Romney’s Not So Excellent Adventures on the Senate Ship of Fools

I felt most of this book was extremely well written, but it couldn’t decide on its intended direction. The first 200 pages or so were very interesting. After Romney loses his 2008 presidential bid, he was casting about for direction in life while simultaneously struggling to process the loss itself. The Orrin Hatch Senate seat then fell into his lap. The irony is Romney actually voted with Republicans 81% of the time as a Senator, but his raw acrimony toward Trump and the “MAGA constituents” contaminated his well, keeping him from serving constructively those conservative principles he grew up embracing. Another irony is many of the Trump supporters he eschews likely voted for Romney back in his 2008 presidential contest with Obama. He can’t see that probability because everything and everyone associated with Trump is anathema to him. 

By the time I got to page 224, I felt like I was reading the male political equivalent to a reality show script from “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”  From this point on, everything in the book is colored by Romney’s overarching repugnance toward Trump, Pence, and practically the entire Republican Party. Once in favor of a border wall, he suddenly couldn’t bring himself to see securing the border as a priority, but as the arm of white nationalism flexing itself before his eyes. 

Coppins later writes, “At a caucus meeting the day after the trial began, Romney stood to make an earnest case for calling witnesses. ‘Arguing both sides of an issue is the best way to find the truth,’ he told them. ‘If we were on the other side of this, I imagine that we would be coming up with arguments as to [how] we could call witnesses in a timely way.’ The room was silent. He later noted in his journal, with a twinge of paranoia, that on his way out he saw one colleague turn to another and shake her head while making ‘disparaging gestures in my direction.’” He can’t see himself as a revenge obsessed Skeletor seeking to uncover secrets of Castle-Volodymyr-Call as an abuse of power, instead of a plea to stop the foreign cover up, in an impeachment hearing that he dreams could carry him like a triumphant tide to the top of the Senate-verse and beyond. 

I wondered if author Coppins felt such gratitude for all the hours of access to Romney and his family, he was torn between an accurate but unattractive depiction of how Romney’s political naïveté, faulty party analysis, and interpersonal difficulties were his political downfall, leaving him an almost tragic figure in the halls of Congress where he became a pariah in the party to which he felt he no longer belonged, and the pressure to make this book all he felt Romney hoped it would be, a vehicle that justified his actions, while lionizing him as a man who put ideals and principles above the taint of party interests. It’s like Romney is an “executive guy” who never processed the loss of his own presidential ambitions, felt most at home in the Oval Office where “he really  belonged,” and interpreted the entreaties of Joe Biden in their bromance as a relationship of equals, and not the manipulations of a corrupt, cunning lifetime politician to secure the votes he needed to get his SCOTUS pick through, and resuscitate his flagging poll numbers with Utah voters. 

Romney asks, “Do we weigh our own political fortunes more heavily than we weigh the strength of our republic, the strength of our democracy, and the cause of freedom? What is the weight of personal acclaim compared to the weight of conscience?” Such a valid question. The stench of political fortunes and personal acclaim is at this moment sucking the last molecules of oxygen right out of the halls of Congress. Coppins writes, “…he sensed that many of his colleagues attached an enormous psychic currency to their position—that they would do almost anything to keep it…Job preservation, in this context, became almost existential. Retirement was death. The men and women of the Senate might not need their government salary to survive, but they needed the stimulation, the sense of relevance, the power.” Romney notes, “I think for most of us, it’s like, ‘Well, what am I going to do instead?’ One of his new colleagues even told him that the first consideration when voting on any bill should be ‘Will this help me win reelection?’ (The second and third considerations, the colleague continued, should be what effect it would have on his constituents and on his state.) Romney would find out soon just how consequential this mentality could be.”

Later Coppins writes, “There was something familiar, even comforting, about squabbling with Democrats over federal spending. It was nice sometimes to just feel like a Republican again, a member of the team. Some commentators saw these moments of partisan relapse as evidence that Romney had forgotten the stakes of the moment America was facing.‘ After [the Trump] crisis passed, he returned to the narrow thinking of a party man,’ The Atlantic’s George Packer wrote. ‘It seems Romney can’t bring himself to imagine that democracy is threatened not just by Trump, but by his own party.’” 

It would seem Packer is somewhat short sighted in his scope of vision regarding “the stakes of the moment America was facing,” which involves our Ship of State sailing into decline, sagging under the tonnage of debt and decades worth of government prevaricating to the American public about everything from assassinations and economic hitmen to elections and pandemic origins, the corruption of three letter agencies who’ve lost sight of real global threats for imagined domestic ones, shattering of secure national sovereignty and governance, the 800 pound gorilla of Big Pharma’s mutation, all combined to weigh down a de facto ship of fools full of senescent lifetime politicians on both sides of the aisle, ignoring the orchestra playing its last tune, Barbra Streisand’s version of “Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair,” as the merry-go-round slows because while power is as addicting as it is corrupting, the carnival never lasts forever.