At the end of a painful article on Romney’s efforts to pivot to the center, John Harwood writes this for the New York Times:
Four years ago, the relatively inexperienced Mr. Obama sought to build his stature with a speech before a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin. Mr. Romney will travel to London for the Olympic Games — underscoring his identification with a unifying event he oversaw in Salt Lake City in 2002.
It’s not a bad idea for Mitt Romney to travel to London for the Summer Olympics. But he is isn’t going to attract throngs of adoring people. He’d be lucky if he could fill a corporate cafeteria. He’ll probably get some autograph seekers if the Secret Service lets anyone near him, but he’ll mainly get to put his mug on television during some of the high profile events.
I wonder how Prime Minister David Cameron will deal with him. He’ll want to be cordial, of course. He probably would like Romney to win since they are both on the conservative side of things. But, he won’t want to anger the Obama administration who he is surely expecting to win reelection. Getting too snugly with Romney would create domestic political problems, too, as the public there will see Romney as a complete oddity. They found George W. Bush’s religiosity odd and off-putting, but what will they make of a real-life Latter Day Saint? Especially one who’s doing whatever he can to convince Jerry Falwell’s army that he’s one of them.
Honestly, the only advice I saw in Harwood’s column that I thought had a prayer of working was to come up with totally new proposals and sell them in a different tone. Rather than staying in the tar pits he’s created for himself, he needs to recast the debate. That way he can stop having to explain why he’s changed his position. Create some policies that no one asked you about. Do something new that isn’t contradictory. You want to be seen as a moderate? Come up with a totally novel idea to solve climate change. Propose something that you actually want the government to do instead of stop doing. And create a hopeful message. His best bet is to convince people that he has a better chance of getting Democrats to work with him than Obama has of getting Republicans to work with him. But, to do that, he has to propose solutions to things the Democrats care about. He has not done that once.
