[Posted by Karl] That doesn’t sound quite right, does it? As Erick Erickson noted: In South Carolina exit polls, Romney wins only the “moderate or liberal”, those with incomes in excess of $200,000.00, those with postgraduate education, those who oppose the tea party movement, and those who think religion does not matter at all. A number of those have been consistent through Iowa and New Hampshire too. Fairly or not, Romney seems to have have a wealth problem , exploitable by his rivals now and Team Obama if Mitt gets the nomination. Oddly, I find myself in agreement with both Erickson and John Heilemann that Romney needs to: (a) “refine his message, not sharpen his knives”; and (b) get comfortable, and quick, in talking about his money issues. In particular, I would advise Romney to go beyond defending the free market in response to the Bain Capital issue. That approach appeals to the right, but the abstract principle may not move the casual voter, particularly the blue-collar casual voter. Romney’s plan to compare Bain’s work to the GM bailout if he becomes the nominee still puts him in the role of “bailout guy,” which is probably not the best frame this year. Perhaps Romney should compare his role at Bain to being a doctor. Sometimes, doctors get to deliver babies or cure sick children who go on to live full and productive lives. In those cases, the doctor gets to feel great. So it is with some companies, like Staples or Domino’s Pizza. In other cases, the patient is so injured or so sick that they have to lose or limb, or even die. The doctors try as hard as they can, but sometimes all the lifesaving measures known to mankind are not enough and the doctors feel terrible about it. So it is when companies get rightsized or go bankrupt. Some may think doctors are overpaid, but no one would want to live in a society without them. Mitt Romney is never going to seem like Mitt Sixpack, but he may be able to come across as caring more about more blue-collar families. –Karl
Follow this link:
Mitt Sixpack
I am watching Ron Paul’s speech and am distracted by his blue sweater. He looks like Mr. Rogers. Frankly, I would find it preferable if Paul were to abandon his speech, flip off his shoes and sing,” It’s a Beautiful Day in The Neighborhood.” I suspect that Paul would scare far fewer people if he engaged in such whimsy.
Continue reading here:
Mr. Paul’s Neighborhood
BOULDER, Colo. — Colorado State Senator Scott Renfroe is introducing a bill to ban photo traffic enforcement, including both speed and red light cameras, statewide. Sen. Renfroe frames it properly: “People need to be held accountable for their actions, but government should be about safety not revenue.” Many people are sympathetic to red-light cameras, assuming they cause fewer people to run red lights, a behavior especially dangerous to others. But that assumption also assumes that fewer red light scofflaws equates to fewer accidents at intersections. Perhaps surprisingly, a raft of studies appear to show that red light cameras may actually be increasing the number of traffic accidents: People afraid of the cameras often stop short, including when the light is yellow, causing the driver behind them also to brake suddenly, occasionally unable to do so in time and rear-ending the camera-fearing driver in front (and causing the same problem for the third car in this line of traffic). To be sure, those in favor of cameras have a couple of studies they quote supporting increased safety due to cameras. I’ve never been sympathetic to speed cameras for a simple reason: Both here in Boulder and around where I used to live in Australia, speed cameras are put in places where there is little safety justification but where people are likely to be exceeding the speed limit, though not enough to have any implications for safety. In the Blue Mountains of Australia, the cameras are routinely placed near the bottom of hills where one would expect cars to have picked up a little speed. In Boulder, they use soccer mom-style mini-vans with radar and cameras built in and place them alongside the road where two lanes merge into one. A person might speed up to get past the person he’s currently driving next to since there’s about to be room for only one of them, longitudinally speaking, only to see the stomach-sinking flash from the cynically pleasant-looking vehicle. Forcing people to slow down when they need to get away from the other car also arguably increases the risk of a rear-end collision in much the same way that red light cameras do. In short, speed cameras are rarely useful for anything but revenue generation and likely were never intended to be anything else despite the soothing words of Nanny State politicians. And red light cameras, even if intended in part to be a true benefit to traffic safety, seem not to be doing so, leaving them as pure revenue raisers as well. When did Americans become OK with the idea of the cameras watching so much of our every day life? If Orwell’s Big Brother were in charge of traffic regulation, you can bet he’d love the idea of these cameras. In fact, we don’t need to theorize about a fictional tyrant; after all, if New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants more traffic cameras “on every corner,” they can’t be a good idea. To give you an idea of the revenue generation aspect of these cameras, Denver was ticketing people $75 — the same fine as for running a red light — if they stopped their vehicles even an inch over the painted line on the road before which a vehicle is supposed to stop when the light is red. When called on it, the city didn’t have the sanity to eliminate that policy; it simply cut the fine to $40. As Senator Renfroe puts it, “The city of Denver must feel like they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar with their vote to lower the white line violation ticket cost. If it really is about safety and not revenue, how about refunding the difference to all the people they ticketed the past six months.” Some data for you: An article on the Left Lane News website mentions that the Denver City Auditor is very skeptical that traffic cameras are anything other than a “cash grab,” and is certain that the public views them as such. Further, “The city has little defense for the audit other than it would be ‘impossible to conduct a study that would satisfy the auditor’s concerns.’ It’s estimated that the city of Denver will generate more than $7 million in revenue from its mobile radar program alone in 2011.” The city of Des Moines, Iowa, collected $454,412 over the last three months of 2011, including $270,866 in December, from five traffic cameras. To give you an idea of the profit involved for the vendors, the Des Moines Register reported that “After paying Gatso USA a flat, per-ticket fee for processing and issuing the citations, the city netted $192,365 from the cameras in December.” How much money do you think Gatso USA is willing to spend in campaign contributions and propaganda dissemination to keep this gig going? Seattle and its neighboring town of Lynwood both plan to take more than $4 million from their residents’ pockets with traffic cameras this year. It’s time to push back, as many other states have, against these cameras specifically, and against the Big Nanny state generally. If you hear a politician defending the cameras, ask him to give you the reason for his position. If it’s about safety, politely tell him that the data on that is, at best for his side, mixed. And, you might ask, if studies routinely show that the cameras do not improve safety, is he really willing to go on record to support them just for the sake of allowing a city or state to fleece drivers? Furthermore, and this argument should appeal to at least some Democrats, the large amount of money involved encourages corruption, as has been seen in various locales around the country. Even the Nanny State-supporting Denver Post editorializes against the obvious corruption of the vendor of traffic cameras being given the assignment to study their effectiveness. Democratic Colorado State Rep. Claire Levy responded to a request for a comment: “I want to see facts regarding effectiveness before making a decision. My basic approach is to let the local governments respond to their citizen concerns rather than have the heavy hand of state government tell them how to handle their traffic enforcement issues.” The libertarian-style argument has some appeal, except that this is not a case of the federal government imposing regulations on a state. Rep. Levy, with whom I often have good-natured political jousts, is a major believer in the Nanny State: she was the prime sponsor of a controversial bill to ban cell phone use by all drivers in Colorado.
Since I wrote this little blog post the other day, picked up at Real Clear Politics, all of a sudden (by coincidence; I’m not claiming I had anything to do with it, but just am remarking on how rapidly the ‘meme’ has taken off) all sorts of people are suddenly realizing that Mitt Romney is hardly the candidate with the best chance to beat Barack Obama. It certainly isn’t all at the Center for Individual Freedom, but we did have a written colloquy on the subject the other day, with Troy Senik and Ashton Ellis insightfully joining me in weighing in . Actually, Jonathan Last made the case earlier, here . Tina Korbe, a rising star, argues the same thing at Hot Air. Phil Klein at the Washington Examiner makes the case that Romney’s flip-flopping is a big liability in a general election (as it was for Al Gore and to a certain extent John Kerry). Back in late December, John Hawkins at Right Wing News also argued the situation quite well. Of course, Peter Ferrara made the case right here at the Spectator , although he also segued into (strong) arguments against Romney’s ability to do a good job if he were elected anyway. William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection also has questions . The scholarly take on it , again doubting Romney’s electability, was by Larry Lindsey at the Weekly Standard . From the center-left , the very smart former U.S. Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) thinks his (former) party doesn’t have much to worry about from Romney: “The fact, however, is that Democrats have not had to strain to plan the race they would run against Romney. For four days in the week, they will paint him as a flip-flopper who has occupied both sides of a lot of ground; for three days, as an entitled tool of corporate interests who made millions doling out pink slips on behalf of a shadowy management firm.” Also at NRO, Andy McCarthy doubts whether we can know who is more electable. At the New York Post , John Podhoretz writes a piece about Romney headlined “Never Has a Winner Looked so Beaten.” The column is brutal. It calls Romney “one of the weakest major candidates either party has ever seen.” Also: “[N]obody loves him. No one is inspired by him.… Claiming he should be president because he knows how to run a business may be the least stirring message any candidate has seized upon since Michael Dukakis foundered in 1988 by claiming he could bring ‘competence’ to the White House. And his liabilities are undeniable. Even though Gingrich’s assault on Romney’s record of laying off workers when he was running Bain Capital is breathtaking in its disingenuousness, that record does happen to be one of a dozen glaring weaknesses in Romney’s biography, political history and approach that President Obama and his team will be able to use to their advantage.” And Jonah Goldberg writes that Romney’s “authentic inauthenticity problem isn’t going away.” Plenty other similar pieces are out there, all in a rush. And they are all correct. I try to look at these things from three perspectives based in my own experience. [MUCH MORE] I’ve been a political activist/political professional/presidential campaign state executive director/presidential caucus organizer/leadership Hill staffer, so I have a participant’s perspective. I’ve been a PR executive, so I then try to look at it from a marketing perspective. And I’ve been a journalist/columnist for 15 years, so there’s the close observer/outsider perspective. (This is not to boast about my background, but only to explain HOW I arrive at looking at things, from different angles, as a way to check my assumptions — althought I do have a long record of getting it right.) Anyway, here’s what I see. I see, first, a candidate who ” fails to inspire .” This is hugely important. It’s the old Dole/McCain/Bush 41 thing again: Without energizing one’s base, it doesn’t matter if you can get a few extra percentage points from “swing” voters (even assuming it’s true that those extra few points are achievable — which is probably not true anyway, because if you aren’t inspirational, you aren’t inspirational, period, meaning you don’t inspire the middle either). It’s also true that millions of voters really can decide to stay home; remember that Karl Rove estimated that up to 4 million expected Evangelical Bush backers stayed home in 2000 after being disgusted by last-weekend news that Bush had had a drunk driving arrest way back when. The result, of course, was a race that took six extra weeks to decide. Next is a candidate’s history, which was the basis of my original post on this front. Aside from winning the governorship against extremely weak opposition in a three-way race where he failed to get an actual majority of the vote, in a state that despite its liberalism had become accustomed to electing Republican governors ( for 12 straight years ), Romney still has never won an electorally significant victory that wasn’t in his native state (Michigan) or in a state that is his backyard and site of his vacation home (New Hampshire). Even in Iowa, his mere eight-vote win after five years of work there amounted to six (yes, count them, exactly six) fewer votes than he earned four years earlier in the same caucus system. Then there’s the attacks on his tenure at Bain Capital. The attacks are over-the-top and unfair. But coming from the left in a general election campaign, they will work. That’s how a weakened Ted Kennedy in a Republican year blew open a tight race against Romney and won by a landslide — by attacking Bain (and by some subtle but effective exploitation of anti-Mormon bigotry, which unfortunately and unfairly and sickeningly will probably cost Romney a point and a half from otherwise GOP voters this year as well). What’s particularly devastating here is when a candidate’s big vulnerability is in the very area he tried to, and expected to, make his biggest political strength. Romney’s main selling point has been that he is a good businessman who proved himself in the private sector; if that gets taken away, he’s toast, because his record as governor was nothing to write home about, with his only significant “achievement” being the execrable one of Romneycare. This is very much akin to what happened to John Kerry, who tried to make his major selling point his supposed military “heroism,” when the highly on-target Swift Boat attacks made that same military service into a slight net liability. You can’t win when your biggest selling point is actually a vulnerability. Romney, indeed, is the perfect foil for the Obama campaign, first because he is the very epitome of a Republican born rich who got richer by moving money around — a millionaire plutocrat who just can’t relate to “ordinary” Americans, and second because he is yet another Republican political/dynastic legatee. Think about it: We’ve gone from one Bush trying to outdo his Senate father by becoming president, to another Bush trying to outdo his president father by winning two terms as president, to a McCain trying to outdo his admiral father and admiral grandfather by becoming president… and now to a Romney trying to outdo his Michigan governor father and failed presidential front-runner by this time succeeding as a presidential front-runner. In the hands of the $800 million Obama campaign, this can easily by portrayed as a rather creepy and anti-American reliance on dynasticism. Combine that with what appears to be a plastic insincerity (again, the “flip-flopping” charge was devastating against Al Gore and can be so again), with a “how dare you question me” attitude that increasingly has shown itself in debates, and with an utter failure to “connect” emotionally with what once were known as “Reagan Democrats” (old-ethnic. i.e. Italian-American/Polish-American, etc., blue collar workers, culturally conservative and on economics distrustful of Wall Street), and you have a recipe for an extraordinarily weak general election candidate. Against all of that, all Romney can offer is a supposed greater acceptability to the educated, less culturally conservative, right-leaning economically, urban and suburbanites who are being targeted by Obama in places like Virginia and North Carolina. But the key thing here is that while these folks may be more socially liberal, they tend to vote more on the basis of their slightly upper-middle-income economic expectations rather than on social issues, and they’ll vote either for or against Obama based on those analyses regardless of who the Republican nominee is. But it is the blue-collar worker, or small-business retailer, who (polls show) votes more often on cultural cues (not necessarily social issues per se, although that is sometimes the case, but more on stylistic cultural cues and concerns) than on other factors. Again, this is obviously a gross over-generalization (as is most 30,000-foot-level political socio-analysis), but these are indeed, as Rick Santorum keeps saying, the people who swing elections in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Missouri. The are far more likely to swing behind Santorum (or Gingrich, or Perry) than behind the stiff rich guy with a “weird” religion and no middle-cultural social affinities (“shooting… small varmints” and flipping on homosexual “marriage”). While general-election polls ten months out are not at all predictive of final results, they can indicate basic information about viability. Candidates with higher name ID (especially with low current “hard negatives” like Romney) can be expected to do far better than ones with low ID, low familiarity, etc. Thus, it is highly instructive that in recent polls in both Florida and North Carolina , Rick Santorum did almost exactly as well (margin of error) against Obama as Romney did, despite Romney’s far greater familiarity to voters. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, Romney just can’t campaign against Obama’s single biggest vulnerability, Obamacare . There are just too many similarities between Obamacare and Romneycare, too many bad results from Romneycare (busting the budget, etc.), and too many video clips of Romney from six years ago saying that he hoped that even the individual insurance mandate would become a “national model.” This will absolutely hobble Romney’s campaign. In fact, it might be an insurmountable problem. All of which is to say that Willard Mitt Romney has very low growth potential in a general-election campaign against Obama. His downside might be not as low as John McCain’s was, four years ago, but his upside is negligible. As Larry Lindsey’s analysis (mentioned above) explains, this can be an easy recipe for what I call a “respectable loss.” But a loss is a loss is a loss. Romney is a weak general-election candidate who isn’t likely to get any better.
