Like Bill Clinton before him, he has developed a gift for wriggling out of controversies by seizing the initiative and creating a third option.
As a Mormon missionary, he was assigned to proselytize from a soap box in Hyde Park in London, where he developed a gift for salesmanship that became the hallmark of his career.
According to a profile in the New York Times, Romney's father, George, was born in Mexico "in a colony of Mormons who had fled a crackdown on polygamy... As a Mormon missionary, he was assigned to proselytise in London from a soapbox in Hyde Park, where he developed a gift for salesmanship that became the hallmark of his career".
Noting that the decades of political ferment and activism have failed to bring much positive change to the nation, he concludes that the only real talent boomers have developed is a gift for "hanging out".
At 11, he won a scholarship to the city's grammar school and developed a natural gift for drawing; at 16, he joined the Plymouth School of Art.
In the evenings he studied Latin texts in the British Museum reading room and developed a consummate gift for correcting errors in them, owing to his mastery of the language and his feeling for the way poets choose their words.
In much the same way, Eggers has developed an exceptional gift for opening up the lives of others so as to offer the story of globalism as it develops and, simultaneously, to unfold a much more archetypal tale of struggle and loneliness and drift.
But after years of city life, some rodents have begun to genetically mutate, developing a resistance to poison and a gift for outsmarting traps.
