Mitt Romney has supposedly been the king of fail since he won Florida on Tuesday, but Republican voters in Nevada seem not to have noticed:
Romney up big in Nevada
Mitt Romney is headed for a dominant victory in Nevada on Saturday. PPP finds him polling at 50% to 25% for Newt Gingrich, 15% for Ron Paul, and 8% for Rick Santorum.
Certainly in Nevada the Mormon vote will get a lot of attention and Romney leads Paul 78-14 with that group, which we project to account for 20% of the vote. But Romney’s dominance in Nevada goes well beyond that. He’s winning voters describing as ‘very conservative,’ a group he’s had huge amount of trouble with in other states, by a 43-34 margin over Gingrich. He’s also winning men, women, Hispanics, whites, and every age group that we track. This will be a pretty thorough victory for him….
The poll was taken on Wednesday and Thursday. Romney’s big gaffe — his national-TV rollout of that talking point about the “very poor” — happened Wednesday morning. Clearly it’s had no negative impact on his standing with his party’s voters in Nevada.
The left criticized Romney for seeming to be heartless. Nevada Republicans, being Republicans, don’t care if he’s heartless. The right attacked Romney for endorsing a government safety net at all. Now, you’d think Nevada Republicans would be quite Randian on that subject — Republicans do think government is horrifically evil. But, in my experience, Republicans do acknowledge the existence of a subset of the population called “the truly needy” — they do know there’s that kid down the street with cystic fibrosis who can’t really be described as a “bum on welfare.” But wingers think this population bloc is tiny, and further believe that anyone whose problems aren’t glaring is a bum on welfare — except themselves when they need (or become eligible for) government benefits; then it’s “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” time.
So, at least as far as the GOP rank-and-file is concerned, the concept actually was pitched correctly by Romney and his message-crafters — he just messed up the delivery. He probably alienated swing voters he’ll need in the fall, and he screwed up by igniting a media firestorm, but he didn’t say anything that offended or alienated his base.
(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)
I think the biggest problem that Romney’s comments created on his own side of the aisle is that he demoralized the commentariat. What he needs more than anything else during the long campaign against Obama is for the full breadth of the Mighty Right-Wing Wurlitzer to energetically echo his every talking point and to create dozens of their own for his selective use.
Think about the Valerie Plame scandal as an example. If you have enough screechers out there saying she was just a pencil-pusher, it suddenly becomes doubtful that she was talking to Iraqi scientists in Amman. But it only works if you’ve got enough Cliff Mays and James Carvilles out there at the oars rowing for Scooter Libby’s ass.
Romney is making these folks throw up their hands in despair.
But the winger media managed to cheerlead the Bush foreign policy successfully for years after it started to fail — or at least they got Bush over the hump of the insurgency, Abu Ghraib, etc., and all the way to reelection in ’04. If they’d just agree to circle the wagons around Romney, they (plus a nasty super Pac campaign) could probably get him across the finish line — the economy’s still bad enough that he could be competitive (according to the polls, he still is). But they’re spoiled — they want more. They want a guy on a white steed, not Clark Griswold.
Because he’s Barry Goldwater. He’s the furthest candidate from his party’s median ideological and temperamental voter in half a century.
Romneybot doesn’t buy any of that “conservative values” shit. He’s not an attack dog or an instigator. He’s got his religion thing genuinely going, I’m sure, but he’s straight laissez-faire all the way on every damn thing. He’s the perfect distillation of laissez-faire philosophy. Leave the rich and their money alone, make sure the “very poor” don’t starve or whatever on the streets, and just shut up and never say anything about anything ever. Just shrug and collect interest.
He’s a politician who doesn’t even know how to properly pander! To literally any constituency. He says nothing, he means even less, and there’s nothing to say about him. He exists. Nominally.
For the GOP honchos, Romney’s terrible sin was articulating the fundamental party position: I don’t care about the poor. It’s supposed to be a secret, Mitt. Now we’re going to have to hire twice as many violins to play the serenade about our compassionate concern for the least among us. So where’s the guy that did the McDonald’s does it all for you thing?
Nevada is full of Mormons. Willard won Nevada last time, remember?