“Romney As Republican Comfort Food”: He Talks A Great Donor Game, But Doesn’t Strike The Grassroots As Authentic
It’s way too early to tell who is going to run, who is able to run and who will win from running for president in 2016. But if prognosticators didn’t try to take a stab at it, then those of us in the politics business would be pushing the unemployment rate up another percentage point.
Thus, the latest CBS poll of potential 2016 nominees shows 6 in 10 Republican voters, or 59 percent of that bloc, want to see Romney stump on the presidential campaign trail. Jake Miller at CBS News:
Republicans have a particularly broad field of prospective candidates, and it’s seemingly growing by the day: Just last week, the 2012 GOP nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, told a room of donors in New York City that he’s seriously entertaining a 2016 bid.
Fifty-nine percent of Republicans would like to see Romney jump into the 2016 race, while only 26 percent believe he should stay out, according to the CBS News poll.
Fifty percent of Republicans would like to see former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on the campaign trail as well, while 27 percent disagree. If both Romney and Bush run, analysts expect them to wage a competitive battle for the allegiance of the Republican establishment.
A lot of observers are scratching their collective heads on Romney’s sudden phantom rise given his self-inflicting 2012 defeat and his flopped run in the 2008 GOP primary. But there are indications of a raging battle between donors and various wings of party activists: he talks a great donor game, but doesn’t necessarily strike the grassroots folks as authentic – unless you fell in love with the unrecognizably likable Mitt showcased in that post-election Netflix documentary. And, the only thing holding Bush back, at the moment, is both his brand (the last name makes everyone, regardless of political affiliation, queasy) and skepticism over his stances on key issues as they’ve changed over the past decade.
If anything, such an overwhelming response from GOP voters should not assume Romney is a great candidate. It just says Republicans are comfortable with going with what they know; even Bush with 50 percent is folks simply going with the brand they know as opposed to the truly qualified brand at the moment. The other presumptives will just have to work harder at name ID.
By: Charles Ellison, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 19, 2015
“Let’s Go Inside His Head”: The True Confessions Of Mitt Romney
Say you’re Mitt Romney, and you still can’t believe you lost the 2012 election. You’ve been aiming barbs at President Obama and sending heartwarming Christmas cards featuring your large family. In 2014, you star in a flattering documentary and post charming photos of your hike through the Mountain West with five of your 22 grandchildren. When asked whether you will make a third try for the White House, you and your wife say absolutely not, many times in many ways.
And then suddenly you’re giving off definitive “let’s do this thing” vibes: telling donors you will almost certainly run, calling former allies and aides, adding yourself to the program at the Republican National Committee meeting in San Diego and inviting conservative radio host Laura Ingraham to an “off the record” lunch at a ski resort in Utah, after which she tells The Washington Post you were “fully engaged and up to speed,” and seemed no longer content to be “just a passive player in American politics.”
So what catapulted you off the sidelines? Jeb Bush’s forceful entry into the emerging field was the spark. But you’ve been reconsidering for a while, looking at the other establishment favorites and wondering why the heck not. It’s not like you’re too old. The baby boom generation is still clogging up the runway. At 67, you’re about the same age as Hillary Clinton and not all that much older than Jeb, who will be 62 next month. As for old news, you’re practically a fresh face compared with Clinton, who has been in the news nonstop for more than two decades. And seriously, how damaging is a third grab for the ring when your competition is the third guy in his family to run?
What else is Romney thinking? Let’s go inside his head.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s tendency to erupt at people was fun for a while and raised lots of money, he muses. But I can raise money, too. And while I’m kind of awkward sometimes, I’m pretty sure voters won’t want a president who gets into public screaming matches. Not that I hold a grudge against Christie, even though his 2012 convention keynote was much more about him than me. But what makes him think people are going to disregard eight downgrades in his state’s credit rating, a poor job-creation performance or investigations into Bridgegate, the five-day traffic nightmare that punished a Democratic mayor? I certainly won’t.
It’s impressive, yes, that Gov. Scott Walker took on unions and has won three Wisconsin elections in six years. But would voters really pick this untested young candidate over the man who saved the 2002 Olympics and countless floundering businesses? (That would be me). And does Walker have the presence and skills to dominate a national race? I’ve already proven I can crush a sitting president in a debate.
And don’t get me started on Jeb and his family: his father’s reversal on his no-new-taxes pledge; his brother’s wars, deficits and intrusive federal education law; and his own support for comprehensive immigration reforms and Common Core education standards. All I did was sign “Romneycare” when I was governor of Massachusetts. I’ve already denied that it was the model for Obamacare. I’ve already said no other state should be required to do what I did. I’ve already said the federal law should be repealed. Problem solved.
