Use the Weapons You Have
And to add to what Krugman says here in defense of using Romney’s Bain record against him, it’s worth noting that Republicans have come up with a great scam: the Ryan plan to gut Medicare in order to finance upper-class tax cuts is so “cartoonishly evil” that you literally can’t get voters to believe that Romney supports it. You can’t rely solely on policy arguments in a political campaign, and the business record he’s running on isn’t like discussing Romney’s suits or something.
Ding ding ding! Give the man a prize.
Lest we forget, the idea that Mitt Romney’s Bain biography was relevant to the assessment of what kind of President he would be was first brought up by the Romney campaign itself.
Speaking of using the weapons you have, is there any chance SEK can put on his film-analysis hat and do a piece on the new Obama ad?
It’s really quite a production, and I’d love to see it broken down.
I love the tag line and hope it becomes a recurring theme in the campaign.
…and beyond.
“Speaking of using the weapons you have, is there any chance SEK can put on his film-analysis hat and do a piece on the new Obama ad?”
I’d kind of like to see that myself, but those e-mails from sound engineers that TPM ran explained a lot about why that ad seems so powerful and damning (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/07/how_sound_design_slips_by_your_brains_defenses.php?ref=fpblg):
“Also, placing Romney’s voice in the various locations builds the implication in the mind of the listener that Romney is present and witnessing it. It’s almost like he’s in America’s front office, singing into a PA microphone while the building rots.”
And yeah, “Mitt Romney’s Not the Solution . . . He’s the Problem” would look excellent on bumper sticker, t-shirts, you name it.
That is a very good ad. Let’s hope it keeps playing.
The Obama campaign barrage on Romney is the most encouraging thing I’ve seen in a while. Of course the Democrats don’t plan on doing much about the liquidation of the American Middle Class right now but even “mere rhetoric” matters to the sensitive souled MOTU. I seriously think that that the Wall Street assholes will be close to 100% GOP backers by 2016 ‘cuz the nasty Dems were unfair to them.
Then any Dem who wins can properly view the Wall Streeters as the enemy and stop all this sucking up to corporations.
Hey, a boy can dream, can’t he?
Naturally, every politician has a set of base beliefs that will evolve slowly over time, if at all, so the actual voting patterns of said politicians might not change that much. But any politician worth a damn will see what works, and their actions will be informed by that. And if you start seeing that corporate money ceases to make a difference after a certain point….
Or perhaps cull Wall Street out of the overall corporate herd, sort of like what Obama has done with the coal industry vs. the overall energy sector. One can be quite pro-automakers, for instance, and still be anti-Wall Street.
As Krugman says, Romney’s history at Bain makes him a poster boy of everything wrong and destructive about our modern vulture-parasite-crony capitalism. Any liberal progressives uncomfortable with focusing attention on this are worse than naive, they’re bring-moist-towelettes-to-a-knife-fight losers, i.e., typical Democrats (see Swiftboat, transitive verb; Rove, Karl). These must be the same liberals who think Republican operatives like Gergen and Brooks are just moderate pundits.
And yet they nominated him in this of all years, when issues of wealth inequality, trickle-down vs. mass-middle-class economic policy, and the outsized political influence of the ultra-rich and the financial sector are so prominent in our political culture.
Was this some sort of “This will really piss off the liberals!” thinking? Well played, GOP. You really got us good.
Have you forgotten the Republican primary already? As amazing as it is, Romney really was there best choice and it was rational for the Republicans to have selected him!
(Though it, of course, remains a good question why someone better didn’t actually run in the primary, but we’ve rehashed that a million times on this blog, haven’t we?)
No, I don’t think he was, and I don’t think it was.
I remember the Republican primary just fine: Romney buried everyone else in a pile of money, and had the party elite behind him. That doesn’t make him the best candidate.
An assertion that Romney was not the best candidate would compel the question about what other candidates were better.
And money is not an argument against Romney being the best candidate. People give to candidates for a number of reasons, but one typical consideration when you give is whether the candidate can win, and another is whether the candidate will look after your interests, and these two components are a large part of any possible definition of “the best candidate”.
