As long as I'm beating up...

...on poor ol' Mitt Romney, allow me to share a bit of an epiphany I may have had about the former governor of Massachusetts while traveling recently.

For a long time now, I couldn't for the life of me understand how a guy who appeared to be such an exemplary human being could run such horrible campaigns for president. After all, here was a man who had two degrees from Harvard and was a self-made gazillionaire who gave generously of his time and money to charity. In addition, Romney struck me as a near perfect family man who, with his high school sweetheart, raised five handsome and successful sons.

So how on earth, I wondered, did this guy run such an incompetent campaign for president in 2008? And why did his Republican primary opponents -- namely John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Rudy Giuliani -- hate him so much? (Think they were jealous, somehow? Remember, Romney came in third in '08. Maybe -- just maybe -- they saw him up close and didn't like what they saw.)

And why is such a seemingly upright and religious man running such a dishonest campaign in 2012? How could Romney be such a shameless liar?

And so my epiphany, I guess, is that maybe I've been looking at it backward all this time. Maybe Romney's campaigns for president -- which is all I really know about the man -- are more revealing of his true character. Maybe his career at Bain wasn't so ethical after all. Maybe it was rapacious. (How the heck would I know?) Maybe Mario Puzo was right when he famously wrote in The Godfather, that "behind every great fortune is a great crime."

Maybe the private Mitt Romney is every bit as amoral as the public Mitt Romney.