Will someone please tell the Wall Street Journal editorial page that Mitt Romney is not Rick Santorum?
Over the past week there’s been a raft of handwringing at the conservative publication over Romney’s inability to make “the moral case” for all kinds of economic activity, such as private equity and capitalism’s risk and reward system. Yet since Romney hasn’t risen to the challenge of defending the free market, surrogates have stepped forward in droves. Two recent examples include a guest column that ran yesterday headlined “Newt’s Bain Opportunism is Mitt’s Opportunity,” calling on Romney to “make a moral case for free market capitalism.” One of today’s editorials, “Mitt Romney’s 15%,” thinks the candidate’s disclosure of his tax rate gives him “the opportunity to make the moral and practical case for lower rates and fewer loopholes.”
The Journal and other economics-only conservatives are demanding too much from Romney. He’s not a moralist. As this revealing bio-piece makes clear, those who know him consider Romney a relativist. Members of his church came to a similar conclusion when he challenged Ted Kennedy in 1994. Remember, the defining characteristic of a relativist is that he doesn’t believe in absolutes. For example, the idea that government should never force its citizens to purchase a product against their will…
Simply put, the reason Romney won’t make the moral case for capitalism is because he can’t make it. It’s just not the way he approaches decisions in business or politics. Like other New England Republicans, he sounds like a fiscal conservative, but he’s always willing to increase spending, and pass more regulations. (See RomneyCare, the Salt Lake City Olympic Games bailout, etc.) His history shows that he opts for what works instead of what’s right.
If the Wall Street Journal and its guest columnists are chagrined that Romney is unable or unwilling to defend beliefs they hold dear, then maybe it’s time they lower the temperature on the rest of the conservative movement who have been expressing the same disappointment with Romney since 2008.
Increasingly desperate, Newt Gingrich has hurled a spaghetti bowl of slurs against Mitt Romney in the hope that something will stick. Curiously, one strand includes the following quote to a South Carolina audience: “Why would you want to nominate the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Obama?”
That illogic, however, could have just as easily been used against Ronald Reagan in 1980 by his own Republican opponents. After all, Reagan lost the 1976 Republican nomination race to Gerald Ford, who obviously went on to lose to Carter. “Why,” they might have asked, “would you want to nominate the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Jimmy Carter?” At this point, Newt’s attacks resemble a food fight more than principled defense of his own candidacy.
Following our recent blog symposium on Mitt Romney’s shortcomings as an effective defender of market economics, this clip from his appearance yesterday on the Today Show is worth watching:
The problem with Romney’s “envy” approach is that it’s a mirror image of precisely the kind of class warfare he’s (rightly) accusing President Obama of. It’s just not going to hold water in a time of economic distress for any Republican — let alone a fantastically wealthy ex-businessman — to attempt to swat away his opponents by claiming they resent his wealth and that of those similarly situated. Romney should instead be making the case for broad-based prosperity — the sort of democratic capitalism Ashton advocated yesterday. Attacking the motives of his opponents instead of rebutting their assertions makes him seem both aloof and unprepared for the debate to come.
Ashton and Quin both point out deficiencies of Mitt Romney’s that go far beyond the narrow attack on Bain I referenced in yesterday’s post. And they’re both right.
Quin says my rhetorical suggestions for Romney would only help so much. Quite so. One Ricochet member asked, in response to my post, if I could come up with a speechmaking salvo that could save Romney from the taint of his misbegotten Massachusetts healthcare experiment. My response: “As Romney found during his time in the private sector, some turnaround jobs are too much for anyone to salvage.”
I’ll just add one factor to Ashton and Quin’s delineation of Romney’s liabilities: he seems unable to connect with voters. This is a man, remember, who was won only one election in his life–and even that occurred in the context of a three-way race where Romney was unable to win a simple majority. As I’ve argued in a previous column, Romney is bedeviled by many of the same shortcomings that hindered John Kerry’s presidential bid: patrician aloofness, a sense that he’ll say or do anything to curry favor with the electorate, and a total lack of the capacity to inspire.
I’ve feared for some time that 2012 will be a mirror image of 2004, with a weak incumbent squeaking by a challenger who earned the nomination by seeming slightly more viable than the other candidates in a mediocre field. Unfortunately, that’s starting to look like exactly how this race is playing out.
I’m glad to see the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page echoing Troy’s advice to Mitt Romney to get out in front of the Bain-bashing and make a full-throated defense of free market capitalism. But as both Troy and the Journal seem to allude to, Romney doesn’t appear capable or willing to make the case for democratic capitalism; the kind of market economy that emphasizes equal access and opportunities instead of guaranteed outcomes.
