When it comes to predicting the outcome of presidential elections, I get pretty bored with the sophisticated models of academics who look at GDP growth and unemployment figures and right track/wrong track or personal popularity polling numbers. Every election is significantly different from every other, and you can do better with a model that predicts that the taller candidate will win than with any model yet produced. To make a prediction about this election, you need to look at what is different about it. And you need to look at instances in history that share some features.
Elizabeth Drew does a decent job of the first part, but she ignores the second. The single most distinct thing about this election is Mitt Romney. Obama has run before. Romney has never been in a general election campaign for president . He is the beginning point for predicting what will happen. You can look at Romney through polling numbers, or you can just go with your gut. It’s probably best to do both. Most recent polling shows that about a third of likely voters have a favorable impression of him, and this is before the Obama campaign lays a glove on him, and before Romney sullies himself with apocalyptically negative attack ads. Why do so few people like Romney? Elizabeth Drew takes a whack at it:
The frequency of Romney‘s displays of awkwardness is something rarely seen in a party’s nominee. The nature of Romney’s stumbles—his wife Ann has “a couple of Cadillacs”—is also unusual…
…He just cannot help reminding audiences that he’s very wealthy, and often comes across as simply uncomfortable in dealing with those outside his own narrow world. It’s not just that both he and Ann were raised in plush circumstances—she perhaps even more so, with nannies and horses in the posh Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills—but that neither of them seems to understand how different their lives have been from that of all but a very few. This may explain why even going for the presidency he didn’t bother to pull out funds he’d stashed away in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland or hold off in expanding their home in La Jolla in a $12 million renovation, including an elevator for the four-car garage. The symbolism of such things goes well beyond the “tin ear,” and suggests a paralyzing inability to understand the circumstances of most others: What else can explain Romney’s look of disgust as he disdained the cookies the hostess had placed before him when he met with a middle class group around a picnic table in Bethel, Pennsylvania? ( “I don’t know about those cookies”—which in his narrow-vision he perhaps thought had come from a 7-11.) These stumbles go way beyond George H. W. Bush’s lack of familiarity with grocery store bar codes. How are the voters, and if he were to become president the citizens, going to react to this kind of talk?
In 2004, relating the young married couple’s hardship living a basement apartment while they completed their studies at Brigham Young University, Ann Romney said that if things got too difficult her husband sold some stocks his father had given him. The couple’s apparent sole interest in sports is horseback riding and their one sports passion is dressage horses (which cost an estimated $250,000-$300,000 a year to maintain). Being wealthy doesn’t automatically mean that a politician cannot connect with the middle class or the poor: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F Kennedy, for example, were at ease about their good fortune, and both could see well beyond their manicured estates.
Romney thinks he is very funny—he and his wife say so—and he laughs a lot at his own jokes, but his jokes tend to be duds, and he lacks wit. He doesn’t get it that telling a group of waitresses that he’s unemployed wasn’t terribly funny. It got less so as it was revealed that he is being paid about $20 million by Bain Capital for doing nothing for the company.
Of course, Ms. Drew only scratched the surface of Romney’s strangeness. She didn’t mention the dog on the roof or his rendition of “Who Let the Dogs Out,” or his assertion that corporations are people, or his unfamiliar religion with its many quirks. Most people don’t know anyone who is remotely like Mitt Romney, and it’s not just because he’s so wealthy. We know egomaniacs like Mark Cuban and Donald Trump. We know geeks like Bill Gates. Wealth alone is not alienating.
But Romney has many more problems than his inability to connect with average voters. The two biggest are his shocking lack of internal consistency and his adoption of the whole modern Republican Party’s agenda. He is the biggest flip-flopper this country has ever produced. He has changed positions on every major domestic issue facing this country. And during the campaign he has sometimes changed a position in the evening that he took at midday. In embracing the Paul Ryan budget plan, he has jettisoned any argument that he is a moderate fiscally responsible Republican. In rejecting immigration reform, climate change legislation, gay rights, and women’s rights, he’s turned away from any form of cultural moderation. These are all flip-flops, too.
So, Romney is a candidate who is embraced by neither party, who can’t connect with average people, who has committed the cardinal sin of becoming the dictionary definition of unprincipled, who has abandoned both cultural and economic moderation, and who has to defend a plan that defies all mathematical and scientific analysis.
I don’t think we’ve ever seen a candidate with that many liabilities. But we have seen two other candidates who suffered similar disabilities. In 1972, George McGovern rode a wave of liberal muscularity and became the Democratic nominee. His problem was that the party bosses didn’t like him and didn’t lift a finger to support him. McGovern presided over a fatally-divided party, but at least he produced genuine enthusiasm. He won one state.
Walter Mondale’s party wasn’t as divided. There were a lot of folks who supported Gary Hart or Jesse Jackson in the primaries, but they weren’t about to vote for Reagan. Mondale’s problem was that he couldn’t attract moderate income white voters. They even came up with a term for it: Reagan Democrats. What happened with Mondale was that liberals lost the argument with Ronald Reagan. The middle moved decisively to the right where it has stayed ever since. Mondale won one state.
To me, Romney is reminiscent of both McGovern and Mondale. Not since McGovern has a party nominated someone who is actively disliked by the party elites. The difference is that this time Romney is disliked by the party base, too. He also shares with Mondale a charisma deficit vis-a-vis his opponent. And I think he shares with Mondale a political message that just will not sell.
Romney has certain advantages not enjoyed by McGovern and Mondale. First among them is the Citizens United ruling that allows unlimited spending by billionaires and corporations on his behalf. Another is the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which allowed the proliferation of right-wing radio and the creation of Fox News. Another is a series of neo-Jim Crow anti-voting laws aimed at disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters. These things give him a puncher’s chance, as does the weakness of the economy. But, overall, this should not be another nail-biter of an election.
These are not two equally matched opponents and they are not selling equally matched plans and policies. This is a welterweight against a heavyweight. It should not be a close fight.
