McKay Coppins on Mitt Romney

Running toward crises

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Steve and Sarah sit down at Dispatch HQ with McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the forthcoming Romney: A Reckoning, a biography of Mitt Romney’s political career. Coppin’s unique access to the soon-to-be-retired senator turns a traditional political biography into a near-psychological thriller covering Romney’s torment after losing the 2012 presidential election, the psychic currency of a senate seat, and his vote to convict Donald Trump.

Show notes:

–Steve’s bonus question on The Skiff

-McKay Coppins profile at The Atlantic

–Romney: A Reckoning

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Comments (46)
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  1. Avatar photo
    C C Writer

    I'm trying to understand what Sarah and Coppins thought was so amusing about Romney's assessment of Trump's character back in 2016 when he was giving advice to Christie. They laughed a lot and seemed to think this was ridiculous for some reason. I didn't go back to the podcast for the exact words, but Romney was totally correct about that as far as I am concerned.

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    Simon J. Dodd

    Like Sarah, I, too, recognize myself in Romney's misreading of the Tea Party. It seemed to speak in the GOP's vernacular, saying words about the Constitution and taxes and debt and spending and welfare, and those of us who believed the ideas denominated by the words assumed that they were with us. It didn't occur to us that they were not saying words but incanting tribal shibboleths, signaling their identity using the sounds approved for GOP affiliation.

    Nor did we stop and wonder—neither wishing to look a gift horse in the mouth nor make condescending assumptions based on mere appearances and facts—at the incredible luck that a mass movement agreed with us. We saw what we wanted to see and ignored the many red flags urging caution.

    My primary takeaway from this (apart from the loss of the capacity to trust) is that labels and formulae are conveniences, and I mustn't take their recitation at face value, assuming that the speaker agrees with me simply because they make sounds that resemble (albeit with an accent) words agreeable to me.

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      C C Writer

      I had a similar experience back when the Tea Party was brand new. But there weren't any "red flags" at the time. The people were legit, at first. I think it soon was co-opted, but that doesn't mean it was false from the start. The take-away for me is that if your movement is too loose, anyone can hijack it and thereby discredit the ideas on which you founded it.

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        Simon J. Dodd

        Let me offer a ready example of a "red flag" that I ignored though in hindsight it was a warning. The tea party people—the grassroots not the leaders—demanded that government spending be cut, but "keep your hands off my social security." This, of course, they distinguished from "welfare," which was to be cut ruthlessly. Like the bleating about "political correctness," we ascribed this gibberish to stupidity; these people were the common clay of the new west, not eggheaded intellectuals, and, we told ourselves, their hearts were in the right places even if their brains were AWOL. Not so. And now that gibberish has taken over and revealed what was really behind the curtain.

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          C C Writer

          Well, I never heard any of those stupid remarks myself, but then I didn't have any contact with those types. All I did was go to a rally that was run by credible people and organizations. I thought I was the grassroots, but apparently I wasn't.

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            Simon J. Dodd

            I never thought I was part of the grassroots, but I thought that the grassroots aligned with me. (Again, they said the right words, or at least made noises that sounded like the right words.) It fit with my illusions. For years we all told ourselves lies about the, "silent majority." Both parties do this. They are sure that they're right, and because right, it *just makes sense* that untold hidden majorities are on their side, no matter what evidence to the contrary may appear. They want to believe. *I* wanted to believe. I knew that Obama was wrong on ideological axes and I was sure he just using accusations of racism to deflect from his wrongness. I was primed to believe that a mass movement opposing him on ideological grounds existed, because it just *had* to. And because I knew my views weren't rooted in racism and that his deflections were insincere, when a movement that looked like what I wanted appeared, I just assumed that they shared my views and weren't racist either. (This goes to another red flag we should have noticed—the "birther" nonsense.) In hindsight, it's pellucid that the tea party, which I saw as an unalloyed positive, was in fact nothing more than a populist movement in search of a lightning rod, racist, insular, stupid, tribal, soaked through with grift, and merely camouflaged with the language of what we at the time called "conservatism."

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  3. Slowdave1

    Terrific podcast! Very insightful into Mitt Romney. So introspective, almost to a fault. And I didn't know the details about his dad having been that close to the presidency. I think Mitt would have made a good president. I'm sorry that he felt the need to wander out and say things he didn't strongly believe in. Like a character out of a Shakespeare tragedy. Feels like it is so important for him to be the president, partly because he wants it but maybe more so because he believes the country needs HIM, that he ventures outside of his beliefs to get votes which ends up (maybe) costing him the win.

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    Chevesl

    This was genuinely great. Coppins is a sharp guy and a fair dealer. What comes out is an all-too-human Romney who was awkwardly out of step with the GOP but has a good soul.

