I initially posted this in the Headlines, but it’s funny enough that it deserves its own post.  The Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri has adroitly captured the plastic and perfunctory phony that is Mitt Romney in a clever and hilarious piece.  Here are a few excerpts:

What goes into a Romneyism?

I only ponder this because midway through an otherwise peaceful day I felt a great disturbance in the Awkward Force, as though a million voices cried out that something tremendously awkward was happening and were suddenly silenced.

This often happens when Mitt Romney speaks.

Sure enough, it turned out he was delivering a speech in Detroit at Ford Field.

And, as usual, he informed everyone that one of his favorite things about Michigan is that “trees are the right height.” He has said this repeatedly.

I have no idea what this means. Neither, I suspect, does Mitt. It bears a resemblance to what on TV sitcoms is called chuffa — something that sounds sort of funny but isn’t an actual joke. Most Romney jokes fall into this category. They’re verbal clockwork oranges.

Mitt Romney’s normalcy in artificial environments like GOP debates is only exceeded by his artificiality in normal environments — like, say, Michigan. Some attribute this to the Uncanny Valley — that space that dolls and CGI creations occupy wherein they are just real enough to be unnerving.

[...]

There’s awkward, and then there’s Mitt Romney. He speaks Speech English fluently. Conversational English? One time he read an article about it in the Economist. And he bought the Rosetta Stone set! But that’s about as far as it went.

In November, the scope of Mitt Romney’s awkward remarks was wider still, including things like grass color: “Everything seems right here. You know, I come back to Michigan; the trees are the right height. The grass is the right color for this time of year, kind of a brownish-greenish sort of thing. It just feels right.”

What? Kind of a brownish-greenish sort of thing? In general, when you find yourself in kind of a brownish-greenish sort of thing, stop walking and clean off your shoe.

[...]

All Mitt Romney’s off-hand remarks fall into the category of Awkward Brownish-Greenish Things Actual People Do Not Say. These quips! These exhausted jests! It’s CGI dialogue. It has all the characteristic features of speech, but it sounds like nothing you would ever say. Even when it works, there’s something off about it.

It’s not that he hits wrong notes. It’s that he’s tone-deaf. When you have someone who knows how the tune goes, an occasional wrong note is inevitable. But whenever Mitt Romney says something, everyone’s response tends to be, “Who ARE you?”

Read Petri’s entire piece here.