By FRANK BRUNI
By FRANK BRUNI
New York Times News Service
TAMPA, Fla. — My favorite Mitt Romney story comes not from his current campaign, though it has certainly yielded a bounty of priceless Mitticisms, but from his 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy. He’s at a convenience store near Boston, pressing the flesh, when he spies a woman about a dozen feet away. She exhibits no evident interest in his advance. He hustles toward her nonetheless, fleet of step and silver of tongue.
“Don’t run away!” is his smooth come-on.
She lifts her left hand, a gesture that could be a tepid, dismissive wave or, maybe, an attempt to cover her face.
“I know,” he says, sympathizing with her standoffishness. “You haven’t got your makeup on yet.”
She corrects him: she does. “You do! You do!” he chirps, shaking her right hand with an almost manic vigor. “Good to see you!”
As she slips away, it’s not at all clear that she returns the sentiment. And nearly two decades later, as the stage here in Tampa is readied for Romney’s coronation, it’s not at all clear that the electorate does, either.
Romney’s political ascent and presidential campaign tell the remarkable tale of a suitor profoundly ill suited to the seduction at hand, a salesman whose enthusiasm has seldom been instantly or expansively reciprocated. He has somehow managed to pull within inches of the most powerful office on earth — the job that should be harder to get than any other — despite an inability and even unwillingness to connect, and despite the fact that most of his supporters, including most Republicans, aren’t so much swooning as settling for him. That’s worth remembering over the next few days, when hard-partying partisans here will do a pantomime of true passion.
As often as not, a convention is a communal lie, during which speakers and members of the audience project an excitement 10 times greater than what they really feel and a confidence about the candidate that they only wish they could muster. It’s balloons and ginned-up fervor and manufactured swagger and more balloons.
And in Tampa, the helium and revelry obscure a great deal of doubt. While Republicans certainly prefer Romney to President Barack Obama and rightly believe that he has a shot at the White House, they also suspect that a more likable nominee with a defter touch would be the heavy favorite to win, given Americans’ apprehensions about a persistently weak economy. And they cringe at Romney’s clumsiness, diligently reminding themselves that their other options were lesser ones: Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain. You bake your cake with the ingredients you have.
Romney’s a strange cake. He has racked up impressive accomplishments in both the private and the public sectors, including his Massachusetts health care reforms. He’s a man of serious abilities. But he seems unable to accept that a presidential campaign demands more than a resume. It demands an audible heartbeat, a palpable soul. His are kept firmly under wraps. In the prelude to the convention, talented journalist after talented journalist set off in search of them, looking for the eureka anecdote, the tear-streaked epiphany. It was a quest as pointless and poignant as any I can recall. You can’t add a John Williams score to a corporate balance sheet. You can’t turn venture capital into “Terms of Endearment.”
At times Romney and his intimates do their awkward best to serve up the desired emotional goods.
“I love tithing,” Ann Romney told Parade magazine, referring to donations to the Mormon Church. “When Mitt and I give that check, I actually cry.”
In a confessional era, Romney is stilted. At a time of increased worry about the distribution of wealth, gobs of it have been distributed his way. He’s a font of precisely the sorts of gaffes that a 140-character news universe spotlights. His timing, all in all, could be better. And his latest reaction is to suggest, as he did in the Politico interview, that the whole likability thing is overrated. So what if he’s not so huggable or compelling? Doesn’t mean he won’t be effective.
That’s not the most stirring of pitches. Then again he’s not the most stirring of politicians. And the triumphant oddity of this convention is that its purpose and atmospherics compel everyone here, including him, to pretend otherwise.