Tag: Mitt Romney

It can be difficult to summarize in one place all of Mitt Romney’s problems as a candidate and as a potential President. I have tried; I wrote, back in 2007, a series so lengthy on Romney’s flaws (some 15,000 words, Part I, II, III, IV & V) that I can’t possibly hope to rewrite the whole thing now, and explained why I preferred McCain to Romney. More recently I focused on the dangers of backing Romney to the integrity of his supporters, the conservative movement’s need to maintain its independence from Romney, and the problems with Romney’s technocratic approach. Let me try to zero in on four of his problems here: the unconvincing nature of his political conversion, the hazards of becoming enamored with candidates whose primary rationale for running is their money, the unprecedented difficulty of winning with a moderate Republican who lacks significant national security credentials as a war hero or other prominent foreign policy figure, and Romney’s vulnerability arising from his dependence on his biography.

Continue reading Mitt Romney, The Unconvincing Convert

We’re far down the rabbit hole of primary season right now, and that inevitably means that charges and counter-charges are flying so fast that the news cycle can change dramatically from morning to afternoon. Naturally, when things are moving this quickly and emotions are running high, people get carried away. This happens to everyone. A lot of people who sit on the sidelines are too quick to say, “oh, so-and-so totally lost credibility with me by making that argument.” But candidates and pundits in particular are making arguments all day long, day after day; they’re going to grab hold now and then of a story they should know better than to believe or an argument they should know better than to make. Like anything in life, the test of character is not the occasional stumble but the long sweep of your record over time – whether you back off when you’ve dug into an untenable position, whether you learn from mistakes.

This comes to mind with yesterday’s confluence of attacks on Mitt Romney’s business record at Bain Capital and his ill-timed quip that “I like to be able to fire people.” To varying extents, the Gingrich and Perry campaigns and their supporters jumped all over him on both counts. A pro-Newt SuperPAC is rolling out a 27-minute documentary attacking Romney’s Bain record; as Erick notes, Perry’s campaign has been pushing a more modest line of attack against the Bain record, but still one that has something of a whiff of desperation about it. Perry’s camp also pushed a downloadable ringtone of Romney’s “fire” line. With time and some context, both campaigns backed off hitting Mitt on the “fire” comment: Perry’s people pulled the ringtone, and Newt told Fox News that the line had been taken out of context.

The “fire” comment is the easier call. Romney was making a completely valid point: that people should be able to fire service providers like insurance companies if they’re not getting good service. That’s one of the pro-consumer aspects of the conservative message, and where we part company from liberals who think first of protecting entrenched interests at the expense of consumer choice. That being said, the comment fed directly into the most damaging narratives about Romney, and was emblematic of how he’s much like Rick Santorum in terms of his tendency to use cringe-inducingly tin-eared language when he’s making even valid points.

The Bain storyline is a little more complicated, in part because there are a lot of angles to Bain’s business; while Romney’s record, as Jim Pethokoukis notes, includes a lot to be proud of, as Jonathan Last notes, you don’t have to necessarily take that business record as a whole if there are aspects worth defending and aspects worth criticizing. A fair amount of what businesses like Bain do is to step in and take over businesses that are in bad shape. We have an ongoing debate in this country about what to do with failing businesses, but denying they’re failing is not an option – either you shutter or restructure them or you prop them up, and that raises the question of who gets stuck with the bill for propping them up. One of the great scandals of the past 5 years, which has given rise to the Tea Party and to some extent the Occupy Wall Street movement as well, has been the extent to which the answer to that question has been the taxpayers.

