In 2004, while serving the one term he served as governor of Massachusetts, Willard Romney decided that he would remake the culture of state politics by remaking the composition of the state legislature. He put the prestige of his office, and his personal credibility, which at that time was considerable, behind a slate of 131 Republican legislative candidates. He and the state GOP put together a $3 million direct-mail campaign. It was by far the most vigorous attempt by a Republican governor to reconfigure state politics in anyone's memory.

He failed.

Then he quit.

As recounted in the Boston Globe's exhaustive series in 2007, shortly after his effort augered in — the Republicans wound up losing two seats in the Massachusetts House and one in the state senate — Romney met with the newspaper's editorial board and told the board that he was finished doing anything for any other Republicans ever again.

"From now on," the newspaper reported, "it's me-me-me."

Nobody who watched him use Massachusetts as a stepladder to where he is today can be surprised that, today, we have two garish examples of the fact that, for all his success in business and his well-manicured family raised on his well-manicured lawns, Romney is essentially an entitled fopdoodle who divides the world into two classes, Himself and The Help, and who is running for president because his golden life has taught him the essential lesson that there is nothing in the world he can't charm and/or money-whip into his pocket if he really, really wants it. First, there's the revelation that he was something of a bully back in prep school:

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school's collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber's hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

And, if you want to see what happens when some cheap little trust-fund Flashman grows up without any experience that ameliorates his inbred feeling that the world owes him its fealty, check out the interview with the local reporter in Colorado, whom Romney treats as though she's brought him the wrong vintage after a hard day's work firing the grubworms:

"Aren't there issues of significance you'd like to talk about?" he said, after the string of social issue questions, one of which came from a viewer. "The economy, the growth of jobs, the need to put people back to work, the challenges of Iran? We've got enormous issues that we face but you want to talk about medical marijuan — go ahead, you want to talk about Medical —"

Of what concern can those silly social issues be to a Romney? When chronic disease struck his family, he didn't have to grub around for some good dope to alleviate the symptoms. He could afford all the latest therapies — including horse therapy with very expensive horses. Any gay folks in the Romney family can get married discreetly in one of the several states where he lives... and, oh, anyway, who is this person to ask him questions that he does not choose to be asked? My dear young woman, this simply is not done.

(Oh, and in case you missed it, while Romney has been running around the country truckling to the anti-choice movement and pledging his commitment to the concept that every embryo is sacred, while pretending he isn't doing exactly that, his son, Tagg, and his wife just had twins via a surrogate and IVF fertilization. Various proles around the country may have principled objections to that sort of thing, but what does that matter? They are not Romneys.)

The Globe series — which I encourage everybody to go back and read, if you can't get your hands on the updated version of it published this year as The Real Romney — is replete with episodes just like this. There's the account of his confrontation with a guy named Ken Bullock, who was the executive director of the Utah League Of Cities And Towns when Romney was bull-goosing the 2002 Winter Olympics. Bullock had the presumption to believe that he had some sort of stake in keeping an eye on the state's $59 million investment in the Games. At one point, Romney wanted to defer the repayment of the $59 million.

"You don't want me as an enemy," Romney reportedly told Bullock.

Later, Romney denied free and/or discounted tickets to the widows and orphans of firefighters who died in the 9/11 atrocities, but felt free to parcel them out to various connected Utah pols.

While governor, he sold out various friends and allies at the drop of a hat. He appointed a guy named William Monahan to be the head of the state's Civil Service Commission and then fired him in a 13-minute phone call after a Globe story revealed that Monahan had purchased a piece of property two decades earlier from some purported organized-crime figures, a story that can't have caught anyone by surprise, since a local paper in Monahan's hometown had revealed it 10 years earlier. In the years since, Monahan had been a staunch supporter of all of Romney's political endeavors, especially his involvement in the controversial construction of a massive Mormon Temple in the toney Boston suburb of Belmont.

(Romney's alleged purity did not last out his term, the Globe pointed out. As his term ran out, he stocked almost 200 state jobs with his political loyalists, including Eric Fehrnstrom, my old Herald colleague who's already made his mark on this year's campaign.)

If there's one thing you can say about Romney in his career as a politician is that there is nobody who he doesn't consider expendable, whether that is a staffer, a friend, an ally, or any particular group of constituents who presume to think that, just because they elected him, he owes them something. He is Nixon without the awesome, class-bred insecurities. Nixon knew when he was being vicious. He gloried in it. The White House tapes drip with his self-indulgent tough-guy crap through which you can see the quivering little grocer's son. That insecurity may be the only thing that saved the Republic. Willard Romney never has known that insecurity for a day in his life. He is casually vicious and he doesn't even recognize that he is.

To Willard Romney, voters vote for him because it is their job to vote for him, their part in the work of a righteous universe to give him whatever it is he wants. It was the job of the workers at Ampad to get fired so that he could make more money because that is what the immutable laws of that righteous universe demanded. It is the job of the media to let him talk about what he wants to talk about — he's bone-ignorant about Iran, too, by the way — because that will further his goal to be president which is where the immutable laws of the righteous universe want him to be. It is the job of all of us to be partners in the immutably decreed apotheosis of Willard Romney, because that, my dear man, is the way things simply ought to be.

(Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog)

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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