An Early Romney Campaign Autopsy

Conservatives and Romney campaign insiders are fudging the truth about why Romney is losing

Politico published the kind of piece that every campaign dreads before an election: a finger-pointing, off-the-record pre-postmortem filled with criticisms by staff and advisers about why a candidate is losing.

This particular story seems to shift most of the blame to Mitt Romney's top strategist, Stuart Stevens, and the rest to Romney himself. My take is that neither Romney nor his top strategist are totally to blame, although obviously both share in it. I agree with the general sentiment that Romney is just not a great candidate. But as Ezra Klein and others have noted, the false narrative in the media, that due to the poor economy it was really Romney's race to lose, overinflated expectations from the beginning. I recall many delusional Republicans last year proclaiming that any candidate with a pulse would beat Obama so they wanted to nominate the most conservative candidate possible. The bottom line is that no matter what the unemployment rate is, as long as the rate is roughly the same or decreasing leading up to the election and the economy is growing every quarter, the incumbent is the favorite to win, not the challenger.

In short, before 2009 Romney seemed like a reasonable competent technocrat. And now he is forced to lead a party at exactly the wrong time for someone with his resume. The id of the party the last few years has been Donald Trump (Birthers), Sarah Palin (anti-elites), Ron Paul (Libertarians), and the Tea Party wings. Only these people or someone from these groups would have excited the base of the party. But the elite establishment in the party understood that any candidate associated with those groups would have no chance of winning over swing voters in the general election. And Romney was the most electable alternative.

However, Romney was handcuffed coming into this race, as any recent Republican governor of a blue or purple state would have been. The party has moved so far to the right in just the last 4 years that any Republican governor who actually had to make moderate compromises to, you know, govern was going to have a really difficult time talking about his accomplishments without depressing the enthusiasm of the base. What were mainstream conservative positions just a few years ago are now poison because Obama and the Democrats supported them. Remember this is the party that is suddenly too conservative for "lefties" like Robert Bennett and Richard Lugar.

The base was always more energized about beating Obama than about voting for Romney or any of the candidates who were running in the primary. So add in some bigotry toward Romney's Mormonism and his inconsistent positions on social issues, and it was obvious a segment of the base was going to be ambivalent towards him. And many of the swing "white working class" voters, in the Rust Belt in particular, were never going to warm to him because of his record at Bain Capital. So in the middle of September Romney is still trying to shore up and energize the base, unable to move far enough to the center for fear of losing the base.

I'm sympathetic to Romney's plight in this campaign. Don't get me wrong - I view him as a complete phony and I've disliked the blatant dishonesty that has been at the core of Romney's arguments. But gaffes aside, given where the Republican party is now, the demands on the candidate to hew to the party line on everything, Romney's own personal appeal problems, and the limits placed on what parts of Romney's bio he allowed his campaign to trumpet, all in all I think the campaign has done about as well as you could have hoped.

Conservatives dumping on the Romney campaign are doing so to explain why Romney is losing in a way that validates their worldview. The reality is that Republican agenda is not all that popular with the public. The party brand is still damaged from the Bush presidency and generally polls confirm that voters prefer the specifics of the Democrats' plans to the Republicans' plans on nearly every issue of importance. You wouldn't know that if you got your news from the Right-wing media bubble, but with the exception of the "deficit", voters give Obama/Democrats more trust and support on every single issue that matters. Obama is even beating Romney on the economy at the moment.

Romney himself may not be trusted as a true conservative by the base, but make no mistake - his campaign and his economic plan are the most conservative in years. Romney has been forced to take a very hard line on social issues. And his economic plan is the most conservative in decades. As noted during the DNC, Romney's campaign is ultimately Bush's economic plan, Cheney's foreign policy, and Santorum's views on social issues. It's a combination of all of the unpopular things the Republican party has advocated over the last decade with a flip-flopping Gordon Gekko as the chief messenger. And people are surprised he's trailing?

The Fox, Limbaugh, Hannity, etc., nexus will inevitably spin a Romney loss as a result of him not being conservative enough or not communicating the specifics of those swell conservative plans well enough. They haven't come to grips with the possibility that their ideas just aren't that popular right now. Romney has acquiesced to every demand of the far right and even put golden boy Paul Ryan on the ticket, yet somehow he's not being conservative enough to much of the base?

