I thought things would go a lot better for Mitt Romney after an adviser promised an Etch-A-Sketch-ing of previous campaign positions. I expected this because Romney seems, at least on paper, to be the kind of guy mainstream journalists would let get away with this: he’s a Republican but, at least for his time in office, he wasn’t excessive about it, plus he constantly yammers about the deficit. That’s a pretty good formula for the sort of GOP Daddy the mainstream press usually likes, no?
But he’s not getting that kind of coverage. I assume it’s because he’s not running an enjoyable, press-friendly campaign like McCain or Bush in 2000. (A couple of weeks ago, Politico told us that Romney’s campaign has “the worst relationship of all with the press,” in a story about “what passes for a media charm offensive” in the Romney operation.)
You know which Republicans could have gotten away with this, if they’d run? Haley Barbour and, God help us, Paul Ryan. The press loves those guys. I’ve been blogging for years about the media’s love affair with Barbour; maybe that pardon scandal tarnished him a bit, but the press certainly would have gone for him if the he’d run and gotten traction in the GOP voter base. And Ryan … well, there’s a bit of skepticism now that even members of his own party are shying away from his budget, but the mainstream press has regularly showered him with adulation.
You can lose this charmed status with the press under certain circumstances, though I’m not quite sure what those circumstances are — for instance, I don’t know why John McCain wasn’t the press’s Golden Boy in 2008. I guess there was just too much revulsion at the disaster of the Bush presidency, and McCain didn’t try to distance himself from Bush. But I also think it’s because Barack Obama out-charmed McCain.
Which makes me wonder whether the 2008 outcome could have been very different with a few small adjustments: either no Obama run or a quick, decisive victory in the primaries by Hillary Clinton, accompanied by a little bit of deviation from Bush-era orthodoxy on McCain’s part, especially concerning the war. (As I recall, the press kept assuming in ’08 that surely someone other than Ron Paul on the GOP side would do the politically prudent thing and express skepticism about the war. Of course the war was a sacrament to GOP voters, so nothing of the sort ever happened.)
A Hillary Clinton who won the nomination but never had to build up an inspiring narrative of breaking glass ceilings? Versus a master schmoozer who’d gone somewhat maverick-y on the war? McCain could’ve gotten away with anything.
… And I should add that I’m not trying to cast aspersions on Hillary — I just think a disturbingly large portion of the press was primed to portray her as a castrating shrew going into 2008.
(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)
I didn’t get a chance to point this out in your other post, but I think Mitt as The Etch-a-Sketch Candidate is going to stick, and you’ve just discovered why. The Beltway press doesn’t like Mitt Romney, and therefore they won’t give him the benefit of the doubt. That became clear awhile ago when Dana Milbank devoted a column to obsessing on how awkward/weird/unlikeable Mitt Romney is.
With the Beltway press (and probably with local outlets too), it’s always about how they feel about a candidate, and whether that candidate is giving them their proper due. Mitt hasn’t been doing that.
(…and that last bit about Hillary was one of several reasons why I wanted anyone but her to be the candidate in 2008. She would have been ripped nonstop by the press. They hate her. No, that’s not right, but that was and is the reality.)
“…and that last bit about Hillary was one of several reasons why I wanted anyone but her to be the candidate in 2008.”
Exactly — me too. And as you say, it was only one of several reasons.
Related: Remember when people were saying that it was a better idea to nominate Obama than Clinton because the conservatives hated her so much that they’d spend her entire term viciously attacking her and our political discourse would be degraded.
Yeah, we really dodged that bullet, amirite?
A nice, thoughtful post, Steve M. Thanks.
We’ll see whether and to what degree the “Etch-A-Sketch” gaffe sticks to Romney. It certainly has potential.
In addition to what you outlined, I think it’s partly a case of an image that just kind of drops perfectly into place.
(Rachel Maddow went to town on it last night, playing out all the ways in which Mitt Romney was just like an Etch-A-Sketch (which had a French inventor! and Romney speaks French! which outsourced its manufacturing to China where its workers were paid $0.24/hour! just like Romney did at Bain Capital!…and so on).
Ha! You hit the post button faster than me!
