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.

GO'P Lies

No, the coming military sequester cuts and "fiscal cliff" are not Obama's fault

McConnell, Boehner, and Cantor: "How can we get you to understand what a horrible no-good deal we forced everyone to make us take last year?!"

It became obvious during the Debt Ceiling negotiations last summer that the the Republican leaders were incapable of negotiating in good faith. Time after time, a grand bargain was supposedly in reach, only to see Speaker John Boehner or House Majority Leader Eric Cantor walk out near the end of that round of the process. During these negotiations, at various times the Republicans turned down deals with a ratio as high as 8 to 1 spending cuts to tax revenue increases.

Finally a deal was reached at the last minute: $1 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, and an establishment of a Super Committee with a deadline of December to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion or more over the next 10 years. The Super Committee had the flexibility to use a combination of tax revenue increases and spending cuts to reach this $1.2 trillion, and if they couldn't reach a deal automatic spending cuts would kick in starting in 2013, reducing military budget and domestic spending budget by roughly equal amounts (roughly $600B each) over the next 10 years.

But once again, the GOP showing their lack of seriousness about the deficit, offered three of deals they knew were unacceptable. The first offer was $2.2 trillion in spending cuts with no tax revenue increases, which was rejected. The second offer included $1.5 trillion in spending cuts and $300B in tax revenue increases. That part seems pretty good, but then the Republicans on the Super Committee also included a poison-pill extension of the Bush tax cuts and a lowering of the top marginal income tax rate. The Democrats predictably balked. The final offer was even worse: $640B in spending cuts and $3B in tax revenue increases, a ratio of 213 to 1 spending cuts to tax revenue increases. And it would barely meet half of the agreed-to deficit reduction figure.

Just like during the summer, no compromise could be made on a balanced deal that also contained significant tax revenue increases, so the automatic spending cut triggers were set to take place in 2013.

This underscores a point Jonathan Chait has made time and time again and he made it again yesterday:

What the defense sequester drama actually shows, for the jillionth time over the last twenty years, is that Republicans don’t actually care about reducing the budget deficit. If you care about reducing the deficit, you want to keep in place these triggers in order to force some kind of agreement. But Republicans want to disarm the defense trigger, and also of course the expiring tax cuts, which are the other trigger, leaving no pressure mechanism to force a deficit agreement. They’re happy to use the pretext of the deficit to pass something that cuts upper-bracket tax rates and social spending (especially for the poor and non-elderly), but there’s no plausible way to read their actual legislative position as anti-deficit.

This reinforces once again that the Republican party cares deeply about only one domestic policy: ensuring taxes remain low for rich people. All of these other issues, especially the whining about the budget deficit and spending that takes place whenever a Democrat occupies the Oval Office, is a ruse and merely a means to achieve the ultimate end of lowering taxes for the rich.

Anyway, in the last week or so the GOP new line of attack blames President Obama for the spending cuts that are scheduled to take place to the military in early 2013, as part of this deal. Here were Mr. Boehner's new talking points earlier in the week:

"Let's remember why we have the sequester. We have it for one reason: because the President of the United States didn't want to deal with the debt limit again before the presidential election. Because the president didn't want to be inconvenienced, he came up with the sequester," he said.

Well, actually, Mr. Boehner, you have the sequester because one party would not accept any fair amount of revenue increases as part of a balanced deal to reduce the defict. These spending cuts do seem to have some real teeth and will likely result in some job losses and possible overall macroeconomic harm. But that's more of a general argument against any significant spending cuts during a time of poor economic growth, than it is an argument against these cuts specifically. Cutting safety net programs would present a similar drag on the economy. 

Keynesians would have preferred a clean debit limit increase in the winter of 2011, followed by more spending to stimulate the economy. Or if anything a balanced deal that has a significant amount of upfront stimulus spending, coupled with future deficit reduction measures, all budgeted over a 10-year window.

So in review, the GOP held the country hostage last summer for months over the Debt Ceiling increase, making an unprecedented demand for a significant deficit reduction plan as a prerequisite for any deal to raise the debt limit. Then they negotiated a deal to raise the debt limit in exchange for an unspecified future plan to reduce the deficit. Then when no agreement could be reached on this future plan, automatic across-the-board spending cuts became the law.

Last summer we were reminded how bad things were when the leaders representing one of the two major parties no longer had the power nor the courage to negotiate budget deals without first consulting the Tea Party, Grover Norquist, and Rush Limbaugh. And things are even worse when the same party leaders now seem unwilling to follow through on deals they voted into law.


How can you run a government effectively when one of the two major parties can no longer be taken seriously when it comes to following through on agreements they passed into law? The GOP were exposed as fiscal frauds when it comes to the deficit years ago. Now they are being exposed as frauds in general. And this is just yet another example of them living up to the "worst Congress in history" label given to them recently by Ezra Klein.