Newt Gingrich’s surprise victory in South Carolina a few weeks ago forced Mitt Romney to show he could get tough in Florida. Now Rick Santorum’s stunning sweep of three contests on Tuesday night should force Romney to do something far more difficult: transform himself into a leader who can energize his party.
It is still the case that Romney will almost certainly be the GOP nominee. The structure of the party’s process — with most delegates awarded proportionally — really does favor organization and long-term viability over momentary spasms of victory.
But if Romney handles the next six weeks badly, he’ll do himself a great deal of damage on the way to accepting the nomination. And it’s not beyond imagining he could cause so much harm to himself that someone else will limp into the nomination.
His impulse is to use his money and support to go negative on Santorum the way he did on Gingrich — and he should, to some degree.
Santorum deserves to have his own deviations from doctrinaire conservatism (supporting liberal Sen. Arlen Specter over conservative upstart Pat Toomey), his more extreme social views (he has moral qualms about contraception) and his own electoral failures (an 18-point loss in 2006) exposed to Republican voters who don’t yet know about them so they can make an informed choice as the primaries go forward.
That is the positive aspect of negative campaigning — it actually does provide information voters need.
But if Romney devotes most of his energies to keeping Gingrich down and leveling Santorum at the same time, he will simultaneously suck whatever life is left out of the Republican primary season in an effort simply to drag himself across the finish line.
While negativity is politically useful, it is also demoralizing unless it is accompanied — and to some extent overshadowed — by elevated and inspiring ideas about the American future.
By dwelling on the negative, Romney would risk turning the case for his own candidacy into nothing more than “I’m the best you’ve got, you might as well go with me.” There are precedents for such candidacies, and they are not good ones: Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bob Dole in 1996.
Telling Republican voters he’s a businessman who’s not from Washington won’t be enough. Romney may want it to be so, because it’s the most comfortable role for him to adopt; that, at least, is the takeaway from the fine Politico insta-e-book, “The Right Fights Back,” by Mike Allen and Evan Thomas.
The lesson of his defeats is that it’s really, really not.
Romney has adopted almost every position conservatives want their candidate to espouse: He’s pro-life, he wants to repeal ObamaCare, he wants to cut taxes and cut the federal budget, and he wants an unapologetic foreign policy dedicated to the proposition that this too will be the American century.
But that’s not what he is fervent about. He saves his urgency for the talk about being a businessman who can apply his experience to setting right what was wrong in America. It’s almost a 2012 version of Barack Obama’s 2008 slogan, “We are the change we have been waiting for” — only in Romney’s hands, it’s “I am the change you have been waiting for.”
He simply has to give his party more — more than himself.
The Romney campaign seems to be in the grip of a delusion that as time goes on Republicans will be forced to concede it is their patriotic duty to fall in line so that Barack Obama can be defeated.
This is not how ornery individualists vote. They have to be wooed and won, not made implicit demands of.
What do they want? They want what voters always want: To hear that their cause is just, their battles are noble, their leaders are tribunes and that righteousness as they see it will prevail.
Romney may not be comfortable taking that role, and he has every reason to be uncomfortable with it, but too bad. If he can’t assume it as a primary candidate, how on earth will he be able to inspire enough undecided voters in a general election to prevail over Barack Obama?