It's been a good week so far for Mitt Romney. On Monday, new polls showed him leading the pack in both Iowa and New Hampshire. And if his growing attacks on Romney are any indication, John McCain is clearly answering yes to the Washington Post's question today, "Is Romney Moving Up?"
But despite his improving poll numbers, perfect hair and gleaming teeth, Mitt Romney can't escape himself. As Ana Marie Cox documents in Time, Romney's unparalleled opportunism, cynical calculation, red state transformations and gymnastic flip-flopping make Mitt a gaffe machine waiting to happen.
Cox's catalog of Mitt's Top Ten Gaffes details many of the greatest hits of smarmy pandering and jaw-dropping freakishness that are certain to add the term "Romneyesque" to the lexicon. It's all there, including his leaked playbook's plan to make France (where he himself performed his Mormon mission) the bogeyman of his campaign. The list goes on: naming Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth his favorite novel and the two-time varmint killer proclaiming himself a lifelong hunter. Cox also highlights Romney's hilarious historical revisionism, including his inadvertent praise for Fidel Castro and the supposed green policies of Adolf Hitler. Romney was even able to insult his own wife, saying of her contributions to Planned Parenthood, "Her positions are not terribly relevant to my campaign." Romney's classic acts of contortion on the Iraq surge, Osama Bin Laden and the doubling of Gitmo are also featured.
Over the past two years, Perrspectives has also compiled a rather prodigious library of the packaging - and repackaging - of Mitt Romney. A small sampling includes Romney's amazing abortion flip-flop, his ever-changing state of residence and his born-again determination to capture Bin Laden. The Romney Irony Watch includes his call for states to end their investments in firms doing business with Iran, despite the portfolio on Tehran ties of his own former employer. You can read about the reformed immigration foe who hired illegal aliens for to landscape his property and joined Tony Snow and John McCain as a casual user of the racial slur "tar baby." (For more Romney classic quotes, see the "GOP Quotes of the Week" here and here.)
Back in 2005, Michael Murphy, Mitt Romney's version of Karl Rove, said of his boss the Governor of Massachusetts, "He's been a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly." The bad news is that this fraud might be elected President of the United States. The good news, as Time reminds us, is that that unlikely eventuality promises to be entertaining along the way.