I want to pause here to thank my good friend, the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, for his advice on how to deal with that time I dismissed 47 percent of the country as moochers who are dependent on government, believe they are victims, and will never take responsibility for their lives. Hewitt is right, everyone makes mistakes. Look at Hillary’s “we were broke when we left the White House” gaffe; Rick Perry’s “oops” moment when he forgot the third federal agency he wanted to eliminate; and Jeb’s description of illegal immigration as an “act of love” by people trying to give their families better lives. I never pretend to be poor, and I don’t start lists I can’t finish. Maybe I went a bit too far with the “self-deportation” business on immigration. You won’t hear me use that phrase again.
Above all, I won’t forget that a lot of those 47-percenters are veterans, seniors, low-income workers, the disabled and people searching desperately for jobs. And I won’t forget that a lot of them vote Republican — even for me! I won the seniors and the veterans, and I nearly won the union vote. I’m not only going to remember these folks, I’m going to focus my next campaign on opportunity and upward mobility. Wait, what do you mean, Jeb already named his political action committee Right to Rise, and stole the phrase — with permission — from my own 2012 running mate?
Back to the drawing board for the third round. I know the right message is out there somewhere.
By: Jill Lawrence, Creative Writers Syndicate; The National Memo, January 15, 2015
“So Much For The Deep Bench”: Republicans Look To The Past For 2016
On Friday, 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney walked back months of promises and told a group of his past donors that he is “seriously considering” another White House bid. According to the Washington Post, he then spent the weekend “calling former aides, donors and other supporters” to rebuild his political operation, and even told one senior Republican that he “almost certainly will” launch another presidential campaign.
There’s still plenty of reason to believe that Romney will not run — and that he’d struggle to win if he did. But if Romney does join the race, he won’t be the only retread candidate seeking the GOP nomination in 2016.
Romney’s runner-up in 2012, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, has made no secret of his intention to pursue the Republican nomination again. When Santorum was informed that Romney may run again in 2016, he reportedly responded, “bring it on,” and declared that he sees himself as “the winner” in what looks as though it will be a crowded field. Former Texas governor Rick Perry has also begun laying the groundwork for a campaign, huddling with donors and policy experts in the hopes of avoiding a repeat of his 2012 disaster.
If Santorum does run, he’ll likely be joined by fellow Iowa caucus winner Mike Huckabee. The former Arkansas governor recently ended his Fox News show to explore a White House bid. Huckabee won 278 delegates in the 2008 presidential race, barely edging Romney’s 271 but losing easily to Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who has dismissed 2016 speculation by quoting the late Morris Udall: “The people have spoken — the bastards.”
As Romney, Huckabee, Perry, and Santorum weigh their options, former Florida governor Jeb Bush has moved decisively towards a run and established himself as the early frontrunner. Of course, Bush isn’t exactly a fresh face, either; he has not held elected office in six years, and he would almost certainly not be mentioned as a top-tier candidate were he not the brother of the 43rd president and the son of the 41st.
There’s plenty of precedent for Republicans considering well-known national figures and former candidates for their nomination; it’s been the party’s modus operandi for decades. But this year was supposed to be different. As various pundits repeated ad nauseam during the 2012 campaign, the Republican Party was supposed be the party with a “deep bench” of “rising stars” to lead America into the future. But upon further review, anointing Bob McDonnell, Chris Christie, or Marco Rubio as the party’s standard-bearer doesn’t seem like such a great idea.
Some candidates who won media favor in 2012 (such as Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and Kentucky senator Rand Paul) still seem capable of mounting serious campaigns. But they have generated so little support as to leave candidates like Romney and Huckabee confident that they could run again and win. And so the GOP once again seems poised to turn to its failed candidates of the past.
Perhaps it’s no wonder that many Republicans seem determined to take down Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton with a campaign straight out of 1994.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, January 13, 2015
“He Must Not Merely Lose, He Must Be Humiliated”: If Mitt Romney Insists On Running For President, Then He Needs To Be Trounced
The main reason democracy works is not the ballot box. It is accountability.
Humans are weak and prone to corruption, and one problem with authoritarian regimes is that there is no mechanism for holding people accountable when corruption inevitably occurs. In a democracy, there is. It’s far from perfect, but in the long run accountability leads to democratic countries being more prosperous, peaceful, and powerful. Just look at the rampant corruption and pollution in China, or Russia’s slide into fascism.
The ballot box is just a mechanism for accountability. I suspect that the U.S. would more or less achieve the same results if it had a computer that replaced one clique of megalomaniacal Ivy League graduates with another clique of megalomaniacal Ivy League graduates every time GDP growth and unemployment hit a certain number — this is essentially what the ballot box does.
Accountability is a different phenomenon. If you have the ballot box without a culture of accountability, you get Iraq’s chaos or Hugo Chavez’s bread lines. Only culture generates and sustains accountability — the rules of the game are the product of a culture that is willing to enforce them. Such a culture creates secular saints like John Profumo, who, after resigning from the British government over a sex scandal, didn’t join a private equity firm, but instead spent years mopping toilets at a charity.
All of which brings us to Willard Mitt Romney.
