Is the Romney campaign depending too much on bad economic news to get their guy elected? The argument gaining traction among conservatives is that the Romneyites aren’t making a strong-enough case for his candidacy. They aren’t embracing a vision of the country and its future; they aren’t elevating the discussion; they aren’t supplying enough specifics.
Bill Kristol likens the Romney approach to a “prevent defense,” and says such defenses don’t necessarily work when you’re 14 points ahead, let alone if you’re tied or a little behind, as Romney is.
“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,” Kristol writes, “has gone from being an annoying tick to a dangerous self-delusion.”
He points out that Bill Clinton, in 1992, was more than the “it’s the economy, stupid” candidate; he produced wonky proposals on foreign-policy and health-care and welfare reform.
But there’s a problem with this analogy, and with this general line on Romney: Clinton did those things because he had to address very specific shortcomings in his own experience and to draw distinctions between himself and his Democratic predecessors, whom the public viewed as too left-wing.
He was young and slick; he needed to seem mature and substantive. He’d tricked his way out of military service in the late 1960s; he needed to show some toughness in foreign policy as a result.
In other words, he did it to polish his own image. He went substantive not to be substantive, but because he had an image problem he had to tackle. He needed to prove he was big enough for the job.
And what of those wonky proposals? They meant almost nothing. His health-care talk during the 1992 campaign did not in any way resemble the Rube Goldberg proposal he unleashed in 1993. There was little continuity between the foreign-policy material his campaign produced and the foreign policy he pursued as president.
The key policy document produced by the Clinton campaign — “Putting People First,” his compendium of proposals on how to fix the economy — was consciously echoed by Mitt Romney’s 59-point program released last year called “Believe in America.”
Clinton was saluted for “Putting People First.” Romney was largely mocked for “Believe in America.” Which shows you just how much “substance” actually matters.
True, the Romney campaign isn’t generating reams of documents from its various committees the way previous campaigns have. But campaign substance can come in many forms. Romney took a major leap forward on Wednesday with the best speech he’s ever given, before the NAACP.
In graceful and clear language before an audience that was hostile at best, Romney connected the need for education reform and stable family life to the disproportionate negative effect the economic troubles have had on the African-American community. It was powerful, effective and substantive.
Romney will have the chance to deliver many such speeches in the coming months on all the issues that Kristol and others want him to explore beyond the merely economic. He should. If he doesn’t, that will be stupid, because he has to talk and talk and talk for four more months, and there should be a bit of variety at the very least.
But the “Romney isn’t being substantive enough” crowd is wrong if its members think the strategy of staying relatively vague is a losing one. Successful politicians have to allow less ideological voters some room to project their own best hope for the future onto the person they’re thinking of voting for.
Richard Nixon, in 1968, told the nation he had a plan for ending the war in Vietnam — but he had to keep the plan a secret so he wouldn’t show his hand to the enemy. Ronald Reagan spoke vaguely in 1980 of renewing “family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom.”
And, of course, Obama in 2008 got millions of clueless rubes — excuse me, enthusiastic young people — to fall for his vapid malarkey about change and hope and hope and change. Hope was audacious. We were the change we’ve been waiting for. Whatever you wanted him to be, he was.
Romney can’t play that card. But to win, he needs millions of people who might not vote for him to do so — and to do that, he needs them to think he’ll do right by them. But those millions disagree about what it would mean to do right by them. As a matter of strategy, what he needs to do is point in the general direction and let them fill in the blanks.
Anyway, he’s said he’ll do everything he can to repeal ObamaCare, unleash domestic energy production, cut regulations and reform the tax code. If he were to do half of that, his would be a transformative presidency.