For some of this stuff, I kind of feel bad for the guy. Americans expect a certain kind of inauthenticity from their presidents. We KNOW Romney is filthy rich. We know he was born into an incredibly privileged and powerful family. It would be weird if that kind of lifelong aristocrat WEREN'T sheltered by his elite status. We also know that he's a lifelong urbanite and Northerner. And yet we want him to play the part of a down-home countryboy -- a t-shirt and jeans guy who drinks his beer from a can while watching high school football on Saturday nights, listening to Toby Keith, and shooting deer with the rifle he got at Wal Mart. It's ridiculous. Romney's problem is that he's a horrible actor -- maybe, somewhere deep down, there's still a shred of decency in him, which itches him when he's being a phoney, and that trips him up.
Reagan was a much better actor. He was a pampered Hollywood elitist, a divorcee with a train wreck of a family, and a non-church-goer, who nonetheless knew how to play a salt-of-the-earth cowboy and devout family values paragon, to get the votes of the rubes. GW Bush was also fairly good at it. He was a coddled draft-dodging, coke-snorting aristocrat, born, educated, and largely raised in New England, who'd never held a real job in his life. Yet he knew how to play the brush-clearing Texan "rancher" for the camera. And the morons ate it up.
