The Boston Globe retrospective on the Romney campaign is not bad. It hits most of the marks on why Romney failed, from having to deal with a nutty primary season, to getting defined by Obama in the spring and summer, to failing to present a human side, to running a lousy and inefficient organization. But the real key to the campaign was that Romney is a jerk who no one likes and that he lies more than any human being on the planet. If I had a time machine and I could go back and run Romney’s campaign, I would hook him to an electrode and shock him every time he lied. Once he was cured of that, I’d tell him to talk about his family about 90% of the time.
But the truth is that you can’t take a jerk and turn him into a nice guy. They tried it with Bush and it didn’t work. Yes, the Supreme Court and a Butterfly ballot made him president, but no one really liked him and he was never popular outside of a couple of years after 9/11 when people were wiling to give him the benefit of the doubt. Look how that turned out.