MoDo is still in New Hampshire. In “A Perfect Doll” she says one Mitt Romney was born with a silver spoon, the other one’s was wooden. Both want your vote. Me? I just don’t see myself voting for a piece of plastic extruded by Mattel. The Moustache of Wisdom is still in Cairo. In “Political Islam Without Oil” he says Egyptian Islamists, the newly elected majority in government, have some big decisions to make. It’s going to be fascinating to watch this play out. Here’s MoDo:
As chief executive of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney was all about cold analysis and hot profits.
He took a rare personal interest in one of his investments: the Lifelike Company, which produced My Twinn dolls, fashioned to look like the little girls who owned them.
As Mark Maremont reported in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, Romney invested $2.1 million in 1996 for a stake in the company; the idea was brought to him by a Lifelike partner who was a friend from Brigham Young University and Harvard Business School.
Romney, who accuses President Obama of “crony capitalism” on the Solyndra deal, introduced his brother-in-law to Lifelike officials, who dutifully hired the relative and promoted him to vice president with an annual salary of $100,000.
Romney’s Bain colleagues, according to The Journal, were dubious from the start and, indeed, the brother-in-law was fired and the company failed, despite a personal loan from Romney.
But I’m beginning to suspect that before the factory shut down, Mitt requested his own customized doll.
He has clearly brought a My Twinn on the trail — a plastic replica of a candidate who’s often described as a plastic replica: white teeth, gelled hair, windowpane shirt, Tommy Bahama jeans.
(“I won’t vote for a Ken doll,” a Bradford, N.H., resident, Jason Reid, adamantly told me at the Bradford Market the other night.)
Romney may have been a pampered prince of Detroit and a leveraged buyout king of Boston, the elite of the elite in the Mormon Church, in the financial world and in the political world.
But Mitt’s My Twinn has a hardscrabble background, struggling from the bottom up, fearing pink slips, sweating losing jobs and somehow, late in life, letting himself get talked into a presidential run.
Romney may have been a Wall Street predator, looter and vulture gnawing at the carcasses of companies and plotting a White House bid in diapers to finish what his dad started, as his Republican rivals have portrayed him. “Make a profit,” a younger Romney laughingly says in the attack film financed by supporters of Newt Gingrich. “That’s what it’s all about, right?”
But Mitt’s My Twinn is Just Like You.
Romney may be a shape-shifting opportunist full of “pious baloney,” as Gingrich, a crazed Chuckie doll, asserts.
But Mitt’s My Twinn is humble, sincere and salt of the earth.
With many worried that America is in decline, a prospective race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is being caricatured here as “Saul Alinsky versus Gordon Gekko,” as Don Baer, a former senior Clinton White House adviser, put it.
And the ones painting Romney as a ruthless Gekko, complete with a 1980s-era slicked-back mane, are Republicans.
Romney had planned to campaign against Obama in the fall by defending free enterprise. But now he finds himself having to do it in the Republican nominating contests.
His G.O.P. rivals are not only trashing President Obama as a socialist, they’ve become socialists themselves in a last desperate — and vain — attempt to bring down the front-runner, whose less-than-scintillating persona inspired one Democrat to note about Republican voters: “The dog won’t eat the dog food.” Romney’s competitors have been running around New Hampshire and South Carolina trashing Romney for doing what Republicans do: throwing people out of work and making money.
To the giddy delight of Democrats, Romney’s rivals here have softened him up for Obama by making the case that Bain is the symbol of the central problem with the American economy: corporate profits are sky-high while companies aren’t hiring much.
Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, the authors of a new biography, “The Real Romney,” tell this story: During the 1968 Republican primary, after George Romney made his notorious remark about getting “the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get” on Vietnam, The Detroit News, ordinarily a supporter, blasted his “blurt and retreat habits” and urged him to get out of the race.
Although Mitt has studied his dad’s mistakes in that race carefully, he seems to be inexorably repeating some of them.
He won Tuesday night, denouncing his rivals’ “bitter politics of envy,” but he had a “blurt and retreat” week in New Hampshire that didn’t augur well for the fall.
Though he was referring to getting rid of insurance companies that were not providing adequate care, his “I like to be able to fire people who provide services to me” crack was a chuckleheaded move that played into the hands of foes.
And his inept attempts to paint himself as an Average Joe who somehow backed into the presidential arena earned him relentless mocking.
