Globe On Romney, Pts. 1 & 2
So far, I'm pretty underwhelmed by the Boston Globe's epic mini-series on Mitt Romney, which so far has not only lost the forest for the trees, but for a lengthy stretch seemed to wander into somebody else's forest. The bulk of today's episode -- "The Missionary" -- laid out the interesting but irrelevant historical tale of Mormonism and Romney's ancestors. Why?
Meanwhile, I'm still baffled about why the Globe led the series off yesterday with the story of Romney's near-death car-crash in France, which is neither new nor illustrative. At the end of the first installment, the writers tease up "the degree to which he would never be the same" after the incident, but today we are told that "within a few weeks, Mitt was seemingly back to normal." The writers try to suggest that "the first glimpses of the super-organized achiever" of later years first emerged after the crash, but his pre- and post-crash missionary work looks pretty much identically aggressive and zealous.
If anything, it's remarkable how little the crash (which killed his boss's wife, with Mitt driving) seems to have affected him, either emotionally at the time or philosophically in the long run. (Romney never mentions it in his book, Turnaround.)
To me, the most important part of Romney's life, biographically, is clearly and obviously the quarter-century or so he spent as a business management consultant, angel investor, and leveraged-buyout dealmaker. That's going to be covered tomorrow, not long after the New York Times ran a broad, comprehensive, but unprobing and unenlightening look at the topic.
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