Any day when even a single second of new footage of Mitt Romney trying to interact with human beings hits YouTube is going to be a good day, and here we've got four whole uncut minutes of it! This is quite a score, comedy-wise.

Andrew Kaczynski unearthed this CSPAN clip from Romney's 1994 Senate campaign, showing him going door to door among the restaurants and houses of Waltham, Massachusetts to introduce himself to voters. It's fascinating to see that Romney's talent as a retail politician in 2011 is precisely what it was in 1994. His present habits are all there in the clip — the nervous energy, the way he always repeats the answers to his bland questions, his endless supply of bad icebreakers ("Don't run away!... I know, you haven't got your makeup on yet, right? Ha ha!... My goodness, what's going on here today? Look at this. This is terrific."), and even the same damn talking points. The best part comes around 2:00, when a woman tells him she doesn't vote because she doesn't trust politicians. He notes that he's not a politician. Perhaps you've heard him say that a few million times during this current election?

The good news for Mitt Romney is that the New York Times has declared retail politics useless and dead, so Romney doesn't have to talk to voters ever again.

[via Ben Smith]