Even Rupert Murdoch Despises Romney:
Murdoch Maligns Mitt
"......Romney never earned more from the often non-verbal Murdoch than a snort, guffaw, or grimace. Murdoch, whose core political values are more visceral than ideological, marveled at the contrast between the stolid father -- George Romney, running a come-from-behind automobile company -- and what he reckoned to be the hopelessly superficial son in the private-equity business. (Murdoch's oldest daughter. Prudence, was once, briefly and unhappily, married to a private-equity type whom he didn't like at all.)
Romney, he continues to tell people who find their way into his political conversations (or monologues) this year, can't be trusted. Romney is "unprincipled" -- one of Murdoch's bad words -- by which he usually means too camera-ready, too media-attuned, and too market-focused. And the larger point: He is just plain grumpy about the uninspired Republican nominee, with the implicit threat that, if unappeased, he is capable of throwing a wrench into the works.
FOR ALL MURDOCH'S cynical use and manipulation of the political system -- for 60 years, he has worked assiduously to get politicians to do his bidding in Australia, Britain, and the United States -- what he is most drawn to in a political figure is sincerity and artlessness, or at least the appearance of it. Margaret Thatcher was for Murdoch not just the standard bearer of free-market capitalism, but the apotheosis of what-you-see-is-what-you-get. At the same time, he was impatient and sometimes dismissive of her ideological companion in the White House, seeing Ronald Reagan as somehow less serious and principled, an actor after all. (One participant at a White House meeting in 1987, which included Murdoch and several exceedingly deferential publishers, remembered Murdoch showing distinct impatience with the president.)
Murdoch has an almost aesthetic appreciation of personal strength and inner rectitude (if you wear a sharp suit, you don't have it) -- as well as an antenna for political phoniness. This may well come from enduring all the politicians who regularly suck up to him. But it is also the newsman's conceit of having seen too much to be fooled by a politician's public face.
In my conversations with Murdoch, he noted again and again what he saw as the incredulous proposition of someone getting elected in Massachusetts and then trying to win the support of the country's Christian right. "You'd have to turn yourself inside out," he said. There are, too, his instinctive aversions. "Slick" is another of his very bad words. He dislikes Romney's smile. He mutters about Romney's hair.....
.......Mistrust is Murdoch's reflexive response. For this thoroughgoing Presbyterian with an instinctive resistance to any deviations from the norm (one of the reasons he is such a good tabloid publisher), "the Mormon thing is not just too exotic for him -- it doesn't read," says someone in his circle of political conversations. And, indeed, Murdoch's tweets seem to come close to linking Scientology and Mormonism: In one, he called Scientology a "very weird cult," and then, not long afterward, tweeted, "Mormonism a mystery to me," while acknowledging, "Mormons certainly not evil."
Romney the financier doesn't sit well, either. There are few people Murdoch knows as well as financiers. And while he understands their usefulness, he sees them as mere middlemen. In Murdoch's view, financiers like Romney don't build businesses; men like Murdoch build businesses....."
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