    I especially appreciated Sarah’s sharing that she identified with Mitt’s mixed motives on rushing towards crises to help, sure, but also because it’s “good to be needed.” That was an admirable thing to be honest about. I, on the other hand, extend the warm hand of disinterested charity daily, robustly, and strictly anonymously so as to avoid the grubby temptations of praise or self-regard so many lessers fall prey to.

    Oh, and can somebody get my brotha Steve a Kleenex up in here? He was sniffing like Tony Montana at the end of Scarface.

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    1. Slowdave1

      2nd on the kleenex. Or was it an audio problem? I could occasionally hear others with pronounced inhales also. If it wasn't such a great podcast, I would have just turned it off. Please fix, I beg you!

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        Simon J. Dodd

        I share this frustration. Listening to this episode with my wife, she several times remarked on how distracting the breath noise is, but this episode is in no way unique. The poor quality of The Dispatch's podcast production stands in stark contrast to the quality of the material. It's not that hard. It takes time and care, yes, but it can be done. Look at ATP, The Talk Show With John Gruber, The Incomparable, Hello Internet, any of the Relay FM shows. Look at even The McCarthy Report, which is all-but unlistenable any time McCarthy himself isn't actively speaking, and even *that* show avoids the artifacts besting (autocorrect for besetting, but it's apt, so I'll leave it) the Dispatch's podcasts. These are fixable problems, and they should be fixed.

        Local-end recording, a concerned editor, cleaner breaks (for what I assume are dynamic ad insertions), a compressor and a bit of EQ, cut the stings in length by 90% (podcast theme music should be no more than one bar), and delete the waffle at the top.

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  5. Joe Fisher

    This is a buck wild interview. Not having read the book, the impression I get from this interview is that my instincts about Romney are correct. He came across to me like an inauthentic slimeball who just desperately wanted to be president. This is a knock I DON'T hit Trump with because I don't think Trump hides the ball like that. I KNOW I can't trust Trump. I never knew if I could trust Romney or not, and the gaffs all came across as failed shiboleths, which this interviews seems to suggest they were.

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      Narwhal

      Can you give some examples from this interview which reinforced your pre-existing opinion of him?

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  6. Mwupton

    This one was a lot of fun. Romney may not always be a reliable narrator of his own life, but it is amazing that he realized it and allowed for a biography to be written about him in this fashion with his full support.

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  7. Runyan.Jason

    This was awesome!

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    AndreaLeane75

    What a fascinating interview. I will have to read this book. I still wonder what things would look like if Romney had won.

    Also, I caught that one snippet where Ryan tried to discourage Romney's impeachment vote. I had a higher opinion of Ryan than that. So disappointing.

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    Charley Warns

    It sounds like a must read. It's be interesting to read Mitt's journal entry after the Clint-interviews-chair episode. He likely figured Clint would act more like what one would figure Charlton Heston would act if put in like situation. Re Mitt not being a sellout, I'm thinking of a tweet I read last night from Mark Levin in which he's calling Liz Cheney, "unhinged." Interestingly, I found 2 quotes from Levin from a 2016 article in The Hill when he was singing a different tune.

    "I’m not voting for Donald Trump. Period. … These bully, dirty tricks, Nixonian tactics, they’re only going to backfire. So, count me as never Trump," Levin said.

    “There’s been too much of this folks, way too much of this,” Levin said. “The crap in the National Enquirer against Ted Cruz, the attacks on Michelle Fields, I mean, I can go right through the list, too much, too much, too much. At some point, you’ve got to stand up to it.”

    Liz Cheney is actually standing up to Trump and yet Levin calls her unhinged! It's not just Levin ... it's everybody. It's an invasion of the body snatchers as Jonah pointed out years ago. Like with Dole-Kemp, Romney-Ryan was an epic ticket; sadly, we'll never know the difference they would've made.

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  10. Dalebrewster1969

    Nope, she’s getting worse.

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      Seth

      I can't speak as much to Liz, but I briefly tried to join Adam Kinzinger's organization after Jan. 6th. It was awful. It basically constructed a cult of personality around Adam in the same way Trump did in 2015 and it duped very online political types into surrendering small dollar donations. An under appreciated aspect of the anti-Trump movement is that they inevitably end up adopting Trumpian tactics and rhetoric in opposition to Trump.

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        Simon J. Dodd

        Worse, they, too, are all thinly-disguised grifts.

        Nor should anyone think that problem is unique to the right. A month ago, I saw a solicitation for donations in support of a "Stop Trump" conference in New York, keynoted by Robert DeNiro. And I don't mean Robert DeNiro the adjunct professor of political science at Wasilla Community College—no, this was the actor. I've rarely seen a more obvious attempt to leech from public anger, and the irony was too much, for these open grifters would doubtless say that Trump's open grifting is one of his most odious traits.

        I'm so sick and tired of grift culture. These people are parasites on society and we must rediscover our sense that what they do is lame, boring, basic, and gross. We cannot rid ourselves of grifters, but we can send them scuttling back to the shadows where they belong.

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          Seth

          Couldn't agree more.

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