The Economist
Mitt Romney's campaign
Fit for fighting?
Feb 1st 2012, 17:09 by R.L.G.
I WROTE before the South Carolina primary that I thought it basically impossible that Mitt Romney could lose the primaries. This didn't require great skill on my part, of course, but now the conclusion is nigh-universal.
So have we found a humming Mitt Romney machine, funded, skilled, disciplined, having won Florida by 14 points and ready to fight the general election? I am far from convinced. The analysis that follows is from the most biased possible source. But I find it hard to argue with.
Team Romney wants voters and the national media to believe its victory reflects its candidate’s positions. In reality, it is a product of the fact that Romney and his SuperPAC allies carpet-bombed Gingrich by spending five times as much money on Florida’s airwaves, and running more than 60 television ads for every one Gingrich and his allies aired. Nearly all of the $15.3 million Romney’s campaign and its allies’ spent on advertising in Florida was focused not on their own candidate, but on the rest of a weak field of opponents, contributing to a campaign in which more than nine out of every 10 ads were negative – by far the most negative campaign in Florida’s history.
It’s difficult for Romney to claim Floridians voted for him rather than against his opponents, since less than one-tenth of one percent of the ads in Florida promoted Romney positively. In fact, a single Spanish radio spot was the only positive Romney ad in the entire state during the last week of the primary, and more Floridians reported in exit polls that Romney ran the most unfair campaign.
This came in my morning e-mail from the Obama campaign. Normally I'd skim and delete, but it struck me with the important reminder: Mr Romney has run a decent campaign, but only against an extraordinarily bad field—a field more Republicans call "fair" or "poor" than "good" or "excellent". So Mr Romney has pasted one on Newt Gingrich. Remember that this is still Newt Gingrich, a man drummed out of office more than a decade ago, whose campaign has been left for dead twice, who cruised around Greece while his team floundered, whose negatives are higher than Emperor Palpatine's, who's on a third marriage, who supported a health-insurance mandate, and greenhouse-gas action alongside Nancy Pelosi, who made $1.6m for helping the loathed Freddie Mac, and on and on. So Mr Romney had $15m lying around to defeat this man in a single state? Well, congratulations, Mr Romney, as far as it goes. (That's more than Mr Gingrich could say to his rival.) But it's a good thing you don't drink, because you don't have a time for a celebration-induced hangover. There's much work to be done to defeat Barack Obama.
For most of the primaries, Mr Romney has been running as though in the general election. He talks vastly more about Mr Obama than his rivals. Only Mr Gingrich has taunted him successfully into fighting back, and then, only temporarily. He stands on the stump or at the debating podium carefully repeating his Obama attack-lines, and this has served him well as his rivals have tanked one after the other. But soon he will be facing a rather more formidable figure than Rick Santorum or Michele Bachmann. Mr Obama is the president of the United States, whose every move generates "earned media". He is a decent debater and a seasoned campaigner. He can still give a stump speech far better than anyone in the Republican field. Mr Romney's canned lines about "apologising for America" and "fighting a war on religion" and—last night's new one—"demonising nearly every sector of the American economy", work reasonably well when unrebutted in front of a crowd of fervid partisans. They will not work so well when Mr Obama gets round to rebutting them as his full-time job, which will not be long in coming.
In other words, we've seen that Mr Romney can win a primary, but that tells us next to nothing. Newt Gingrich is no Hillary Clinton. We've also seen a long preview of Mr Romney's general-election campaign, and what we've learned is that he can defeat Fantasy Barack Obama in a walk. Good luck with that. I certainly hope Mr Romney gives Actual Barack Obama a spirited and tough fight. But nothing in his unimpressive romp so far makes me sure that he will.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/02/mitt-romneys-campaign
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