The Washington Post published an expose Thursday morning on Mitt Romney's prep school years, part of the more serious vetting the candidate is getting now that he's the putative GOP nominee. The money story: Romney liked to taunt students at the prestigious Cranbrook for any supposed homosexual proclivities, taking his antagonism so far as to pin down a classmate and cut his stylish hair off his head.
The Post talked to five other schoolboys who were with Romney at the time, and who gave independently corroborating stories of what happened. Romney had apparently been quite bothered by a shy and somewhat effeminate classmate, who returned from break with bleached blond hair hanging down over one eye.
"He can’t look like that," Romney is reported to have said. "That’s wrong. Just look at him!” Romney organized a small mob (executive skills!), and the boys pinned the classmate down while Romney chopped his hair off.
All five of the participants now express regret over the incident:
"It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me," said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was "terrified," he said. "What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do."
Romney's campaign said the candidate has no recollection of the incident, and spokesperson Andrea Saul called the stories "exaggerated" and "off-base."
The WaPo article details a more light-hearted, mischievous side of Romney that has been rarely displayed on the trail. But its anecdotes also emphasize Romney's bullying traits that seem like schoolboy simulacra of Bain Capital's savage capitalism. This story of bullying a maybe-gay classmate also comes less than 24 hours after Obama's sudden endorsement of gay marriage, a confluence of timing that makes Romney look all the crueler.
Still, there must be a limit to how far we're willing to probe into candidate's pasts. Just as anything Obama did between the ages of -1 and 18 is currently being mined for evidence of socialist anti-colonialist tendencies, now any instance of Romney being a jerk is going to be used to affirm his adult viscosity. Really, it sounds like both were being adolescents in the cultural milieu in which they grew up. You probably never held down a kid and gave him a haircut because you thought he was a pansy, but you also didn't go to an elite prep school in the 50s, when stuff like that was more the norm. Likewise, Obama once wore a turban. So what?
I'm all for the Post publishing its story—it's info about Romney, and better to have it confirmed than deal with rumors and inneundo. But let's be careful not to extrapolate too much from some stories of what Romney did when he was a teenage prep school punk among other punks.
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