I can’t believe we are really talking about Romney 2016, but there is one thing in this excellent Ross Douthat post that could be seen from another perspective. Douthat writes that Romney’s performance was “disappointing relative to his own pollsters’ expectations [emphasis in the original] in the general election”.
Maybe it more relevant to argue that it was the performance of the Republican pollsters that was disappointing, just as the performance of the Republican tech operation was disappointing, just as the ads produced by the right-leaning Super PACs were disappointing. You could argue that some of these were the failings of Romney as a manager, but it is worth remembering that Romney ran by far the best organized of the Republican primary campaigns. He ran the best managed buggy whip operation in America.
This gets at how I see Romney. He was going to competently run the GOP playbook as it existed in 2012, with the GOP team that existed in 2012. The smart guys thought that he should run on the economy while avoiding the social issues and potentially damaging specifics on health care policy. His campaign ran the kind of campaign that the decadent Republican consulting class wanted to run. Both Tea Partiers and establishment Republicans were obsessed with the entrepreneurs who built that – and so was Romney. Both Tea Partiers and establishment types complained about the 47% and so did he. The best that Romney could be was a pretty good version of what his party thought it wanted. Mission accomplished.
Now, if Romney ran in 2016, maybe he would adopt something like the Yuval Levin and James Capretta approach to health care and/or the Marco Rubio and Mike Lee approach to tax policy – if that is what he thought the nominating electorate wanted. That would be fine, but the problem is that no playbook exists for selling those policies and defending them from opposition distortions. If that playbook existed, Romney would study it until he had it mastered, but he is the wrong guy to develop that playbook, just as he was the wrong guy to reform the center-right’s creaking electoral institutions.