It was the oft repeated sentence of last Tuesday and early Wednesday, and I'm not sure people appreciated the significance: Mitt Romney was the first Republican, ever, to win both the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary.
Now, never mind what is says about Romney or his chances... doesn't the fact that Iowa's Republicans and New Hampshire's Republicans have never been able to agree on who would best be President speak volumes to what's wrong with the GOP? ... and then they go and both agree on Mitt Romney?
Much like 2008, the Republican primaries are over, even if no one got the memo yet. Romney's opponents have had two chances to stop him and both essentially failed. Rick Santorum nearly tied him in Iowa, but then only managed to tie Newt Gingrich for 4th in New Hampshire. Ron Paul attracts about a quarter of GOP primary voters. Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry should have given up months ago. Newt Gingrich is a smart man and a terrible candidate.
And Republicans are stuck with Mitt Romney.
Like McCain, Romney hasn't so much won the race as beaten an entire party's apparatus into submission. Much like John Kerry, Romney attracts about slightly less than half of the voters of his own party, a bad sign for attracting anyone else. And, like Kerry, the thing that is supposed to make Romney ideal for this race - his "private sector" business experience - is much like John Kerry's war record out of Vietnam... it looks best if one doesn't examine it too closely.
Also, not to get too East Coast superior about it... but is Massachisetts really the best place from which to launch a national politica; career? I mean, since John Kennedy... anyone?
This, then, is 2012, much the way I expected it to be, and which has already proven itself in the first two weeks: this race will be Barack Obama versus a deeply damaged Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama is likely to win reelection. It's all over but for the shouting.
And sure, there will be a lot of shouting... but really, will it matter? Romney's biggest flaw, it strikes me, is that, like many of our Presidential also-rans, just can't seem to put together the necessary mix of self confidence and clear thinking on his opponent needed to win as a challenger over an incumbent. I saw Romney in an extended interview on CNBC the morning after New Hampshire, as well as watching his victory speech the night before... and two things shown through: he's awkward, and his arguments against Obama are depressingly generic.
Romney's argument against Obama appears to be this: he's a "European Socialist" whose destrictive policies have hurt America and he doesn't understand captalism or free markets, stoking the fires of class envy and resentment in ordinary folks. I would point out, as others have... that none of this is precisely accurate. Much of it, and the examples to support the argument, is right wing boilerplate from talk radio and conservative talking heads. As Al Sharpton (of all people!) pointed out Tuesday night, Occupy and other angry voter demonstrations are not about "envy" of wealth... they're about perceptions of economic injustice. And as a number of others have pointed out, you could take apart that whole notion of the good and the bad about "Eurpopean Socialism" for days.
More pointedly, Romney makes these arguments poorly. Still. He stumbles through his examples, mumbles his applause lines, and he looks especially uncomfortable when trying to say bad things about otherwise nice people. It's one reason that Romney's relied, especially heavily, on surrogates. I'm not saying Romney s a nice man - he strikes me, still, as esentially cold - but I think he was trained to be polite, and he has a hard time doing otherwise. I think he'd politely like America to realize that Obama is wrong. And, really, that's kind of cute (pure Country Club Republican, which is, after all, his upbringing). But it's no way to win a rough and tumble election process. Especially if you're a wealthy scion of a politicallly connected family who seems constitutionally incapable of empathizing with the difficulties of others.
Unless Romney gets significantly better, and his argument gets sharper - and frankly, he's had more than 5 years to figure a lot of this out, so far, and this is where it's got him - it's hard to see how his combination of awkward and unpleasant and specifics-free presentation will be enough to beat a sitting President, even one as spectacularly mediocre as the current one. There will be a lot of shouting, a lot of name calling, a lot of back and forth... but I tned to think we know where this is going. And most of us would be happy, I suspect, if it all just happened sooner, rather than later.
That imatience, I think, goes a long way to explaining the other developing trend of this election, a real disdain among voters for the media, especially 24 hour operations on cable and in the blogosphere. If nothing else, it's interesting to wonder where we go if Americans actually lose patience with the cureent cycle of endlessly chewing over some minor comment, replayed endlessly out of context. Already Mitt's "I like to fire people" comment is largely buried and left aside, sure to reappear, but not really crucial to the outcome that's largely foreordained. Can anyone, really, sit through another panel of likeminded talking heads on any of the cable "news" shows? Three hours of it, at least, on CNN, MSNBC and Fox on Tuesday night, the night when it was obvious, 15 minutes after the polls closed, that Mitt Romney had won New Hampshire. After two hours... was there anything, I mean anything, left to discuss?
I honestly thought I'd find this state of politics depressing, but in some sense, it's really very freeing. Who needs to spend the next 2 or 3 months watching Mitt Romney wrap up the GOP race? Now I've got time to catch up on my reading, watch some DVDs and find something else interesting - actually interesting - to write about. It's all over but for the shouting. And that's why they make earplugs.
Comments