting as dirty as the other side. I think it also stuck in his craw that he was never tapped to be a cabinet member in the Trump administration, where he could hopefully nudge Trump to govern in a more dignified moderate manner.

Instead Romney had to settle for the consolation prize of being a U.S. Senator. He knew was at an age where he would not be running again, and he simply did not have it in him to try. Like John McCain, however, he never forgave Trump for succeeding where he had failed, and he disliked him personally. Personal dislike is why we are still dealing with Obamacare, because McCain, who did not vote for it the first time around, voted against its repeal because, knowing he was on his way out of the Senate and this world decided to take the opportunity to give one last middle finger to Trump, betraying his duty to make such decisions based on what was good policy for the nation. Mitt, similarly, knew he had reached the point in his career in which he really did not have to care about anything. He was apparently he was not planning to run again, so he could afford to pretty much to do and say whatever he wanted.(He might have been concerned about whether his legacy would be tainted and that might possibly affect his children and grandchildren.)

Mitt decided to take the opportunity to vote against Trump in successive impeachment trials, thereby granting bipartisan cover to the Democratic party and hoping that the legacy media would cast him as one of the last honest Republicans who was not tainted by Trump. But it is clear this was as much about his personal dislike for Trump and his opportunity to “flip him off” while in office and kick him in the butt on the way out the door.

It is interesting that Romney he did not vote against any of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. Any single Republican Senator could have tanked Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination. There is a good possibility Romney could have defeated Amy Barrett’s nomination. Yet he chose not to do so, even though these actions would have stuck it to Trump much more than a vote in favor of an impeachment that was guaranteed to fail anyway.

I think this history paints soon-to-be-former Senator and former a lot of things: First, petty. He would rather vote against a President he didn’t like for doing something he himself did not understand and didn’t bother to try to understand. It would be one thing if he had actually looked at what Trump was supposed to have done and what the issues were and concluded that what Trump did was wrong enough to merit his removal. He now virtually admits that he cast the vote on the first impeachment out of spite. Spite is not a way to run a government.

Second, it paints him as a coward. Romney was willing to cast a vote in favor of an impeachment that would have absolutely zero practical effect other than to enable him to strut around and say that he voted for impeachment and therefore should be treated as the last honest Republican. He was not willing to cast a vote against a Supreme Court nominee or two when doing so would have had decisive practical and political effects. Had he voted no for either of the last two Republican nominated judges, there’s a good chance that Trump would have had to go back to the drawing board with regard to Kennedy’s successor, and a very good chance that Trump would have had to leave office without appointing Ginsburg’s successor.

That could well have had a very significant effect on last year’s slate of conservative opinions. We could very well still be living in a nation where abortion was the one area of policy not a constitutionally guaranteed right and not subject to the Democratic process and where racial discrimination against whites and Asians for higher education was fine and dandy, having survived SCOTUS scrutiny. Romney didn’t have the guts to do lasting damage to this President and man he hated so much.

I’m not going to read this hagiography. It sounds like I already know all I need to know, and I am not interested in reading a couple hundred pages of self justification by a failure and a has-been who is going to exit the political scene soon. The chance for his opinions to matter has passed him by. The only difference between the time his opinions ceased to matter and the time John McCain’s opinions ceased to matter is that Romney will get however long God gives him after he leaves the Senate to enjoy free of almost any obligations, while McCain hung on in the Senate until the Grim Reaper arrived.

There is a chance, although I don’t know statistically where it stands, that by the time Romney’s time in this world comes to an end, Trump will no longer be a factor in American politics, either because he got his second term and is legally done, or because he ran that third time, failed, and decided not to run again when he would be 80. Then his family will have the advantage of the funeral being a relatively quiet affair and not an anti-Trump rant. By that point, We the American people will have already decided Mitt Romney no longer matters. We won’t have to wait for the crowd from the funeral to walk away before we reach that conclusion.