The way I’m using the term, democratic capitalism disdains the unfairness many perceive in the crony capitalism of Obama’s Solyndra deal, and in the bailouts of companies deemed too big to fail. Americans don’t like it when public employee unions get tenure protections and better benefits than the private sector. People feel cheated when General Electric pays no federal income taxes thanks to loopholes only the wealthy like Warren Buffet can exploit. For the free market to work, people have to trust it, and right now Wall Street, the White House, and many other entrenched special interests from unions to rent-seeking businesses are making everyday Americans think the capitalistic system they’ve been sold is far from democratic.
In a sense, democratic capitalism is at the heart of Sarah Palin’s appeal. Her entire career in Alaska was built around taking down entrenched interests enriching themselves at the expense of a fair system. She exposed a corrupt state oil and gas commission; disrupted the state GOP’s patrician good old boys club by defeating an incumbent governor; and won a fight with a major oil company over its ability to exploit Alaska’s natural wealth without sharing some of it with residents. These were the accomplishments that made her a maverick and put her on John McCain’s vice presidential radar. When Palin was toying with a presidential run this time around, she gave a major speech blasting distortions of the economy that make the market less fair, and ultimately, less free. Better than anyone to date, Palin communicates the Tea Party’s angst over Big Government into a larger narrative about the dangers posed by any segments of society that threaten the democratic element in America’s form of capitalism.
Now, I’m not saying that Mitt Romney is a foe of democratic capitalism. What I’m saying is that he doesn’t appear comfortable articulating his understanding of the free market in a message that applies equally to executives and frontline workers. That’s probably because he’s never been a frontline worker. Of course, he’s worked hard – graduating with honors from Harvard law and business schools demands it – but as the son of an auto executive and governor whose first job out of graduate school was telling CEO’s how to fix their companies, Mitt Romney has never experienced capitalism from the factory floor. That means he will have a hard time explaining the virtues of capitalism to people near the destructive end of capitalism’s creativity.
Fairly or not, if Romney is the nominee liberals will savage him as a member of the 1% who made millions replacing people with technology and exporting many of the remaining jobs overseas. Conservatives who favor the free market should hope that Romney discovers how to articulate the democratic element of capitalism soon and well. He could start by reading Troy’s excellent remarks as soon as possible.
Regular readers know that I’m far from the biggest Mitt Romney supporter in the world. That being said, the criticisms of his time at Bain Capital leveled by fellow candidates Newt Gingrich, Jon Hunstman, and Rick Perry have been shockingly opportunistic and intellectually dishonest, particularly for self-proclaimed advocates of free market capitalism (they’ve also ignored the more salient criticism — the numerous instances in which Bain lived off the taxpayer).
Over at Ricochet, I have a proposed rhetorical response for Romney. The whole’s thing here, but here’s a sample:
I would remind my opponents – as I would remind President Obama – that work is a form of public service. Our ability to make money is directly tied to our ability to provide something of value to our fellow man. But sometimes when the customer’s needs change or when we lose ground to our competitors, we have to make changes. We don’t choose these circumstances. As a matter of fact, we hate these circumstances. But, like many Americans that are struggling today, we accept the things that we cannot change, we make the hard choices, and we persevere. That is never an easy task. And unfortunately, sometimes people lose their jobs as a result. But what, I wonder, do my opponents think the alternative is? If a company on the brink of failure has no choice but to let a few employees go now or to see all of their jobs disappear eventually, what should they do?
Those are the kind of painful choices that people face in the real economy. And I find it telling that that concept is foreign to my opponents. They’re not foreign to the American people – because they’re living through them every day. You can talk to anyone who’s ever sat behind a manager’s desk – whether it’s in a corner office or a corner store – and they’ll tell you that there’s nothing that they hate more than having to fire someone. Americans take pride in their work. Losing a paycheck hurts. But losing your sense of dignity hurts more. My experiences in business didn’t make me enjoy firing people. It made me loathe the politicians in Washington for whom those people are nothing more than statistics on a spreadsheet.
The ever-perceptive Michael Barone is out with a new piece today chronicling — in his trademark even-handed style — the weaknesses of the various Republican presidential candidates (Barone makes clear up front that this isn’t an attack piece, just an attempt to balance their professed strengths with the demerits they try to obscure). My favorite is his judgment of Jon Huntsman, who hasn’t been able to break through with conservative voters despite the fact that he had a serviceable record as Governor of Utah:
Jon Huntsman, even more dependent on a breakout in New Hampshire than Santorum, has a different weakness. His disdainful dismissal of other Republicans, even more than his service as Barack Obama’s ambassador to China, has antagonized many conservatives.
