TAMPA, Fla.

Mitt Romney doesn’t elicit passion, as Ronald Reagan did in Detroit. Or respect, as Poppy Bush did in New Orleans. Or excitement, as W. did in Philadelphia. Or admiration, as John McCain did in St. Paul.

The emotion he evokes is pity. Romney slogged and spent his way to the G.O.P. convention his dad craved for himself only to find that his role is not so much leading man as forgotten man.
Following an adulatory promotional video about himself, Chris Christie splashed in the Narcissus pool, giving a preening keynote speech that gassed on for 1,800 words and 16 minutes before he even deigned to mention “our actual nominee,” as Sarah Palin sardonically put it on Fox News.

Christie, who has already said he may run in 2016 if Romney loses, urged “sacrifice” and “tough choices” even though the blurry Romney beckons with an all-you-can-eat buffet of defense spending and tax cuts.

When TV cut away to Mitt in the hall to capture what should have been a thrilling moment, he looked as though his jelled skull might burst into flames.

He must have been fuming over why his high-priced mercenaries, who vetted Christie’s speech two weeks ago, failed to ask the New Jersey governor to cool it on the solipsism. In a conflict of consultants, the Romney adviser who’s helping run the convention, Russ Schriefer, is a once (and future?) Christie strategist.
Do Romney’s consultants, like some other conservatives here, have a thinly veiled disdain for an animatronic aristocrat who insists on being in a business he has no business in?

This synthetic convention aches with the enormity of the effort involved in trying, and failing, to make Mitt alluring and compelling, the fruitless, endless hunt for the enigma code that will decipher the cipher.

It’s absurd that Romney is still working tirelessly to show who he is given that he has spent the past six years running for president. Ann Romney was straining so hard to come up with heartwarming, personal anecdotes about Mitt and her family, she actually hit on one with CBS News about her son mourning her miscarriage that a startled Mitt said he had never heard.
Even when conservatives try to defend Romney, they manage to insult him.

“If you’ve just been diagnosed with a brain tumor,” Mike Huckabee told Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast, “you honestly don’t care if your neurosurgeon is a jerk.”

David Brooks of The Times mocked press critiques of Romney, but the satire slashed the candidate, too: “Romney owns many homes without garage elevators and the cars have to take the stairs.”
If conservatives think Reagan is a candidate for Mount Rushmore, Romney brings to mind a Sisyphean rock.

As Bill Kristol put it on Fox News, hailing Paul Ryan as Romney’s savior: “It feels less like a couple of hundred people in Boston working very hard to kind of push the boulder up the hill and more like a genuine exciting cause.” (Mitt’s dad urged him to “be bold,” not boulder.)

Charles Krauthammer dryly suggested on Fox News that to be more likable, Romney “should go out on stage with the dog that he had on the roof of the car and have the dog endorse him right there ... Seamus and Mitt.” (Except Seamus is dead, and Mitt is struggling to prove he’s alive.)

Romney is seen more as maître d’ than nominee, ushering the party to a better table in the future. In Politico, conservatives referred to the placeholder Mitt as a transitional figure and “an ideal segue.”

When Mitt awkwardly came out on stage at the end of Ann’s speech in what was supposed to be a crescendo, the room went flat. The few ripples of excitement in the Ward Cleaver-Betty Crocker convention with the generic music and anesthetized delegates have centered on younger 2016 prospects.

On the convention floor Tuesday night, Rick Perry told Chuck Todd of NBC News that he would “absolutely” consider running in 2016.
On “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart hailed Marco Rubio as “Charisma Boy,” saying it was good that Marco had dodged the problem of being Mitt’s running mate because, if he wins, “it would have been uncomfortable for you to run against him in 2016.”

After Condi Rice, glamorous in a salmon suit, impressed the crowd Wednesday night, Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic and GQ tweeted: “OK, HRC v. Condi in 2016 is on.”

And, of course, there was the evening’s main course and future, Ryan, who brought the zombie convention alive with a zowie speech — building up Romney and tweaking him about what’s on his iPod, “which I’ve heard on the campaign bus and on many hotel elevators.”

Ryan’s deft speech conjured the president’s nightmare — that disillusioned voters might decide it’s time to try something new.