The right hates Romney because he's not angry enough

Amazingly enough, in the midst of the debt-ceiling debacle this summer, all the current leaders in the GOP presidential field (yes, including Mitt Romney!) urged John Boehner to risk default and national disaster rather than reach any deal with the dreaded Democrats. As the supercommittee struggles to craft some sort of agreement before the doomsday deadline at the end of this month, fierce partisans on both side refuse to give ground and hammer out an agreement that might reduce the deficit and save the country. Democrats claim that Republicans want to wreck the economy for political advantage, or to steal more money from the poor for their rich Wall Street friends; conservatives insist that Obama and his minions scheme to wreck the economy to impose their vision of a totalitarian socialist utopia.

In other words, a moment of aspiration has given way to an era of anger, while hope and change morphed into rage and paranoia. Some measure of the sad state of the nation, and of the conservative movement, can be gathered from the desperate weeks that the preening demagogue Donald Trump actually received serious consideration as a presidential possibility.

In this atmosphere Romney looks suspect to many activists on the right not because he isn’t conservative enough but because he isn’t angry enough. His real problem isn’t a question of ideology, it’s a matter of attitude. Mitt can’t keep himself from looking self-possessed and unflappable, cool and collected, reasonable and restrained. Rage isn’t part of his emotional repertoire: even when visibly frustrated by Rick Perry’s boorish disregard of all rules of debate in the Las Vegas slugfest, he came across as more pained and perplexed than infuriated.