At least Huntsman and Santorum would have been better general election candidates. They wouldn’t have had this albatross around their necks, and it’s not as though Mitt’s upside as a campaigner surpasses theirs.
Nor did I claim it was. Rather, I noted that Mitt money, as opposed his awesome campaign skeelz, explains his victory in the primary.
But didn’t we see, in the nomination of “electable” John Kerry, that primary voters can demonstrate a remarkable ability to misjudge that?
It’s clear that the primary voters thought Mitt Romney was the most electable. They certainly didn’t vote for him because he make their hearts go pitter-patter.
… you think Rick Santorum would have been a stronger candidate in the general than Romney.
Rick Santorum.
Wow.
Wow. You think Mitt Romney is a better general election candidate. Wow.
OK, now what?
I’m with Murc on this one. Santorum is batshit insane and would have been a horrific general candidate. (Keep in mind, for all of Romey’s idiocy, the polling is pretty close right now.)
Huntsman would have been a better general election candidate, but we’re talking about the Republican primary here. Huntsman had no chance with the base. I guess that’s irrational, so I suppose I should have qualified my comment: amongst serious contenders, Romney was the rational choice,.
There is no question that Santorum has huge negatives.
If you were running for President in 2012, which negatives would you rather have: fetus-cuddling or Bain Capital?
And that’s before we even get to their positives.
Doesn’t the fact that Rick Santorum ran an awful primary campaign, couldn’t raise any money, and, despite some surprising primary victories, couldn’t get more than nominal support from the religious conservative leaders who ought to have flocked to him suggest that he would not have been a good general election candidate, either?
It’s not JUST the fetus-cuddling. For all his negatives Romney is an actual politician and he can open his mouth without embarrassing himself in ways that render him un-electable.
If Santorum had somehow gotten the nomination he would have genuinely scared people. At worst, Romney comes off like a clueless plutocrat. That’s bad, but at Santorum’s worst, he comes off as a mean-spirited crazy man who thinks everyone who isn’t a specific kind of Catholic is going to hell.
So yeah, advantage: Romney.
John,
It sure does.
It does not, however, suggest that he would have been worse than the guy who had the lowest approval rating of any presidential nominee in decades.
We’re not talking about “good” here. Neither of them would be “good.”
Are you watching the same Mitt Romney that the rest of us are watching?
I’ll bet you $10,000 you’re not, my friend. Corporations are people, I don’t care about the poor, I like being able to fire people who provide services to me…need I go on?
Not in 2012.
Joe, no offense, but you are deluding yourself here. Santorum is a nut-job, and would have been exposed as such in a national election.
Certainly. The question is whether this would have done more damage to him than Romney is now experiencing.
I’m certainly not saying that Santorum would have been good.
Rick Santorum has actually won more elections, including more general elections, than has Mitt Romney.
When you have two awful candidates, and one of them easily beat the other one in a primary campaign that ought to have played to the loser’s strengths, it seems hard to argue that the loser is the better candidate. If Santorum couldn’t even convince Republican primary voters to support him, how can we possibly think he would have been a better general election candidate?
Santorum’s electoral history isn’t particularly impressive.
His first election win, for the House in 1990, involved defeating a seven term Democratic incumbent. I suppose that’s fairly impressive, but it was a western Pennsylvania district where, presumably, his social conservatism wouldn’t have been much of a handicap. He was re-elected in 1992 without very strong opposition. Then he won a Senate race in Pennsylvania in a very Republican year in 1994. And then in 2000 he was re-elected against an incredibly weak opponent (whose bright idea was it to nominate a pro-life Democrat to face Rick Santorum?) And that’s the extent of his general election victories, as far as I can gather. He hasn’t won one in 12 years. And he was utterly destroyed in his re-election campaign in 2006.
Santorum lost Pennsylvania to Casey by a 17.4-point margin in 2006. According to wikipedia, that was the largest loss margin for an incumbent Senator against a challenger since 1980. Santorum is also a joke.
