Mitt Keeps Missing the Message
If Romney wins Florida, it won't be because he's becoming a more effective candidate.
It won't be because Mr. Romney has become a better or more effective candidate. Primaries exist to help with that process, to let contenders read signals from the political landscape, to adapt, become stronger. Successful politicians absorb the signals and change up. Not Mr. Romney. If politics were evolution, the governor would still be swimming in the primordial soup.
That much was clear this week. The first signal was Mr. Gingrich's resounding victory in South Carolina. If Mr. Romney were listening, he'd have understood that vote was as much against him as it was for Mr. Gingrich. It took but one punchy Gingrich debate performance to have voters abandoning the front-runner in droves.
South Carolina voters also clearly explained why. Exit polls showed that Mr. Romney's two (and only) messages—that he is the best suited to turn around the economy and to defeat Barack Obama—aren't working for the majority of voters. Mr. Gingrich beat Mr. Romney on both issues. The electorate explained that they first and foremost want a candidate willing to passionately promote conservative ideals.
Mr. Gingrich then followed his victory with a week in which he all but goaded his opponent into voicing some bigger principles. He kept up the "Massachusetts moderate" label. He again went populist and accused Mr. Romney of not working for all his money and profiting from big banks. He compared Mr. Romney to Charlie Crist. Among Florida conservatives, there is no greater diss.
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Candidate Romney
A candidate with even half the usual
complement of political antennae would have seen this as a game-changing
opportunity to win with conservatives. It was Mr. Romney's moment to
turn his occasional defense of Bain Capital into a broad rallying cry
for capitalism. Florida posed the perfect backdrop to elevate his causes
of free-market housing and energy. It was a chance to unveil a simpler
and bolder economic reform plan. Mr. Romney had some strong moments in Thursday's debate, but on the Florida stump he's mostly been plodding on. As in Iowa, as in New Hampshire, as in South Carolina, he's still criticizing Mr. Gingrich. He's still running on his biography. He's still sending the media press releases announcing the latest Miami Dade politician to pronounce him most electable against Barack Obama.
Which gets to the other story of this week: the president's State of the Mitt Address. Mr. Gingrich might have some Republicans spooked, but Democrats are still hoping for the Massachusetts governor. They, too, have noticed that Mr. Romney is ducking the class-warfare debate, and that not even the Gingrich threat has moved him to engage. They take that as an invitation to make it the central theme of the Obama re-elect. The president's Tuesday speech was a direct assault on Mr. Romney's wealth and tax breaks for "the rich."
That challenge, coming on the back of Mr. Romney's tax release, was all the more reason for him to change the narrative by seizing on a big idea like comprehensive tax reform. He could have underlined how the tax code that Mr. Obama wants to further contort only undermines growth and leaves average Americans paying a higher effective rate than does Mr. Romney. Instead, he complained that Mr. Gingrich's tax simplification plan would let off rich guys.
Mr. Romney has his unscripted, inspired moments. Late in South Carolina, a feisty Mr. Romney chastised a heckler—who was slamming him for being the 1%—for seeking to "divide the nation . . . as our President is doing," and then riffed on America's great economic model. Romney strategist Eric Fehrnstrom boasted it was "Mitt Romney at his best." He was right. And it lasted all of 30 seconds. A few days later Mr. Romney was back to borrowing the heckler's language, telling Floridians "the 1% is doing fine. I want to help the 99%."
The Romney camp lives in terror of deviating from the months-old script. It did, and will, defend RomneyCare. It did, and will, stick with a 59-point economic plan. It did, and will, promote only the "middle class." Did. Will. No flip-flops here, folks. Move along.
Yet it is precisely Mr. Romney's past flips that now require him to adjust, to convince conservative voters that the convictions he today claims are real and strong. Mr. Romney likes to repeat that he is a free-market conservative. What voter is going to blame him for proving it by putting out a roaring tax reform? That's not a flip-flop. That's progress.
Mr. Romney isn't beating Mr. Gingrich in Florida on the arguments. He's barely eking ahead of a man whose own history and temperament are his hurdles to victory. Mr. Obama won't have that problem. If a Nominee Romney thinks he can win the White House with the sort of uninspired performance he put in this week, he's got a long 2012 ahead of him.
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