Mitt Romney is the most improbable of presidential candidates: a weak juggernaut.
He is poised to sweep every primary contest — a first for a non-incumbent. And yet, in Republican ranks there’s an abiding sense that he should be beatable — and beaten.
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It’s not that Romney doesn’t have fans. His events in New Hampshire were packed to the rafters and felt like general-election rallies. He’s surging in polls in South Carolina and Florida.
And yet the non-Mitt mood just won’t go away. Indeed, it’s intensifying. One reason for that is people are starting to doubt whether he is in fact the best candidate to beat President Obama. For instance, you hear conservatives wondering more and more whether all of the attention from the White House is a head fake. Romney certainly makes a convenient foil for a presidential campaign already in populist overdrive. The desperate attacks from Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry on his career in the private sector are indefensible, but Romney certainly has a gift for inviting them. You can be sure President Obama is grateful to Gingrich and Perry for making them bipartisan critiques.
Still, I suspect there’s no head fake. Romney has his faults, but his 2 percent milk personality makes him hard to demonize. He seems more like a super-helpful manager at a rental car company than a fire-and-brimstone preacher. The White House would dearly love the opportunity to run against a culture warrior. It seems many in the media would like the same thing. Hence the absurd grilling of the candidates in Saturday night’s ABC-Yahoo-WMUR-TV debate.
(For reasons that remain mysterious, the moderators wasted vast swaths of time quizzing the candidates on gay marriage, whether they thought states could ban condoms, and on how Rick Santorum would respond if one of his sons declared his homosexuality. Because, as we all know, how a president would treat his hypothetically gay son is the defining issue of our times.)
Romney was at his best swatting away the swarm of inanities at the debate — birth control is “working just fine.” He’s weakest, however, when discussing himself. In this he is the anti-Obama. The president is never more eloquent and heartfelt than when he is talking about himself; it’s his ideas he can’t move.
Romney, meanwhile, has the opposite problem. Voters can buy his policies; it’s the salesman that leaves them unsure. For instance, in the Sunday Meet the Press debate, Romney suggested that he didn’t run for re-election as governor of Massachusetts because to do so would be vain or selfish somehow. “That would be about me.”
Newt Gingrich ridiculed that as “pious baloney.”
And he was right. Romney’s claim that he’s just a businessman called to serve — Cincinnatus laying down his PowerPoint — is nonsense. Romney, the son of a politician, has been running for office, holding office, or thinking about running for office for more than two decades. “Just level with the American people,” Gingrich growled. “You’ve been running . . . at least since the 1990s.”
Now that the GOP Establishment has touted Mitt it seems you are having second thoughts whether The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit is not going to generate wild excitement in 2012.
Bring on the brokered convention, and Dr. Paul. Are Republicans going to argue against a balanced budget, paying down the debt, not giving foreign aid to dictators, what else?
This should be fun, a debate about our Constitution and if it is even relevant to the Republican establishment.
"This is the first time I can remember where people say it may be necessary"
Jonah, I love your writing, but as has become your habit of late, you ignore the 10,000lb elephant in the room: Who's better? And, what result does a brokered convention - a convention you suggest might be necessary - provide that will be better than Romney?
Is Newt Gingrich going to get more popular with women with a brokered convention? Is Rick Santorum going to get more popular with libertarians and moderates with a brokered convention? Is Rick Perry going to get more intelligent, or at least more articulate with a brokered convention?
"But that calculation always assumed that rank-and-file Republicans will vote for their nominee in huge numbers no matter what. "
Rank-and-file Republican will vote for the nominee, and they've also demonstrated that they'll vote for Romney, gladly. That's not where Romney's problems lie. Romney's problems lie with the most strident voices that won't tolerate even the slightest deviation from their accepted orthodoxy. These are the people who are enthusiastically willing to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It's irrational.
Look at the Senate race in MA. There is no shortage of "conservatives" who will happily say, "Good riddance" to Scott Brown. Trading someone who agrees with you as little as 50% of the time for someone who never agrees with you is irrational, but that's the state of the grass-roots today.
Regarding Scott Brown, i say good riddance too. I would much rather deal with an enemy than an alleged friend who stabs me in the back 50% of the time.
"I would much rather deal with an enemy than an alleged friend who stabs me in the back 50% of the time."
Then you have absolutely no idea how things work in a legislative body. The power is with those who control the Leader and the Committee Chairmen.
Scott Brown could vote with the Dems on very Bill that comes to the floor, and so long as he continued to caucus with and vote for Republicans in leadership positions, he'd still be worth FAR MORE than trouble his votes caused.
"With leaders like Boehner and McConnell your point is moot."
You're proving my point without even realizing it.
Mitch McConnell is NOT the Senate Leader, he's the opposition Leader. Every problem that John Boehner has is created by one man and one man only - Harry Reid.
Without Harry Reid, you would see the Tea Party-backed House pass legislation that would then move to the Senate. Rather than having that legislation die in Committee, like it does now because of Harry Reid, you would see McConnell force very uncomfortable votes in the Senate for the purple and red state Dems. That doesn't happen today.
