Read together, David Brooks and Dan Kennedy help us get to the heart of Mitt Romney’s limitations as a presidential candidate.
Brooks delivers the mother of all counter-factuals:
[Romney] needs to show how his outer pronouncements flow directly from his inner core.
For his part, Kennedy imagines how Romney might make a virtue of his lack of orientation:
If there’s still an authentic Romney underneath all the phony exteriors he’s tried on and discarded, then it is probably someone without a real political orientation — a pragmatic problem-solver, too liberal for Republicans (outside of Massachusetts), too conservative for Democrats, too bloodless and unappealing to be able to turn those qualities into a virtue, the way Ross Perot briefly did a dozen years two decades ago.
The problem for Romney is two-fold, contrary to Brooks’ fondest wishes and as Kennedy recognizes, Romney has no inner core*. There is probably some psychological explanation for his success as a professional manager and his still startling propensity and capacity to say whatever he thinks necessary. But, the unavoidable truth: on the salient issues of the day, Romney has embraced both sides.
And, contra Kennedy, there is no market for a presidential candidate with no orientation. None of the problems the country faces are subject to some ideology-free management wizardry. People of good faith not only disagree about the right solutions, they disagree about the definition of the problem: global warming, fiscal and monetary response to massive unemployment and other economic problems, healthcare, GLT rights, &c.
Whatever management skills he may bring to bear, nobody on either side of the spectrum is going to trust that Romney is going to use them to solve their problems.
Ultimately, Romney’s problem is that he’s not Reaganesque, or even Obama-esque. He has failed to figure out how to make himself a screen on which others can project their political fantasies. That may be an inevitable consequence of his problem-solving abilities. His record is just too specific. As governor, he brought mandated universal healthcare to Massachusetts. Hard to film that one in soft light with a gauzy filter.
To borrow a turn of phrase from some of the folks he’s abandoned, for Romney, it’s only going to get worse.
* I think that writers like Brooks have trouble acknowledging Romney’s empty core, because he seems, in his private life, to be a decent person. A good husband and father. A good friend. A good church member. But, Romney is playing on the public stage, and whatever private virtues he might have, as a public figure, he’s a hollow man. In this regard, he is very George H. W. Bush-like.
Mormonism has played a central role in Romney’s life — how else does one get to be bishop? Why else disinvite future in-laws from a marriage-related ceremony?
Despite this, Romney studiously avoids mentioning his religion. His famous speech about religion mentioned Mormonism but once. So Romney may indeed have a core but has just decided to keep it carefully under wraps.
From Frank Rich’s profile of Mitt.
might call it The Tao of Mittens
Happy days.
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(( So as not to frighten the horses, the notes have been banished over to here.))
He and his family is conservative in the sense that they offer a trip back to the 1950s, with his and Ann’s looks, perfect sons (even one named Chip!). In many other ways he embodies the typical Organization Man and the Man in the Grey Flannel suit. And just like ad man Don Draper, he has no core beliefs simply a belief in his own ability to sell us products he thinks we will think we need. In many ways he is a lot closer to classic Dick Nixon than he is to Ronald Reagan in any of his incarnations.
In 1960 Nixon promised moderation, small c ‘cloth coat’ conservatism, tepid gradualism towards civil rights, lukewarm hawkishness towards our enemies, and an a Fridgedaire in every home. He was also an organization man who waited his turn and grabbed at every opportunity he could while doing all he could to avoid offending any potential constituency. Nixon eventually realized his second go around that he needed to appeal not to peoples brains (that failed in 60), nor didhe didn’t have the charisma to appeal to their hearts (no JFK or Obama here), but to their gut. Hence he was the first mainstream conservative able to successfully run against the nameless ‘elites’ that were stopping ‘traditional American values’.
Romney is trying to do that in this election, but is running into the issue that unlike the self-made and Harvard Law reject Nixon he has been part of that same East Coast elite ever since he was born really. As much as Obama has a problem with working class whites it appears Romney has a bigger one, and they like the self-made and resentful Santorum a lot more than the corporate toolbag that is Mitt Romney. Authenticity rather than ideology is playing the largest roll in his rise and why Romney might not ultimately seal the deal since he is also not ‘one of us’. Look for Santorum to use codes against Mitts mormonism as Huckabee did in the weeks ahead and to echo even more Buchanite economic populism, particularly in Michigan where I think he is primed for a huge upset.
Well, one that’s something other than $$$ and becoming President.