Mitt Romney, you’re no Ronald Reagan

by Lev on 12 September 2012
So Mitt Romney is in deep shit, thanks to his comments on the terrible tragedy unfolding in Egypt and Libya. It seems as though the only people in his corner are Sarah Palin and Jon Kyl, who thought a rape analogy would be just the thing to help Mitt out. (Incidentally, what is it with these people and rape? Going back to Claytie Williams, whose similar comments cost him the Governorship of Texas, and all the way through to Todd Akin, you’d figure this is an area they’d try to avoid.) It’s an epic gaffe and a pretty vile one, so far as these things go. And, at the very least, it’s another two days where he’s playing his weakest piece (i.e. foreign policy) rather than his strongest (i.e. the economy).
Seriously, you’d think that last week’s jobs report would be all that Mitt would want to talk about right now. It was unambiguously bad news for the president. It didn’t immediately harsh the mellow that came after the DNC, but a few more days of discussion–discussion driven by an aggressive Romney campaign, hammering the message home with a much less equivocal catchphrase than, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”–might just have been the ticket to turning the race back to him a bit. I personally think, “Can we afford four more years of this?” would be a better line to take–less familiar, harder to rebut by simply reminding people of what happened exactly four years ago. But that would require a Romney with some intuitive sense of politics and strategy. The jobs report is now lost into the ether, and with it another one of the few remaining opportunities for Romney to turn the tables.
Or maybe it’s not about intuition. Maybe it’s about toughness. You see, the backdrop to the most recent Mitt-failure was several days of aggressive attacks upon Romney’s national security credentials. Obama has a strong advantage in that department, his poll superiority there is based on his actual accomplishments, which is to say that he is genuinely strong there. Romney disagrees–he believes that support is flaccid, movable. Assuming that Romney even believes his own frames, getting hit by Obama so ruthlessly on these issues would be like Jimmy Carter dumping all over Ronald Reagan in 1980. One can easily imagine how pissed off Romney would be by that, and so Romney seized the first available opportunity to respond–and stepped right into a trap. Truth is that these issues are not at the forefront of the electorate’s minds, so Obama probably wasn’t going to be able to move many votes with the attacks. The real reason for attacks like this is to make the other guy make a mistake. Richard Nixon did precisely the same thing to Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam, just kept attacking, attacking, attacking until Johnson went ballistic in response, which allowed Nixon to act the victim. Romney was even easier to provoke than one of the most notoriously insecure men ever to hold the presidency. Think about that.
At this point, though, it really almost doesn’t matter. People say that some sort of foreign policy or economic disaster might shake things up to let Romney win, but the odds of the latter are mitigated by Europe (maybe?) starting to get its act together, and it’s unclear to me that there would be enough time for the president to burn off support from a rally-round the flag moment at this late a stage should something truly awful happen. Romney is clinging to the notion that it’s 1980 all over again, with him as Reagan. And it’s true that Obama is like Carter…except that the economy isn’t tanking, he’s a foreign policy success in the eyes of the public, and he’s the one who is more likable and trusted by the public. And Romney is like Reagan…except that he leads his party in name only, he can’t come up with effective phrases to sell his positions, he’s not tough enough to let irrelevant attacks slide off him, and he’s not enough of an intuitive politician to respond to public opinion, though admittedly I bet he gives about as much of a damn about public suffering as David Koch and his actual indifference to jobs, jobs, jobs is shining through. But asks if we’re better off now and is super-aggressive all the time. So, he’s more like Cartoon Reagan, really.
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