The following is courtesy of that liberal rag, The New York Times, and its journalist Michael Barbaro:

From the moment that Mr. Romney ended his first bid for the Republican nomination, he complained to friends, advisers and family that he had felt cheated out of a chance to explain himself to the country. He had emerged from his debut on the national political stage, he told them, as a caricature he did not recognize: emotionally uncaring, intellectually inauthentic, ideologically malleable. As opposed to now?

Over the next three years, a little-examined period in his life, he sought to reclaim his public identity with the self-critical eye, marketing savvy and systematic rigor of the corporate consultant that he once was. Permission to throw up, please?

When Willard Mitt Romney, 65, delivers his acceptance speech Thursday night in Tampa, Fla., reveling in his success at winning over a fractious party and endeavoring to sell himself anew to Americans, he will owe the moment in no small measure to what he did during this time. Or in large measure to the fact that every other GOP nominee was a loon.

It was a restless period when he labored to persuade voters to see him as he saw himself: a man of deep convictions and big ideas, a credible party leader and inevitable presidential nominee. I see few convictions, old ideas, lots of money, and a man who desperately wants to be president.

He coolly (coolly, Gracie?)  assessed the failings of his 2008 campaign and undertook an intensive yearlong tutorial on everything from the tax code to global jihadism. He wrote a book laying out his vision and values to answer conservative doubters and counter charges of flip-flopping, elbowing aside a ghost writer who he felt could not accurately channel his voice. Well, he does like firing people. He bought good will in his party by crisscrossing the country to raise money for hundreds of candidates, even cutting a check for one lawmaker’s portrait in the New Hampshire State House. The GOP: party of good will. 

Mr. Romney returned as a far stronger candidate — a crisper debater, a more decisive manager, a better strategist and a stick-to-his-message campaigner whose chief selling point this time around, his business expertise, was well suited to the political moment. Didn't he just change his message again? Completely? And isn't his business expertise in taking over and breaking up businesses, and sending jobs overseas?

Etc. This is the biggest pile of horseshit I've read in a long time. It's typical of the genre, the lack of success that led to the present success, “the turnaround,” but it makes up for its lack of meat with a whole messa adjectives and adverbs. It's basically saying that after 2008, Romney, retrospective, changed himself from an emotionally uncaring, intellectually inauthentic, ideologically malleable losing candidate to the winning candidate we see today: who is emotionally uncaring, intellectually inauthentic, ideologically malleable. Thanks, Times.

The new Mitt Romney: Now with more whitener.

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