[This was originally published on July 13th, 2012, at 9:46 EST]
You have to read to page five of Robert Draper’s piece on Obama’s Super PAC to find the money quote.
[Bill] Burton and his colleagues spent the early months of 2012 trying out the pitch that Romney was the most far-right presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater. It fell flat. The public did not view Romney as an extremist. For example, when Priorities [USA] informed a focus group that Romney supported the [Paul] Ryan budget plan — and thus championed “ending Medicare as we know it” — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.
In the context of the article, this bit of information is used to explain why Priorities USA pivoted to focusing on Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital. But we should consider what this information means for the Romney campaign. His actual economic policies are so unpopular that people simply refuse to believe he could actually be advocating them. And that is precisely why he isn’t advocating them. He is not talking about what is actually in Paul Ryan’s budget proposal at all. Nor will he. It polls so badly that you can’t even run ads against it because people don’t believe anyone would be so radical as to propose such things.
So, that’s the starting point for understanding this election. Team Romney is trying to steal a page out of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign by making this an election all about the economy, stupid. But his economic plans are unmentionable. Their substance is taboo. All substance on the core issue is off limits. Romney is waging a campaign on the economy without articulating any specifics.
The specifics exist, of course, in the Ryan Plan or Romney’s 29-page economic plan (or however long it is), but he’s not interested in discussing those details. Why would he be? He might as well indicate that, if elected, he intends to infect every American with chlamydia. For the same reason that Bill Burton and Paul Begala discovered that Romney’s economic plan was not ripe for criticism, Romney knows it isn’t ripe for advocacy either. It’s just this toxic thing that neither side wants to touch.
But it really is what the Republicans want and intend to do if they get the power to do it.
Here is where I see the Presidential campaign after three weeks of Romney trying to dodge what he did to American workers at Bain Capital.
Romney is depending on downticket momentum to carry him to victory through reverse coattails. Remember the old saw “I don’t like Congress but I like my Congressman” as the explanation for why people continue to elect incompetent incumbents. Those incompetent incumbents generally have built a GOTV machine that can routinely deliver them the numbers in an average election where there are no real issues debated. And Republicans in states with Republican governors are working to turn a high-turnout election into an average one by disenfranchising large numbers of African-Americans, Hispanics, young voters, and elderly voters.
Combine that with the media shitstorm that Romney’s campaign knows is coming from all those “unaffiliated” contributors, and Romney himself can sorta coast like W did in 2000 — putting pressure on the Obama campaign to know him out and likely leading to the sort of mistakes that Gore made (crowding in the debate, for example) out of frustration that people did not see who W and the Republicans were.
And if they don’t win, it still makes it close enough to steal.
I think this is the Republican plan, but the only pert that’s actually likely to work is the voter suppression part–which is by no means a sure thing. In particular, the Obama campaign operation has a long history of remaining serene in the face of things that would drive other campaigns crazy. Their strategy against both McCain and Hilary more or less amounted to losing every battle but winning the war.
And now they’re up against Mitt Romney, and they’re actually winning every battle. They are calmly but relentlessly destroying the only rationale the Mitt Romney has offered for his candidacy, which is that his business experience makes him the right guy to fix the economy. If he doesn’t have that, he literally has nothing to run on, since people trust him less on essentially every other issue.
OK, there’s a lot of disapproval of Obama on immigration, but in order to exploit that, he’d have to run to Obama’s left on the issue, which he simply can’t do because that would completely alienate the GOP base. And Obamacare is iffy, but Romney can’t touch that because of the worst case if unclean hands in recent political history.
This is scarily plausible analysis, Tarheel Dem. Well done.
I’d be interested in what folks think about the theory that, particularly across the industrial Midwest, all the talk about Romney’s wealth, tax shelters, and Bain Capital dealings is, in effect, a shorthand way to have the conversation about Republican v. Democratic economic policies.
I don’t know whether I buy this theory myself, but it does seem at least somewhat plausible. After all, one of Ted Kennedy’s most effective issues in beating Romney in 1994 was using Bain Capital’s bankrupting of Ampad in a series of commercials and debates.
Ampad served as a kind of shorthand for where Romney’s interests lay, and whose interests he’d advance if elected to the Senate. It was a “rich guy who cares about working people” v. “rich guy who doesn’t care about working people” election.
Absolutely the campaign points very directly at the interests Romney has and will serve.
It’s a way to talk about the potential consequences of Romney’s economic policies without having to talk about the current state of the economy.
And it’s a character conversation, best exemplified by Romney’s and sidekicks’ attitude that the little people don’t know how to govern themselves and if they did they would be rich.
There are worse things for a “substance-free” election to be about than higher taxes on the wealthy, predatory capitalism, the collapse of manufacturing employment, and unfair rights and privileges for the rich and the executive class.
That’s what this year is about. Yeah, it’d be nicer if the election was about two parties trying to figure out the best way to build 21st century infrastructure and fight climate change, but if a fight is gonna be completely one-sided, better to be on the winning side than the losing.
you are absolutely right, BooMan
The key to Romney’s appeal (such as it is) to swing voters is the perception that he is a moderate somewhere between the Republican right and the Obama communists. Destroy that perception that he is anything but a moderate in terms of his actual policies and support base, and you destroy the candidate. The research may have shown that that is hard to do, but then Obama wasn’t elected to do an easy job. This has the possibility of being a transformative election – like Reagan in 1980, if Obama gets it right.
