Did Republicans have no choice but to nominate a serial flip-flopper like Mitt Romney? Perhaps so.
~~~~~ indent ~~~~~ David Karol .. http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/05/17/a-foolish-consistency/ .. has an interesting post at the Monkey Cage in which he argues that Romney’s “very inconsistency was a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for his success in capturing his party’s presidential nomination this year.” But I think it goes further than Karol suggests. It’s not just that Romney had to switch his positions to be a credible potential nominee. I would argue that any Republican presidential nominee today would have to be a serious flip-flopper. ~~~~~~~~~~~~
And here is the reason.
~~~~~ again ~~~~~ The Republican Party has been moving to the right very quickly in recent years. Almost no one taking the stances that Romney is taking now could have been elected as a senator or a governor from most states just a few years ago. So, if you were consistently conservative (like, say, Bachmann or Santorum), you were either doomed to service in the House or to being kicked out of the Senate. If you had a presidential résumé, conversely, it was probably because your views were pretty moderate a few years ago. Arguably, the only person who can get nominated in the current Republican Party is someone who has pivoted to the right rapidly in the past decade. Rapid polarization makes flip-flopping a necessity. ~~~~~~~~~~~~
From “Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush” to “The principles that Ronald Reagan espoused are as true today as they were when he spoke them.”
From “Well, that’s what we did in Massachusetts, and that is, we put together an exchange, and the president’s copying that idea. I’m glad to hear that” to “Obamacare is bad news … and if I’m president of the United States I will repeal it.”
From “I just signed a piece of legislation extending the ban on certain assault weapons” to “I do not support any new legislation of an assault weapon ban nature.”
From “I’m not willing to sit back and say too bad for Michigan, too bad, too bad for the car industry” to “That’s exactly what I said…. ‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.’”
From “I think there is need for economic stimulus…” (2009) to “I have never supported the President’s recovery act, all right, the stimulus, no time, nowhere, no how.” (2011)
That is some serious flip-flopping and only possible from a man who at heart is a serial liar. But then again, in the immortal words of George Costanza, it’s really not a lie if you believe it.
___
(The Romney source photograph is a Creative Commons licensed image from photographer Gage Skidmore.)
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Without excusing Romney at all, i've been thinking the same 'had/has to be a flip-flopper' thing to have ever had any chance .. firstly, to get the nomination, and then to satisfy the myriad weird forms of Republican species the USA has tortuously eating at it's bark now.
Did you catch neocon William Kristol this morning? .. HaHAHA ..... ;)
Dukakis, Kerry ... Romney?
Remember Michael Dukakis (1988) and John Kerry (2004)? It's possible to lose a winnable presidential election to a vulnerable incumbent in the White House (or in the case of 1988, a sitting vice president). So, speaking of losing candidates from Massachusetts: Is it too much to ask Mitt Romney to get off autopilot and actually think about the race he's running?
Adopting a prevent defense when it's only the second quarter and you're not even ahead is dubious enough as a strategy. But his campaign's monomaniacal belief that it's about the economy and only the economy, and that they need to keep telling us stupid voters that it's only about the economy, has gone from being an annoying tick to a dangerous self-delusion.
As Frank Cannon and Jeff Bell, among others, have pointed out, the economy is not an automatic path to victory. It does provide a favorable backdrop for this year's campaign. But what are voters to think when they hear the GOP nominee say, as he did yesterday to CBS’s Jan Crawford, "As long as I continue to speak about the economy, I'm going to win"? That they're dopes who don't know the economy's bad, but as long as the Romney campaign keeps instructing them that it is bad, they'll react correctly and vote the incumbent out of office?
The economy is of course important. But voters want to hear what Romney is going to do about the economy. He can "speak about" how bad the economy is all he wants—though Americans are already well aware of the economy's problems—but doesn't the content of what Romney has to say matter? What is his economic growth agenda? His deficit reform agenda? His health care reform agenda? His tax reform agenda? His replacement for Dodd-Frank? No need for any of that, I suppose the Romney campaign believes. Just need to keep on "speaking about the economy."
The Romney campaign will answer that they're imitating Bill Clinton in 1992, who famously focused on "the economy, stupid." But Bill Clinton was a full spectrum presidential candidate, with detailed policy proposals on welfare reform, health care, education, and foreign policy. He also made real efforts to convince the voters he was different from the losing Democratic candidates who preceded him ("a new kind of Democrat," "ending welfare as we know it," a hawkish-sounding foreign policy, Sister Souljah, etc.). So far, the Romney campaign doesn't resemble the Clinton campaign. It seems to be following more comfortably in the tradition of the five post-Cold War Republican presidential candidates who preceded Romney. They received 37.5 percent, 40.7 percent, 47.9 percent, 50.7 percent, and 45.7 percent of the vote, respectively. The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to (narrow) defeat.
By the way, Romney made his comment about speaking about the economy on July 4th—a date that might suggest there's more to the American experiment than the economy.
The candidate's response on the ObamaCare mandate reveals larger campaign problems.
