Watching Mitt Romney’s excellent speech yesterday reminded me of my departed friend and colleague Dean Barnett.
For those of you who didn’t know him, Dean was an amazing man. I first met him around 2001 when we became email correspondents. I could tell from his letters that he was a talented writer and even though he had a day job—a real job—I started nudging him to start one of these new-fangled things called a blog.
Eventually he did. He ran a site called Soxblog, pseudonymously, that dealt with the Boston Red Sox, golf, pop culture, and politics. It became quite popular and eventually Dean started blogging semi-professionally, writing for Townhall.com and other sites and eventually coming onboard THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Normally the Oscar Wilde line about writers and envy is right on, but it gave me a tremendous amount of joy to watch Dean blossom as a writer.
That’s because Dean was an amazing man. Diagnosed with cystic fibrosis early on, Dean was working with a short clock, yet this burden somehow brought out the best in him: He was perpetually fearless, funny, kind, hopeful, eager, and, what impressed me most, charitable. Here, for instance, is him writing about the disease in 2006:
He died two years later.
In addition to everything else, Dean was also a Romney guy. He knew Romney from Boston and had spent a lot of time with the man while volunteering for Romney’s doomed Senate campaign in 1994. I was never a Romney guy myself. In truth, I spent 34 months of my life, from January 2010 to November 2012, arguing that he would be a disastrous Republican presidential nominee.
One of the things which irked me about Romney was the type of supporters he seemed to attract. Most of them based the entirety of their arguments for Romney on notions of process and inevitability and they seemed—even by the standards of political partisans—immune to countervailing evidence or arguments.
But Dean had never been like that. During the 2008 primary campaign, Dean was entirely on Romney’s side. But his reasoning was simple: He thought Romney was an extraordinarily smart and preternaturally decent man. Dean wanted Romney in the White House because he believed that Romney would be a very good president.
And because his case for Romney was so high minded and foundational, Dean wasn’t blind to Romney’s problems or his campaign’s mistakes. He could see them, acknowledge them, and analyze them in total good faith and with a great degree of objectivity precisely because they didn’t undermine his primary rationale for liking Romney.
The most effective supporter any campaign can have is someone who can acknowledge the candidates’ shortcomings and rather than hiding or rationalizing them, can make an affirmative case beside them.
All of which is the long way around the barn to saying this: When the documentary Mitt was released in 2014, I wasn’t terribly surprised by the Mitt Romney it revealed. That was the man Dean had known and admired all those years. And when Mitt Romney got on stage and made the case for conservatism and against Donald Trump yesterday, that was, too. It was a fine speech—smart and decent. And it was a genuine act of leadership.
More than winning the White House, even, I think Romney’s speech would have made Dean proud.