That’s it in a nutshell. Attitudes matter just as much as — if not more than — positions. You never get a second chance to make a first impression and Huntsman’s decision to curry favor with the media by running down the conservative base in the early days of his campaign can’t be ameliorated by the virtues of his positions on taxes, education, or abortion in Salt Lake City.
Where I think Barone gives us a genuinely new insight is in his read of Mitt Romney:
His weakness is that he never experienced the cultural revolution of the 1960s and so sounds corny and insincere. So far, that hasn’t been disabling.
Here, I think Barone dramatically oversimplifies. The sense of insincerity has a lot to do with Romney’s ideological elasticity, which has seen him seemingly take every side of every issue at some point in his career. But the cultural point is still well-taken. Barack Obama is the ultimate postmodern president — cool, detached, ironic in the fashion of those who spend too much time on college campuses, and utterly solipsistic. It’s a long way from there to Romney, who seems like the buttoned up father figure on a black and white sitcom. But while the former Massachusetts Governor is far from the ideal corrective to the current occupant of the White House, there’s no doubt that a president who seems pried from “Leave it to Beaver” is preferable to one whose entire political career seems like an extended audition for “The Real World”
Rick Santorum must be living right. Even though a Super PAC supporting his presidential bid is closing up shop due to lack of funds it looks like Santorum can count on two other entities to help him mount an advertising war in New Hampshire this week.
Quin is effusive below about Rick Santorum’s win last night in Iowa (yes, technically he lost by by eight votes, but that’s a win given the context). There’s good reason to celebrate. Santorum’s late surge in Iowa was truly remarkable and his speech last night was probably the best given by any candidate in the last year. This is Santorum operating at the peak of his powers. Unfortunately for him, the peak of his powers won’t be enough to carry him to the nomination. Here’s why:
— Iowa is a unique electoral atmosphere and one that is particularly well-suited to a candidate like Santorum. It has a surplus of social conservatives (particularly evangelicals) for whom Santorum’s emphasis on faith and family was dispositive — as it was for Mike Huckabee in 2008. The demographic makeup of the next few key primary states won’t be nearly as kind to him.
— Santorum’s timing in Iowa was impeccable. He surged in the closing days of the race, when there were no debates left and when media coverage (and, more importantly, media consumption) was at something of a standstill because of the holidays. Thus, Santorum has undergone far less vetting than anyone else in the race. When that process begins — which was probably about twelve hours ago — it will expose some of his intrinsic difficulties, such as his history with the K Street Project and his long history of big government conservatism.
— Santorum was able to campaign in Iowa like he was running for governor, visiting all 99 counties and hosting nearly 400 town halls over the course of the last year. He did it on a shoestring budget, too, traveling in a pickup truck with one staffer and shopping at Target. While one of Iowa’s great virtues is that it allows for exactly this kind of retail politicking, that window has now closed. Santorum did a year’s worth of work in Iowa. He’ll only have a week or two for each of the upcoming races.
No doubt, Santorum will be a far bigger figure than many pundits (myself included) imagined in coming weeks. His Iowa win, however, has all the hallmarks of an anomaly rather than the beginning of a trend. And that fact — combined with the inability of conservatives to rally around any one candidate — will have Mitt Romney smiling all the way to the GOP Convention in Tampa.
At CFIF, we’ve spent some time arguing that Rick Santorum could produce a surprise win in next week’s Iowa caucuses. Ron Paul continues to top the leader board in the Hawkeye State, rising to a level of support that most consider surprising. But with news that a Super PAC is switching its support from Michele Bachmann to Mitt Romney, and spending almost $500,000 on an ad-buy for him, it looks increasingly likely that the former Massachusetts governor could be the biggest surprise winner in Iowa. Why? Because his campaign took a decidedly hands-off approach to Iowa for much of 2011, preferring to focus its efforts – and locate its headquarters – in New Hampshire. Now, Romney is peaking at just the right moment.
It’s probably true that there are really three GOP contests in Iowa right now. Ron Paul’s libertarian caucus, the establishment caucus between Newt Gingrich and Romney, and the conservative caucus between Santorum, Bachmann, and Rick Perry. Unless Paul wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, he’s likely done after next week’s voting. (But what if he did win both?) A Romney win in Iowa probably knocks out Gingrich, with whomever survives to win the conservative caucus having an uphill climb against a strengthened Romney.