I’m still glad Santorum lost because he might have won the general and he would be a disaster as President, but it’s an uphill battle to establish that he was a stronger candidate than Romney.
John,
Disagree. When you have two awful candidates, and one of them easily beat the other one in a primary campaign, it is probably the case that something other than their relative strengths as campaigners determined the outcome.
You’re right, it’s not. It’s better than Mitt’s, though. It’s impossible to look at his experience in electoral politics, and then look at Mitt Romney’s, and say that Mitt is an actual politician and Santorum is not – which was the point to which I was replying.
Actually, Bob Casey, the Democrat who beat Santorum in 2006, did so by running as an anti-abortion Democrat.
Joe, you keep on conflating “best candidate” with “best campaigner.” They’re not the same thing.
Of course you’re right that Bob Casey was pro-life, and I should have thought of that, but Casey was also named Bob Casey, and was a well-known and popular political figure in the state who’d been elected several times to statewide office. Ron Klink was just some nobody. A pro-choice nobody might have had a shot against Santorum, but a pro-life nobody just had nothing really to recommend him.
Agreed. Judgements about electability are barely an art, let alone a science, and so mistakes are quite possible. With this caveat, I note that, to get to the general election, it would be a good thing if one could get through one’s party’s nomination process, and Huntsman for one was at a distinct disadvantage at that apart from the money issue. And apart from that, I don’t think that Huntsman was that much more impressive than Mitt. Mitt, you might remember, also has “moderate” credentials as a former governor of Massachussets.
As for Santorum, well, let’s just say that he doesn’t have Mitt’s problems, but he has problems all of his own that would have killed him in any national election.
It’s not the positives that would have made Huntsman stronger in a general election than Mitt; it’s lower negatives. This Bain attack is destroying Mitt Romney, and there is no comparable attack they could use against Huntsman.
He sure does, but 1) he has more upside than Romney and 2) in 2012, fetus-cuddling is less of a liability than Bain Capital. If the economy was going great guns, the opposite would be true.
What is Santorum’s upside? The social conservatives who like him are going to vote for Romney anyway, because they hate Obama. What other upsides does he have? Santorum is poisonous to independent voters in a way that Romney is not.
He’s vastly better than Romney at retail politics. He can connect with people. He could sort of come across as likable if you squint. I’m not saying he’s Bill Clinton, but he’s at least competent in this regard.
Whereas Mitt Romney is awkward, and makes you want to punch him in the face, my friend.
On the other hand, Romney is capable of raising money and running a professional campaign. In a general election, that seems more important than retail politics, which general elections generally don’t involve very much of.
In addition, Santorum’s supposed skill at retail politics couldn’t win him early primary races in New Hampshire and South Carolina, where retail politics is much more important than in a general election, and with an electorate where Santorum’s obvious flaws are not as clear disadvantages as they would be in a general election campaign. If Santorum’s supposedly good retail politicking couldn’t even win him the South Carolina primary, why would we think they would be a particular advantage in a general election campaign, where retail politicking is much less important?
If Rich Santorum had won the nomination, the top Republican fundraisers and campaign staff would have gone to work for him. Mitt Romney is extraordinarily good at raising money, but does the Republican presidential nominee really need to be extraordinarily good in order to bring in the money these day? I don’t think he does.
The state next to Mitt Romney’s, and the state next to Newt Gingrich’s. I consider Iowa, an “away game” for all of them, to be the better measure.
Because there is a floor that a viable candidate needs to reach, and Mitt Romney just might be below it.
Huntsman Chemicals is not exactly the little sisters of the poor.
John Kerry was the most electable of the squad of dunces we had before us in 2004. He did better than the fundamentals suggested the Democratic candidate should have, and he also demolished Bush in the debates. He certainly had numerous weaknesses, but so did all of the other candidates. Howard Dean probably would have lost 40 states, and John Edwards was a complete lightweight, and that would have become clear sooner rather than later.
