You live in a bubble your whole adult life only to find yourself in a seemingly impermeable bubble within that bubble for ten long months since the Iowa caucuses in January, a bubble that was suddenly pierced November 6th when even Fox News called the election against you, and Mitt, you decided to stay in your bubble, the original one, for what must have been close to an hour, trapped in a narrative that I swear to God that only you and Karl Rove still believed in, otherwise you would have conceded, Mitt, humbly accepted your fate before you did.
Which, alas, is still the case: that you’re not able to come to grips with what happened to you on Election Day 2012. Mitt is milling around, not yet mulling his options. To be Mitt Romney these dark days in November is to be like a lone survivor in a landscape laid waste by a nuclear explosion, where nothing that is left standing bears any resemblance to your expectations.
This Mitt is not John McCain, he is not John Kerry, he is not Bob Dole. Or Walter Mondale. We won’t be seeing Mitt Romney because he’s not leaving that original bubble of his, the one reserved for the uber-wealthy. Mitt won’t be taking a seat across from me on the subway (not that McCain or Kerry or Dole or Mondale will either . . .) or be reading a Kindle at a bus stop, waiting for the cross-town.
The truth is, given my life being what it is, a relatively ordinary one, I can’t for the life of me imagine what it’s like for Mitt Romney. I wonder, in a year, will I even remember his name. At this moment it is the one thing he has going for him. How can you forget a name like Mitt?
Running for Your Life: The Perils of Coastal Living
