About eight months ago, I was tasked with an assignment: Starting in South Carolina, I would follow Governor Mitt "Tin Man" Romney on the long trail, from winter to summer of his life’s most important year. My job was to get as close to the candidate as possible on a mission of the spirit: to search for signs of genuine life, to spy out those remnants of the candidate’s humanity not yet blown to smithereens in the psyops war between the campaign and the press. In that time, I have learned a few things. Those things are these.

Thanks to his campaign’s all but unprecedented restrictive vigilance in the media-access department, trying to penetrate the veneer of the Romney brand is like trying to split a billiard ball with a butter knife. Getting anywhere close to him will require you to suffer repeated, soul-depleting exposures to his campaign anthem, Kid Rock’s "Born Free." You will also endure an uncountable number of citizens reciting this sentence verbatim: "I like his business background, and I think he’s got the best chance of beating Obama." You will hear people applauding with dire fervor for huge transnational oil-bearing tubes, for voter-identification laws, for Mitt Romney’s plan to defund PBS: "Big Bird is gonna have to get used to cornflakes." In lieu of actual access, you will be reduced to spending many stageside hours formulating new descriptions of the governor’s hair and speculating on which side he dresses to. (The evidence suggests it’s the left.) You will come to sort of adore Ann Romney and to believe her when she says that when Mitt wondered aloud whether he was the right man for the job, she asked her husband, "Can you save America?"

You will become fluent in the governor’s facial habits: "The Face in Repose," heavy browed, eyes sitting back in cautious little caverns. "The Sainted Aunt," his pissed-off look, head canted, blinking crossly, lips tightened to a peckish-peevish dash.

You will see a nation’s worth of people in khaki pants and blue blazers, a couple of African-Americans, and white people. Lots of white people. You will meet a classmate of the candidate’s who will offer intel like "He got people to cheer at football games" and feel like you scored a scoop. You will meet a baby wearing a button reading ENJOY CAPITALISM. And in the end, you will shell out a sum exceeding your monthly mortgage payment to touch him, and in hysterical desperation to try to know an unknowable man, you will conclude that it was worth it.

Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Hear Mitt’s Singing Voice

Unless you’re Megyn Kelly, your search for Romney begins where mine did, on the stump. So where is the candidate now? Somewhere far away on a warm, dry bus, while we are in some rain and some mud. Icy BBs of precip slant down on the venue, Harmon’s Tree Farm, a roadside Christmas-tree brokerage west of Columbia, South Carolina. The folk cower under romney for president signs, which wilt on their heads to resemble the swooping wimples of Renaissance nuns. A band is set up on a trailer, jamming "You Shook Me All Night Long." It’s sort of cool that people in the virtual age still want a glimpse of the candidate in the flesh, when his voice hasn’t been digitally processed to demiurgic sonority or his face cosmetically treated to resemble whittled foam latex. They want to see the man.

Now the bus is here. The bus is here! Mitt himself is riding shotgun. Or standing shotgun, bending under the sun visor to wave at the crowd in a queenly manner. He clambers to a microphone dais in front of an age-browned barn. In person, he looks a little narrower, a little wind-gnawed. More human, less off-puttingly perfect than reported in the press.

I have been forewarned that, on the stump, Romney’s humanity is rarely manifest. As you know from 10,000 news-analysis pieces, Mitt’s father, George Romney, ruined his own presidential bid by speaking candidly—if clumsily—against the Vietnam War, and the media tell us that the son now guards his candid sentiments as though they were doubloons.

Well, the media are full of beans, because right off the bat, Romney hits us with some unscripted juice. "My, oh my, you guys are great to be out here with this rain," he says. He has declined the use of an umbrella and is getting rained on with the rest of us. He grins, jaw like a crescent moon. "This guy here with the orange shirt—boy, that thing is turning a diff...a deeper color of orange here this morning."

The man’s shirt is turning a deeper color of orange due to moisture saturation, is the phenomenon that Mitt Romney is pointing out. Is there an emotional clue here? Not to his essential self, perhaps, but the remark does suggest a man who does not often behold damp textiles, who perhaps comes from a land where the laws of materiality and hydrology are different from our own. But the orange-shirt remark is all the candor Mitt’s giving up this morning. From here, he declaims a replica of the speech he’s been reciting two or three times a day for weeks.

If you’ve somehow dodged Romney’s stump speech until now, its rather flavorless nubs are these: "1.7 million jobs lost in the private sector. Oh, by the way, [Obama’s] added 135,000 jobs in the governmental sector.... Get rid of Obamacare and return health care to the individuals.... Maintain a strong military.... Come out of poverty by virtue of our belief in free trade, free enterprise.... Spent my life in the private sector. I know how the economy works.... Return to the principles that made us the hope of the earth.... Pursuit of happiness... Prosperous future..." Blork blah blargh.