Romney, who is good-looking, wealthy and blessed with a lovely family, is, unsurprisingly, not actually very angry. He would like to be president and run the country like a business, but he is not the kind of guy who is in mourning for the Articles of Confederation.

Romney’s most dramatic recent moment came when he was attacked by a fellow passenger on a flight home from the Olympics in Vancouver. A spokesman said Romney, who was not injured, was “physically assaulted” when he asked a man to raise his seat to an upright position before takeoff.

Perhaps the assailant mistook Romney for a flight attendant.

The attacker was taken off the plane but not charged, and Romney’s spokesman said there was no indication he recognized his victim. But maybe he did. Perhaps he was an irritable Democrat. Or maybe he was an animal lover, still seething over the fact that Romney once drove his family to Canada for a vacation with their Irish setter, Seamus, strapped to the roof of the car.

But let’s agree right here and now that this is a bad idea. Not the dog on the roof. Although that, too, is really, really undesirable. But I was thinking of the attack.

I digress. About the Conservative Political Action Conference. Some of the tenthers’ favorite stars were too busy to show up. Sarah Palin  whose husband once flirted with the Alaska secessionists  declined. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas  who cuddled up to the Texas secession movement in 2008  is home running for re-election and wowing the crowd at a Tenth Amendment Town Hall. His strongest challenger for the Republican nomination appears to be a woman who told Glenn Beck that she had an open mind about whether there was any American government involvement in the 9/11 attack.

The news media, as Beck said to Katie Couric, is “a sound-bite world  a really nasty place to live.” I would like to think that this is just because we happen to be at a moment in history when the country has a huge number of TV, radio and Internet outlets fighting to be loud enough and shrill enough to get noticed.

That’s what things were like with newspapers at the end of the 19th century, and I cannot tell you what Grover Cleveland went through. But if that’s the explanation, this, too, shall pass. Like the Articles of Confederation.