Editorial July 5, 2012, 10:46 a.m. ET
If Mitt Romney loses his run for the White House, a turning point will have been his decision Monday to absolve President Obama of raising taxes on the middle class. He is managing to turn the only possible silver lining in Chief Justice John Roberts's ObamaCare salvage operation—that the mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty is really a tax—into a second political defeat.
Appearing on MSNBC, close Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom was asked by host Chuck Todd if Mr. Romney "agrees with the president" and "believes that you shouldn't call the tax penalty a tax, you should call it a penalty or a fee or a fine?"
"That's correct," Mr. Fehrnstrom replied, before attempting some hapless spin suggesting that Mr. Obama must be "held accountable" for his own "contradictory" statements on whether it is a penalty or tax. Predictably, the Obama campaign and the media blew past Mr. Fehrnstrom's point, jumped on the tax-policy concession, and declared the health-care tax debate closed.
For conservative optimists who think Mr. Fehrnstrom misspoke or is merely dense, his tax absolution gift to Mr. Obama was confirmed by campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul, who tried the same lame jujitsu spin. In any event, Mr. Fehrnstrom is part of the Boston coterie who are closest to Mr. Romney, and he wouldn't say such a thing without the candidate's approval.
In a stroke, the Romney campaign contradicted Republicans throughout the country who had used the Chief Justice's opinion to declare accurately that Mr. Obama had raised taxes on the middle class. Three-quarters of those who will pay the mandate tax will make less than $120,000 a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Romney high command has muddied the tax issue in a way that will help Mr. Obama's claims that he is merely taxing rich folks like Mr. Romney. And it has made it that much harder for Republicans to again turn ObamaCare into the winning issue it was in 2010.
Why make such an unforced error? Because it fits with Mr. Romney's fear of being labeled a flip-flopper, as if that is worse than confusing voters about the tax and health-care issues. Mr. Romney favored the individual mandate as part of his reform in Massachusetts, and as we've said from the beginning of his candidacy his failure to admit that mistake makes him less able to carry the anti-ObamaCare case to voters.
Mr. Romney should use the Supreme Court opinion as an opening to say that now that the mandate is defined as a tax for the purposes of the law, he will work to repeal it. This would let Mr. Romney show voters that Mr. Obama's spending ambitions are so vast that they can't be financed solely by the wealthy but will inevitably hit the middle class.
Democrats would point to the Massachusetts record, but Mr. Romney could reply that was before the Supreme Court had spoken, that he had promised Bay Staters not to raise taxes, and so now the right policy is to repeal the tax along with the rest of ObamaCare. The tragedy is that for the sake of not abandoning his faulty health-care legacy in Massachusetts, Mr. Romney is jeopardizing his chance at becoming President.
Perhaps Mr. Romney is slowly figuring this out, because in a July 4 interview he stated himself that the penalty now is a "tax" after all. But he offered no elaboration, and so the campaign looks confused in addition to being politically dumb.
This latest mistake is of a piece with the campaign's insular staff and strategy that are slowly squandering an historic opportunity. Mr. Obama is being hurt by an economic recovery that is weakening for the third time in three years. But Mr. Romney hasn't been able to take advantage, and if anything he is losing ground.
The Romney campaign thinks it can play it safe and coast to the White House by saying the economy stinks and it's Mr. Obama's fault. We're on its email list and the main daily message from the campaign is that "Obama isn't working." Thanks, guys, but Americans already know that. What they want to hear from the challenger is some understanding of why the President's policies aren't working and how Mr. Romney's policies will do better.
Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is assailing Mr. Romney as an out-of-touch rich man, and the rich man obliged by vacationing this week at his lake-side home with a jet-ski cameo. Team Obama is pounding him for Bain Capital, and until a recent ad in Ohio the Romney campaign has been slow to respond.
Team Obama is now opening up a new assault on Mr. Romney as a job outsourcer with foreign bank accounts, and if the Boston boys let that one go unanswered, they ought to be fired for malpractice.
***
All of these attacks were predictable, in particular because they go to the heart of Mr. Romney's main campaign theme—that he can create jobs as President because he is a successful businessman and manager. But candidates who live by biography typically lose by it. See President John Kerry.
The biography that voters care about is their own, and they want to know how a candidate is going to improve their future. That means offering a larger economic narrative and vision than Mr. Romney has so far provided. It means pointing out the differences with specificity on higher taxes, government-run health care, punitive regulation, and the waste of politically-driven government spending.
Mr. Romney promised Republicans he was the best man to make the case against President Obama, whom they desperately want to defeat. So far Mr. Romney is letting them down.
A version of this article appeared July 5, 2012, on page A10 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Romney's Tax Confusion.
Romney: I'd No Longer Nominate Judges Like John Roberts Mitt Romney suggested in a Wednesday interview he would no longer nominate a judge like John Roberts, now that the U.S. chief justice has cast the deciding vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act. On his campaign website, Romney states that as president he “will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.” But apparently Roberts no longer makes the cut. Read More ? http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/mitt-romney-john-roberts-supreme-court.php?ref=fpnewsfeed
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