Almost Human

Almost Human

That hair! Those teeth! Those jokes that sound...for a minute…almost...natural! (Until they’re told again with mechanical precision at the next stop down the road.) Robert Draper followed Mitt Romney’s campaign for a month, in search of the man behind the robot. He thinks he found him. But will America ever do the same?

mitt romney spent January 15—the day he won the Michigan primary and finally emerged as a credible threat to secure the GOP nomination—suspended in his customary state of gee-whizzery. The morning’s campaign load had been very light, just a single undersized rally in an office-furniture warehouse on the outskirts of Grand Rapids. With his fate firmly in the hands of his birth state, Romney now had the rest of the day to kill. Ecutive decision: Let’s go tour the ol’ alma mater!

And so, after a quick bite of pizza at Hungry Howie’s, the Romney clan—61-year-old Mitt and his wife, Ann, three of the five fabled Romney boys and their wives—squeezed into the chauffeur-driven SUV and motored over to Cranbrook Kingswood Upper School in the ultra-affluent Bloomfield Hills suburb outside Detroit. Once they arrived, word quickly spread that Romney was in the building, and the students poured out of their classrooms. Sure, I’ll pose for a few. Did your mom and dad vote this morning? Nice work! Get that boy an internship, heh heh heh!

Romney couldn’t help but be boggled by memories. Why, he’d met his sweetheart, Ann, while here. That was back when the girls were at Kingswood, the boys were at Cranbrook, and he’d seen that pretty little girl on horseback—and Mitt did what boys tend to do in such situations, which was throw a rock at her horse. What a place! Romney ambled into the campus’s weaving workshop and stood over the loom next to the textile instructor. Now show me how these darn things work—isn’t that something? After which: back to the Radisson for a ninety-minute strategy meeting. There wasn’t much downtime for Mitt. He had to be active, had to know the data. He_ loved_ that stuff!

A wave of exit polls came in shortly after 6 p.m. The former Massachusetts governor’s old chief of staff and now campaign manager, Beth Myers, said to Romney over the phone, “I’m on my way up to tell you.” _Well, that didn’t sound good. _Sitting in his hotel room, Romney told Ann, “We’ve lost.” He was telling other people the same thing when Beth and the eldest Romney boy, Tagg, knocked on his door to say: “34–29, we’re up!” Hey, that’s more like it!—though no one started popping the noncaffeinated cola yet, since the data had also been encouraging seven days ago in New Hampshire.

This time, though, the numbers held. And shortly after nine, Romney stood in a Southfield, Michigan, hotel ballroom, declaring over the din of 400 supporters: “Tonight marks the beginning of a comeback for America!” He looked, for Mitt, if not actually disheveled, then at least somewhat impacted by life: white shirtsleeves half-assedly rolled up, eyes glazed with emotion, indomitable haircut distinctly mussed. (Family backstage: _What happened to your hair??? _Mitt: Sometimes it just breaks, I dunno.…) They were out of there by nine thirty, back to the hotel room, where there was much hugging among Romneys, a little basking—then: Okay, enough celebrating. Let’s look down the road. Ann, tomorrow you head to Nevada. Tagg, you get back to Boston. Craig, you’re with me in South Carolina. And we all meet up in Florida—what do you say, team?

Even as the Romneys were calling it a night, his lieutenants were loading up at the bar adjacent to the victory ballroom. (“Mitt’s not the kind of guy you’d want to spend New Year’s Eve with,” says one of his top advisers.) Relief was in the air. Thanks to tonight’s result, one long-argued matter—namely how to sell this wholesome, airtight package of a man—had been laid, at least for the moment, to rest.

“What they were concerned about from day one,” one adviser would say, “was that he’d come across as this bloodless technocrat— this Michael Dukakis. And there was a feeling that we were going to eventually lose the ‘managerial’ vote to Giuliani.”

That belief had sent the campaign in pursuit of socially conservative voters for most of 2007, despite the view held by several advisers that, as one put it, “the so-co stuff just isn’t who he is.” In any event, the strategy hadn’t worked: Romney had lost in Iowa and New Hampshire while coming off as a panderer in the process. The failed tactic only fed the ongoing narrative of Romney, once a pro-choice governor, as shape-shifting slickster. “The national press calling him disingenuous—that is so not him,” one of his close advisers said that night at the bar after Romney’s victory speech. But then she confessed, “Going to Iowa and presenting yourself as the ultimate family man—not his strongest suit. He’s a problem solver, a genius with numbers. That’s his strong suit.”

