On my radio show, my co-host Don Reese and I have talked a few times in recent weeks about just how bad Mitt Romney has turned out to be at campaigning, with some surprise. Speaking of all the gaffes, Don wondered where Mitt’s handlers are as he commits gaffe after gaffe. But as we’ve found out with the etch-a-sketch comment, his handlers are turning out to be just as bad.
Even before the primary began, the assumption was that Romney’s campaign was better funded, better organized and run by serious professionals with a plan to win. He’d gotten essentially a four-year headstart on the campaign, while his opponents — other than Ron Paul, who also had a big organization but whose goal was something other than winning the nomination — were running on shoestring budgets with small, inexperienced staffs and virtually no presence in many key states. As Santorum has stepped into the role of the primary not-Romney in the face, he’s had to scramble to put together an organization in nearly every state.
But money and organization are one thing; you still have to be good at campaigning, and Mitt has been abysmal at it. He’s committed one gaffe after another, constantly bringing up how rich and disconnected he is from the reality of most Americans. And it really does make you wonder what’s going on inside the campaign. Did he offer that $10,000 bet to Rick Perry on his own or was that discussed ahead of time and planned out in discussions with his advisers? Almost nothing said in a “debate” is ad libbed, especially when, as in that situation, it was a line of attack that he’d heard again and again. Campaigns plot out exactly how to respond to the expected attacks by their opponents, and Perry had been talking about what Romney’s book said about health care reform repeatedly before that debate. So did Romney go rogue with that bet or was it planned and intentional? We have no way of knowing now, but if Romney loses this fall you can bet that someone will write a book about the campaign and reveal the truth.
And now we have the etch-a-sketch comment, which has observers wondering whether it was intentional. If it was, if it was planned out, it was world-class stupid. Andrew Sullivan is spot on:
It sums up every single worry about Romney in one metaphor: that he is a machine, that he can say or stand for anything, and that, from time to time, depending on which segment of the population he is appealing to, he will simply become something completely different. Which is, of course, per Kinsley, the true definition of a gaffe. Fehrnstrom told the truth. And Etch-A-Sketches, because they can draw anything and remove anything, are also a perfect metaphor for liars, opportunists and soulless re-invention.
Weigel does even better:
With this quote, Romney guru Eric Fehrnstrom has scored a cleaner hit on his candidate than Rick Santorum ever has.
So is that highly paid, professional team just that bad? Or can they just not control their candidate? I tend to believe the latter. But as I said on my show recently, there’s a sense in which Mitt’s inauthenticity is, ironically, authentic. He really is the perpetual suck-up, the sycophant, the used-car salesman telling you whatever he thinks it will take to get you behind the wheel of the car. He really is that awkward with people, especially people who aren’t filthy rich.
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Mr Ed
March 27, 2012 at 12:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Don wondered where Mitt’s handlers are as he commits gaffe after gaffe.
At the weekly Obama 2012 strategy meeting.
unbound
March 27, 2012 at 12:54 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Based on my personal experiences dealing with a handful of CEOs, they aren’t dumb, but they definitely aren’t the smartest people I run into. They are, however, very aggressive. If Mittens hired a bunch of people like him, then there may not be any really smart people in his campaign…which would explain the gaffs.
Even if Mittens hired good professionals, he may be overriding them fairly regularly. CEOs are very aggressive and tend to “know” better than anyone else around them.
Hercules Grytpype-Thynne
March 27, 2012 at 12:57 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Mano Singham yesterday linked to a Tom Tomorrow cartoon that captures Romney perfectly. After announcing that a meteorite is on track to strike and destroy the planet, a pair of newscasters ask how this will affect the 2012 Presidential race. Romney is shown saying “I’m very concerned about the destruction of this planet. I know many of its owners.”
juice
March 27, 2012 at 1:06 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It goes to show that what people want in political office is a good liar. They don’t want their intelligence insulted by someone who can’t artfully pull the wool over their eyes.
dingojack
March 27, 2012 at 1:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I wonder if the Republicans (or any party really), read the ‘insider’ accounts of past campaigns to figure out what went wrong and why.
