Romney has no one to blame but self

Warning: If you really like
Mitt Romney, this may make you angry.

Former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney ended his presidential campaign today,
effectively handing two people a major victory in this presidential cycle: John
McCain and the American voter.

Romney’s campaign was the most contemptuous of the American people that this
former political operative has ever seen.  At every step along the way he
displayed an arrogant disdain for the voters’ collective intelligence,
concentrating on spin and story, polls and polish to a degree unseen in even
our nation’s media-driven, makeup-covered politics.

Don’t believe me?  How about a half dozen examples?

Let’s start with the biggest pander of all.  Romney flip-flopped on
abortion, plain and simple.  People who vote on the issue of abortion in
this country are absolutist on the issue.  It’s not a matter of politics
to them and they are much savvier voters than Romney gave them credit
for.  A man who says one thing in Massachusetts and another in Iowa will
never be a hero to them. 

Think George Bush in
1992.  He won the presidency with pro-life support, but then put David
Souter on the Supreme Court (who upheld Roe v. Wade) and made no efforts
to end the practice.  Their support for Bush was lukewarm in ’92, one of
the many contributing factors in his defeat.

Romney never got this, and focused all his efforts on evangelical Christians
and social conservatives who were never going to get all the way behind him.

The Ames Straw Poll in Iowa last August is a perfect example.  Iowans had
to pay $35 to attend, but well-financed campaigns like Romney’s and George W.
Bush’s in 1999 paid the fee for their supporters and build expensive campaign
organizations specifically for this event.  Mike Huckabee couldn’t afford
to cover the entrance fee for many supporters and had spent less than a
second-tier congressional race, but still finished a surprisingly strong second
to Romney.  Conservatives in Iowa were excited enough about Huckabee to
actually pay to vote for him.  USAToday estimated that Romney spent
$442.87 per vote that night compared to $57.98 per vote for Huckabee.

On immigration, Romney was just as bad.  There are 12-20 million people in
this country illegally.  The people who vote based on the problem of
illegal immigration do so because they see their social services overworked and
unfairly burdened, their wages artificially depressed and their language and
culture threatened by a foreign people.  They want solutions.  With
Romney, they got sound bites.

When Mitt Romney campaigned in Nevada in November he addressed the issue of
illegal immigration, saying that while visiting the border a border guard told
him the solution was “to shut off the sanctuaries.”  States and cities
that don’t treat illegal immigrants like hunted fugitives should be punished by
their government with the loss of federal funds.  That, Romney suggested,
would end the problem of illegal immigration.

Firstly, while I respect
their work, I don’t think the ideal advisor to a presidential candidate on the
issue of illegal immigration is a border patrol officer. 

More importantly, however, if you take a minute to think about his solution you
realize it won’t do anything to stop illegal immigration.  And worse, it
may just hurt you.  When the federal government cuts off funds to states
it doesn’t just make it harder for illegal immigrants to go to school or
drive.  It makes it harder for everyone.  Romney showed himself more
interested in political posturing and taking shots at Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee
(you awful sanctuary mayor and governor, you) than in fixing an issue that is a
major concern to a lot of Americans.

Romney broke Reagan’s 11th
Commandment gleefully, slicing into Huckabee in Iowa and McCain in New
Hampshire.  He ran as a Bush Republican when he could use it against
someone, saying that Huckabee should apologize for writing about Bush’s
“arrogant bunker mentality” in foreign policy and that McCain was wrong for
initially opposing the Bush tax cuts.  But there aren’t many people left
even in Republican circles who haven’t thought that Bush has been a bit
arrogant in foreign policy.  And fiscally conservative Republicans agree
with McCain that the tax cuts should have been offset by spending cuts. 
So who was Romney appealing to?  The answer, clearly, is just about no
one.

And then there was the issue of “change.”  After Iowa, nobody could talk
enough about change, especially the pundits and the pollsters.  The
candidates, Democrat and Republican, followed.  Take this tidbit from the
New Hampshire debates:

ROMNEY: “It's a message of change.