Grinding the data, then fixing the problem—that’s who Mitt Romney was, and that’s precisely what he had been doing in his meticulously calculated but frequently turbulent rookie campaign for national office. His calculations had been painfully transparent. He’d moved to Mike Huckabee’s right in Iowa. He’d attempted to channel Barack “Change Agent” Obama in New Hampshire. And now, in Michigan, the Bain Capital cofounder, savior of the 2002 Winter Olympics, and deficit-busting governor had discovered a more authentic self—Turnaround Artist of Broken Institutions, Healer of Sick Economies—just in time to save his candidacy. Over and over that evening, his gurus were saying it: “He’s found his voice.” Yet even that was a borrowed sentiment; Hillary Clinton had said the same thing a week before, following her comeback victory in New Hampshire.

The Romney curse was this: His strength lay in his adaptability. In governance, this was a virtue; in a political race, it was an invitation to be called a phony. In both Iowa and New Hampshire, the campaign had tacked this way and that, field-testing losing formulas. But that night in Michigan, Romney’s team could bask in a fleeting moment of satisfaction in what was shaping up to be one of the most episodic presidential-campaign seasons in American history.

Meanwhile, the candidate himself slept, resting his new voice.

So smart, so handsome, so brisk and efficient, so mercilessly goddamned golden —and yet on the trail with Romney in Iowa in late December, you could see in his lacquered grin and hear in his distracted rope-line patter (“What a crowd! So good to see you.… Isn’t that_ something!_”) that this was a man far from home. “He’s in his element when he’s doing these,” an aide whispered to me one morning, during an event that featured Romney delivering a PowerPoint presentation to a hundred or so mildly fascinated Iowans. “Let’s turn to the next problem area,” the candidate was saying. “Tas—next slide. Immigration. Boy, that’s another difficult slide to look at. I’ll try to explain.…” The audience clapped mightily at the end—neat show!—but none of them appeared to have been, in any lasting way, smitten.

Still, you could not say that Romney was getting by with the minimum in Iowa. He had poured $7 million into saturating the airwaves with sharp-elbowed “contrast ads,” had thrown down an unrivaled get-out-the-vote organization, and had visited more than seventy of Iowa’s (as Romney put it) “ninety-nine bloomin’ counties!” At regularly hosted audience Q&A’s, his campaign urged audiences to “Ask Mitt Anything.” Most were Wiffle balls: “What’s your position on homeschooling?”

“I like homeschooling!”

And the result of all that money and effort? Well, Romney liked to say he’d withstood a John McCain surge and a Rudy Giuliani surge and a Fred Thompson surge and would beat back the current Mike Huckabee surge with similar dispatch. Unmentioned was that Romney himself had never surged—not even after his December speech on religion, which was intended to address voter disquiet over his Mormon faith. (Romney had initially been skeptical about the idea but had been won over by Huckabee’s rising poll numbers and had decided to write his own speech; after his advisers declared Romney’s first draft “too pedestrian,” the candidate had redrafted a final, loftier version.) The speech pleased conservative pundits but had no effect on the numbers. In the days leading up to the caucus, what mostly greeted Romney in Iowa was a rising tide of politeness. The tide of voters was flowing to Huckabee—the strumming, wisecracking televangelist of the field.

Romney, too, could be hilarious, his advisers assured me: During a debate prep session, one aide apparently asked him a sharp question about Mormon quirks, to which, feigning indignation, Romney replied, “Well! See if you get_ your _own planet when you die and go to heaven!” But on the trail, his humor was usually of the painfully hokey kind (describing one mishap, Romney would tell audiences that his wife Ann “fell on de butt in Dubuque”). Overall, Romney’s humanity remained a perplexing thing. He zipped through the photo ops, the media avails, the meet and greets, and other such campaign ercises as if they were bos to be checked, all part of the greater problem to be solved. It was possible to stand within a few feet of the candidate for several minutes at a time and of course to Ask Mitt Anything—and yet the most palpable sensation was that you were in the presence of a man who had no desire to give himself away.

