David Brooks in the NY Times has an apt analogy on the presidential candidates that is right up my alley:
In the Marx Brothers movie that is the Republican presidential race, Mitt Romney is Zeppo. He doesn’t spin out one-liners. He’s not the rambunctious one. He’s just the earnest, good-looking guy who wants to be appreciated.
I became a Marx Brothers fan in middle school as part of a trend that my small group of friends fell into at the same time. Everyone wanted to think of themselves as Groucho, but we all knew the comedic values to the Italian wise cracker Chico and the silent miming of Harpo. Zeppo didn’t even really count in our minds, until one day when one of my friends said as much, noting that there is no reason for him to really even be there. Precocious little jerk that I was, I remember experiencing the “ah-ha” moment when I corrected them that Zeppo himself may not be important but “a” Zeppo is important. In fact – it’s crucial. I told them that for our purposes – everyone else is Zeppo. Meaning: because of the anchoring that the straight-man Zeppo provides, we have the liberty to run around being blunt to the point of rudeness (Chico), irresponsibly breaking things (Harpo) and making inappropriate sexual advances that are covered up by frank and stylized speech (Groucho).
For us – Zeppo was our teacher or parents or adults in general, slash, society at large.
For the Republican primary, it’s Zeppo takes the form of one Willard “Mitt” Romney.
But Romney continues to run an impressive presidential campaign. Last week, while the Twitterverse was entranced by Herman Cain, Romney delivered his most important speech yet. It was politically astute and substantively bold, a quality you don’t automatically associate with the Romney campaign. Romney grasped the toughest issue — how to reform entitlements to avoid a fiscal catastrophe — and he sketched out a sophisticated way to address it.
The speech was built around the theme that government should be simpler, smarter and smaller. First, he established his bona fides. Romney reminded his listeners that when he went to work at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, he inherited a $370 million deficit. He left behind a $100 million surplus that went into an endowment fund.
Then he argued that over the decades government has become bloated and lethargic. In World War II, the Navy commissioned 1,000 ships a year and had 1,000 employees in the purchasing department. Today, Romney said, we commission nine ships a year but have 24,000 employees in the department.
Romney then laid out a measured fiscal strategy, starting with a promise to bring federal spending down to 20 percent of gross domestic product, which is about the precrisis average. He then turned to entitlements.
In other words: While the wacky brothers make their mischief – the one who doesn’t appear as important on the surface and doesn’t get the fans of the genre excited is actually the rock that stabilizes the chaos.