Republicans are utterly beholden to an extremist 1% agenda and if they cannot rule absolutely they will obstruct debate and foreclose legislation by abusing every veto point in the system. That is the substance of the election.
Well if the election isn’t about substance, it is about something. I think it’s also important to consider the degree to which presidential elections are in fact popularity contests. If you look outside of politics, there’s a pretty obvious difference between, on the one hand, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and on the other hand Al Gore and John Kerry. It’s always been that way. One basic reason John Adams only got one term was that he just didn’t have the charisma of Washington or Jefferson.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is just a dick. The more people see of him, the less they like him. So not only do they have to avoid talking about their economic proposals, they also have to limit people’s exposure to the candidate himself. I don’t see that they have any option but to put all their energy into bashing Obama and hope voters conclude that anyone else will do.
Which makes perfect sense, actually. Mitt Romney is such an empty human being that he’s sort of the walking personification of “none of the above.” Call me an optimist but I do think there has to be some limit to American voters’ gullibility.
“Call me an optimist but I do think there has to be some limit to American voters’ gullibility. “
OK, you’re an optimist. 😉
Through my own scientific double blind trials I have calculated that the gullibility factor that is built into the American population is 35%.
Methodology:
Just after the war started support for the Iraq invasion was 62%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_opinion_in_the_United_States_on_the_invasion_of_Iraq#March_2003
There is a certain portion of the American voter that one might think is gullible, but in reality they are just plain nuts. The Crazification Factor of voters is 27%.
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/10/lunch-discussions-145-crazification.html
62 – 27 = 35%
Re: Can We Retake the House? (none / 0)
I’ve long thought and argued that it is play and likely winnable, based on the fear of rightwingnuttery, and the focus on self-interest that this election is gonna produce in the coming months.
In the coming months, whether the product of the pres debates or by other means, the voting public is gonna clearly understand the bright line of demarcation between the two camps well illustrated today with this http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3812 that shows a repeat of the Bush tax cuts, leaving such gems as the Ryan plan as just another club to smite the 1% stooges with.
now that he’s picked Ryan, the toothpaste is outta the tube as they say….
Democrats are vulnerable on these points which undercut any attacks on the Ryan Budget.
The Ryan-Republican strategy in 2010 was to argue that the Affordable Care Act cuts Medicare. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Romney-Ryan team runs against Obama’s Grand Bargain in a way that those who don’t do math will find believable.
The progressive blogosphere could do a great service by scaring Democrats away from a lame duck session. And itemizing one-by-one with documentation the provisions of the Ryan budget.
What time is is kids? It’s social media time!
I don’t see how these items would undermine the criticism of Ryan’s budget. None these items are promoting vouchers as substitutes for Medicare.
Ryan will make his “ACA cuts Medicare” argument again. And movement toward a Grand Bargain will fuzz up in the public mind Obama’s defense of Social Security and Medicare. And there will be extreme pressure from the deficit concern trolls to implement the zombie Bowles-Simpson plan in a lame duck session.
Ryan’s plan has to be attacked in a clear, well-defined way and Romney must be tied to it to have a winning narrative. Nuance is a no-no in campaigns.
But this could be thrown back at Ryan.
At Dkos, there is a FP post that the Romney campaign is backing away from the Ryan budget “plan”. I’m not sure how this will work out. It’s bizarre though.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/11/1118923/-The-Committee-to-End-Medicare-Mitt-Romney-picks-Pa
ul-Ryan-5
Obama campaign can use it as just another way of showing Romney as a waffler. But I think that is already baked into most peoples perceptions by now. And among swing voters there are a lot of people willing to let Romney’s whoppers go by because they just rationalize that it is business as usual for campaigning.
So I’m a little concerned that Romney is just going to obfuscate, hem and haw for a couple more months on budget plan concepts. It would be easier if the Obama campaign could clearly define him and his budget priorities and then attack that definition. Romney’s strategy, it seems to me, is to stay fuzzy at all costs, just double down on the “trust me and don’t worry about the facts” approach.
Since he doesn’t have many facts on his side it is his only shot.
Watch out for the resurgence of Rivkin-Ryan. Bipartisan and all that.
Romney is running a “stealth mandate” campaign just like W did. Vague during the campaign but seizing on the fact of election to insist that the American people gave him the mandate to roll out extreme changes. On every platform point, Romney flip-flops even within his vague positions.
But contrary to earlier expectations, the religious fundies in the South are backing him and promoting him. Mormonism is not a problem for them compared to having a black man in the White House.
Stopped working after he secured the nomination. Now it only makes him look like an out-of-touch, flip-flopping wimp and crook who attempts to compensate by alternatively playing a bully or victim (waa, Obama and the media are being mean to me).
The entire Draper piece is worth reading.
There are actually two reasons why this election hasn’t been about policy. The first, as you note, is the fact that the Republican agenda is so unpopular that they would be foolish to talk about it. The second is the fact that Obama would look like an idiot if he proposed any specific policies, because nobody believes that he has a chance of getting them enacted. (Well, maybe if the Democrats win both houses and are willing to overturn the filibuster… gosh, I’m getting all misty eyed and hopeful here…)
Perhaps the main reason why there is no substance to the election is that the actual campaign, in a sense, only started today.
OK, the message I’ve been seeing for days is that on the economy Romney and Ryan really do see eye to eye.
So, tell me again why anyone ever described Romney as a moderate?
And if those are indeed his economic views then he is not the man without views he has been painted to be.
He is a batshit crazy Randian out to wreck every piece of American social democracy.
So, liberals are not attacking him for what he really is because nobody would believe it?