The wonderful thing about the “Etch-a-Sketch” concept is that, although Romney is such a perfect illustration of it, he is far from the only poltiician it applies to. In fact, it goes to the very heart of both contemporary campaign management and contemporary political journalism. Image is everything, substance is not even an issue.
Those of our fellow-citizens who support Santorum, Gingrich, or Paul, have many screws loose in their brains, but I give them sincere credit for rejecting the phoniness of Romney. Unfortunately that’s about as far as it goes with them.
A last pickup on Romney’s Etchie background. Rachel picked up last night that interestingly Etch is owned by Bain. Not only that but in order to get their costs down the Bain-owned Etch-A-Sketch let their Ohio work force go and outsourced the Etch-A-Sketch manufacturing to China where the employees were paid .24 an hour and the workers worked 80 hour weeks and tried to get their meat allotment raised but failed…
Etch-A-Sketch is a rotten story all round. But for Romney it is a real window into his character.
Oh, man. We can have a whole lot of fun playing Six Degrees of Bain, ’cause it appears that Bain’s got more tentacles than a giant vampire squid.
Was thinkin same thing. I see the makers of the E/A/S are seeing a surge in orders. Hopefully, that will mean those little $.24 an hour assembly folk in China will get a raise, cause Ohio workers won’t see a dime.
“John McCain wasn’t the press’s Golden Boy in 2008.” That’s an odd statement, because he was for a long long time, even as they started to complain that they didn’t know this guy. But there was a final straw for them all, like Joe Klein. http://mydd.com/2008/9/3/john-mccain-has-lost-joe-klein
I saw somebody on TV this morning saying maybe we should buy some etch-a-sketch stock because “everybody’s buying them.”
Just a little game in speculator-land.
The press sold its soul long ago, and Rmoney has the look of somebody who thinks he can afford yours.
You know which Republicans could have gotten away with this, if they’d run? Haley Barbour and, God help us, Paul Ryan.
And you know what doesn’t help? When people like Ezra Klein slobber all over Paul Ryan. Ezra claimed on Tuesday that Eddie Munster wasn’t purposefully trying to balance the budget(like Ryan would ever do that!!) on the backs of the poor. Ezra needs to put down that bong.
Do you know what this whole Republican primary campaign is about? It’s about the Bush and Cheney families (puppetmasters of Romney) being challenged by various other squadrillionaires and their minions, for the control of the GOP. The tea party, religious right, etc. are just useful idiots. Koch Bros, Sheldon Adelson, Harold Simmons, et al. are duking it out with the Bushes and the Cheneys, that’s about it. They all hate Obama, but they all hate one another as well.
No folks…you’ve got it all wrong.
Romney is not “popular” w/the press because he is the one who is supposed to lose the election.
Duh.
It is as simple as that.
He’s the designated loser.
End of story.
Had Obama somehow alienated large enough segments of the Permanent Government…by say opposing the N.D.A.A. thing, telling Israel to get its act together regarding the Palestinians and Iran or risk losing its money and arms flow or sending a few of the worst culprits in the financial scam directly to prison without passing Go…the “Etch-A-Sketch” comment would have disappeared before even one news cycle was over and instead Obama would be the one getting bad press.
Now that Romney has fairly well sewed up the RatPub nomination (with the full cooperation of the media…bet on it), said media will turn up the anti-Romney heat. This Etch-A-Sketch thing is the first twist of the knob. Not full blast, because there’s money to be made in the coming months of faux battle, plus a well-fixed fight is supposed to look real, but just enough to make sure that nothing…untoward…happens.
Watch.
It’s going to be a wonderful show!!!
For children.
AG
I think it’s probably more complicated than that.
This is “complicated,” TB. Most of the players themselves do not understand the game that they are playing. Newsreaders and newswriters, editors at the copy level, the scutworkers in the political arena, even many candidates…not until you get up near the top of the chain of command is it a different story.
The top players know. The intelligence people, the bosses of news department and networks, the really high-level politicians and political operatives, some of the more perceptive reporters…most often by necessity either independent or allied with small-circulation, fairly radically out-of-the-mainstream organizations…these people understand how the game is run. Bet on it.