Just because Kerry wasn’t a great candidate and lost doesn’t mean he wasn’t the most electable candidate available. It just means it was a campaign that the most electable Democrats sat out because they thought (perhaps correctly) that it was basically unwinnable. Kerry came closer to winning than, I think, Democrats had any right to expect.
Goddamn it, John Kerry outperformed election prediction models. The idea that John Kerry blew the election due to his “lack of charisma” and the dreaded “swiftboating” is a myth. Sure in retrospect he seems like a weak candidate, but nothing makes a politician look like a loser quite like losing an election.
Yes. One of the weird things about America (maybe in sports as well as politics?) is that you can come so close to winning, and the hindsight cataracts set in immediately afterwards, thus; Kerry was a LOSER, and his LOSING was inevitable from the start! Against an incumbent at that.
I totally agree with this, and I’ve never been a huge Kerry fan-finding him personally boring and remote. Yet I have to admit he ran a solid campaign, and that while he could have run better offense, he has nothing to be ashamed of. By all models, an incumbent wartime president with a stable economy has no business having a close challenge like that, but Kerry did just it with dogged hard campaigning and a relatively clear message. He also killed in the debates, just mopped the floor with Bush.
I agree with ploeg. You can argue that “Romney buried everyone with money” and that’s true, but you have to be able to point to someone who would have been a better candidate. If that better candidate had been there, the money would have followed (look at how one lone billionaire pumped money into Newt’s vanity campaign to keep him viable long past his sell-by date).
Who would it be? Perry? Crashed and burned in seconds. Cain? Lasted a bit longer. Pawlenty or Huntsman? Weeded out early because Republicans wouldn’t vote for them. Santorum? The more people get to know Rick Santorum the more they hate him – he’s worse than Romney in that respect.
There wasn’t anyone that was going to win the GOP nomination this year that was going to accept who was going to perform any better than Romney is now. That says more about what the GOP has become than it does about Romney, really.
The best GOP candidate is easy, think of 3 words “999″
Republicans wouldn’t vote for them in a primary. This doesn’t tell us anything about what Republicans thought about their chances in a general election.
I don’t think we can say he’s “worse in that respect.” The more voters in Iowa got to know him, the more they liked him. Has that happened to Romney anywhere?
Look at the beating Romney is taking over Bain. Huntsman, Pawlenty, and Santorum don’t take that beating, and this is a particularly bad year to have that weakness.
Yes, the more batshit insane Iowa Republican voters got to know Santorum, the more they liked him. That doesn’t really help your point, though.
Actually, noting that any group of voters anywhere came to like Rick Santorum better the more they saw of him helps my point a great deal.
Once again I ask: can you name any group of voters anywhere who have come to like Mitt Romney better the more they see of him?
If not, that would seem to suggest something about his strength as a campaigner: he is sub-Santorum in his ability to get voters to like him.
By the time Pennsylvania threw Santorum out of the Senate by 18%, he had inspired so much distaste that lifelong Republicans were changing their voter registrations. I know some of them here in the red zone of PA, and it surprised me.
…they’d had over a decade of watching his performance in office.
As I mentioned before, electability is one component in choosing the best candidate. One would think that being acceptable enough to one’s party to gain the party’s nomination would be another important component.
But that argument only holds up if we assume that the primary electorate’s perception of electability is correct.
Well, what if the people who had the surpassing good judgement to conclude that Mitt Romney was electable, with a great deal of Obama-2008 crossover appeal, were wrong?
The argument depends on no such assumption. In fact, the assumption is entirely irrelevant. If you are not ideologically compatible with the candidate, you will not vote for the candidate, full stop. If you think that the candidate has no chance of winning the nomination, you might vote for the candidate anyway as a protest, but most would look for the second-best candidate who has a chance to win.
I will note on your side that it is easy to make a bad judgment on electability if you do not allow yourself to seek out all possible evidence. Attacking Mitt on Bain was entirely out of bounds during the Republican primary, so this line of attack is relatively novel, and Mitt is having a hard time dealing with it.
