People and pundits on the right tell themselves so many lies that it is often difficult to know if they are deceiving themselves or simply trying to deceive the rest of us. Now, I am willing to concede one thing from Hugh Hewitt’s analysis of last night’s result. If Mitt Romney is the eventual Republican nominee, he will get some benefits out of having to fight for it. Barack Obama had something like 19 debates with Hillary Clinton. He got better as he went along, and a lot of the ammunition McCain might have used against him had become old news. Using Hillary’s words against Obama had some impact, but not enough to outweigh the other considerations. And by forcing Obama to compete in every state, Clinton also assured that Obama’s team had organized in every state. I didn’t like it while it was going on, and Clinton wasn’t doing it for the health of the party, but the process did not weaken Obama.
The same could be true for Romney. But I think there are downsides that outweigh the upsides for Romney. To understand the difference you have to understand that Romney and Obama are not positioned in the same place. Obama was the anti-Establishment choice for the base primarily because he was against the war in Iraq. By November 2008, being against the war in Iraq was a positive. Mitt Romney is not the anti-Establishment choice. He is playing the role of Hillary Clinton. He’s playing it badly, and without the fervent base of support she enjoyed, but he’s the candidate that most elected Republicans and big donors want on the top of the ballot. In this cycle, Obamacare is what Iraq was in the last cycle. Romney was for it before he was against it, putting him in a position similar to Kerry and Clinton.
The problem is that Romney is distorting himself in order to compensate for his past sins and in an effort to win the trust of conservatives. The more he has to distort himself and the longer he has to go on distorting himself, the less credibility he has and the harder it is for him to pivot back to the middle.
Obama didn’t need to do any of that. First, he had mathematically wrapped up the nomination fairly early on, provided he didn’t implode. Obama’s opposition to the war didn’t place him out of the mainstream or hurt his chances with independents. For the most part, he didn’t have to make promises he couldn’t keep or that he had no intention of keeping. When Obama emerged as the nominee of the party, he didn’t have to move dramatically from the way he had been campaigning all along. That’s why the prolonged campaign ultimately did him more good than harm.
Romney is in a completely different situation. He’s already abandoned almost every moderate or sane position he ever held, and he’s gained a reputation as a flip-flopper as a result. This makes it much harder for him the flip back to the middle without exacerbating his reputation for lacking any principles. But the more time he has to do it, the most subtle and gradual he can be about it. At a minimum, losing South Carolina has lost him valuable time.
But I think his problem is more severe than that. If he continues to campaign as he has been, he’s going to lose the nomination to Gingrich. His strategy of being the inevitable, most-electable candidate has hit a stone wall. He’s going to have to go after Gingrich with real aggression, and Romney has never been appealing as an attack dog. It’s Gingrich who is appealing as an attack dog, at least to the Republican base. So, it’s not clear that Romney can change his campaign in a way that will be successful, but if he does, he will drive up his unfavorables to Newt-like levels with the general electorate.
So, all in all, I believe Gingrich’s win in South Carolina is very bad news for Mitt Romney and for the Republican Party. You can try to make some lemonade out of it, and there could be some benefits, but the net result is unlikely to be anything less than disastrous.
