Just Not Cool

I’ve written it on this blog in the past, and I firmly believe it’s true— that there’s a high school analogy for everybody and everything in life. This is why I don’t understand the difficulty that media pundits and everybody else seems to encounter when they try to describe Mitt Romney, and try to explain his struggle in the Republican primaries. We know exactly who Mitt is, and we know everything about him. We know because we went to high school with someone just like him.

He was the rich kid. Not only did he come from a wealthy family, but he was the best looking and best dressed boy in school. For this reason, he could get a date with any girl in school, but the really bright, high-quality girls never went out with him more than once. When asked about it by their girlfriends, they would only say, “He’s just not cool.” He drove a new convertible every year, but those same bright, high-quality girls would never ride in his car because they didn’t want to be seen with him. He went out for every sport, but never lettered. Nevertheless, he always wore a letter sweater (even without the letter) because he thought it looked cool.

He was the guy who would buy you a candy bar at lunch time if you would sit with him in the cafeteria (not cool), and he would buy your entire lunch plus a soda pop if you would vote for him in the election for class president. So he became the class president, simply because he had the money to buy lunches and sodas for everybody, but he never could buy enough goodies to ever become what you could truly call, “popular.” Classmates were willing to sell their votes, but not their friendships.

Without his money and fine clothes and good looks, he would have been called a “loser,” but we all know that in this life, nobody gets labeled “loser” if they have a lot of money. That’s what big money does for you. But all the money in the world can’t buy the image of “cool.” That’s Mitt Romney’s fundamental problem. He’s just not cool. There’s a word for guys like him, and you don’t hear the word used often enough. Mitt Romney is “smarmy.”