Mitt needed a lift from the pizza man

Back in September, Florida pizza shop owner Scott Van Duzer guaranteed himself a place in political photo-history with his impromptu bear hug of Barack Obama during the president's  unscheduled campaign stop in Ft. Pierce. Some onlookers were said to gasp at the sight.   It was all in fun and although it didn't seem so at the time,   you could  later look back on it to define  the differences  between the campaign souls  of the two presidential candidates:  Obama's easy spontaneity  in a crowd and Mitt Romney's herky-jerky body movements and unconvincing smiles. For all of the money spent on his campaign, you'd think they would have set aside a little to match the pizza owner's  spirited scene.

I, and apparently a lot of other people, couldn't quite get past the notion that Mitt was  unable to break  from the mold of a powerful  businessman who wanted to  incorporate every store front (and pizza shop, maybe) in America.  From body language to scripted repetition of thought-lines - "I've done it before and can do it again", he repeatedly pledged, as though we hadn't heard him the first thousand  times -  never convinced a majority of the 99 per centers that he could relate to our worlds.

By all previous notions of winning politics, he should have coasted to the White House. A slowly recovering  economy, the every-present racial undercurrents, a flood of more campaign money than could be restrained by Hoover Dam, or more succinctly, the three Rs of this year's campaign - racism, religion and Rovism.  Obama was undermined by the U.S.Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Republican Jewish Coalition, evangelicals and countless religious broadcasters, including Mike Huckabee, who loudly protested the nation's movement toward a more liberating  social gospel that accepted same-sex marriage, contraceptives   and other individual lifestyle choices.   "Sociocultural rot," cried Plain Dealer deputy editorial page editor Kevin O'Brien,  a fully accredited Hard Right thinker, in another weepy outburst on today's Op-Ed page labeled "It's twilight in America".

Clearly, even for the stubborn CEO like Romney, he ecountered more on his plate than he could handle and raced to the tall weeds in the Tea Party for cover.  Whether it was personal choice, health care,   climate change  or the auto industry, Mitt remained a Tea party captive and never deviated from the script - at least his current one, not the older one as governor  of Massachusetts.  On Tuesday, the same state rolled over him , with 61 pct. favoring Obama.

Now, the post-mortems are piling up from the right, declaring him to be a traitor to the conservatives' cause, that he wasn't really one of them.

Oh? Then who was he?

We may never know.