Newsweek Calls Romney a ‘Wimp,’ Romney Not Worried

Is Mitt Romney really a wimp? In a long, detailed, devastating analysis on the cover of Newsweek, political reporter Michael Tomasky broke down the many reasons why candidate Romney is severely lacking in the manhood department—and why the country should be very afraid if he’s elected because he will be out to prove how manly he is. In a cover shot of Romney with the words “The Wimp Factor” underneath, Newsweek asks, “Is He  Just Too Insecure to Be President?”

For his part, Romney responded to the Newsweek cover by saying, “If I worried about what the media said I wouldn’t get much sleep,” he said in an interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation” in Jerusalem on Sunday. “And I’m able to sleep pretty well.”

Romney pointed out—as Tomasky did in the piece in question—that Newsweek did the same thing in 1987 with an election cover story that said of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush,“Fighting the ‘Wimp Factor.’”“He was a pretty great president and anything but,” said Romney, who said the Newsweekcover is the first time he recalls being called a wimp.While Tomasky’s piece does engage in quite a bit of the political analyst’s version of armchair pop psychology, Tomasky paints an extraordinarily detailed case for why Romney is so weak and insecure. He discusses Romney’s faux pas in Britain this past week, his social awkwardness, his getting rattled when the Obama campaign started attacking him, his aversion to risk, his belief that he was being courageous by criticizing “Obamacare” at the NAACP convention in front of a group that’s not voting for him any way and, most damning of all, his alarming number of flip flops on major issues.

“He still, after five years and two presidential campaigns, has yet to take one real stand on any issue; has yet to adopt one position that troubles his party’s hard right,” Tomasky writes. “The catalog of Romney flip-flops is lengthy and by now famous: abortion rights; support for Planned Parenthood, to which he and his wife once wrote checks, now in his gun sights; Grover Norquist’s ‘no tax increases’ pledge, which he admirably refused to sign as a gubernatorial candidate but since 2007 has taken up with gusto; on immigration, where he once supported a path to citizenship; on guns (he supported the Brady Bill in the 1990s); on ‘don’t ask, don’t tell; and, most famously of all, on health care.”

Tomasky continued, “You watch something like his recent VFW speech, and you see that he so desperately wants people to see him and think: ‘He’s like Reagan.’ Please. You would no more cast Romney as Reagan than you would Pee-wee Herman as James Bond.”

 

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