Mark Steyn advises Mitt Romney to shape up
I love Mark Steyn. Of-course. But his response over at NRO‘s The Corner to Newt Gingrich’s victory in the South Carolina primary mystifies me. Like a lot of what I’m reading and hearing from people I normally respect in conservative pundit circles, it comes across as a pained exercise in peddling total illogic.
He does, very effectively, lay out a litany of incompetence on the part of Mitt Romney and his campaign for the presidential nomination of Republican party (a campaign, it should be noted, that he’s been waging for something close to six years). He notes that during this campaign Mitt Romney has clearly been wasting the enormous sums of money he’s spent on it “in big ways and small.” Despite his highly paid advisors, Romney’s stump speech is “awful” and “insipid pap,” and he spews “generalities” which are “condescending.” He notes the apparent lack of an effective rapid-response team, and Romney’s failure to be prepared for obvious and predictable challenges—most recently on the subject of his tax returns. He observes, quite devastatingly I think, that Mitt Romney’s campaign currently resembles “an unreformable government bureaucracy: big, bloated, overstaffed, burning money, slow to react, and all but impossible to change.” He points out that Mitt Romney for 2012 has followed the same overarching strategy that failed for him in 2008: to “sit on his lead and run out the clock.”
Yet, as devastating as all of this is, in overall tone the column reads like a list of things that Mark Steyn would really like to see Mitt Romney correct. This is underscored by his final line in the piece: “Mitt needs to get good real fast: A real speech, real plan, real responses, and real fire in the belly. Does he have it in him?”
Well, what do you think, Mark?
I think that asking Mitt Romney to shape up now is a little like asking Captain Francesco Schettino to pull up his socks, steel his spine and do right by the passengers on the floundering Costa Concordia. That ship has kinda sailed, so to speak, hasn’t it? If Mitt Romney has been consistently floundering for the past six years on so many levels in his bid for the Republican nomination—despite the enormous advantages he has in terms of resources and the sewn-up support of a critical mass of the Republican establishment—why should anyone think he truly has it in him to turn himself around? Even more to the point, why should we really have confidence that he has it in him to beat Barack Obama in the fall?
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Instead of harping on the mind-boggling array of things which Mitt Romney needs to correct in his inept campaign, how about shifting the focus to giving some credit to the guy who won the state of South Carolina without any of Romney’s advantages? Newt Gingrich, for all of his flaws, is displaying the crucial strength which Romney lacks: an ability to connect with what voters are riled about this year, and an ability to articulate their more deeply-held and long-frustrated conservative beliefs. He won every congressional district in South Carolina and scored strongly in almost every voter demographic, including among “independents.” The scale of his victory means something, because it directly contradicts the conventional wisdom that he is unelectable. It shows that given the right opportunity to make his case, he connects, and with a broad range of people. It becomes easier to believe that he can make the sale on a national level. Mark Steyn’s woeful litany of things which Mitt Romney needs to work on tells us—as if we needed to know—the opposite about Mitt Romney. Given the opportunity over and over again to make his case, Mitt Romney fails to get the customer.
Sure: national polls have shown Romney preferred to Obama for the November election, but that’s not so much a reflection of how the national electorate knows and loves Mitt Romney as it is a reflection of how relatively eager they are to vote for an alternative to Obama, and they are assuming (based on the messages they have gotten from the media) that Mitt Romney is going to be that alternative. If Newt Gingrich becomes the presumptive nominee and then the actual nominee, that advantage of being the alternative to Barack Obama is going to accrue to him. It will be up to him not to squander it, of-course, but it will be there for his taking.
Based on how this campaign has gone to date, who—between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich—seems more likely to squander a built-in advantage?
