Boston Herald opinion piece

PRINCE OF BAIN ROUTINE JUST DIDN'T FLY
By Peter Gelzinis, Boston Herald

The words go back more than 100 years, but fit Willard Mitt Romney like a pair of jeans.

“You can’t beat somebody with nobody.”

The truth, bitter as it may be for the Prince of Bain to swallow, is that for all his furious shape-shifting — from the snows of New Hampshire to the sands of Boca Raton — in the end Mitt Romney was a handsome cipher, a shadow, a nobody.

That 47 percent of victims and freeloaders, who could never have afforded to pay $50,000 for a plate of hubris, had the last laugh.

What Romney believed depended upon whom he was talking to, or what state he happened to be in. That clown chorus that followed him through the Republican primaries had it right from the get-go. Mitt had no core.

His final debate performance a couple of weeks back was like something out of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Rather than trade ideas with Barack Obama, he channeled the president, as if trying to fill that inner vacuum where something like an original policy was supposed to go.

Mitt was always in such a rush to get to the White House. He never stayed put long enough to create a genuine political identity, to say nothing of a history. Let’s be honest, he was our governor for all of two years, not four.

Instead of squandering these last four years, to say nothing of the $50 million from his own vast cash reserves, Romney would have been better off if he had chosen to stay and run for a second term as governor.

But then, being our governor was always nothing more than a stepping stone, a necessary padding of the resume.

And to be fair, Mitt Romney almost pulled it off. But there is no almost in politics