Right lines, wrong music: what Mitt Romney lacks is the ability to inspire.(2008 III)

Derry, N.H.

HALFWAY through Mitt Romney's town-hall meeting at a school gym here, a polite, sincere young girl near the front gets the mike. She says she's been trying to ask her question at events for other candidates, but this is the first time she's gotten a chance. Her 26-year-old cousin was hurt in a rugby accident and is paralyzed from the neck down. She wants to know the former Massachusetts governor's position on stem-cell research.

It wouldn't take an act of Clintonesque empathy to express sympathy for this girl. To ask how her cousin is doing. To recognize the pain her family has gone through. Any minimally adept city-council candidate would do it. Indeed, pretty much any person--even without the incentive to try to win people over for an election--would do it. It takes a prodigious emotional reserve, or a monomaniacal focus on policy, or some other unfathomable quality, not to do it.

But Mitt Romney doesn't. "Great question," he says. "Let me tell you where I would invest federal dollars." He then launches into a detailed explanation of stem-cell research, describing a meeting he had a few years ago with a professor at Stanford University who told him about altered nuclear transfer, or "alternative methods of getting embryonic-like cells." By the end of his brief discussion of "reprogramming" and "pluripotent cells," there is no doubt that Mitt Romney knows stem-cell policy. All that he fails to address is the human element of the question.

The next day, at another town hall in Nashua, a woman gets up and asks another stem-cell question, prefacing it by saying that her son has Type 1 diabetes and the family has lived with the effects "24/7, 365. I think every hour of every day about what the effect of this will be on his work." Again, Romney dives straight into the details of the policy.

Politics largely is about relating to people, and it is here--despite his resources, his organization, and his planning--that Mitt Romney has fallen down. It's why he hasn't been able to make the sale with voters, and why his candidacy faces the abyss after losses in Iowa and New Hampshire. Romney is an impressive and fundamentally decent man who has been diminished by his campaign.

At a time when the electorate was looking for a different kind of politician, Romney ran in Iowa as the same old kind of Republican. Shifts in his positions (the ever-maligned "flip-flops") also made him seem like the same old kind of politician. Romney had to become pro-life if he was to have a chance for the nomination; he would have been in worse shape than Rudy Giuliani if he hadn't. And he had to run in socially conservative Iowa because anything other than an early-state strategy seeking to build momentum on initial victories wouldn't have made sense for a candidate without a national following.