In the political realm, you want a culture that says you can only be a major party’s presidential nominee once (unless you win the presidency, of course). Why? Because. Because it allows new blood to emerge. Because otherwise you risk becoming a place like France, where the same politicians have been playing musical chairs for decades. Both Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand ran for president twice on a major party ticket before being elected to the top job, and the country would have been better off if their parties had held them accountable instead. Party machines run like feudal systems, doing everything to protect the Boss, including tolerating a culture of corruption. Healthy political parties realize that the cemeteries are full of indispensable men and rotate their troops.
This means that if Mitt Romney is to run for president, which it increasingly looks like he will do, he must not merely lose — he must be humiliated. This is not only because he would be a terrible standard bearer for the GOP (although that’s certainly true), but also because an example must be made of him. He must suffer a defeat so stinging that it will deter anyone else who might try that trick in the future.
Romney’s candidacy is clearly an exercise in self-delusion. For the GOP to nominate a painfully wooden private-equity baron — at a time when its biggest problem is its image as the party of rich white men — was excusable the first time; a second time, it would be a joke. No American would take the party seriously. And if Romney thinks talking about poverty — an issue on which no mainstream journalist would give him the benefit of the doubt — will change his public perception, he clearly has departed from reality. Even without the accountability aspect, a Romney candidacy would be a disaster.
I personally find it impossible not to have sympathy for Mitt Romney, the man. But there seems to be two Romneys. There’s “Mitt,” the fair-dealing businessman, the talented technocratic governor, the Christian man deeply involved in his church, the devoted husband and father. And then there is “Candidate Romney,” a man who seems to be so consumed by his self-regard, his unshakeable faith in his own world-historical significance, that he is willing to say anything, and do anything, to reach the highest office in the land. The question was always which one would end up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if elected. But now it is moot.
What was most endearing about Mitt Romney was what seemed like a genuine, basic human decency. But this selfsame decency should have told him that, no matter how great a president he thinks he would be, he could not run again, for the good of his party and country. Since he seemingly does not understand this, the country must make him understand.
By: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, January 15, 2015
“Still With Worrisome Fundamental Beliefs”: It Says A Lot That A Strong Economy Is Bad News For Mitt Romney in 2016
Nothing says democracy like a private-equity-manager-turned-governor whose dad ran for president facing off against a governor-turned-private-equity-manager whose dad was president over, you guessed it, the presidency.
That’s what we might get, though, if Mitt Romney, who’s “considering” a run in 2016, and Jeb Bush, who’s already formed a political action committee, end up duking it out over the Republican nomination. (Romney started out in private equity before becoming a governor, for those keeping score at home, while Bush was a governor before getting into private equity). But before we, well, get too far into the horserace, we should remember that Romney, at least, lost in no small way because he didn’t have anything approximating a policy agenda.
Think about that. Romney was a professional presidential candidate for almost five years by the time Election Day rolled around in 2012, and he still didn’t have a coherent strategy for the economy by then. His tax plan was a mathematical impossibility: he would have had to either abandon his tax cuts for the rich, raise taxes on the middle class, or run much bigger deficits to make it work.
And his economic plan, well, we’re still waiting for it. Romney told his donors that “if it looks like I’m going to win, the markets will be happy” and “we’ll see capital come back, and we’ll see—without actually doing anything—we’ll actually get a boost to the economy.” And that was it.
Romney really thought President Obama was scaring away a recovery, so all he had to do was win and then do nothing. Now, to be fair, doing nothing has actually worked out okay for Obama since he got re-elected, though not by choice, as the combination of more monetary stimulus, less fiscal austerity, and time have healed the economy enough that unemployment has started falling fast.
In fact, joblessness is already lower after two years, at 5.6 percent, than Romney said he’d get it in four. But, as you might have noticed, the recession put us in such a deep hole that there are still plenty of problems that need fixing. Romney, though, didn’t have a plan to take advantage of can’t-go-any-lower interest rates to rebuild our infrastructure. Or to help underwater homeowners refinance their mortgages. Or, more on this in a minute, to increase worker wages.
Romney, in other words, just ran against the economy, and hoped that would be enough. It wasn’t. And it shouldn’t even be an option in 2016, when unemployment could be as low as 4 percent. The question then won’t be how to get jobs, but rather how to get good ones with good pay.
Now, Romney is ideologically flexible. But he seems to have some worrisome fundamental beliefs that would hurt him if he runs in 2016.
After he lost the presidential race, Romney blamed his loss on Obama giving “gifts” to minorities and women, and warned that “this is really serious” since “we’re following the path of every other great nation, which is we’re following greater government, tax the rich people, promise more stuff to everybody, borrow until you go over a cliff.”
Does that sound like somebody who would try to boost stagnant wages—which should be the issue of 2016—by, say, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (and the ranks of the “47 43 percent“) like a lot of conservative wonks want to?
By: Matt O’Brien, The Wonk Blog, The Washington Post, January 12, 2015
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