The ten grand man

My first negative feeling about Mitt Romney came in the Republican Primary debates, when he grinned the Mitt grin at Rick Perry and said, "I'll bet you $10,000."

Rick Perry looked stunned. Not that it would be all that hard to stun Rick Perry. But I was stunned, too. Politics may be crass, but it's at a higher, more sophisticated level of crass than the Beavis and Butthead my-dad-is-richer-than-your-dad theory of governance. I just could not imagine Benjamin Franklin telling John Adams, “I’ll bet you 10 grand that Georgia will ratify the First Amendment.”

Apparently I’m not the only one. James Fallows of The Atlantic, on CBS this morning, was asked to predict strengths and weaknesses of Obama and Romney in tomorrow night’s debate. Among Mitt’s weaknesses, he said, was “the $10,000 bet instinct serves him wrong.”

But this is not about the debates. It’s about Mitt’s power to rub me the wrong way. I have to excuse myself also from being a committed Obama vote. Mitt could do this to me if his opponent were someone I would never vote for, like Justin Timberlake.

I mentioned the Mitt grin. There is also the Mitt walk. Both are annoying. But I have actually been affecting the Mitt walk for years, which I copied from a newspaper executive (I call it the “executive shuffle”) I once worked for, so it’s not like I lack affection for it. They are just annoying, the way watching George W. Bush’s impersonation of Alfred E. Newman for eight years was annoying.

But they don’t rub me the wrong way. Mitt’s tax returns rub me the wrong way. There’s something about his refusals that doesn’t look right. Dozens of reporters and other diggers are hard at work looking for those tax returns because of that same conviction: doesn’t look right. I wish he had gotten this out of the way last spring. What if they surface tomorrow? Maybe they’ll be fine, but maybe not. It rubs me the wrong way that we have to worry about this 37 days before the election.

Mitt’s going off half-cocked with his comment about the Libya consulate attacks rubbed me the wrong way, but not near as much as his “47 percent” comment, which didn’t just rub me the wrong way. As a lifelong middle-class Trouser, an Army vet, a hard worker for five decades and now proud of a nation which would provide me retirement benefits, I was offended. Maybe Justin Timberlake wouldn’t be so bad after all, if he’s old enough.