Original post:
Why Romney is Weak vs. Obama
Let me go ahead and stipulate that Mitt Romney has presidential height and hair, and appears to have presidential composure in debates and interviews (at least, when not being mauled by the Great Grizzly of Interviewers, the always fearsome Bret Baier ). He also has a history of business success and has the longest private sector career of any participant in the GOP primary – though it’s obviously worth noting that his lengthy private sector career has largely been the result of his utter failure to enter and remain in the public sector, despite trying over and over and over and over again to do so . However, leaving aside the fact that his positions on most issues have a history of being “multiple choice,” as Ted Kennedy once said, Mitt Romney has two major vulnerabilities to attack – and it just so happens that they are the top two issues of this entire election. It’s no secret that the key to this election is “the economy, stupid.” This will be a jobs election, an economy election, and – given the Obama administration’s limited but well-worn playbook – a class warfare election. Business success demonstrates a much-needed understanding of what our economy needs to get moving again, but job creation and relatability are at a premium in such an environment, which is why Romney’s Bain experience is such a handicap. Is the Republican party pro-market? It is and it should be, which is why serious Republican candidates should be careful just how they hit Romney on Bain, if they do it at all. However, anybody who doesn’t think ads like this and videos like this will be running day and night throughout the general election (to great effect on the undecided portion of the blue-collar population) is simply deluding him- or herself. Quite simply, whatever the context and whatever his actual business record, Romney will be hit left, right, and center over the jobs that were eliminated and the people who were put out of work by Bain Capital, and pictures like this will be shown over and over again, until people have had pounded into their heads that Mitt Romney is a wealthy 1%er who bathes in Benjamins and gets his jollies from playing Donald Trump and yelling “you’re fired!” at average Americans. There’s no question the message war will be unfair and devoid of any context whatsoever that could demonstrate that the Republican nominee isn’t Dr. Evil incarnate. However, Romney’s Bain Capital record basically is sets the ad campaign up on the tee for the Obama campaign and dares them to swing for the fences again and again and again. This would be bad enough in a “normal” election, when the Republican nominee would (as usual) be painted as a corporatist who cared less about the American economy as a whole than he did about lining the pockets of his corporate fat-cat friends. In an election in which an historically bad economy and historically high unemployment are front and center, choosing a nominee whose record of eliminating jobs can be encapsulated in TV and radio ads, and personified with the faces and voices of those whom Bain Capital put out of work, is simply nonsensical. Similarly, in an election where a significant amount of passion on the right comes from the prospect of repealing Obamacare, with its bloated price tag, restrictions on patient and citizen choice, and – above all – its legal mandate that citizens purchase approved health insurance, in the state of their residence and at a jacked-up price that results from the community rating that the combination of such a mandate and the requirement that consumers with pre-existing conditions be thrown into the common risk pool makes necessary…and the “inevitable” nominee is a man who boasts a statewide version of virtually the exact same program as the signature legislative achievement of his term as a governor? Just amazing. This is not to say that Mitt Romney would be the same as Barack Obama if elected (let alone worse), though I’m loath to assume any position or conviction on his part given his history of being so “multiple choice”). In fact, this commentary has little or nothing to do with how Romney would govern if elected; rather, this has only to do with the campaign and what we can expect. With that being said, let me sum up by making sure I’ve got this right: in an election in which jobs and Obamacare are the top two issues, the “inevitable” Republican nominee is a person whose business career consisted in no small part of eliminating jobs, and whose signature legislative achievement is the enactment of state-run health care. Is that about right? If so, God help us all.
Read more:
The 2012 Election and the ‘Inevitable’ Mitt Romney
