The Fall of Romney, Inc.

In fairness to Team Romney, they did more right than not. They rose from single digits in the national polls to receiving 32% of the primary votes cast to date. They became the conservative establishment’s choice. They leveraged mechanical and resource superiority into solid leads in Iowa and New Hampshire, giving Rudy Giuliani pause about competing in the early states and chasing John McCain from Iowa. They leveraged their candidate’s mastery of pat, 60-second answers into dominance (and rising poll numbers) out of the first debates. They met their goal of winning Ames, and got a bump. They met their goal of 30,000 votes in the Iowa Caucus.

Nearly all of the benchmarks set by Romney, Inc. were met — and often with flying colors. They checked every box they needed to become the nominee. Practically everything the Romney campaign could keep under control, they did. But for a few thousand votes in New Hampshire, the conversation today would be dramatically different.

Unfortunately for Mitt Romney, goals and benchmarks are not the same as real-world outcomes. John McCain missed nearly all of his campaign’s benchmarks and yet will become the nominee.

The X-factor in translating a campaign’s technical mastery into victory is the candidate himself. And here, there was something missing.

I am attending CPAC this week. This is the same CPAC Mitt Romney put a huge effort into last year, paying some 200 students to come vote for him and likely providing his margin of victory over Rudy Giuliani (I know! Rudy once finished second at CPAC. Wild…). His speech last year was packed with every conservative insider’s code word imaginable. McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy — you name it.

Conservatives at CPAC care mostly about one thing: getting the policy right. Saying the right words is of paramount importance. And what you say today is more important than what you said yesterday (provided you didn’t make a sport of poking conservatives in the eye). And so while we all got a chuckle out of “Flip Romney,” CPAC rewards the candidate whose words (today at least) most closely match the clearly defined worldview of its audience. Much the same is true of the predominantly economic and national security conservatives in the blogosphere and on talk radio.

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.

The idea that talk radio could paper over this basic demographic divide is almost comical. The leader/follower model of conservative support (get Rush, the talkers, the CPAC people, all the groups on your side, and in so doing win the hearts and minds of a decisive majority of conservatives) has been proven starkly and decisively wrong.

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.

Let’s face it: in this primary, blogs and talk radio were an echo chamber. What was happening in the electorate (identity-minded Christian voters choosing Huck; loosely affiliated conservatives choosing McCain) was unthinkable to Agenda Conservatives. At a minimum, this challenges us to think differently about the movement, to junk the leader/follower model for a networked model that elevates real grassroots outside the Beltway over “grasstops” and to find new ways of bringing low-information conservative voters into the fold.

(from cadillactight.wordpress.)

Right wing establishment failed to deliver for Romney Posted on February 8, 2008 by Joe Tobacco Ruffini:

Yes, we here at Cadillac Tight (no, I don’t have a mouse in my pocket, I speak here of my readers and I) came to that conclusion when we saw Romney fail in Florida. While there wasn’t quite the pre-Super Tuesday talk radio push for Romney right before the Florida primary, the talkers were already coming down very hard on McCain. Polls didn’t look good for Romney going into that primary anyhow, and when he did lose it to McCain, it was evident that Hewitt & Co. had failed.

I wonder, though, if they’ll come out of this with any humility? Look, talk radio does two things very well: It whips up rage about issues that are already disturbing the GOP base, and it ensures that stories favorable to the right, or damaging to the left percolate up into the traditional media. That’s it. No one ever anointed these talkers leaders of anyone, or anything…they simply assumed that mantle for themselves, and were shocked, shocked I tell you when CPAC rolled around, and they saw in the mirror that the mantle didn’t exist: They were naked.

Indeed, what the Republican establishment considered an unbeatable alliance, talk radio combined with National Review, was unable to save them from what they perceive as the horror of a John McCain nomination. Still, the predominant narrative you see among that crew since Tuesday is that McCain must come to them to reassure them of his stalwart conservatism. That’s hubris all over again, isn’t it? GOP voters have obviously considered the merits of McCain vs. his conservative “deficiencies”, and decided that he’s the candidate they prefer. What business, then, do these people have in demanding that he come kneel at their feet for their blessing? McCain’s CPAC speech is the best they are going to get out of him, and it was little enough. Indeed, Kathryn-Jean Lopez at NRO tried to give the talkers credit even for that:

This McCain speech would not have been given today, if it weren’t for folks like Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Andy McCarthy, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. Can I thank them on behalf of America?

This is the delusion the Republican leadership, and the conservative establishment are laboring under: They really think that there is nothing wrong with their ideas, their methods, or their scorn for their own voter base. Even after the 2006 “thumping” they took in Congress, they don’t see it. Rather than take a step back and consider that McCain may actually be closer to the base in terms of his policy preferences (they can, after all, always tell themselves these primaries were about “electability”, not policy), they intend to soldier on with their losing agenda, keeping a nice supply of brickbats ready to hurl at their own base when things don’t work out the way they expected them to.

Yes, in addition to my belief that it’s time for a Democratic president to assume responsibility for the long war, in order to force Democrats to abandon their asinine arguments that no such war exists, I see it really is time for a long stretch in the wilderness for the Republicans. They aren’t prophets, so it won’t be pleasant for them, and truth be told, many policies will probably be enacted that I and the rest of America absolutely hate during their absence. Some of those policies will be permanent. Many more Republicans will leave the party to become Independents, or even Democrats. There is no guarantee that after their exile, Republicans will come back as they did in 1994, re-anointed in the oils of small government, fiscal responsibility, foreign policy competence, and a strong national security outlook.

There’s certainly no suggestion that they’ll do so without a sojourn in the desert, though.

“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.”

RE: Right to the heart of the matter, you’re getting warm...

“The idea that talk radio could paper over this basic demographic divide is almost comical. The leader/follower model of conservative support (get Rush, the talkers, the CPAC people, all the groups on your side, and in so doing win the hearts and minds of a decisive majority of conservatives) has been proven starkly and decisively wrong.”

RE: Dead-on-point again, and warmer still...

“...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.”

RE: BINGO!!! Your’re on Fire! “...conservatives chose character and authenticity over issues...”

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