Can’t seem to reply to ploeg’s comment about Bain being offlimits during the GOP primary, so I’ll reply right here.
Bain wasn’t offlimits during the GOP primary. Gingrich damaged Romney very deeply in the SC primary with extremely negative attacks on Romney’s Bain record.
It is inarguably relevant this year, when Mitt Romney won the primary running as the most-electable candidate, and the Republican primary voters very plainly took an expansive reading of “ideologically compatible.”
I’d say it is relevant every year, but I can see where that’s arguable. This year, though, when “being acceptable enough to one’s party to gain the party’s nomination” is the same thing as “being electable,” and doesn’t have very much of a connotation of ideological compatibility at all, my assumption is entirely apt.
A necessary step for being the Republican candidate for office is that you can get Republicans to vote for you in their primary. If you can’t do that you aren’t going to get the chance to convince anyone in the general election.
Hunstman and Pawlenty had no chance of getting out of the primary and into the general election. That makes them worse candidates than Romney, who was able to meet that hurdle.
Apparently it has, because Romney got more people to vote for him in 2012 than he was able to muster in 2008. Somebody must have decided he was likeable (or at least more likeable than Rick Santorum).
Huntsman and Pawlenty I’m going to discount because, again, they had a zero percent chance of winning a Republican primary this year. And winning the Republican primary is a necessary condition for competing in the general election.
Santorum wouldn’t take a beating for Bain, but you can be damn sure that the Obama team has an opposition research file an inch thick full of every stupid, dirty, slightly crooked thing that Rick Santorum has ever done in his entire life.
All of the GOP clown car this year were weak. And the Obama team is really, really, really good at this whole “campaigning” thing. I have no doubt that in the hands of John Kerry’s team Mitt Romney’s “Bain Problem” wouldn’t even be on the radar because they wouldn’t have known how to push the right buttons to make it work.
I’m pretty sure we all understood that one needs to win the party’s nomination in order to be a general election candidate, even before your comment. That’s not, in fact, where our disagreement comes from.
I do not agree with your argument that it is impossible for a party to nominate a less-electable candidate over a more-electable one. “The Republicans must have picked the most-electable candidate, because they picked a candidate.” Again, this assumes an infallibility on the part of primary voters that I don’t agree with. I think that primary voters can believe someone to be quite electable, vote for him based on that perception, and be dead wrong.
I think you rebut this argument quite well at the end of your comment: All of the GOP clown car this year were weak. Mitt Romney won more votes when he was running against Rick Perry and Herman Cain than when he was running against John McCain and Mike Huckabee. This tells me less about Romney’s supposed increasing likability than you seem to think.
Obviously parties can nominate less electable candidates over more electable ones. George McGovern was less electable than Hubert Humphrey or Ed Muskie. Barry Goldwater was less electable than Nelson Rockefeller or Bill Scranton. Perhaps Gary Hart was more electable than Walter Mondale, or Al Gore than Michael Dukakis, although it’s harder to say for sure.
But in all these cases, what one is saying is that a more centrist candidate would have been a stronger candidate. Are there any examples where a candidate who is more radical would have been more electable? The only possible case I can think of is Reagan over Ford in 1976, and Rick Santorum is no Ronald Reagan.
What everyone else said. Romney burying everyone else in money doesn’t necessarily mean he was the best candidate. Who in the GOP field would have been better?
MAYBE T-Paw, I guess?
Of course not; no one said it did.
What it does mean, however, is that you can’t point to his primary victory as evidence that he is a strong campaigner. He won on a grossly-uneven playing field.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
There’s a difference between saying he’s a strong campaigner and saying he’s the best that the Republicans have this year.
Romney is a lousy terrible utterly no good campaigner.
He’s also the best candidate the Republicans had to offer this year.
These are not mutually exclusive statements.
OK:
What it does mean, however, is that you can’t point to his primary victory as evidence that he is the best candidate they have this year. He won on a grossly-uneven playing field.
