What I Admire About Mitt Romney

Shallow thinking makes shallow minds. I think of this when I think of a lot of the criticism of Barack Obama. It is reflexedly negative. Obama literally can’t drink a Budweiser without being criticized because his beer is not American enough. (Budweiser is owned by a Belgian brewery).

I don’t want to be like that. I aim for thinking that is deep, subtle, fair, fearless.

That means I can’t look at Mitt Romney the way that others look at Barack Obama. I must see him as a complex human being, one with good and bad qualities. That doesn’t mean I have to admire him on balance. But I have to be willing to see him as he is, and not as some cartoonish Snidely Whiplash, twirling the ends of a mustache that he doesn’t have, plotting evil for the sake of evil.

So I prove to myself that I have some capacity by nuance by looking for good qualities in a man that I otherwise don’t like. Here are ten things about Mitt Romney that I admire.

• Romney is smart. He won a law degree and a business degree from Harvard.
• He is brave. With his money, he could spend the rest of his life in luxurious retirement. But he enters the public forum to run for public office. Certainly, he knows the risks of that. But he does it anyway.
• He is energetic. Constantly campaigning can take a toll. He perseveres.
• He is faithful to his wife. There has never been any whiff of sexual scandal.
• I have heard that as a bishop in his church, he gave compassionate advice to some of his church-members who came to him for help.
• I have heard that one of his co-workers had a daughter who went missing. He deployed a team to the city where the daughter was missing, and he set up a command center. They found the girl.
• Romneycare really was a good idea. And it was path-making.
• He was successful in business. He occupied himself in a business in which he could use his considerable abilities to thrive, and he carried through and became a financial star.
• He rescued the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. They were successful.
• In a party in which many are anti-gay, he is not anti-gay. Until the man was driven out by the right-wing media, one of Romney’s top foreign-affairs advisers was openly gay. That seemed not to trouble Mr. Romney.

I challenge my conservative friends to perform this exercise with Barack Obama. Are you fearless enough to put aside comfortable, cartoonish concepts of the president’s character and to see him from a different point of view?