Because of his record and light campaigning in the state, Romney wasn’t supposed to win Iowa. If he does, his march to the nomination may be a short one.
If you’re pressed for time (and with the holiday season here, I hope you are), Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin provides a good summary on what the NYT report tells about Romney’s current place in the Republican field:
What his classmates saw at Harvard are the same qualities that both attract and repel voters today. His economic expertise and pragmatism make him the most electable Republican in 2012, while his lack of ideology makes many conservatives long for anyone else to lead their party. Had a more credible conservative appeared to challenge him, Romney wouldn’t have had a chance. But in the absence of such a paragon, Republicans will probably have to make their peace with the man who seems to be very much the same person who excelled at Harvard four decades ago.
Another reason Gingrich isn’t fading is Mitt Romney. Let’s face it: Mitt Romney is the Republican version of Al Gore. Even people who are predisposed to liking him can’t seem to get there. Romney is supposedly more electable than Gingrich, at least according to the Inside the Beltway crowd and the major media.
Really? Liberal pollster Peter Hart’s focus group, asked to pick a family relationship to Romney, labeled him “black sheep,” “fun neighbor,” “cousin,” “second cousin,” “dad that was never home.” The same group labeled Gingrich “grandfather,” “father,” “my favorite uncle,” and “uncle who keeps bringing home different wives.” Is grandpa less electable than the dad who was never home?
Labeling Romney a black sheep and the GOP version of Al Gore really crystallizes his failure to excite Republican primary voters, doesn’t it? The most devastating part of these analogies is that they manage to be accurate without being overly negative or hurtful (unless you factor in political pain).
Though there are many positive things to say about Rick Santorum’s candidacy – battle-tested conservative on national security, welfare reform and foundational issues like family and marriage – he has yet to catch anything resembling a break while seemingly every other Republican running for president has (witness the regrettable Jon Huntsman ticking up in New Hampshire).
Unlike frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum has no personal baggage, and has not flip-flopped on any principled issue since entering public life twenty years ago. As we’ve discussed before, Santorum has great ideas on personal and corporate tax reform that would lead to real economic growth. So, with the base refusing to support Mitt Romney and others skittish of Newt Gingrich’s past and future, why can’t Rick get a break? Is it media bias over his stance on social issues? Bad debate performances? Does he lack contacts with big donors?
Byron York has written several pieces anticipating an Iowa surge for Santorum, but so far…nothing.
A piece in Politico today looks at the efforts by Mitt Romney’s campaign team to ward off the growing challenge from the Newt Gingrich boomlet. While the author, Reid J. Epstein, spends a fair amount of time examining the lines of attack that are being planned for both Romney and his surrogates, one aspect of their strategy is undersold in the piece. Epstein writes of the Romney campaign:
… They’re also ready to sit back and wait for the other candidates who are more dependent on strong showings in Iowa to do the dirty work.
Cue all-purpose gadfly Ron Paul. Paul is out with a devastating new anti-Gingrich ad that plays right into Romney’s hands. In fact, the ad — with its focus on questioning Newt’s conservative credentials — plays a lot better coming from the undiluted Paul than the notoriously squishy Romney. The reality, though, is that it probably does much more to help the latter than the former. See for yourself:
Everything you need to know about the Obama political team’s total ignorance of Republican politics can be summed up with one fact: when Obama chose then-Utah Governor Jon Huntsman to serve as his Ambassador to China in 2009, he did so thinking that he was removing a formidable opponent for the presidency. Huntsman’s tepid performance as a 2012 candidate — and his total inability to connect with the conservative base — have comprehensively given the lie to that notion, an outcome that the president’s political team could have envisioned if they had actually talked to any Republicans.
Now, the best minds in the Democratic Party are at it again. With Newt Gingrich leading in the polls in Iowa and South Carolina — and closing the gap in New Hampshire — they’re issuing a new television ad targeting … Mitt Romney?
Reports indicate that the White House is convinced Romney will be the nominee and wants to soften him up early. That’s silly for a couple of reasons. First, it shows (as did the Huntsman calculation) that these strategists don’t realize that being the Democrats’ favorite Republican doesn’t automatically launch you to the front of the field. Second, Romney’s continued inability to get above about 25 percent in the polls (his favorability has actually been dropping of late) and Gingrich’s surge make it extremely premature to assume a nominee. And third, even if the White House’s hunch is right, what difference is a general election ad airing a month before the primaries going to make?
