If the speech that Mitt Romney gave at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday was nothing else, it was, at least, a fitting capstone to his 2012 Presidential campaign—and, perhaps, to his political career. The man is, on paper, a near-perfect candidate: not just capable and accomplished, but polished, impeccably good-looking, and well spoken; a President right out of central casting. But that’s on paper. In reality, he’s stuck playing a character named Mitt Romney, even now either unable—or unwilling—to let the mask slip.

In theory, Romney should feel freer now that he’s lost what will supposedly be his last campaign. Defeat can be liberating that way. Obviously, there’s a limit: It’s not like he was going to come on stage and renounce his renouncing of the health-care law that was once his signature accomplishment as governor of Massachusetts, and which formed the basis of Obamacare. He wasn’t going to demand that conservative activists start living in the real world and stop forcing Republican candidates to take positions in primaries that will hurt them in general elections. He wasn’t going to make waves. Expecting him to would have been silly.

But there’s a very large middle ground between all that and what Romney actually did, which was to deliver a variation on his old stump speech, complete with the Kid Rock theme song and the “I met person X who represents everyone in America” anecdotes, some of which were the exact same stories he’d used during the campaign. There were hints of emotion, but they were just that: fleeting glimpses at what might be real feeling underneath.

As Romney himself said, the person who lost the last election probably isn’t the best person to be offering advice on how to win the next one. That’s fine. He doesn’t have to give his Party a vision for how to proceed. That’s not his responsibility, and it’s not clear that anyone in the G.O.P. would really listen to him anyway; though he did get a very enthusiastic reception from the audience at CPAC. Maybe he really will go into some sort of quiet retirement now—away, for the most part, from politics. That’s fine, too. But for his sake, here’s hoping that if and when he does so, he allows himself some time to relax and just be plain old Mitt.

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty.