Has Romney Really Thought This Out Yet? Days after telling supporters that he is considering another run for the presidency, Mitt Romney appears to be moving quickly to prepare his campaign and to give it a clear rationale. Given that only a few weeks ago most Republicans were not exactly clamoring for the former Massachusetts governor to make a third attempt at the White House, that is probably the most important thing Romney can do. His confidants are telling reporters like Politico’s Maggie Haberman and James Hohmann that he intends to run to the right of Jeb Bush on some issues but also to make tackling the issue of poverty one of the key elements of his campaign. In theory that sounds good but like his statements about changing his approach to a presidential run while retaining what seems like most of his 2012 staff, the disparate elements to Romney 3.0 don’t seem to match. All of which leads one to wonder just how thoroughly the normally meticulous wonkish Romney has thought all of this out prior to jumping into the fray last week. Romney’s entire effort seems geared toward preventing Bush from gaining a stranglehold on the party’s establishment wing and major donors. To that end, he has seized on a key flaw in Bush’s strategy: his seeming determination to run against the party’s base by sticking to his unpopular positions on Common Core and immigration. This way he’ll in avoid having to tack to the right during the primaries and then back to the center in the general election as Romney did in 2012, an inelegant process that is at least partially blamed for the Republican defeat in November. Romney, who sought to appease a party base that distrusted him on ObamaCare by taking an uncompromising stand on immigration in his last campaign, understands that this could be a formula that could help a candidate from the party’s more conservative wing gain an advantage in the primaries. Yet at the same time, Romney thinks he can talk more about poverty. Is that possible? The short answer is that there is no contradiction between a tough stance on immigration or even education and concern about poverty. Indeed, it is high time that Republicans began following the lead of Rep. Paul Ryan (who just declared that he won’t run for president) and become the party of ideas again by charting a conservative approach to economics and opportunity that will help the poor. Indeed, the idea that the only way to help the impoverished is to create more big government and entitlements are antithetical to the notion of promoting self-sufficiency. But it will take a deft touch on policy to be able to swing between those two modes convincingly. To imagine that Romney, a brilliant thinker and analyst but a poor political communicator, is the man to do it requires a considerable stretch of the imagination. Even worse is the fact that the public’s image of Romney is that of a wealthy plutocrat. It should be conceded that this image is the creation of a systematic campaign of Democratic attacks more than reality. Though he is wealthy, Romney’s extensive religious activities, a story that he and the GOP did a poor job of telling in 2012, were largely focused on good deeds and helping others. But unfair or not, politicians rarely get a second chance to define themselves before the general public. To do so on one’s third run for national office is unprecedented. This is, after all, the same man who was caught on tape claiming that the “47 percent” of the country that were beneficiaries of government largesse would never for the Republicans. He disavowed that statement as an unfortunate gaffe but he reinforced it after the election on a conference call when he seemed to be saying more or less the same thing about Democrats buying the votes of various groups with funding. For any politicians to undo such an image while speaking convincingly about poverty while also running to the right of the leading moderate in the race would seem to be the sort of nuanced trick that might challenge the talents of even a communicator as skilled as a Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. But does anyone seriously think Romney can pull it off even if it is, as it surely must be, a sincere reflection of his views? Like the idea that he had create a completely different kind of campaign that is smarter and more attuned to technology with a lot of the same people running it, this set of ideas doesn’t exactly compute. Perhaps with more preparation and a more experienced Romney at its helm, this campaign can head off Bush, a host of conservatives challengers and then defeat Hillary Clinton in the general election. But until this gets sorted out, it’s hard to shake the impression that all of this hasn’t been entirely thought out very well. If Romney is to succeed, he’s going to need to sort of all of this out in a manner that so far does not seem to have happened. Until he does, Jeb Bush may be forgiven for thinking that Romney’s entrance into the race is a problem but not a catastrophe.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 02:25:21 +0000
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