Yawn. Willard Mitt Romney.

At a time defined by political gridlock, there’s one thing on which it seems most Democrats and Republicans can agree: it’s easier to get excited about a pile of rocks than it is Mitt Romney’s run for president. Sure, there have been a few moments that managed to transfer some Americans’ attention from their sinking net worth and mounting debts to the Republican race for the American presidency (re: Newt Gingrich’s Dickens-esque advocation of handing poor children mops to teach them the values of hard work; the advent of the Santorum sweater vest; Rick Perry’s inability to count to three, et al.), but very few—if any—of them had anything to do with Mitt Romney.

Despite blazing the majority of his primary campaign trail as a frontrunner (a status which, given his bottom-of-the-barrel competition and staggering amounts of spending should have been a lot easier than it actually was), Mitt Romney still failed to resonate with a formidable chunk of his party’s voting base. Said failure could be the inevitable result of Americans being more concerned with potential home foreclosures than the empty ho-hums of an overly-polished and out-of-touch multimillionaire. It could also be a sign of a population disenchanted with the constipated state of the GOP and American politics in general. Or maybe it’s just some sad combination of both. But either way you slice it, it probably doesn’t help that no one can get a good gauge on who Mitt Romney actually is. Not that anyone wants to. Plainly speaking, it’s not only that people find Mitt Romney incredibly boring—the man’s just not very likable.

On the left, Romney’s emergence to the presidential scene represented not only a consequence of free-market capitalism and a political party in decline but also a reminder that—despite how many grimaces and groans his ‘humorous’ attempts at relating to middle America elicited—the results of this election may very well determine the fate of the middle class for the foreseeable future. The liberal focus, then, wasn’t so much on Mitt Romney the fleshy snore as it was the easily manipulated (and broken) system that bore him such exorbitant amounts of wealth and political power in the first place.