Opinion

Mitt’s losing habit

It’s said that Mitt Romney likes to deliberate: to gather massive amounts of information, master it, consult with people he trusts — then make a decision and execute his plan with precision.

Admirable? Sure. A sign of a mature perspective? Undoubtedly. But it may be destructive to his presidential bid, with the election just four months away.

Case in point: It took nearly a week for Romney to hit on an appropriate response to the Supreme Court ruling on ObamaCare. Two hours after the ruling, he said he agreed with the dissent that found nearly every element of the bill unconstitutional.

After he spoke, his party and his putative supporters could speak of little else than Chief Justice John Roberts’ perverse majority opinion. The consoling belief for those who loathe ObamaCare was that Romney had at least been handed a weapon by the court’s finding that the mandate to buy insurance is a tax — because that means Obama violated his 2008 pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class. But Romney went silent. For four days.

Then, Monday morning on MSNBC, his campaign committed a bizarre blunder: Spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom, reportedly Romney’s closest aide, told Chuck Todd: “The governor believes that what we put in place in Massachusetts was a penalty, and he disagrees with the court’s ruling that the mandate was a tax.”

So this was why Romney had gone silent. The campaign had been working through what it believed was a terrible problem — how were they to talk about the ObamaCare tax without triggering accusations that Romney’s own Massachusetts plan had been structured along the same lines?

The Romneyites looked at it from the right and from the left, from the top and from the bottom, with polls and with focus groups, not to mention soothsayers and alchemists and practicioners of voudoun. And they came up with a trick-shot solution.

They would attack the court by saying the majority opinion was wrong, since of course conservatives believe the majority opinion was wrong. But they could save Romney from the flip-flop charge by saying the opinion was wrong because ObamaCare is not a tax like the opinion says.

By doing this, Romney would shield himself from attacking President Obama for doing something he had done himself seven years ago — imposing a monetary cost on everyone in Massachusetts who didn’t buy health care as dictated by his plan.

As a piece of crisis management, it was a pretty clever solution — but only if you think Romney was in a crisis. He wasn’t: The court’s ruling on the tax question was a problem for Obama.

We learned that Romney’s perspective on the Supreme Court decision was entirely defensive. Consumed with protecting his own weak flank on health care, he completely ignored the practical reality that he’d been handed a chance to deepen the public’s sense of Obama as a big-spending liberal whose promise to limit tax hikes to the wealthiest Americans was hollow and factitious.

That’s not just a missed opportunity; it stands as a fundamental piece of political mismanagement.

Finally, on July 4, he gave in. “The majority of the court said it’s a tax and, therefore, it is a tax,” Romney said almost grudgingly.

Here we see the costs of Romney’s deliberative approach.

First, he wastes precious time. It’s not necessary for everything in a presidential election to be rapid-fire — but when a major issue surfaces and becomes the talk of the nation, a campaign must at least be lively, engaged, on the move.

Presidents are supposed to lead, not follow. Go quiet and you look dead. If you look dead, you lose.

Second, Romney seems to have an unfortunate habit of cocooning himself with advisers who’ve been through the wars with him — an understandable impulse, except that they all seem to be fighting the last war rather than the current one.

Other voices are shut out. According to the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake, Romney’s foreign-policy team is almost entirely without direction because Romney isn’t all that interested in the subject and so his major underlings aren’t either.

Third, he’s not focused on making the sale with the American people. He wants to sand off his own rough edges and be as inoffensive as possible to keep attention focused on Obama’s mistakes. That won’t do it. He has to get people to vote for him. That means taking some risks, including being called a flip-flopper.

He should be called a flip-flopper: He is one. So is Obama. So are all politicians. Big deal.

The problem is that not all politicians are winners. Whatever Obama may or may not be, he’s a winner. The jury’s out on Romney.