But hey, why tell you any of this because you know it all already.
Any alleged Republican who comes out in favor of the Cordray recess appointment is absolutely useless to our leadership and to those who worked so hard to elect him. Given another chance (which, happily, he is in no danger of getting), he'll be Arlen Specter.
"Then you have absolutely no idea how things work in a legislative body."
We understand completely how things "work" in this legislative body....they work really, really, poorly. The get-along, go-along wing of the Republican party is nearly as responsible for the course this nation is on (over a cliff) as the Liberals are.
It's well past time to stand up and shout "Enough!". Voting for the McCain's and Scott Brown's of the world is every bit as futile as voting for someone who may be viewed as too extreme to the MSM, because it continues to reinforce the idea that we don't need to make serious, painful changes with the way our government functions.
Of course, like you, I too want to be an ideologcially-pure, powerless minority. That way I can be smug while the liberals wreck our country. Excellent strategy.
I guess you believe that if a person doesn't meet your standards--lower them. Come on, Scott Brown is even left of the Dede Scozzafava branch of the Republican party.
I agree rank & file Republicans will support Romney.
I also agree that a significant number of people who identify themselves as conservatives who are irrationally hostile to Romney.
Where I part company, though, is to the extent there's any inference that conservatives are the only segment of the Republican coalition that picks up its ball & goes home.
Picture this: B-rock OSama and Mitt Romney side by side together in a debate.
B-rock's voice is deep, slow, deliberate and authoritative, even thoughtful.
Romney's speaks in his characteristic breathy middle pitch, quickly, nervously, as if he's desperate to sell himself, begging to please, or relentlessly on the con.
He presentation is so nervous, jerky and disjointed that his body moves like R2-D2.
Folks, these are the telltale signs of falseness that we all know and see and which have always made people feel that Romney is a phony.
Thus far, no one has articulated these fatal flaws in Mr. Romney's presentation, even though the sense of phoniness pervades everything his every spoken word.
Thus far, no one on the right has provided the contrast that would clarify what we are all seeing and hearing in Mitt Romney.
But B-Rock Osama will.
Next to B-rock Osama, Mitt Romney will appears to be a either a bumbling fool or a con artist desperate to sell us the phoniness that he has become.
Americans may never realize why they don't trust Romney, but the Romney-phoniness will be set into high relief by the contrast all will see when he goes up against B-rock Osama.
Mark my words.
Conservatives are about to nominate a man who looks and sounds as phony as B-rock Osama actually is.
God help us all.
The one question I have for Ron Paul supporters is this: How effective would Ron Paul be against Obama when all Obama needs to do is show, on a split screen, the similarities between Ron Paul and Jeff Dunham's Walter dummy?
Romney, I think is nervous and trying too hard to be likeable. That makes him look forced or plastic. He has to get rid of that in order to win and he may once he is nominated.
He reminds of the 2 Bob Doles, the stiff way-too-serious candidate and the affable and funny Senator in the cloak room.
Jonah, you baffle me. You acknowledge that Mitt Romney has tremendous upside in many ways, but you wring your hands over style. Okay, I agree with you, he should have come up with a simple direct answer to the question of why he didn't run for reelection, even though it was a really silly line of attack. But good grief, on so many questions he's given very strong answers. Romney has excelled at almost every debate and proved the most adept at countering attacks. You even admit that of the candidates Romney is probably the hardest to demonize. And yet you wish for a brokered convention??? with who? Ron Paul is off the reservation and yet he's pulling 25% (albeit mostly independents and moderates). How do we broker with someone who sounds like Michael Moore on foreign policy and uses the rhetoric of a Bilderberg group tin foil conspiracist? After 5 million dollars in TV ads in SC attacking Romney from the left, how are any of us to feel a desire to rally around Gingrich (who has more baggage than Imelda Marcos) or Perry (death by a thousand self-inflicted cuts). You can call it vetting the candidate, but when you employ the language of OWS and the far left, where do we go from there afterwards? And yet you have all the pundits on Fox News tonight like Mark Steyn mirroring your "weak candidate" schtick. Are you sure? How many candidates have grown in stature over time? GW Bush did... Reagan did.... and that's just in recent history. Don't blink, but Romney's support has been solidifying. Hang in there and give this process some more time.
It's simple. If his name was Mitch instead of "Mitt", he'd have no problem connecting with the average voter.
It's kind of like meeting a woman named Kitten. She might be an ex-Marine with a Phd in physics, but upon being introduced you wouldn't take her seriously.
I've given Romney the knock enough in the past -- Tom Dewey for a new century, another me-too GOp candidate.
But he's still out there. He's starting to show some red-meat-eating ability. He's more electable than Bob Dole, more reliable than John McCain. He's a Washington outsider. And given that the GOP favorites (Jindal, Daniels, Christie) would rather let Obama finish ruining the country before they take on a non-imcumbent in 2016, we need to back Mitt now.
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