This was an election that was always going to be much more difficult for Republicans to win than they had anticipated. And the selection of Romney as the candidate made it nearly impossible to run a coherent campaign that could also appeal to swing voters. It is not the fault of the campaign, it's the fault of this particular candidate and the cynicism of the party that made it so difficult for the candidate to be himself. After four years of obstruction and incoherence on policy, Mitt Romney is without a doubt the candidate the party deserves. He might even be the candidate they need too if it results in a decisive Electoral College loss as well as the loss of the House majority.

The Bain of Romney's Existence

 Mitt-gomery Burns?

 "Ironic, isn't it Smithers? This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That's democracy for you." --C. Montgomery Burns

As the drip, drip, drip of the stories about Bain Capital, tax returns, and overseas tax shelters continue, I keep wondering how, after running for President for 5+ years, did Mitt Romney allow these issues to continue to fester. Certainly you'd think someone like Romney would at least have the self-awareness to know that Swiss Bank accounts, Cayman Islands bank accounts, and a record of closing companies and outsourcing jobs just might not be all that popular with American voters.  

Does someone of Romney's status just think all of this is normal? You might attribute a never-before-seen level of arrogance, entitlement, and privilege to someone who thought he could run for President (twice!) and not have to provide legitimate answers to all of these questions. I think even Gordon Gekko would have the self-awareness to know what he did would not be viewed positively by most voters and would have figured out how to spin it better.

Romney obviously knew as far back as mid-way through his term as Massachusetts governor in the mid-aughts that he was going to run for President. At that point if you were Romney's strategists, wouldn't you advise him to begin shedding the overseas tax shelters and Swiss Bank account and bring that money home? If it wasn't presently happening on recent tax returns, you could always dismiss the charges as "old news." And wouldn't you have been able to mount a coherent, believable defense of your record at Bain Capital? Maybe something a little better than "I'm not going to apologize for my success."

Nobody wants you to apologize for your success, Mr. Romney. You have every legal right to all that money you earned and to the money you saved from the taxes you avoided paying. But the American people don't have to laud you for the way you made your money, nor do they have to appreciate how you used loopholes and shelters to avoid paying your fair share in taxes.

And to try to sell people on the idea that venture-capitalists' goal is to create jobs is laughable. As Washington Post business/economics columnist Steve Pearlstein pointed out a few years ago:

In the real world, businesses exist to create profits for shareholders, not jobs for workers. That's why they call it capitalism, not job-ism. There's no reason to beat up on business owners and executives simply because they're doing what the system encourages them to do.

And I think that's exactly right. Bain Capital, like all businesses, exist to make one thing: money. Job creation only occurs when a company believes the added labor will create more profit. You don't run a business with the goal of creating jobs; you run a business to make a profit. 

And as a guy running a venture-capital firm, it's perfectly reasonable for Romney to have participated in leveraged buyouts, loaded companies up with debt, outsourced jobs, closed companies, etc., all in the name of creating profits for shareholders. I don't like it, but that's what venture-capitalists do. In fact, as a guy running a company such as this, if he didn't try to do everything he could to maximize profits, he should have been relieved of his duties. But again, Americans don't have to like it.  While parents hope the best for their kids, does any parent really have dreams of their kid ascending to an executive job in private-equity?  

That's why CEO's of venture-capital and private-equity firms typically don't run for President - for one it's a huge pay cut. And voters usually want to believe Presidents understand their problems, and can relate to them, and not appear to be, as Mike Huckabee famously noted about Romney, "the guy who fired you."

So from 1977 until the present, Mitt Romney has had five public endeavors: 1)worked at and eventually ran Bain Capital, 2)ran unsuccessfully for MA Senate in 1994, 3)helped run the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games, 4)served as governor of MA for 4 years, and 5)has run for President for 5+ years.

Obviously #2 and #5 aren't really something to emphasize. #3 is a nice story, but not really the kind of thing people look for in a presidential candidate. So that leaves his time as MA governor and his time at Bain. He's doesn't talk much about his time as a technocratic, moderate governor thanks to the right-ward tilt of his party in the last 4 years. So that leaves Bain and he has been reluctant to tell the whole story of his time there.

I'm a little biased here, but it just feels like the whole picture isn't complete. He seemed to bank his entire campaign on being the acceptable generic candidate in an election that was going to be singularly about holding the incumbent accountable for the slowly-recovering economy. Maybe being the "other" in that binary choice will be enough if the economy stays the same or gets worse. But as it is looking now, that strategy came with big risks (letting your opponent define you, economy improving, etc) and the consequences of those risks are on display this week.

I don't see any way Romney can put these stories to rest without releasing several more years of tax returns, along with documents from Bain from 1999-2002 showing what his role in the company was. Releasing the hounds isn't going to work.