I Read the Mitt Romney Book

On the eve of the 2012 election, I did something that today feels unthinkable: I went to bed well before the result was called. Pretty confident from 538’s forecast that Obama would win—and pretty confident that, if he didn’t, it wouldn’t be the end of the world—I turned in early. When I woke up the next morning and saw that Obama had indeed won, I smiled briefly and moved on with my day, and barely thought about the election again. I was reminded of these simpler political times as I read Romney: A Reckoning, McKay Coppins’ new biography, which paints Romney as the last sane Republican, a kind and decent man adrift in a party that’s left him behind. Fathers and Sons In Ambition & Contentment, I wrote about how pretty much every U.S. president, and many presidential candidates, had a fucked-up relationship with their father. Romney both confirms and subverts this archetype. The elder Romney, George, was a popular Michigan governor who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1

On the eve of the 2012 election, I did something that today feels unthinkable: I went to bed well before the result was called. Pretty confident from 538’s forecast that Obama would win—and pretty confident that, if he didn’t, it wouldn’t be the end of the world—I turned in early. When I woke up the next morning and saw that Obama had indeed won, I smiled briefly and moved on with my day, and barely thought about the election again. I was reminded of these simpler political times as I read Romney: A Reckoning, McKay Coppins’ new biography, which paints Romney as the last sane Republican, a kin