So, I don’t like seeing pro-free-market Republicans attacking the concept of what Bain does, any more than I liked seeing Romney attack Rick Perry from the left on entitlements. But just because the role of red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalists is a crucial and necessary one does not mean that they are likely to be popular candidates in today’s general election environment. Criminal defense lawyers, for example may be crucially necessary to our system of justice, but if they have represented a lot of unpopular clients, they are not likely to be politically viable. I continue to think that Romney’s business record is an under-explored political vulnerability (one Ted Kennedy used against Romney in 1994, but didn’t even use all the ads he cut) that the Democrats will exploit ruthlessly. And Romney’s existing defenses of that record are fairly weak. We should not be caught unawares by this in the summer and fall when it’s too late to pick another candidate. In many ways, it’s like the swift boat story. You’ll recall that the centerpiece of John Kerry’s electability argument in 2004 was his military record – not any policy proposal on national security, mind you, but the simple fact of his biography as a war hero. Given that Kerry had decades-old enemies from his activties as an anti-war protestor, it was unwise for Democrats to assume that this biographical narrative alone would go unchallenged in the general election. But that’s exactly what they did, and the Swift Boat Veterans’ ads (especially the ads using Kerry’s own Senate testimony from 1970) did terrible damage to Kerry.

Romney’s story is much the same. There’s no serious argument that Romney’s record of supporting free enterprise and job growth in his single term as Massachusetts governor is better than the records of Perry, Gingrich, Santorum and Huntsman; his claim to be a job creation specialist is grounded in his record at Bain, and just like Kerry’s war hero biography, this claim is bound to attract scrutiny. It would be foolishness in the extreme for Republicans to demand that nobody talk about this during the time when we’re choosing a candidate. The harder question, for free-market Republicans, is how to have a serious debate on this point without compromising our integrity and our principles.

The fear that Bain, and Romney’s wealth (by birth as well as his business wealth) will be a political liability is hardly fanciful. Look back over the years at the list of wealthy Republican candidates who put their wealth ahead of their limited records in public office. The California GOP has had the worst record: Bill Simon, Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, Michael Huffington, and Bruce Herschensohn all flopped. The positive example is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who proved a disaster for California conservatives in office. Simon, a good and decent man and fairly conservative, faced an opponent with approval ratings so terrible on Election Day that he was recalled just months later – yet the Democrats tore Simon limb from limb with attacks on his private business record. Republicans in other states or at the national level have often found such candidates to be electoral failures or totally unreliable in pursuing our party’s principles in office: Herman Cain, Mike Bloomberg, Carl Paladino, Linda McMahon, Jack Ryan, Pete Coors, Pete Dawkins. (Ron Johnson and Rick Scott being rare exceptions, and Scott only won after a searing campaign against his business record). An understanding of private business is a valuable thing for public officials, but it’s no substitute for experience pursuing good public policies; Jon Corzine was a success in business before he ran New Jersey into the ground, and the most successful businessman ever to be president was Herbert Hoover. It’s entirely valid for Republicans to ask whether we are buying ourselves a similar set of headaches with Romney.

The other point I would make about integrity is that it goes close to the core of why a Romney nomination worries me so much: because we would all have to make so many compromises to defend him that at the end of the day we may not even recognize ourselves. Romney has, in a career in public office of just four years (plus about 8 years’ worth of campaigning), changed his position on just about every major issue you can think of, and his signature accomplishment in office was to be wrong on the largest policy issue of this campaign. Yes, Obama is bad, and Romney can be defended on the grounds that he can’t possibly be worse. Yes, Romney is personally a good man, a success in business, faith and family. But aside from his business biography, his primary campaign has been built entirely on arguments and strategies – about touting his own electability and dividing, coopting or delegitimizing other Republicans – none of which will be of any use in the general election. What, then, will we as politically active Republicans say about him? I was not a huge fan of John McCain’s record, but I was comfortable making honest points about the things McCain had been consistent on over the years – national security, free trade, nuclear power, public integrity, pork-barrel spending. There were spots of solid ground on which to plant ourselves with McCain, and he had a history of digging himself in on those and fighting for things he believed in. But Mitt Romney’s record is just one endless sheet of thin ice as far as the eye can see – there’s no way to have any kind of confidence that we can tell people he stands for something today without being made fools of tomorrow. We who have laughed along with Jim Geraghty’s prescient point that every Obama promise comes with an expiration date will be the ones laughed at, and worse yet we will know the critics are right. Every time I try to talk myself into thinking we can live with him, I run into this problem. It’s one that particularly bedeviled Republicans during the Nixon years – many partisan Republicans loved Nixon because he made the right enemies and fought them without cease or mercy, but the man’s actual policies compromised so many of our principles that the party was crippled in the process even before Watergate. We can stand for Romney, but we’ll find soon enough that that’s all we stand for.