Occasionally, he revealed himself anyway. During one Ask Mitt Anything session in Indianola, Iowa, a young woman in a parka stood up to ask the candidate a question. “What concerns me,” she began as she stood before a man with an estimated net worth of $250 million, “is that so many people in office cannot even relate to what the average American is going through. I look at the gas prices and health care skyrocketing. How are you going to be any different?”

“Well, I’ve made a difference,” Romney replied, and then ticked off his accomplishments as governor—health care reform, raising educational standards—before perhaps recognizing that the woman was not really asking what Romney had done but what he felt. Passing on a chance to show some empathy, he instead reminisced fondly about how he and his family spend Christmas skiing at their condo in Utah.

The moment reminded me of something he had said the previous week during the _Des Moines Register _debate: “I don’t lose sleep thinking about the upper-class tax burden.”

A reporter sitting next to me in the debate spin room muttered, “Yeah, he has people on his payroll to do that for him.”

“He was very friendly,” recalls one GOP operative who first met Romney in June 2006 at a D.C. event intended to introduce the Massachusetts governor to the Beltway Republican establishment. “But it was one of those slightly condescending out-of-the-playbook-of-a-politician things. It’s not like I thought, This guy’s a prick. I just didn’t get a warm feeling about him.”

When I asked a Romney adviser and former Bush campaign aide how the candidate compared with the president, he replied, “He’s more like Blair than Bush,” referring to Romney’s more cerebral, data-driven manner. On the other hand, Romney is noticeably deficient in Bush’s people skills. A former White House staffer who has consulted for Romney recalls, “From the moment I first stepped into the Oval Office, Bush was sizing me up, looking me up and down, wanting to know who the hell I was. He got a good read of me, and we connected and worked well together as a result. Romney’s very hail-fellow-well-met friendly in a CEO kind of way, but there’s a fog that separates you from him. You feel like you’re his three-fifteen appointment and the three-forty-five is going to get the very same treatment.”

The conventional method for humanizing a mechanical politician like Romney is to surround him with his family. And certainly Ann Romney provided a welcome soft touch on the campaign trail. One evening at an event outside Cedar Rapids, the former first lady of Massachusetts described to an audience of 900 Iowans how Mitt had responded when she told him she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. “He told me, ‘Sweetheart, I don’t care if you ever cook another meal,’ ” Ann said as her husband stood by her side. “He told me, ‘I’ll eat cereal the rest of my life.’ ” The crowd gasped in awe.

But it was more often the case that the flawlessness of the Romney clan—that unmarred dental architecture, those lush coifs and godly physiques—had an off-putting effect. “Perfect family, perfect teeth and hair—the reaction is ‘He doesn’t understand people like me,’ ” the former White House staffer acknowledges. Says another adviser: “Romney looks like he’s never had a bad day in his life.”

“My dad, he’s not a natural politician. He’s a businessman,” said Tagg Romney, 37, one afternoon as we sat in his office at Romney headquarters in Boston. “Very buttoned-down.… But you have to see this guy in a crisis. I mean, nobody’s better.”

Tagg then recounted a moment in which his grandmother had fallen through the floorboards of their former house in Michigan—and while the whole family was freaking out, Mitt was down in the hole with his mom, dialing 911 with his free hand. “In a crisis, he relies on instinct, but otherwise he’s very, very deliberate. Look at what he did on health care in Massachusetts. He brought in everyone, listened to everyone.…”

Tagg agreed that his dad’s humanness could be better communicated. “You should see the new video we’re posting on the Web site,” he said, describing a five-minute clip of the Romneys vacationing at their New Hampshire retreat on Lake Winnipesaukee. “My dad, he’s got all these whiskers on his face—I mean, I think that’s good. And he’s watching my brother light a firecracker—standing over him and yelling, ‘You moron!’ ” Grinning, he added in a low voice, “The campaign’s a little nervous about it—it’s risky.”

ONE MORNING in mid-December, Romney welcomed me to the front of his campaign plane for an interview. He had spent the early part of the flight to Iowa scribbling campaign ads. Now he sat across the aisle from me, genial and impersonal as a meteorologist, taking care to maintain eye contact at all times.

“There’s always an ‘except’ with every candidate,” he said when I asked him about his seeming inability to close the deal with the voting public. “I like John McCain except. I like Rudy Giuliani except. I like Mitt Romney except. We all have some area of concern.”

And what was his?

