All right, yes, I couldn't have anticipated quite so much going quite so wrong for Mitt Romney in one week - and my point about the Iowa GOP and the New Hampshire GOP actually having problems with each other still stands, more emphatically - but the attempts to manufacture lots of "Mitt might fail" drama after South Carolina's primary seems like a stretch. I don't know if Mitt Romney can win this fall or not (though I'm more convinced not), but two things I do know are that our next President will not be Newt Gingrich. Or Rick Santorum.
The past week is a reminder that Mitt Romney is well set up for losing if only for this: five years, millions of dollars, lots of preparation... and this is as good as he got. And what he's got is, well, nothing. His campaign team apparently couldn't imagine winning New Hampshire and losing South Carolina. He wasn't prepared to talk about Bain in detail, his personal income, or his taxes. And still, he offers little more in the way of a campaign than "I'm not a loser like Barack Obama, and I've run a business. QED, bitches."
If there's a reason this year's election looks so dismal - and most emphatically is not, as Mitt likes to suggest, the election of our lifetimes - it's because both of the major parties most likely candidates seem unable to rise above inept campaign strategies. Mitt's a lousy candidate surrounded by apparent mediocrity; while the President insists on shouldering this unpleasant task for our own good, surrounded by advisors whose best case appears to be "well... who else is there?" One can't really blame for priary voters in the Republican Party for voting as if screaming for a lifeboat. Anything, anything... but not this.
There's lots of pundit theorizing, but the question of why Newt Gingrich won South Carolina is just not that deep: South Carolina reasserted itself, this week, as the acid test of who is sufficiently seen as Southern and right wing enough to satsfy the most extreme elements of the right wing base. This generally means a Southerner; not - as many northerners like to oversimplify it - because the south is racist. It's more than that. The notions of disdain for other types of existence is about a lot more than race; it's also anti-intellectual, anti-urban, anti-cosmopolitan of any sort. Mitt Romney, probably, never stood a chance in South Carolina, simply because he's an educated northeasterner from a wealthy, patrician family in the most traditional sense. And really, a similar rejection of northern working class success explains why Rick Santorum, as well, probably also never stood a chance to consolidate his bona fides as the conservative alternative. Newt, in the end, was the guy from the state next door (remember how that same logic is supposed to invalidate Mitt's win in NH?), who spoke Southern and right wing talk radio as no one else could... or would want to. South Carolina's right wing base roared up and delivered a message that scares the national party to death: ignore the South at your peril.
At the same time, the impotence of relying, yet again, on a Southern strategy as embodied by Gingrich is all too clear: Gingrich is a lousy candidate, whose own moral failings don't remotely jibe with Evangelical voters. There's lots of discussion, naturally, about how Gingrich's marital failings werre conveniently overlooked on his way to victory, but I'll double down on my thinking that America is in no mood to reward divorce, especially as practiced by someone like Newt Gingrich. The mess of Gingrich's personal life was saved, really, by the bitter, opportunistic way Marianne Gingrich obviously inserted herself into the political process, and by John King's oblivious, ham-handed attempt to shoehorn a nonexistent "issue" of it into the next debate. "Don't vote for my philandering ex-husband" makes people uncomfortable, even if they agree with the description. And Gingrich, dressing down King, was substantively right - King didn't even try to concoct a question that made any sense, and was trying, mostly, to embarrass Gingrich. And Gingrich, obviously, is beyond shame.
Romney, on the other hand, isn't: what was fascinating about his tax and salary debacle was how much he betrayed the realities of class, and of his life in the upper class in particular. It's tacky, when you're rich, to talk about just how much money you have. Romney, clearly, isn't comfortable either explaining, or God forbid, justifying his own lavish wealth. He's oblivious to how his own money compares to others - calling his $350,000 plus in one year's speaking fees "small" is probably, comparatively, correct for him. It's just tuneless (and tasteless) when relating to the public as a whole. His tax rate, too, is probably not the biggest deal; it's interesting to note that Romney more or less made the same admission Warren Buffett did about his effective tax rate. Buffett, of course, gets a pass; he favors tax increases. As the more sardonic among us note, me included, nothing precludes Buffett from sending the government more money than he owes. Which is to say... in the end, is Buffett really so superior to Romney, on taxes? So why is Romney's relatively honest admission such a bad thing?
Like John Kerry before him - and more than a few others as well, before them - Romney can't win unless he learns to step out of his own patrician class understandings and expectations. South Carolina was, in no small measure, a reminder of just how and why the Republican base has moved to reject the "Country Club" core of its past; the democratization of wealth and education has up-ended traditional notions of class in our country... but class divisions don't just go away. They are cultural and societal, constructs, not just economic and political ones. Romney's tone-deaf invocation of Class Envy (both in New Hampshire and even after South Carolina) will ruin him in a general election; what's striking is how Republican voters - the ones who piously claim that "class warfare" is a liberal construct - are also, clearly, turned off by that logic. Romney's experience at Bain Capital, it turns out, isn't just an easy target for liberals looking to paint him as Mr. One Percent; appaently even many ordinary Republicans get that a pampered millionaire scion makes a terrible spokeperson for the virtues of American wealth.
The Republican Establishment, really, can't mask the internal dissensions and divisions that are tearing their party apart; what's apparent after three contests, and Florida will likely make more plain, is that there is no one person who can unify and give voice to the conservative right. The wisest Republicans, still, seem to be the ones who decided to flee this year's contest - Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, John Thune... and on and on. They know, as most of us do, that Republicans can't really beat Barack Obama because they don't really have a coherent alternative policy to sell. But South Carolina is a reminder that attempting to find a coherent policy is both impossible in the current climate and can't happen without alientaing some group or another. Newt Gingrich will, most likely, be the voice of the angry Southern conservative at this year's convention, which might be enough to make him the nominee, but I doubt it. Either way, until the Republicans can figure out how to effectively get beyond their Southern base, they've got nothing. And wouldn't nothing be better represented by Mitt Romney, anyway?
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