In retrospect, Pawlenty seems to quite clearly have been the best candidate for the general election as well as the guy who would have been able to waltz to the nomination as the not-Romney candidate. Then again, give those facts, you could also probably argue that his dropping out far too early indicates a real lack of inate political instincts that would have been a huge hindrance, I guess.
T-Paw dropping out made a lot of sense at the time. Rick Perry hadn’t yet flamed out, Romney had more money than god, Gingrich had his sugar daddy and a lot of buddies from the old days, Santorum had the crazy thing working for him. Nobody yet knew how weak they’d all be.
In hindsight, sure, bad move. I’m sure he (and for that matter Mike Huckabee) are kicking themselves.
He dropped out because he couldn’t even ship in enough supporters to beat batshit crazy Michele Bachmann in a straw poll. If someone runs a completely incompetent primary campaign and can’t get anybody to like them, that is pretty decent evidence that they would run a completely incompetent general election campaign and wouldn’t be able to get anybody to like them.
You can hire people to run your campaign competently.
But, as they say in basketball, you can’t coach height.
And yet Rick Santorum did not hire people to run his campaign competently. Why not? Why couldn’t he get any competent professionals to work for him? Why couldn’t he raise any money? Why couldn’t he convince religious conservative leaders to support him enthusiastically? Why couldn’t his supposed skill at retail politics give him wins in New Hampshire and South Carolina?
Whatever else may be said about Romney, he was able to create a campaign that was competent enough to win him the nomination. Santorum didn’t even come close to doing so.
I think you’re putting too much stock in the amount of money Republican primary candidates can raise as a reliable measure of their merit.
I remember it well. The majority anti-Romney Republicans were unable to coalesce around any of the media-selected alternatives, almost all of whom didn’t have any national campaign apparatus or funding.
In the question of can the Republicans have a grassroots party instead of a top-down party, the answer is no. Only the Paulites even tried and their insurrection was based around the least democratic acquisition of delegates available.
Going after Romney the man should only be uncomfortable if Romney is actually a good man.
He is not.
I think the Atlantic is a greater ocean than the Pacific.
We all know what a disaster Romney is, there is only 1 solution for the GOP now:
http://palin4president2012.blogspot.com/
BROKERED CONVENTION !!!!!!!!!!!
I just assumed that was a parody – even after navigating to the link – until a few seconds of clicking around forced me to conclude otherwise.
I did, however, manage to refrain from leaving an hilarious comment about how great their parody site is.
Your restraint is admirable.
As for Palin for President, all I can say is, oh please … oh please … could we ask for Palin/Paul as a ticket, pretty please?
“cartoonishly evil”
Whiplash/Moriarty 2012!!!
Shorter Mitt Romney/Karl Rove/pearl-clutching centrist, liberal, and Serious pundits and politicians: “How dare President Obama actually campaign for reelection!”
And in an election year, no less!
It’s rich that Karl “Unindicted Felon” Rove would be squeamish about talking about possible felonies.
I feel like I’ve landed in the bearded Spock universe. A Democratic campaign going straight for he jugular and its Republican opponent whining and clutching pears? Wow, never though I’d see that again in my lifetime. More red meat, lots more, please! Pound that fucker Rmoney so hard he has fainting spells on national TV. Given how overdue it is to openly attack Wall Street for what it’s become and what it’s done and is still doing to us, this is a genuinely cleansing political conversation as well as a lethal campaign tactic.
Romney’s tactics at Bain are essential to who he is and what policies he supports. Romney’s problem with the auto bailout is that equity was given to workers for money owed to retirement funds. Mitt thinks that the NAACP is driven by people wanting “free stuff from government”. He sees people who work as labor overhead. Who he was at Bain is integral to who he is now and the lessons he learned there are not ones we want imposed on our country.
Stealing this!
Mitt Romney looks at working Americans as overhead.
Yes, it’s completely impossible to separate Romney from Bain Capital.
I can’t fathom how anyone can think Bain is off limits. His main claim to being a good President… his experience at Bain!
When republicans complained about Chicago politics , I always said:
If only.
But now…
Twisting the knife.
Brian Schmidt drops the hammer