The problem is not entirely without its solutions; one of those is that the only real mechanism conservatives would have for keeping Romney honest is to pour efforts into getting more conservatives elected in the House and Senate, and in particular targeting primary challenges at people who have supported Romney. But that’s a desperate measure, and it still doesn’t answer the question of how we make the affirmative case for Romney without losing our integrity. Which is precisely why we need a hard look now at what we’re getting in return.

The fourth of a five-part series on why Republicans who are serious about winning the White House in 2008 are wasting our time on Mitt Romney. For background, check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, my explanation of why I’m with Rudy, and my take on Mike Huckabee.

IV. Campaigning Like A Democrat

In this installment, I’d like to discuss yet another of the major problems I have with Romney: his style of campaigning, which in my view is too much like a Democrat-style campaign that often ends up insulting the intelligence of the voter – because it proceeds from the assumption that the voters are stupid.

Now, let me preface this by saying that it would be foolish, especially after 2006, to assume that Democrats are somehow congenitally unable to win elections; there’s obviously a long history of highly effective Democratic campaigns. And it would be silly to pretend that Republican campaign tactics are without sin.
But I do contend that there is a distinctive style of campaign, with a number of identifiable traits, that has been adopted primarily by Democratic candidates and far fewer Republicans. It’s a style that can be effective in state and local races, where there are limits to the attention span and resources of the voters and the media (consider Bob Shrum’s record of success at the state level). But it has proven repeatedly to wilt under the hot glare of a national campaign that affords the media and the voters alike months of attention to a candidate’s every move and utterance. Romney and his campaign team seem to illustrate too many of these distinctive traits, and that not only repels me but concerns me deeply about his viability in a national election.

Continue reading The Trouble With Mitt Romney (Part 4 of 5)

The third of a five-part series on why Republicans who are serious about winning the White House in 2008 are wasting our time on Mitt Romney. For background, check out Part 1, Part 2, my explanation of why I’m with Rudy, and my take on Mike Huckabee.

III. What, Precisely, Does This Man Stand For?

In Part III, we take on the issue that has dogged Mitt Romney throughout his campaign for the presidency: the charge that he is a flip-flopper. The fact that he has that reputation is itself damaging, as John Kerry could tell you; it’s not as if the Democrats will not know how to make maximum use of it if Romney wins the nomination (I’d advise him to avoid windsurfing in the interim just to be safe). What I’d like to explain here is precisely why it is that the flip-flop label sticks so easily to Romney when it doesn’t seem to attach to other politicians who have changed their positions now and again.

Continue reading The Trouble With Mitt Romney (Part 3 of 5)

The second of a five-part series on why Republicans who are serious about winning the White House in 2008 are wasting our time on Mitt Romney. Part 1 is here, and my explanation of why I’m with Rudy is here.

II. The Experience Factor and The War

In Part 1, I discussed my general impression, and some of the reasons for that impression, that Romney would be a lousy general election candidate. Closely related to both the electability factor and what I call the governability factor – i.e., what confidence we have that Romney can actually move the chains in Washington if he gets elected, and not get eaten alive by the forces naturally opposed to a Republican president – is the question of Romney’s experience and accomplishments in public office. Or rather, his relative lack thereof. At a time when the nation is at war and the general public has lost faith in our party first and foremost because the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina convinced people that the GOP was not doing a competent job of administering the federal government, and when the Democratic candidate has been in DC a long time but with little independent executive experience, Romney’s thin resume in public office is likely to be a major handicap or at a minimum forfeit what is usually a strong Republican advantage, of the type enjoyed by Eisenhower (Supreme Allied Commander, a job involving intricate political/diplomatic maneuvering and unprecedented logistical planning), Reagan (two-term governor of the nation’s largest state), Nixon (two-term Vice President as well as Congressman and Senator) and both President Bushes (the elder a two-term VP, CIA head and RNC Chair as well as a Congressman and UN and China Ambassador; the younger a two-term governor of Texas).

Read on – there is much, much more…

Continue reading The Trouble With Mitt Romney (Part 2 of 5)

The first of a five-part series on why Republicans who are serious about winning the White House in 2008 are wasting our time on Mitt Romney.

