Yes, there are many things that I like about Mitt Romney. I like his high standards. I like his virtuosic genius in the private sector. I like the fact of his presence as the one person in America who has the talent and the experience to model new paradigms for a private sector that has become increasingly dysfunctional and centralized. I like his life-long championship of a strong American military position.

Yes, Mitt Romney may be the kind of new Teddy Roosevelt we need to speak softly and carry a big stick, and to inspire an American private sector so it is more than grossly overpaid senior executives using company employees and consumers to centralize everything to themselves. In the meantime I would look forward to him decentralizing our federal and state governments in the wash. I like Romney’s decentralizing kind of mind.

Basically, I like the fact that Romney is a circular rather than a centralizing thinker, and that he would be the most successful business person in history to have been elected an American president. I like the fact that he has had the best formal education of any president that we would have, and that he is included among a handful of Americans who had earned simultaneously a law degree and an MBA at Harvard University. I like the fact that Obama in his outspoken and frequent attacks on Romney shows an unending fear of this extremely resourceful entrepreneur.

That being said, I feel that Romney has an excellent chance of losing the Republican nomination, even with his excellent mind and the best and the brightest Republicans working on his side. Yes, I said losing.

See, the Republicans at the moment of this writing are more fractured than a piece of ancient Roman parchment. From the beginning, Romney has only captured the imagination of about 30 percent of Republican minds nationwide. The rest of the Republicans have been giving auditions to an assortment of veritable wackos until they can come up someone who could at least pass a standard corporate mental test.

They have now tried Herman Cain, and when he flipped out they looked at Newt Gringrich, and now they are looking at wacky Ron Paul. Paul, it is true, at 77 years old sounds even crankier about his concept of the Americans military in Iraq and Afghanistan as murderers of the innocent than he did as a 73-year-old cranky candidate in 2008.

Clearly, Obama would love to run against an eccentric like a Herman Cain, a Newt Gingrich or a Ron Paul. And the Republicans in their current death wish may yet accommodate him.

Meanwhile, the Romney camp has its own problems, but I believe the main problem with his campaign has not begun to go away. The problem is that Romney has not yet revealed himself to be a human being; a fellow earthling who shares the gamut of our human feelings.

As I have written before, Romney is still very much of a billionaire candidate, and billionaire candidates have done notoriously poorly in American politics. A lot of this is because they have so much money that they end up spending millions of it on things that cannot help them, but ends up hurting them. An example of this kind of candidate is Margaret Whitman, the former California candidate for governor, who is now a Romney advisor. Heaven help Romney if he imitates Whitman!

Whitman – like billionaire candidates in the past – ended up spending tens of millions of dollars on campaign consultants who were so busy wrapping her in candidate packaging that by the time of the election no one knew who she was. Romney is still having the same problem. His candidate wrapping has covered up everything that has made him human. What is left for the public is a perfectly-coiffed one-dimensional political candidate, and as any mathematician can tell you, you cannot tell what a one-dimensional really is.

Romney’s 30 percent political support is strongest among New England white people, in the area where he served as a governor of Massachusetts. Unfortunately, though, there are not enough New England white people to elect him president. In fact, these are the kind of people who in a real national election would probably vote for Obama, as they voted for George McGovern and Michael Dukakis.

Romney has been pretty smart about splintering his opponents so that his 30 percent support tops the share of each of his opponents. But this is the kind of smartness that wins battles while losing wars. The only way he can win the Republican nomination is not by splintering the support for his opponents, but by raising his support closer to 50 percent. Otherwise the attrition of the campaign is going to leave him with only one or two opponents at the end, and those one or two opponents will have the 70 percent of the GOP support that he is missing.

Romney is especially going to have problems with everyone who is not a New England white person. For example, a southerner in the Deep South is not a New England white person, and Romney is not bonding very well at all with southern Americans in the Deep South. Nor is he bonding very well with African-Americans or with Hispanic-Americans anywhere. These are Americans who need some face value because they have suffered in the past in many circumstances involving trust. Romney surely could not defeat Obama if only a handful of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and southerners from the Deep South actually support him.

But this composition doesn’t trust Romney now because Romney is really doing very little to show that he shares human things in common with them, that he even shares their DNA, or close to their DNA. To them, he is a man from a far-away planet, with little common ground with them, besides that he is a biped. For many of them, even his religion – his Mormon religion – comes from some other planet.

Romney, be yourself

But Romney’s isolation from earthlings is I believe his own fault. You can sort of see Romney in his campaign today surrounded by his ten-thousand-dollar a day political consultants who are telling him, “We’ve got your back, Mitt. We haven’t even let one little earthling thing about you leak out into the public,”

Meanwhile the growth of Romney’s popularity has been stunted by radio talk hosts and campaign officers blitzing complaints that as a Mormon, Romney would become “America’s first non-Christian president.” Now I am a Mormon also, and one of my bishops has told me that I would need to identify myself as a Christian even if that meant (like it meant in ancient times) being thrown into the lion’s den. So why can’t Mitt Romney just honestly identify himself as a Mormon Christian, too? Just because he is called a “Mormon” does not mean he is not a Christian, any more than we could call Baptists or Nazarenes from the Church of the Nazarene or Pentecostals “non-Christians” because they call themselves Baptists and Nazarenes and Pentecostals.

If Romney would just let his coiffed hair down and give the public the benefit of human disclosure, more people would understand that he is one of the most Christian people ever to be a major presidential candidate. He volunteered for and completed a Christian mission in France for two years. How many major presidential candidates have done that? As a mature family man he became a bishop and then a stake president responding to the spiritual and materials needs of many hundreds of Christians in his church community, and he did it without compensation and around the many hours of his day job. My own impression with this church experience is that it is Christianity, super-sized.

But the truth is that Romney also has an aristocratic aloofness that keeps him from sharing with the public his Christian dimensions, like for example the way George W. Bush shared his Christian dimensions in 2000 and so did Jimmy Carter in 1976. And yet this thing that Romney does not share – his Christian testimony – is at the core of who he is.

Hey, Romney. I have an idea. Get out of your aristocratic rut. You are probably going to lose the way you are going, with your ten-thousand-dollar a day campaign consultants hiding all of your human dimensions from the public. Why don’t you take my advice for free and start trusting the American people with the things that are most important to you, including your Christian faith? I mean to say, why don’t stop acting like Thomas Dewey on a wedding cake and instead start acting more like Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln speaking to Americans from your heart?

Think of this campaign like it is an old classic movie, like it is another “Philadelphia Story.” You may remember that in this movie, Katherine Hepburn had no interest in Cary Grant until Grant’s determination to win her brought out all his range of human feelings and thoughts. And after all that, Hepburn looked at Grant in a new way, with an expression on her face that said, “Woo. Woo. Who would have thought you had a wild side?”

So show your true dimensions at last.

Chris Sharp- Commentary via fiction

Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California..” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.