February 07, 2008
Mitt who?
So, Mitt Romney decide to call it quits today and end his race for the Republican nomination, essentially ceding the big prize to McCain.
I was never a Romney fan -- Thompson was my guy, until he decided that campaigning was just so darn inconvenient. But, as the field dwindled, he ended up being my pick as the least awful of the available choices.
And now, despite his money and once insurmountable-lead, he's history.
Patrick Ruffini offers an astute post mortem on the still-warm corpse of the late, great Romney Candidacy.
What Romney didn’t account for is that it would take more than being a CPAC, or Agenda Conservative to win the nomination. Country Music Conservatives — and frankly, most voters outside the Beltway swamp — don’t listen to your words; they listen to your tone of voice as you’re delivering those words. Do you get angry when you should? What’s your sense of humor like? For social conservatives, are you grounded in faith? And ultimately, are you the real deal?
This has nothing to do with being right on issues. It has everything to do with being authentic.
Any voter in the Agenda Conservative orbit got the Romney message: we need to stop McCain and Huck is a tax hiker, so vote Romney. This message actually affected a fairly large segment of the primary electorate: about 30%. As the kind of people who go to CPAC and think issues matter, bloggers like us are squarely in this orbit. Everyday, what we write has the opportunity to directly impact about 30% of the party — and more than that when we have other things in common with social conservatives or moderate hawks.
Romney’s capturing of this constituency is seen in the election returns. He was essentially the candidate of white collar salesmen driving around in the suburbs listening to talk radio. He got 46% in Oakland County, Michigan, 38% in Cobb County, Georgia, and 42% in Duval County (Jacksonville), Florida. Those were virtually his lone standout performances — and they came from the world most bloggers and radio hosts inhabit. Even those of us who are social conservatives rarely live in the rural South. And because of this cocooning, the conservative elite failed to understand how those voters could possibly have more in common with a Baptist minister with a Massachusetts millionaire. We can debate the LDS effect all we want, but even without it, Romney already had two strikes against him: that he was from the land of Kennedy and Kerry and acted like it, and that he was too white collar for a party that most of the bluebloods have left.
[...]
Despite these challenges, it was still a close call. As I said: a few thousand votes the other way in New Hampshire… But still: the ease with which John McCain won states like South Carolina and Florida has taken us all aback. It all boils down to Agenda Conservatives being nowhere near a majority of the party. Yes, John McCain was a weak frontrunner, but Mitt Romney was a weak challenger, and enough conservatives chose character and authenticity over issues to make the difference.
Romney's "authenticity" always struck me as a major weakness. Say what you will about McCain and Huckabee, there's no doubt that both men are comfortable with who they are -- even if that identity is often indistinguishable from that of a Democrat or a 21st Century Huey Long.
It seems to me that Romeny had a problem for which there was no good solution: He was Mitt Romney.
Posted by Mike Lief at February 7, 2008 11:32 PM
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Comments
There's an old - well, maybe not *so* old - German convention of ordering coffee "with cream" (mit schlag) as ordering "kaffee mit." Then in a perverse twist, ordering coffee black became coffee without with (kaffee ohne mit).
It looks like we're in the black coffee now: ohne Mitt. As it were.
Posted by: BlogDog at February 12, 2008 06:06 PM