[Federalist] Last month, Mitt Romney announced he will retire from the Senate after one term. Romney, who is 76, cited his age. That was undoubtedly a major consideration for a guy with a platoon of grandchildren.It’s also true that Romney is unpopular with Utah voters and had no real chance of reelection after becoming the most prominent elected Republican antagonist of Donald Trump. With Romney’s 30-year political career ending with a whimper, there would naturally be a forceful attempt to shape his legacy as something other than a failure.
Fortunately, Romney already made plans for this. The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, also a practicing Mormon, was already beavering away on a Romney biography that was sure to be sympathetic. Sure enough, very soon after Romney’s retirement announcement, The Atlantic ran a juicy excerpt adapted from the prologue of the forthcoming book. While the excerpt was sympathetic to Romney, in some ways it defied expectations.
The tableau it paints of Romney is something of a caricature. A luxury condo in the Watergate was too painful a commute to the Capitol, and Ann Romney doesn’t like spending time in D.C., so he’s living alone in a $2.4 million townhouse on Capitol Hill. He passes the time by watching Ted Lasso reruns on his 98-inch television while eating salmon sandwiches slathered in ketchup because he doesn’t like salmon. (When it comes to food, the septuagenarian Romney, who has declared his favorite meat is "hot dog," seems to have the maturity of a 7-year-old.)
When that doesn’t stave off the boredom, he invites over a reporter who will keep him company late into the evenings while he "nurse[s] a morbid fascination with his own death, suspecting that it might assert itself one day suddenly and violently," brags about how his compulsive exercise habits are superior to those of his colleagues in the Senate, and breathlessly recites a litany of petty grievances about his fellow Republicans.
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