Mitt Gore? Mitt Kerry?

Check out Jacob Weisberg's recent article in "Slate", he argues that Mitt Romney's problem may that he too closely resembles Al Gore and John Kerry.  I was recently thinking the same thing.  Considering that Gore won the popular vote back in 2000, I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, still, it's an interesting read.  Some highlights:

"He's too handsome, too rich, and too pompous to win the hearts of ordinary Americans. . . . . . . . . .Republicans are doing something quite strange at the moment. They are in the process of choosing a candidate whom hardly any of them actually likes. Though Mitt Romney won the Florida primary handily yesterday, rumbles of dissatisfaction with him continue.  Romney isn’t so much winning the Republican nomination as having it default to him for lack of any compelling alternative. . . . . . . . . .The case for voting for Romney goes as follows: Of the Republican presidential candidates, he is the only one with any real chance of defeating President Obama in November. . . . . . . . . . Seldom, however, do his half-hearted supporters evince any affection or enthusiasm for the man himself. They generally acknowledge Romney to be an insipid, somewhat blank personality, who is almost absurdly variable in his positions and core beliefs. . . . . . . . . . In this respect, Romney strongly resembles two similarly unloved Democratic nominees from the recent past, Al Gore and John Kerry. Gore and Kerry both suffered from the same characterizations that get applied to Romney—too wooden in person while too flexible in their views. Their supporters often argued that qualifications were what mattered. But ominously for Romney, both Gore and Kerry lost winnable races because of their flawed personalities. George W. Bush, on the other hand, got elected and re-elected, despite his enormous, substantive shortcomings, because ordinary people found it easy to relate to him at a personal level. They felt he wasn’t trying to be someone different from who he was. . . . . . . . . .Romney, Kerry, and Gore are all, in a way, versions of the same political type. Statuesque, handsome, from privileged backgrounds and impeccably credentialed, they have no log-cabin stories to humanize and ground them. Unlike a Lyndon Johnson, a Richard Nixon, a Ronald Reagan, a Bill Clinton, or a Barack Obama, they didn’t overcome humble origins or broken families. . . . . . . . . .In his attempt to overcome his privileged origins, the unloved candidate struggles to establish his plain-folks ordinariness in ways that inevitably backfire. He touts his plebian tastes—pick-up trucks, country music, trashy food—and inevitably overdoes it or gets the background music wrong. Al Gore’s attempt to look less like a Washington politician yielded the “earth tones” fiasco. John Kerry asked for his Philly cheesesteak with Swiss cheese, and was photographed nibbling at this alien object rather than tucking in, as one does. Romney defended his claims as a sportsman by asserting that he had gone out hunting for rodents and varmints “more than two times” . . . . . . . . . .The public usually picks up on this authenticity gap—the space between who the candidate really is and how he wants to be seen." 

Good read, the entire article can also be found at Financial Times.