Rick Perlstein looks to Romney's father and the pillorying he endured for being too honest about the Vietnam war:
[Michigan Governor George Romney] supported it after returning from a trip there in 1965. Then, courageously, after a second trip in 1967, he began to criticize it. On September 4, 1967, a TV interviewer asked, "Isn't your position a bit inconsistent with what it was, and what do you propose we do now?" The line everyone remembers from his response: "When I came back from Vietnam in 1965, I just had the greatest brainwashing anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam." But he continued with a devastating, prophetic, and one-thousand-percent-correct assessment: that staying in Vietnam would be a disaster. The public, and certainly the pundits, weren't ready to hear it. …
The Mormon bishop, however, did not quit. Instead he leapfrogged across New Hampshire telling unseasonable truths – that LBJ was "spinning a web a web of delusion," and that "when you want to win the hearts and minds of people, you don't kill them and destroy their property. You don't use bombers and tanks and napalm to save them." His opponent, meanwhile, running what you might call a robotic campaign, just bullshitted about Vietnam, hinting he had a secret plan to end it. The truth was a dull weapon to take into a knife fight with Richard Nixon – who kicked Romney's ass with 79 percent of the vote.
When people call his son the "Rombot," think about that: Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills.
The Dish 