The Economist
Lexington
Mitt, take two
This time, will Romney be Romney? If he were, he would stand a chance
“NO APOLOGY” is the title of the book Mitt Romney published last year. But many voters think the former businessman now making his second bid to become president has plenty to apologise for. In 2006, as governor of Massachusetts, he passed a law that overhauled health care in the state. It was a source of immense pride at the time. As a recent profile in the New Yorker recalls, the signing ceremony in Boston was pomp on stilts. A pipe and drum band led the governor into Faneuil Hall, where he signed Romneycare into law with 14 different pens. His supporters hoped the landmark reform would in due time propel the governor into the White House.
They were wrong. In 2008 Mr Romney failed to win the Republican nomination even after spending $45m of the personal fortune he made in venture capital. And this time round Romneycare has morphed from his pride and joy into one of his two big handicaps as a candidate. This is not because the reform has failed—more than six out of ten people in Massachusetts say they like it—but because of his party’s thought police. Once Romneycare became the inspiration for Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, the ideologues decreed that the “individual mandate” at the heart of both laws (ie, a personal obligation to buy health insurance) was an unconstitutional, unAmerican abomination that the Supreme Court should strike down. A recent satirical headline in the Onion summed it up thus: “Mitt Romney Haunted By Past Of Trying To Help Uninsured Sick People”.
If Mr Romney is embarrassed, he dare not say so. Renouncing his signature achievement as governor would be fatal to a candidate whose 2008 campaign was shipwrecked by flip-flops on abortion, gay rights, gun control and immigration. So he argues now that whereas individual states have a perfect right to impose an individual mandate if they so choose, the federal government has no business thrusting such a policy down the states’ throats. In his windswept announcement speech from Bittersweet Farm in New Hampshire last week, Mr Romney made a pointed reference to the tenth amendment (states’ rights), promised to repeal Obamacare and called his own health reform in Massachusetts “a state solution for a state problem”.
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Will this defence work? When Mr Romney was a governor it was not yet heretical for a conservative to propose compelling citizens to buy insurance. Plenty of people in right-wing think-tanks saw this as a market-based way to make the free-riding uninsured share the costs they imposed on others when they pitched up sick in hospital. But the rise of tea-party libertarianism has changed the debate. How dare any government force any individual to buy a product he does not want? To the purists who want a straight answer, Mr Romney’s retreat behind states’ rights will look like the evasion it is. If the question becomes a test of whether he is a true conservative, many true conservatives will be confirmed in their suspicion that he is not.
Mr Romney’s second big handicap as a candidate is that he is a Mormon. That tends to cancel out the appeal this upstanding family man and former bishop would otherwise have to the party’s social conservatives. Many Americans see Mormonism as a cult: in polls over the years a steady one in four say they would be less likely to vote for a Mormon as president. This makes it especially hard for Mr Romney to win over the evangelical Christians who make up about half of the voters in Republican primaries, and an even bigger share in early-voting Iowa and South Carolina. He has a practised answer to those who ask about his faith—“We’re not electing a pastor-in-chief, we’re electing a commander-in-chief”–but, like Romneycare, this remains a vulnerability the candidate can do nothing to remove.
Many pundits say that these two problems are enough to sink his chances. That is too deterministic by half. People who say that a Mormon cannot become president used to say that a black man could not become president. True, his rivals can be relied on to try to hang the individual mandate around Mr Romney’s neck. But if America’s recovery continues to falter, the dominant issue in next year’s election is going to be the economy, making it easier for Mr Romney to change the subject from Romneycare and religion to a subject where he has a stronger story to tell. If the economy is still prostrated in November 2012, a candidate who resembles a competent CEO with a credible plan to bring back prosperity could certainly give Mr Obama a run for his money.
The candidate from central casting
Mr Romney was born to be that candidate. His chiselled good looks could have been made for Mount Rushmore. He has a solid record not just as a businessman and successful governor but also as the rescuer of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Apart from having a personal fortune he is a formidable money-raiser: on a single day in May he raked in more than $10m of contributions via a phone-bank appeal. And although he remains a stilted speaker who struggles to fire an audience’s emotions, most voters take him seriously. A Washington Post/ABC poll this week had him level-pegging with Mr Obama, at 47% each, with Mr Romney doing rather better among independents.
What about the complaint that he has no fixed convictions? This time he is on his guard. He is sticking to some unpopular positions, such as his belief in global warming and the need to curb greenhouse gases. He appears to have learnt that it is a mistake to pretend too hard to be the diehard social conservative he isn’t. Who knows? Americans might welcome a technocrat after the ideological partisanship of recent years. But first the Republicans must find it in their hearts to forgive him the transgression of Romneycare and let him run against Mr Obama as himself. That is the harder part of the task Mr Romney has taken on.
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