But, as the authors of “The Real Romney” report, Mitt once told a church friend that Romneys were built to swim upstream. He was never a great natural tennis player, the authors wrote, but he compensated with strategic thinking and gamesmanship. As a friend of Mitt’s put it: “His strategy is simply to hit the ball back one more time than you do.”
And lie like a dog on the floor… Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:
With the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the even more puritanical Salafist Al Nour Party having stunned both themselves and Egyptians by garnering more than 60 percent of the seats in Egypt’s parliamentary elections, we’re about to see a unique lab test for the Middle East: What happens when political Islam has to wrestle with modernity and globalization without oil?
Islamist movements have long dominated Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both the ayatollahs in Iran and the Wahhabi Salafists in Saudi Arabia, though, were able to have their ideology and the fruits of modernity, too, because they had vast oil wealth to buy off any contradictions. Saudi Arabia could underutilize its women and impose strict religious mores on its society, banks and schools. Iran’s clerics could snub the world, pursue nuclearization and impose heavy political and religious restrictions. And both could still offer their people improved living standards, because they had oil.
Egypt’s Islamist parties will not have that luxury. They will have to open up to the world, and they seem to be realizing that. Egypt is a net importer of oil. It also imports 40 percent of its food. And tourism constitutes one-tenth of its gross domestic product. With unemployment rampant and the Egyptian pound eroding, Egypt will probably need assistance from the International Monetary Fund, a major injection of foreign investment and a big upgrade in modern education to provide jobs for all those youths who organized last year’s rebellion. Egypt needs to be integrated with the world.
The Muslim Brotherhood, whose party is called Freedom and Justice, draws a lot of support from the middle classes and small businesses. The Salafist Al Nour Party is dominated by religious sheiks and the rural and urban poor.
Essam el-Erian, the vice chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood’s party, told me: “We hope that we can pull the Salafists — not that they pull us — and that both of us will be pulled by the people’s needs.” He made very clear that while both Freedom and Justice and Al Nour are Islamist parties, they are very different, and they may not join hands in power: “As a political group, they are newcomers, and I hope all can wait to discover the difference between Al Nour and Freedom and Justice.”
On the peace treaty with Israel, Erian said: “This is the commitment of the state — not any group or party — and we have said we are respecting the commitments of the Egyptian state from the past.” Ultimately, he added, relations with Israel will be determined by how it treats the Palestinians.
But generally speaking, he said, Egypt’s economic plight “is pushing us to be concerned about our own affairs.”
Muhammad Khairat el-Shater, the vice chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood and its economic guru, made clear to me over strawberry juice at his home that his organization intends to lean into the world. “It is no longer a matter of choice whether one can be with or against globalization,” he said. “It is a reality. From our perspective, we favor the widest possible engagement with globalization through win-win situations.”
Nader Bakkar, a spokesman for Al Nour, insisted that his party would move cautiously. “We are the guardians of Shariah,” he told me, referring to Islamic law, “and we want people to be with us on the same principles, but we have an open door to all the intellectuals in all fields.” He said his party’s economic model was Brazil. “We don’t like the theocratic model,” he added. “I can promise you that we will not be another dictatorship, and the Egyptian people will not give us a chance to be another dictatorship.”
In November, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, an independent Salafist cleric and presidential candidate, was asked by an interviewer how, as president, he would react to a woman wearing a bikini on the beach? “She would be arrested,” he said.
The Al Nour Party quickly said he was not speaking for it. Agence France-Presse quoted another spokesman for Al Nour, Muhammad Nour, as also dismissing fears raised in the news media that the Salafists might ban alcohol, a staple of Egypt’s tourist hotels. “Maybe 20,000 out of 80 million Egyptians drink alcohol,” he said. “Forty million don’t have sanitary water. Do you think that, in Parliament, I’ll busy myself with people who don’t have water, or people who get drunk?”
What to make of all this? Egyptian Islamists have some big decisions. It has been easy to maintain a high degree of ideological purity all these years they’ve been out of power. But their sudden rise to the top of Egyptian politics coincides with the free fall of Egypt’s economy. And as soon as Parliament is seated on Jan. 23, Egypt’s Islamists will have the biggest responsibility for fixing that economy — without oil. (A similar drama is playing out in Tunisia.)
They don’t want to blow this chance to lead, yet they want to be true to their Islamic roots, yet they know their supporters elected them to deliver clean government, education and jobs, not mosques. It will be fascinating to watch them deal with these tugs and pulls. Where they come out will have a huge impact on the future of political Islam in this region.
