“Santorum’s Prophecy Is Coming True”: Republicans Scratch Their Heads At Romney Tax Messaging Chaos
Republicans are bewildered by the Romney campaign’s declaration that the health care law’s individual mandate is not a tax. The GOP seized on the messaging opportunity handed to them by the Supreme Court, and immediately started trumpeting the idea that President Obama wasn’t just raising taxes — he was orchestrating the largest tax hike in American history. But a top Romney adviser threw water on that Monday, saying the mandate isn’t a tax. The RNC chairman then said Romney believes it is a tax.
Confused yet? Republican strategists told TPM that far from the unified voice the GOP said it would present after the Supreme Court ruling, the messaging has been chaotic, and ultimately embarrassing for Romney and the GOP. But, they believe, the disarray won’t affect down-ballot races, in which GOP candidates can still push the tax messaging.
“It’s a problem, I’m not going to lie,” said Hogan Gidley, a former top adviser to Rick Santorum’s campaign. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it’s a problem for the Republicans.”
Gidley was often the public face for Santorum’s warnings that Romney would be caught in precisely this kind of health care mess if he became the nominee. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled and Romney’s campaign has already stepped on the GOP’s messaging, he says Santorum’s prophecy has come true.
“Here we are a couple months into the general and you’re going, ‘Hey wait a minute, that Rick Santorum was right,’” he said.
Democrats are certainly enjoying the “message dichotomy,” as Gidley put it. The party has sent out multiple press releases highlighting the differences between Republican leaders and their presidential nominee. But Gidley said Democrats who believe they’ve got Romney and the GOP on the run should be warned.
“Democrats are doing a dance in the street with the fact that the RNC and the Republican nominee are on different spin planes on this issue,” he said. “But when the dust settles, again, you’re just going to realize that Romney wants to repeal it and Obama doesn’t.”
Other Republican strategists agreed that the split on whether the mandate amounts to a tax is bad optics. But they said that Republicans candidates other than Romney — who don’t have the baggage of Romneycare to deal with — can still run on the tax messaging.
“It’s not as clean and on-message as Republican strategists might prefer,” said Jon McHenry, an unaligned D.C.-based GOP consultant and pollster. “But it’s a one-day, inside-the-Beltway, ‘what are these guys doing?’ story as opposed to taking the tax issue off the table for the next five months.”
Down ballot, the tax argument still works, McHenry said.
“[Senate] Democrats aren’t going to put Mitt Romney on air defending their position. They’re just not,” he said. “It’s more a missed opportunity for the Romney campaign than it is a detriment to other [GOP] campaigns.”
Another strategist agreed that Republicans are annoyed by the Romney campaign steering the focus away from the tax-based message, which strategists think has real legs.
“A lot of people think he’s trying to get too cute,” said the strategist.
By: Evan McMorris-Santoro, Talking Points Memo, July 3, 2012
“Why Bain Is Back”: The Folks On The Receiving End Of Capitalism’s Creative Destruction
A month ago, conventional wisdom had it that the Bain attacks on Mitt Romney were somehow failing terribly — notwithstanding the fact that they’ve been key parts of every other campaign Democrats and Republicans have run against Romney going all the way back to 1994. And yet all of a sudden, the Obama campaign is going full outsource/Bain attack on Romney at every opportunity. So they think it’s working great. New polling suggests they may be on to something. And in the most telling development, in the days leading up to the surprise Supreme Court ruling, the Romney campaign itself is mounting a mammoth pushback, signaling more clearly than anything that they think it’s working too.
So what happened?
Consider three basic factors. First, round one of the Bain Wars was almost entirely hashed out in what you might call the Acela corridor — an insular community, overwhelmingly affluent and educated, and decidedly not the audience for the message or the folks who find themselves on the receiving end of capitalism’s creative destruction.
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) visited TPM’s DC offices last week as part of our Newsmaker interview series and said basically: trust me, this message worked in Ohio. Maybe he was right all along. I suspect he was.
But there was another rhetorical dimension. ‘Private equity’ is a weird phrase. Most people have no idea what it does or doesn’t mean. And the Romney campaign through it’s surrogates was able to hit its opponents with something like ‘Hey, it’s poor form to be going all Nation magaziney and pretending that private equity isn’t awesome!’
And within that community, it worked. Thus Cory Booker, Bill Clinton, and a lot of other Democrats. ‘Private equity’ means a lot of different things. My own sense is that some parts of it are incredibly destructive while others create efficient allocations of capital. But who cares what I think? Wherever you come down on that question there’s simply no question that private equity is at the tip of the the spear of creative destruction in our society. So in a country where everybody gets to vote, it’s sort of crazy to think criticizing something like that would somehow be beyond the pale like attacking the Pope or crapping on motherhood and apple pie. But there it was.
‘Outsourcing’ though and ‘Offshoring’ — these are just more graspable words, more concrete concepts. Everybody understands them. Everybody knows what they mean. I’m pretty sure the Romney campaign wants to say something like, ‘C’mon, our whole economy today is based on stuff like this and we all know it and everybody accepts it so don’t pretend otherwise.’ But they can’t. And what really got them all boxed up was when they got themselves into this ridiculous debate over whether Mitt’s an ‘outsourcer’ or an ‘offershorer’. As I said Monday, that’s an argument you lose by winning. Or lose by losing. Whichever way, you lose.
Even really smart strategists manage sometimes to charge into a brown paper bag like this. But this was a bad move because it opened Romney up to that most lethal political weapons: ridicule and mockery. The Obama camp seemed to get this early and just decided to drive a freight train right through him. Holding out for this distinction seemed incredibly stupid and more than that wildly out of touch since the difference is basically immaterial to people who lose their jobs as a result of it. And, as always, weakness which invites attacks.
In a country afflicted for decades by loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs and chronically stagnant working class and middle class wages it’s crazy to think that Romney’s history as a private equity king — especially one working the lower tiers of the private equity world — wouldn’t be a liability for a lot of voters. But it was something that DC reporters were best positioned to miss.
By: Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, July 2, 2012
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