If they play their parts well, they do not “lose” no matter on which side they may have worked. That’s why you see the same tired, old, cynical faces saying the same tired, old, cynical things on every major news channel during campaigns. It’s amazing to me that some of them do not at least figuratively roll their eyes when spewing the rubbish that is necessary to keep up the front of “competitivity” that is necessary to effectively run this scam. It’s a well-fixed reality show on a gigantic level and nothing more.
Are there errors?
Sure. But over the last…oh, say 45 years, since Nixon…the only glitches in the machine have been Nixon himself…they chose the wrong horse (he was mentally unstable, crooked as a snake with a broken back and had to tanked before the population found out.), Jimmy Carter, who barely beat Gerald Ford and was disposed of rather handily after only one term, and Bill Clinton who was so good at what he did and also essentially proved so non-threatening to the PermaGov that there was a split in the ranks which was only closed by the whole CIA-run Lewinsky farce. After that? The media got better at its game and now it’s nearly seamless. Nobody’s going to sneak through any cracks in the scam wall now. It’s digital, not analog and there are no cracks. Just numbers.
Bet on that as well.
And the numbers that count…the final vote…will say that Barack Obama has satisfied his masters well enough for another extension of his contract.
Watch.
Unless he goes totally rogue…fat chance…or something completely out-of-the-box occurs, it’s four more years for Barry. And if something does happen to force a change the odds, that’ll be OK too. Romney’s a good ol’ permaGov boy. No risk there…
Four years later? Another scam bout will be rigged and the American sheeple will swallow that one, too.
Watch.
It’s the Omertican way.
Watch.
Betcha…
AG
To know Mitt Romney is to loath Mitt Romney. I hope you saw Rachel Maddow’s evisceration of him.
Think about it. Mitt lies so much, it upsets POLITICIANS.
The problem with Romney is that it’s almost impossible to take him seriously no matter what he’s saying, whether he’s trying to be presidential or charming or funny or reasonable or persuasive or whatever. He seems like a big handsome and pampered dork.
.”. And I should add that I’m not trying to cast aspersions on Hillary — I just think a disturbingly large portion of the press was primed to portray her as a castrating shrew going into 2008.”
I have to disagree, if anyone portrayed Hillary Clinton as a shrew it is because she behaved like one. I still remember her shrill voice uttering “Beraaaak Obaaaama!” in many of her daily press conferences. Her startegy of trying to use righteous indignation and false bravado failed so then she had her surrogates (Geraldine Ferraro and Lady Rothschild) go out and claim that Barack Obama was only doing well in the primaries because he was Black and that somehow he was using his Blackness as an unfair advantage. I could go on and on but these are just a few of the reasons that Hillary Clinton was CORRECTLY describe as a shrew.
A male candidate doing exactly the same thing wouldn’t have been cast as a “shrew.” They would have found some other way to describe it.
Oh, and nobody would be talking about any male candidate’s “shrill” voice. That’s actually pretty close to a sexist dogwhistle, actually.
I think this will follow Romney. Every slight change in his espoused opinions, especially “tacks to the left,” will be accompanied by the “beep beep beep” signal of a truck backing up. Every change can be depicted as an Etch-a-Sketch being erased and replaced by the new position. It’s the fact that this so captures at least two things that folks don’t like in Romney — his constant willingness to change his position and claim he hasn’t, and that oddly robotic mien — that makes the Etch-a-Sketch metaphor so devastating.
Dude,
Governor Foghorn Leghorn tried to WHITEWASH the police state that was Jim Crow Mississippi and the White Citizens Council, and despite the media’s love for his Boss Hogg azz, it didn’t work, and they couldn’t cover for him.
As for Goober Ryan, you might be right. They keep on telling me that that idiot is so ‘ serious’, when all I see is another Ayn Rand sociopath.
The one thing the media loves more than anything is a story that confirms an existing, widely-understood narrative.
This story confirms the simplest, most widely-understood narrative in this election cycle: Mitt Romney is a flip-flopper.
Paul Ryan and Haley Barbour could have survived this not because they are more popular, but because this particular gaffe doesn’t confirm or advance any existing narrative about them.