“Y’know, that’s something you’re going to have to assess,” he demurred. “McCain, I think, did a very nice job planting in voters and the media that I change my mind on the issues. He’s hammered that effectively—in my view, unfairly and incorrectly. But if you changed your mind on abortion, that allows you to tag everything else in the same way. That’s something which I have to consistently battle.”

For the next half hour, Romney discussed his scant criticisms of President George W. Bush (“Yes, I would’ve done things differently along the way, but I don’t know that it’s particularly productive—I think that smacks of Monday-morning quarterbacking”), the lessons he took from his failed attempt to unseat Senator Ted Kennedy in 1994 (“We just sat there and took punches—you’ve gotta be able to attack back”), and the music on his iPod (“Lots of ’60s, the Beatles, Roy Orbison, the Eagles, Springsteen, and country as well: Clint Black, Toby Keith, Chesney, and oh, what’s her name, I can’t think…”). Even close up, Romney’s handsomeness remained ridiculous: six feet tall, with enviable dabs of gravitas-gray in his sideburns, and ever alert brown eyes. At the same time, I could see actual suggestions of fatigue beneath those eyes. A lock of hair out of place. Pores. Though somewhat stiff, Romney came off as polite, unbullying, and anything but pompous. It became possible to conclude that, yes, there was a certain authenticity to this bright, somewhat boring multimillionaire.

During our conversation, only two subjects seemed to animate him. One was when I asked him to explain what his advisers meant when they invoked “the Bain Way”—referring to the consulting firm where Romney earned his fortune.

“It’s not as mystical as it sounds,” he replied. “Almost anybody in the consulting world faces a setting where you’re being hired by a corporation to help them solve a major strategic problem. Our approach was to have”—and he said this lovingly—“a very data-rich, data-intensive analytical process of the widest array of options, of gathering data to evaluate those options.… I like people to have pretty off-the-wall, extremely variant viewpoints on what to do. I have people arguing a different side. You learn something through the argument.”

Consciously or not, Romney was describing himself as the anti-Bush. And there seemed to be at least some truth to it. Once, before adopting the position that Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be denied entrance into the United States, he argued the matter with foreign-policy aide Dan Senor—and then had them switch sides, so that Senor was arguing Romney’s position. Another time, Romney led a conference call with economic advisers that rambled for over five hours. (“I thought, This must be what it’s like with Clinton,” recalls one participant.) This was the pre-presidential-campaign Romney: a steady-handed pragmatist who’d only lately been packaged as a true believer of the right.

The second question that drew Romney out was one about a particular line from his stump speech—I’ve spent my life in the private sector. I haven’t been in politics long enough to be badly infected—that had always struck me as disingenuous. Far more than the average office seeker, it seemed, Romney relished campaign-strategy sessions, studied poll numbers, and insisted on personally rewriting his major addresses. He was even the son of a governor and presidential candidate!

“You know, every fourth grader talks about how maybe they’ll someday be president,” he allowed before assuring me that he had given no serious thought to running until Utah senator Bob Bennett urged him to consider it in 2004. Nor, he insisted, had his dad ever discussed with him the possibility—though he then added warily, “There may be someone in my family who thinks so. But not at a time when there was a realistic setting.”

A few minutes after the interview, Romney ventured back to the rear of the plane. “I’ve been thinking about that question,” he said. “Y’know, I can’t think of a single time my dad ever talked to me about me running for president. And to get into politics—if I’d wanted to do that, I should’ve stayed in Michigan. Massachusetts wasn’t the ideal place for me to begin a political career.”

“But Governor, surely it had to be on your mind throughout your childhood. I mean, as George Romney’s son, there must have been a lifelong stream of adults urging you—”

“Me and a million other guys,” he said with a wave of his hand. And then again: “Me and a million other guys.”

At seven thirty on January 8—a fittingly ambiguous morning of snow and bright sunshine for the New Hampshire primary—traffic outside the Bedford polling station was at a standstill. A record turnout—but was that a good thing for Romney? Five days after losing in Iowa, the ever calculating candidate had spent the entire previous day shamelessly wooing independents with new campaign signs (washington is broken) and a new message, extrapolated from data of the Iowa results. (“Senators Biden, Dodd, and Clinton were defeated by a person describing the need for change in Washington—there’s no way our party will be successful in the fall if we put forward a long-standing senator,” with obvious reference to John McCain.) Gone were the edgy condemnations of gay marriage and the nostalgic tributes to Reagan. Making fresh appearances were a reverence for honest government (“I want high ethical standards!”), a flash of populism (“The politicians in Washington just don’t listen to the people of America!”), and an insistence on “change”—a word he used at least seventeen times during a single Nashua campaign event. Now, as he put it, what mattered most was who could “post up against” Obama, whom Romney was all of a sudden refusing to criticize, instead predicting with admiration: “I think he’s going to blow them away again.”

