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Mitt Romney’s Tough Sell: Blaming a Worsening Economy on Obama
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/22/mitt-romney-s-tough-sell-blaming-a-worsening-economy-on-obama.htmlMitt Romney’s Tough Sell: Blaming a Worsening Economy on Obama
by Michael Tomasky Apr 22, 2012 10:00 AM EDT
Some polls have Obama and Romney running neck-and-neck. But the truth is that Mitt can only win if the economy tanks, says Michael Tomasky.
snip//
Obama leads Romney on almost everything. In many categories he just slaughters him. Easygoing and likeable, 54 to 18. Is compassionate, 52 to 23. Middle-class looker-outer, 48 to 27. Even good commander in chief, 43 to 33 (I guess they haven’t seen the clips of Obama apologizing for Ameri—oh, right those clips don’t actually exist!). Of 13 questions, Romney leads Obama on exactly two. He leads on “changing business as usual in Washington,” but any challenger is going to lead an incumbent on that, because the sitting president by definition embodies business as usual in Washington. So that one, as they say at the racetrack, you can toss.
That leaves us with one meaningful category on which Romney leads—“having good ideas for how to improve the economy,” by 40 to 34 percent. All of this tells us, I think, a lot about how this campaign might play out. Three points:
1. Romney’s only hope is a bad economy (bracket here the possibility of earth-shaking and totally unpredictable events). He needs bad jobs numbers over the summer and into September, and the consumer-confidence needle dipping back into the negative zone. He ain’t gonna win this thing on likeability. He’s not going to win it, the commander-in-chief result suggests, on the usual Republican accusations that the Democrat is weak. And we know he’s not going to win on social issues, on which most independents think the GOP is off in some weird and unnamed galaxy.
2. Romney, therefore, will (if he’s smart, that is) try to avoid every topic that is not the economy. As the weeks go on in this race, every week in which the debate is chiefly about women or immigration or Afghanistan or whatever will be a week that Obama wins. It doesn’t even really matter if Romney holds his own on the particulars. These are loser topics for him and the GOP.
3. Obama will (if he’s smart) try to put these subjects at the center of the debate. He can’t exactly avoid talking about the economy. It’s a pretty dominant subject. And in fact, there are many points on which he can attack Romney on economics (Medicare, his royalist tax plan, etc.). But Obama will probably try to talk a lot about women and immigration and Osama. In addition, he’ll do things that emphasize likeability and so forth, and that highlight Romney’s detachment and insulation from the normal vagaries and vicissitudes of daily life. The Obama campaign should try to create situations that will bait Romney into doing more things like mentioning his wife’s dressage horses or insulting the cookies served to him by a middle-class family purchased from the neighborhood’s most beloved bakery.
2. Romney, therefore, will (if he’s smart, that is) try to avoid every topic that is not the economy. As the weeks go on in this race, every week in which the debate is chiefly about women or immigration or Afghanistan or whatever will be a week that Obama wins. It doesn’t even really matter if Romney holds his own on the particulars. These are loser topics for him and the GOP.
3. Obama will (if he’s smart) try to put these subjects at the center of the debate. He can’t exactly avoid talking about the economy. It’s a pretty dominant subject. And in fact, there are many points on which he can attack Romney on economics (Medicare, his royalist tax plan, etc.). But Obama will probably try to talk a lot about women and immigration and Osama. In addition, he’ll do things that emphasize likeability and so forth, and that highlight Romney’s detachment and insulation from the normal vagaries and vicissitudes of daily life. The Obama campaign should try to create situations that will bait Romney into doing more things like mentioning his wife’s dressage horses or insulting the cookies served to him by a middle-class family purchased from the neighborhood’s most beloved bakery.
Romney needs a “fundamentals” election. In fact, he needs the most fundamentals-ist election of all time. He needs the voting public to conclude, “we don’t really like this guy, in fact we pretty well dislike him; but we need him.” A tough sell.
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