Like an aircraft accident investigaton, but into a political campaign.
Dingo
Area Man
March 27, 2012 at 1:23 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
My best guess is that Mitt really is out-of-touch and disconnected from the masses. But that’s something we all knew. It’s when you add to that his need to reinvent himself and squish and squirm to please the radical Republican base that you end up with the bizarre spectacle that we see. Not only can he not just be himself, his carefully crafted political persona has to constantly change, which has led to a sort of identity crisis. Even Romney doesn’t know who Romney is anymore. The gaffes are from not knowing which hat he’s supposed to wear on any given day.
slc1
March 27, 2012 at 1:29 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
We may sum up Romney as follows: there’s no there there.
cptdoom
March 27, 2012 at 1:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Can this really be surprising? Romney has won exactly one campaign for higher office in his life, and then didn’t run for re-election, so he’s 2 – 3 in losses (both 1994 MA Senate and 2008 GOP nomination). Ask most Baystaters what the major outcome of Romney’s time as Governor and you get “he got us alcohol sales on Sunday” (I know, how ironic). There wasn’t a lot of “there” to begin with.
exdrone
March 27, 2012 at 1:45 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Like the Broadway show Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, you can get any production to opening night as long as you have enough money and a poor sense of worth.
Bronze Dog
March 27, 2012 at 1:45 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Given the gaffes, especially the Etch-a-Sketch one, I think I’m going to discard any specific predictions about the Republican party’s future, aside from the general likelihood of defeat to Obama in November.
But then again, one new prediction I’m willing to risk is that some wingnuts are probably going to miss our point if Romney wins the primary:
“He said he was an Etch-a-Sketch! You can’t bring up the crazy or stupid things he said in the primary, because they’re gone, now! Erased! For the general election, you have to start over with the new Romney!”
daved
March 27, 2012 at 1:45 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Nah, they’d also mention the health care reform law that he’s now so energetically running away from. That’s the main thing I think of, anyway.
Returning to the central point of the post, however, even several years ago, I was able to observe that no matter what position you favored on a given issue, you’d be able to find a point where Romney had agreed with you. And another where he’d been 180 degrees the other way. He’s always seemed to have no more opinion than a weather vane. It’s impossible to say what he really believes, because you can’t find anything where he’s been consistent. (Well, OK, he’s consistently wanted to be elected, but that’s about it.)
Jordan Genso
March 27, 2012 at 1:46 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Now I don’t believe this to be true, but what if the Etch-A-Sketch line was planned?
If you’re the Romney campaign, you face the impossible task of motivating the radical base, and winning over some reasonable moderates. By definition, no one could do both. So maybe they figure their best chance is to intentionally accept the idea that they need to *wink* at both groups.
When Romney takes horrible positions while talking to the base, he sends out *winks* to the swing voters indicating that he doesn’t really mean it, and he’ll be much more reasonable once elected.
When Romney works on attracting moderates, taking positions not radical enough for the base, he sends the base *winks* to let them know he is just doing it to help his electability, and once in office, he’ll do all of the radical things they want.
It’s not an original idea, but if you were in the Romney campaign’s position, doesn’t it seem more viable than the alternatives? It’s incredibly tough to get two opposite groups to believe that you’re telling them the truth while lying to the other, but the Romney campaign may see that as the only chance they have at winning, and so everything they do is a balancing act between the two lies.
It reminds me of those situations where an adulterer’s wife catches her husband with his mistress, and the man tries to get both women to believe that they are the one he really wants to be with.
harold
March 27, 2012 at 1:51 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Despite being a Mormon, Romney was, when successful, still basically just the rich patrician east coast guy with old time moderately conservative views.
He was perceived as being in the mold of Prescott Bush, Nelson Rockefeller, and many similar others.
That model has never worked well for presidential elections, but it used to work for getting elected governor or senator, or even being made vice president. It used to be that the more liberal parts of the country sometimes elected “liberal Republicans”. That’s how Romney got to be governor of Massachusetts. And that was only ten years ago. But things have changed a great deal since then.