“And when we sit down and talk about change -- Barack Obama and myself at that
final debate, as you are positing -- I can say, "Not only can I talk
change with you, I've lived it. In the private sector for 25 years, I brought
change to company after company. In the Olympics, it was in trouble. I brought
change. In Massachusetts, I brought change. I have done it. I have changed
things, and that experience is what America is looking for."

Romney chased the sound bite
of the day, regardless of the campaign he had been running. You know what came
next.

MCCAIN: “I just wanted to say to Governor Romney, we disagree on a lot of
issues, but I agree you are the candidate of change.”

The studio audiences’ laughter was certainly matched in living rooms across the
country, but only because it reinforced a perception that was already in
people’s minds.  There’s something a little bit ludicrous about a third
generation politician who gives an unpopular establishment president his full
throated support trying to cast himself as a candidate of change.

McCain, on the other hand, ran his New Hampshire campaign as one of persuasion,
saying, in effect, “You may not agree with me, but you understand why I feel
the way I do and you’ve got to respect that.”  In New Hampshire, the
world’s capital of retail politics, voters feel entitled to hear the whole
story and get to know the person.  McCain could talk about his principled
support of immigration reform and in the same breath his principled support of
the surge strategy in Iraq.  In those living rooms and lodges, he won
voters’ respect, just like he had in 1999.

Romney, by contrast, took a
security detail with him everywhere he went and never spoke a disagreeable
word, prompting this anti-endorsement from the Concord Monitor: “When New
Hampshire partisans are asked to defend the state's first-in-the-nation
primary, we talk about our ability to see the candidates up close, ask tough
questions and see through the baloney. If a candidate is a phony, we assure
ourselves and the rest of the world, we'll know it.

“Mitt Romney is such a candidate.”

But what about Nevada, you ask?  Mitt Romney whipped them all here, didn’t
he?

Of course he did, and he paid handsomely for it.  While Mike Huckabee and
John McCain achieved their early calendar wins through direct voter contact,
Mitt Romney hired consultants and rented office space and operated phone
banks.  His people got the voter IDs and they filled the call sheets and
on caucus day they did their GOTV.  When you’re running virtually
unopposed that is more than enough.  Ron Paul finished second place here
for goodness sake.

Despite their early date, the Nevada Republican Caucuses this year, it appears,
were only slightly more important than those in Wyoming (Mitt Romney paid for
his “gold” there, too, remember).

Speaking of winning “gold
medals,” did you recall that it was Romney who started that analogy? 
After Iowa he talked about his one silver medal and one gold.  The
metaphor was seized upon in the press and all the way through South Carolina
the talking heads were talking about medals.  This was brilliant media
strategy.  He planted the idea in people’s minds that the Wyoming Caucuses
and the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary and the Nevada Caucuses
were all equal contests when Romney was virtually unopposed in two of
them.  As a bonus, every time people talked about medals, there was a
subconscious reference to Romney, savior of the Salt Lake City Olympics

In that one tiny victory of Romney’s campaign lay the only real tragedy of his
loss.  Had Romney run as himself (or at least his Massachusetts
incarnation) he would have had a real shot at the nomination.  Romney
would have been great as a pro-business pragmatist, socially moderate but with
a strong personal family narrative.  He was a problem-solver with
across-the-aisle appeal who could have made a real contest with John McCain
among New Hampshire moderates and independents.  Had he skipped Iowa and
not jumped sharply to the right Romney may have actually been the candidate
capable of uniting the Reagan coalition.

Former Reagan Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver was fond of telling an anecdote
about his early years working in the California governor’s office.  On his
first day, he advised then-Governor Reagan to not answer questions, but to walk
past reporters huddled outside his office.

“I just can’t do that, Mike,”
Reagan said.  “It wouldn’t be me.”

Throughout his campaign, Romney never gave voters a chance to know who he
actually was.  He showed himself willing to be anyone to anybody as long
as they would make him the Republican nominee.

 “If this were only about me, I would go on,”
Romney told the Conservative Political Action Conference today. “But I
entered this race because I love America, and because I love America, I feel I
must now stand aside, for our party and for our country.”

With those words he put an
end to a campaign that was entirely about him.  In an ideal state,
elections are about the voters, not the candidates, and Romney’s departure
today was their victory.