The traffic still wasn’t moving outside Bedford. It was so backed up, in fact, that what the heck, Mitt Romney emerged from his black SUV and proceeded to stride through the gridlock, walking a third of a mile to the doorway of the elementary school, trailed by dozens of reporters and a few advance men hollering, “Watch your step! Black ice! BLACK ICE!”

“Good morning! Nice to see you! Good morning!” The candidate lunged toward bustling voters—some recoiled from the smiling man and his looming press coterie, but many accepted his handshake and even murmured a few encouraging words. “The hands I shake here—” said Romney, “time and again I hear people say, ‘I was undecided, but now I’m gonna vote for you.’

“I’d like to get the gold here,” Romney added, wringing his Olympics experience for analogies. “I’m happy I got the silver in Iowa. I got the gold in Wyoming. By the end of the night, I’ll almost certainly have received more votes than anyone on the Republican side.”

The tangle of bodies and cameras had become oppressive. Voters were running for daylight. “This is ridiculous,” said Ann Romney as she pushed her way through the pack. An advance man hollered something, and Romney said to everyone and no one in particular, “Okay, we gotta move. The electioneer here wants us to move. Guys, we gotta run.” Breaking through the pack, Romney reached for the door handle of the black SUV, pulled at it, and—locked? What the heck?

“Governor!” called out an advance man. “This way! That’s not our car!”

Five hours later, at four forty-five in the afternoon, Tagg Romney arrived at the hotel room of his father, who greeted him by saying, “We lost.” To McCain.

Ann Romney did not bother to conceal her shell shock as her husband sighed, “Well, another silver” in his concession speech. “That’s the first time,” Tagg Romney would admit later, “that I saw my mom not being absolutely convinced that we were going to win the whole thing.” For the next two days, her dismay began to rub off on her husband. Tagg tried a Rocky analogy on his dad: Look, Apollo Creed just landed a good punch to your head. Now you gotta get up.

Romney needed only so much bucking up. After all, hadn’t he, during college, spent two and a half years in Catholic France as a Mormon missionary, knocking on door after door and being rejected again and again? _(And feeling good about it, because eventually he helped win more converts than any other missionary!) _On the campaign trail, Romney’s optimism could be indigestible at times, which, however, made it no less appropriate: The day after he lost in New Hampshire, a Romney-campaign call drive brought in $5 million.

romney loved to tell audiences about how his sons, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday last year, bought him a 1962 Rambler, the kind his father, George Romney, used to make while chairman of American Motors. It’s got one of those great big steering wheels.… Had one just like it as a kid. They used to call it Mrs. Romney’s Grocery Getter.

Audiences in Des Moines or Nashua would indulge this cornball nostalgia with halfhearted chuckles. But not in the Motor City! Here, at the very mention of Rambler, they roared in appreciation. As a senior adviser had said of Michiganders, “They know who he is.”_ Yes, they did!_

And needing their votes in the worst way, Romney chucked his beloved campaign data points and told the economically beleaguered crowds exactly what they wanted to hear. “Oh, some candidates will tell you, ‘Jobs are gonna be lost, and they’re not coming back,’ ” he said to 400 whooping Republicans in Taylor, Michigan, mocking a recent straight-talk remark by McCain. “Well, I am gonna fight for every job, and I’m not gonna rest until Michigan is back!”

At the annual Detroit Auto Show, Romney’s traveling reporters collared Detroit Auto Dealers Association president Doug Fox and asked him if McCain’s assertion was off base. No, Fox said, that was unfortunately the case. A lot of those jobs would never return. “So just to be clear,” I followed up, “you find McCain’s assessment of the jobs situation in the Michigan auto industry more realistic than Romney’s.”

The industry spokesman nodded.