I’m a conservative in large part because of the vast social/cultural gulf that separates Right and Left, first and foremost on the issue of abortion – and yet, the candidate I’m supporting for the 2008 GOP nomination, Rudy Giuliani, is an avowed pro-choicer who has often been on the wrong side of that gulf.
I also believe that the GOP, for a number of reasons I’ll discuss below, needs to nominate a candidate who has a demonstrated record of management excellence – and yet, my second choice in 2008 is Fred Thompson, a man who has pretty much never managed anything.

You would think that I might be a natural constituency for Mitt Romney, the stronger of the two GOP candidates (the other being Mike Huckabee, more on whom here) who has substantial executive experience and is running as a social conservative. After all, I’ve watched Romney for years (I was in school in Massachusetts and semi-active in GOP campaigns during his 1994 Senate run), and he’s even an alumnus of my law school. So why is Romney no more than my fifth choice for the nomination (behind Rudy, Fred, McCain, and Hunter)? Why do I dread the prospect that he might capture the nomination? Let me explain.

I should start off by saying that there are quite a number of things I like about Romney. He’s obviously smart, articulate and very hard-working. He was a fabulously successful businessman, intimately involved in the development of many new and growing businesses during his career in venture capital and private equity. He ran the Salt Lake City Olympics well, rescuing it from a corruption scandal as well as the challenge of handling the extra security that came from hosting the Games just five months after September 11. He was a good Governor in Massachusetts. He’s obviously a good family man, a man of faith and unquestioned personal integrity. He seems like the kind of guy anyone would be glad to have as a next-door neighbor or a son-in-law. I supported him for the Senate in 1994 (and was appalled at the religious bigotry hurled at him in that campaign by Ted Kennedy), cheered for his campaign for Governor in 2002, and I’d walk over hot coals to elect him in place of my own state’s current Governor, Eliot Spitzer.

I. If We Nominate Him, We’re Gonna Lose

Leaving aside for a second how you rank them, there are basically four things that have to be looked at in examining a presidential candidate:

1. Can he (or she, but we’re talking Romney here) win the general election?

2. Does he stand for good positions and priorities on the issues?

3. How likely is he to actually turn those positions into effective policy, often in the face of a hostile opposition and media and under various pressures from within and without the Party and the Beltway to back down, flip-flop or compromise?

4. How well do we think he can handle unexpected crises and new issues (especially in foreign affairs) beyond what he’s campaigning on?
Regardless of the relative priority you put on the other three, the simple fact is that the best possible potential president in the world is no use if he can’t get elected. And I am quite certain that Mitt Romney, if nominated, won’t get elected. There are a number of reasons for this, not all of them fair, but no less real for being unfair.

A. He’s Not Not-Bush

The first reason is one of the iron rules of politics: after 8 years of the same president – any president, popular or otherwise – voters want change. Partly it’s a sense of getting someone who has a different style and approach and just feels different, and partly it’s the entirely rational assumption that since the job is too big for any one person to do comprehensively, at least exchanging a president with one set of flaws and priorities and values for a different one will ensure that the same things don’t get overlooked or done wrong for another four years.
By nature, this puts the incumbent’s party at a disadvantage, since switching parties is the easiest way to ensure wholesale change – as happened after two-term presidencies in 2000, 1960, 1952, and 1920, and after quasi-two-term presidencies in 1976, 1968, and 1952. And that disadvantage increases when the incumbent is deeply unpopular and is prosecuting a frustrating and unpopular war, as was the case in 1968 and 1952. Make no mistake: that is true today of George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.

The challenge for Republicans, then, is to prove to the electorate that the next nominee is not-Bush, and specifically is not-Bush in the ways that people find most troublesome about Bush. (That’s easier said than done when different people are upset about different things, but you can start by focusing on the reasons why people who might potentially vote Republican, and even people who are still happier than not with him, are dissatisfied with Bush).

