See, "Romney Recycled":
If Mitt Romney is the answer, what is the question? We can think of a few worthy possibilities, though one that doesn’t come immediately to mind is who would be the best Republican presidential nominee in 2016.That's pretty hard hitting, and undeniably frank.
Mr. Romney told donors last week he is mulling a third run for the White House, confirming cheering whispers from his coterie of advisers. The question the former Massachusetts Governor will have to answer is why he would be a better candidate than he was in 2012.
The answer is not obvious. The logic offered by his admirers is that voters have a case of remorse about rejecting Mr. Romney in 2012, he can raise money and knows how to run a campaign, and even Ronald Reagan didn’t win until his third try.
The Gipper analogy is a stretch. Reagan’s first effort was belated in 1968, he nearly upset President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, and when he did finally win the nomination in 1980 he also won the general election. Mr. Romney lost the nomination decisively to John McCain in 2008, and he defeated a historically weak field in 2012 thanks mainly to his ability to raise more money and then pound his competitors with negative ads.
Mr. Romney is a man of admirable personal character, but his political profile is, well, protean. He made the cardinal mistake of pandering to conservatives rather than offering a vision that would attract them. He claimed to be “severely conservative” and embraced “self-deportation” for illegal immigrants, a political killer. But he refused to break from his RomneyCare record in Massachusetts even though it undermined his criticism of ObamaCare. A third campaign would resurrect all of that political baggage—and videotape.
The businessman also failed on his own self-professed terms as a superior manager. His convention was the worst since George H.W. Bush ’s in 1992, focusing more on his biography than a message. This left him open to President Obama ’s barrage against his record at Bain Capital, which Mr. Romney failed to defend because that would have meant playing on Democratic turf, as his strategists liked to put it. The unanswered charges suppressed GOP turnout in key states like Ohio.
Mr. Romney’s campaign team was notable for its mediocrities, led by a strategist whose theory of the race was that voters had already rejected Mr. Obama so the challenger merely needed to seem like a safe alternative. He thus never laid out an economic narrative to counter Mr. Obama’s claim that he had saved the country from a GOP Depression and needed more time for his solutions to work.
And don’t forget the management calamity of Mr. Romney’s voter turnout operation, code-named Orca. Mr. Romney likes to say he reveres “data,” but Mr. Obama’s campaign was years ahead of Mr. Romney’s in using Big Data and social media to boost turnout. The Romney campaign was so clueless on voter mobilization that well into Election Night the candidate still thought he would win. He lost a winnable race 51%-47%, including every closely contested state save North Carolina...
And I'm intrigued by another Romney run. But we'll see. It's still early. Lots of things could happen. For example, perhaps Rick Perry can catch fire this time, especially if he's learned the soft-on-immigration lessons from his 2012 disaster. Yep, we'll see.
Keep reading.
0 comments:
Post a Comment