But the facts weren’t about to deter Romney as he played up his roots—“I’ve got Michigan in my DNA, I’ve got it in my heart, and I’ve got cars in my bloodstream!”—at all local stops. Romney now only used the word change with derision, as in: “You hear Barack Obama talking about change. Well, like I heard someone say: That’s all you’ll have left in your pocket if Obama becomes president—change!” He again deified Reagan, reminding a Detroit audience that Dutch “brought us optimism again. He told us what we could be, and then he delivered, and that’s what we need in the White House!”

The morning before the January 15 primary, Romney stood in a high school gymnasium before 2,000 students and gave a meandering, embarrassingly unfunny performance that the traveling media generally agreed was his worst of the campaign. But when I asked a few of the students afterward what they thought, they were impressed.

“What did you hear that you liked?”

“The part where he said he was going to help Michigan,” chirped a sophomore with glasses. The others around her agreed.

No more sucking up to social conservatives, or wooing indie voters, or pining for change. It was the economy, stupid—Romney’s world, at long last. And it would mean victory.

“On MSNBC this morning, all the talk was about how we’re going into a recession,” one of Romney’s top aides told me in Michigan—hastily adding, “We all hate that. But, well, it certainly plays into his wheelhouse.”

“Who wants a doughnut? Vote for me, you’ll get one of these!”

On the morning of January 19, while voters in South Carolina were settling the McCain-Huckabee fight in the Palmetto State, Romney stood in the parking lot of a Las Vegas high school with an armload of Krispy Kremes. The Nevada caucuses would soon begin at venues like this one, and though Romney pretty much had them in the bag—“Who except the Mormons are gonna wake up at 9 a.m. in Vegas on a Saturday morning and not be too hungover to caucus?” guffawed an aide—it seemed prudent to nab a photo op before jetting off to Florida.

“Two golds and two silvers—we’re feeling pretty good,” Romney said while shaking hands, posing for photographs and scribbling his name across campaign posters. “Anybody see Jay Leno last night? What a thrill—I never thought I’d ever be on Jay Leno! Didja see that skateboarder on the show? Had his skateboard attached to his feet? Well, I’m hoping Nevada will be attached to my feet!”

And finally, “Thanks, you guys are terrific—what friends I’ve got, I’ll tell ya!” before dashing off to the airport, leaving the natives to fulfill their civic duties. Twenty-four thousand Clark County Republicans filed into twenty-nine caucus sites, assisted by local GOP volunteers—many of whom were wearing Mitt Romney stickers or shirts. What friends he had!

At nine or thereabouts, the doors closed and the caucuses began. Inside precinct 3373, the chairwoman, Lois Westover, stood before forty-one fellow Republicans. She asked who would like to speak on behalf of their candidate for two minutes. In alphabetical order, advocates of Giuliani, McCain, Paul, Romney, and Thompson stood up. (There were no takers for Huckabee or Duncan Hunter.) They spoke, with varying degrees of fluency and passion, off the cuff—except for Romney’s advocate, who happened to be chairwoman Westover. She read from a prepared 358-word text: “One man is uniquely equipped to meet this new generation of American challenges.… Please join me in voting for Mitt Romney, the man that will lead a coalition of strength for us, for our families and for America.”

After the ballots were tallied—Huckabee got one vote, Thompson two, Paul four, Giuliani six, McCain eight, and Romney twenty-one, a dead-accurate reflection of Romney’s victory margin in Nevada that day—I stayed behind to ask Westover about her speech. “It was canned,” she admitted. The Romney state office had sent the text to her and to other precinct leaders three days ago.

“No other candidate had sent out prepared statements,” I observed. Everyone else talked from the heart about their candidate—what they saw in their guy, what they believed he stood for—except for the advocates of Romney.

Westover smiled proudly.

“Well,” said the voice of Mitt Romney for Clark County precinct 3373, “we’re very well organized.”

POSTSCRIPT:

By the time the Florida vote totals were in, Mitt Romney had stopped bringing up gold and silver medals—or, for that matter, the delegate count. In the wake of a pivotal McCain victory, followed by Giuliani’s abrupt withdrawal from the race and Huckabee’s equally poor showing, the Romney campaign had to satisfy itself with a new mantra: "It’s a two-man race."

The problem: Republicans knew who the other man was. And they seemed to like that man. Going into Super Tuesday, could the same thing be said about Mitt Romney?

It was a heck of a problem.

gq_ correspondent _robert draper’_s book _Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush _is in paperback this month. _

Photograph by Lisa Kereszi