‘a billion dollars aimed at a single person.” There was a week last summer during which I heard that phrase spoken every day by different people in the Republican ambit — two political consultants on Monday and Tuesday, a senator on Wednesday, a major donor on Thursday and a candidate for office on Friday.
The Obama campaign had vowed to raise $1 billion. It wouldn’t need the money for a primary contest; it could save it all for the general election. And it would only be raising it for one purpose: To destroy Obama’s opponent.
Think of it. Nothing like it has ever remotely been attempted before. The amount of cash, to be spent in a period of three or four months, is staggering. Think of every aggressive advertising campaign you’ve ever seen for the release of a major motion picture and then multiply it by a factor of 20.
And most of it designed to bring a single person — one single person — down.
If you want to know why the GOP race became the race it did — why the candidates who seemed best suited to taking on Obama in 2012 didn’t run — the obsession in Republican ranks last year over the Obama campaign plan is the best explanation.
Go ahead and believe all the talk about “not being ready” and “not hearing the call” and “wanting to serve the people of my state” and all that. It’s almost certainly nonsense. The people who didn’t run saw a bruising primary battle ahead of them, followed by an unrivaled and unprecedented onslaught in which nothing would be off-limits.
Mitt Romney handed the Obama campaign’s attack machine a gift on Wednesday with his carelessly phrased remark — “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” Right there you can see an ad buy in the tens of millions of dollars in which those words are used to make him seem heartless, out of touch, cruel, unfeeling.
Of course Romney didn’t mean he doesn’t care about the very poor; in point of fact, he has probably given more in charity to the poor than any other major politician in America. Romney tends to speak very quickly, especially when the subject is one that makes him a mite uncomfortable — health care, say, or issues of class.
He should learn a lesson from this and take a breath. Think before he speaks.
Great politicians don’t fear slowing down. Or silence. In fact, slowness and silence are useful political tools. They are ways in which a politician can learn to control the discussion instead of being directed by it.
It’s only February, and gleeful Democrats and leftists are likely to drain this quote of its effectiveness rather quickly.
The key for Romney is to remember this: In politics, as in golf, the worst mistakes are self-inflicted. You lose focus and slice the ball into the woods. You get nervous on the last day and psych yourself out and overprepare and miss a six-foot putt you could make in your sleep. The first rule of politics is not to do yourself damage.
That’s especially true this year. It appears Obama is not going to reach his goal of a billion dollars, but $750 million will be enough.
But disheartened conservatives and Republicans have no reason to panic. First, it’s clear Romney is a quick study, as his transformative debate performances in Florida proved; when he has to adapt, he does.
And, more important: All the negative advertising in the world won’t save Barack Obama from the judgment of the voters if they decide his tenure has failed them and the country.
No matter how much Obama raises, no matter how biased the media are in his favor, the re-election of an incumbent is inevitably a referendum on the incumbent, even though incumbents would like to think otherwise — and, in the case of the Obama campaign, to make it otherwise.
John Kerry was a pretty lousy candidate in 2004, but he ran a campaign on George Bush’s greatest vulnerability, Iraq. Republicans would have loved to run a campaign based solely on Kerry’s flip-flopping, but they couldn’t. Bush was forced to make an affirmative case for the war in a series of speeches in September and October.
In the end, Bush won 51-48 — which almost tracked pretty closely with the national approval-disapproval numbers on the war in Iraq (52-44, according to Gallup) on Election Day.
The dynamics of this year’s race haven’t changed because Romney put his foot in his mouth. Indeed, if Romney views this as a teachable moment for himself, he might just have discovered how to avoid giving the Obama machine more grist for its relentless mill.
Slow. Down.