With George Allen’s campaign having ended before it began, Romney is probably the least not-Bush of any of the candidates. He’s the son of a politician, a businessman running with a fairly short resume in public office, a religious man, a Harvard MBA. Like Bush, he’s led something of a charmed existence – he didn’t come up by the bootstraps, and he didn’t fight in a war. Like Bush, he’s known for his tightly controlled message discipline. There’s even a sense that Romney has been the favored candidate of the Bush family, Jeb in particular (and there’s a reason why Jeb, arguably the GOP’s best possible candidate, can’t run in 2008). See here, here, and here. Worst of all, Romney will be seen as Bush-like without the corresponding virtue (his stubborn constancy) that Bush’s supporters have long most admired, and without Bush’s cultural credibility with Southern Christian conservatives.

To Romney supporters, the comparison seems unfair in two major ways even above and beyond the extent to which it ignores Bush’s own political and policy accomplishments and punishes Romney even for the virtues he shares with Bush. First, unlike Bush, a mediocre oilman who didn’t find consistent success until he led an investor group to buy the Texas Rangers, Romney was a great success in the private business world. (While this is an impressive credential, it turns out to be less of a historically useful one than you might think – successful businessmen, notably Hoover, have been poor presidents; about the only man to really succeed in the presidency and in business was George Washington, and Washington’s success in the whiskey business came only after he left office). Unfortunately for Romney, it may be very difficult for his campaign to convince people that he is selling a kind of experience that’s fundamentally different from Bush’s.

Second, Romney is much more verbally facile than Bush, much less apt to seem cornered and defensive behind a podium or to leave listeners wondering about his gray matter. But Romney has his own issues as a communicator, as I will discuss below and later in this series.

The bottom line? For Americans who are open to conservative principles but tired of George W. Bush, Romney will be a tough sell, much tougher than Giuliani (a New Yorker, a verbal battler, a guy who accomplished a lot as a public-sector leader in the public eye, and who is – unfortunately – not identified with religious conservatives) or McCain (whose war-hero status gives him unique credibility and who has long been known as a “maverick”), and perhaps even tougher than the laconic Southerner, Fred Thompson, with his commanding demeanor, long movie and TV exposure and more comparatively humble origins. That might not be as much of an issue if Romney had credibility in his efforts to differentiate himself from Bush on the Right on issues like spending and immigration. Lacking that, his only substantive way out is to turn against Bush on the Iraq War. And conservatives – like me – who believe that that war effort can’t be separated from the wider war thus have twice the reason to be nervous about Romney.

B. Americans Hate Phonies

This is admittedly subjective, but Jonah Goldberg aptly summarized the way Romney often comes off in public by describing his demeanor as, “What Do I Have to Do To Put You In This BMW Today?”. I’ll discuss the specifics in more detail later, but the broader issue is that Romney seems unconvincing as the conservative he is running as; his calculations seem too close to the surface.
When the race kicked off, with Rudy and McCain as the frontrunners and the second tier filled with unknowns and/or candidates with their own issues with the base (e.g., Huckabee on taxes, Brownback to some extent on immigration), there was an opportunity for a candidate to build a market niche as the sane, electable conservative. Romney, to the credit of his business instincts, jumped on that opportunity like a starving man on a sandwich. The problem is that that posture is just not consistent with Romney’s history of campaigning and governing as a moderate, pragmatic, non-ideological Northeastern Republican, and specifically with numerous stands he has taken in the very recent past. Now, a good businessman, or even a candidate running principally as a competent technocrat, can get away with running on what the public wants today rather than on principles. But Romney is running a fundamentally ideological campaign, and he is doing so all too transparently as a businessman pursuing an underserved market rather than as a true believer.

Romney’s air of slickness and phoniness manifests itself in a number of specific ways I will get into later in this series, but the overall effect is an even more pronounced than usual (for a politician) tendency to leave people feeling like he will say anything to get elected. Democrats have, justly, suffered for that perception in the last two presidential elections, and they are almost certainly nominating a candidate who is legendarily calculating (Bill Clinton, by contrast, was a master at faking sincerity; but Romney, like so many others in politics, lacks Clinton’s talents in this regard and would do well not to try to imitate him). Republicans, having successfully and appropriately attacked Gore and Kerry and most likely Hillary as well on this basis, cannot afford to run a candidate who comes off as a phony.

In Part II: Romney’s relative lack of experience and the implications for Romney as a war leader.