Ever Know a "Vanilla" candidate? For example, Mitt Romney...

Mitt Romney is like the "functional" candidate. Even his strongest supporters don't seem passionate about him, they just know he would be good at specific functions, like fixing the economy. McCain's entire campaign was pretty vanilla too. The only time any passion was present was when he named Sarah Palin as his running mate. Even then, he was so vanilla he cancelled that passion out pretty quickly. I think the vast majority of candidates will always be "vanilla" because there has to be a certain amount of over the top passion to make the others stand out.

I set my bar a little higher than a lot of people. To me, vanilla (or simply unflavored) would be people like, Rick Santorum, rick Perry, Romney, Bachman, (and until recently) Tim Pawlentey. et al. Most candidates fall in to this category for me because I hold them to a very tight gold standard. There are very few who fall outside that bracket.