You’re thinking of William Weld, not Mitt Romney.

Ah, that's it. I must need to re-fill my meds.

I mean, say what you want about all the hairy-pitted Birkenstocked lezbos and their emasculated companions up here setting policy and performing marriage rites, but that caricature doesn't really fit the nature of the state outside a couple prominent enclaves. It's just folks up here, churchgoing people who drop their r's some places and put them in other places where they don't belong, who watch the Red Sox and don't quite know what to think about hippie college kids. And to have our governer - who we elected - go out of state (for example to South Carolina) and openly mock the morals and intellect of us who put him where he is, really stings. That's a pretty sh***y thing to do.

Not to mention the complete hash Romney has made of his policy initiatives. He failed to overhaul the Mass Highway Department even after one highly paid featherbedder was photographed checking out for the day at 10 AM repeatedly while drawing a massive paycheck. He openly and unapologetically flipflopped on the gay marriage/civil unions question, changing his rhetoric to match his audience. He failed to carry through on his promise to spread the state's attention west of the I-95 beltway outside Boston to the neglected rest of the state. The Big Dig just sort of... gets worse by the day.

Speaking as someone who was cautiously optomistic about Romney's governership, he's been a total bust, a mealy-mouthed panderer whose naked national ambitions have never taken a backseat to actually getting down to the brass tacks of running (and hopefully cleaning up) our corrupt, cash-poor commonwealth.

I predict he'll lose in 2006 and parlay that loss into a moral win for his conservatism - "America's gonna love the man those Massachusetts liberals hated!" (most of the country doesn't know that MA has had a string of Republican governers going back to Bill Weld in 1991, so any failure will be simply failure and not a sign of partisan animus), and be a serious player for the Republican nod in '08. And given his tragic unseriousness about the job he has now, that would be... great for the Democrats in '12.