The alternative, more Machiavellian interpretation is that the White House wants to weaken Romney in order to bolster Gingrich, who they view as the more beatable candidate. If that’s true, watch this video and ask yourself if this is a man you’d be spoiling for a fight with:
If this is how Team Obama plays offense, they better hope they have a hell of a defense in 2012.
Apparently, the media – and I – misread Mike Huckabee’s remarks to South Carolina Tea Party members as an endorsement of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Here’s a fuller quote of Huckabee’s answer to whether conservatives should stay home on Election Day 2012 if Romney is the Republican nominee:
“It would be real tragic if they stayed out. Mitt Romney may not be their first choice, but Mitt Romney every day of the week and twice on Sunday is going to be a much more effective president for issues that they care about than Barack Obama.”
In a head-scratching move, Mike Huckabee told South Carolina Tea Partiers that it’s time to support Mitt Romney for president. How’s this for emphasis:
“I think Republicans and conservatives and the Tea Party need to get behind him and say, ‘You may not be our first choice, but between you and Obama, I’ll vote 40 times to get you elected,” Huckabee said.
The biggest loser with the socially conservative Huckabee’s endorsement of the socially moderate Romney is GOP candidate Rick Santorum. Pundit chatter pegged Santorum as the beneficiary of the anti-Romney social conservatives in Iowa, but current poll numbers show Santorum still trailing badly. There’s still time for him to make a move, but Huckabee’s endorsement of Romney just cut it in half.
As Ashton notes below, I’ve been peddling a theory for the last several weeks that Newt Gingrich is poised to end up in a one-on-one showdown with Mitt Romney for the Republican Presidential nomination. The reason is simple: despite his seeming meltdown early in the campaign, Newt has been playing the long game, eschewing attacks on the other Republican candidates, and using the debates as a cost-free method to display his intellectual mastery of the issues and his ample abilities as a communicator.
It’s a savvy strategy, though like all “great in hindsight” moves it has benefited a lot from luck. If Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, or Herman Cain had been able to to convince the primary electorate that they had presidential deliverables, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Even the leaden Tim Pawlenty campaign may have been getting a second look if the former Minnesota governor had stayed in the race. But they haven’t, and Newt (who probably enjoys a five-point premium in the polls just because of the number of Republicans who’d love to watch him debate President Obama) is now riding high: a new poll out of Iowa yesterday had him second, only four points behind Herman Cain, who is likely to start taking a serious nosedive any day now.
One note of caution: as Ashton mentions, I have my doubts on whether Newt can overtake Romney in the final tally, as two factors will come into play once the former speaker is seen as a formidable threat. First, his intemperance while leading the House of Representatives will be brought back to the fore. Newt can reasonably argue that he’s even better equipped to lead the nation having learned the lessons of those years. Fair enough, as such things go. The other issue will be his messy personal life, which is the factor most likely to torpedo the campaign. If Gingrich has learned anything from the Herman Cain debacle, hopefully it’s that he should be candid about his past — and do so as quickly as possible. That will allow him to better control the story and adequately separate fact from fiction. Expect to hear a lot about Newt’s new-found religious convictions when those issues take center stage.
As for Romney, he should hope that Newt stumbles on one of these issues, but be prepared for him not to. The front runner has had it easy thus far, with most of his major opponents taking themselves out of contention without the former Massachusetts governor having to so much as lay a finger on them. Ask any Democrat from the last few decades: Newt will not be nearly so easy a target.
Granted, Newt has 9 staff members in the Palmetto State while Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry each have 7, but hey, he’s still #1!
Troy wrote an insightful entry analyzing Gingrich’s somewhat discussed boomlet as perhaps not enough to overtake the unfathomable Mitt Romney. Still, if there’s anyone in this race who knows how to galvanize a movement, it’s the author of the Contract with America.
Quin, I await another onslaught on why Gingrich would not be (to put it nicely) your choice for POTUS.
Jennifer Rubin’s interview with House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) gives more reason to surmise that a pairing of him and GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney as the 2012 Republican ticket. Rubin says that Ryan’s response to Romney’s entitlement reform plan was “effusive” and a clear statement of support from the leading elected conservative intellectual.
With Romney mired in an electoral no-man’s land – leading all other challengers but only garnering 25% support – adding Ryan to his team sometime next year would probably be enough to get disaffected Tea Party and conservative support otherwise underwhelmed with Romney’s checkered history.
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