Nationally, the “rich coastal moderate Republican” has never been a very popular type. George H. W. Bush (who had been in favor of abortion rights during the 1980 Republican primary) was able to get elected president once, but only by using expert hard core southern right wing advice and airing the Willie Horton ad.
Still, Romney’s big mistake has probably been even bothering to pander to the right during the primary season. For full disclosure – I can’t stand Romney and don’t want him to be elected. Having said that, if he had consistently marketed himself as the relative “moderate”, he would probably have won the same primary states anyway, and would have avoided damaging himself with such a transparent display of insincerity.
Randomfactor
March 27, 2012 at 1:55 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
First-class people hire first-class people.
Second-class people hire third-class people.
Romney hires fourth-class people.
Jordan Genso
March 27, 2012 at 2:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
To expand on the scenario a little. It may be that the Romney campaign felt the mistress (in this case, the moderates) were beginning to believe that he really does love his wife (the base), so he had to make a grand gesture to the mistress by buying her a diamond necklace (making the Etch-A-Sketch statement).
The problem is, his wife knows about the necklace, and so while his wife (the base) feels she can’t leave him, as there’s no one else for her to turn to, she can never trust him again.
He should’ve given the mistress flowers instead.
jamessweet
March 27, 2012 at 2:08 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I found the Etch-a-Sketch comment comforting, TBH. It was a reassurance that, if elected, he’ll just be a greasy moderately right-wing career politician, and not the scary theocrat he’s been forced to act like in order to protect his right flank from getting all splashed with Santorum.
OTOH, I assume Ferhnstrom’s goal was not “make people who would never dream of voting for Romney anyway slightly less likely to shit their pants if he wins the election”.
The Lorax
March 27, 2012 at 2:13 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Hey guys, you know what this means? If Romney crashes and burns, it’ll be the Santorum and Gingrich Show until the general election!
I’m suddenly reminded of an old timey black-and-white cartoon with a piano melody playing in the background, with 1940′s-style Santorum and Gingrich attempting to steal an apple pie from Obama, and hilarity ensues.
tacitus
March 27, 2012 at 2:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Perhaps Romney’s desire just to be President — and his belief that he is entitlement to be President — far outstrip any sense of mission or purpose he has for becoming President.
If you care about the people you’re wanting to help, then you typically have some connection with them — you feel their pain, their trouble, and can empathize with them. Clearly that is not what Romney is about.
Randomfactor
March 27, 2012 at 2:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Despite all this, it’ll be rMoney as the nominee in the end.
It was ALWAYS going to be rMoney.
boselecta
March 27, 2012 at 2:32 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“Santorum has stepped into the role of the primary not-Romney in the face”
A freudian typo? I presume you meant “in the race“, but yes, Santorum is probably the most in-your-face not-Romney they’ve got:-)
Raging Bee
March 27, 2012 at 2:39 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Possible Democratic slogan for 2012: “Vote Democratic — because the rest of the world isn’t like an etch-a-sketch.”
baal
March 27, 2012 at 2:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
While I’d like to “not-Romney in the face” i think you meant ‘race.’
yoav
March 27, 2012 at 3:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think at least part of his problem is that mittens bought into the common wisdom that he was going to win by default because it’s his turn this time and his campaign just assumed they were going to coast through the primaries instead of having to fight for every delegate against some real nutjobs like frothy and the amphibian. His campaign also seem to be unable to adjust their strategy when the situation change.
D. C. Sessions
March 27, 2012 at 4:06 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I can think of several ads that start with someone shaking and shaking an etch-a-sketch:
* stop there — it’s good as is.
* then complaining that no matter what they do, it doesn’t erase
* complaining that none of them are any good
* etc.
chilidog99
March 27, 2012 at 4:13 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I always felt that the perfect Anti-Romney add would be an image of one of those old fashioned circular clothes line / carousel hangers in the back of a house. It would be festooned with different outfits “Empty suits” and the wind would be spinning it around. As each different suit came up, a different Romney flip flop would be shown. Then the wind would intensify and the suits would start flapping wildly as the carousel started spinning faster and they eventually would break free to fly off. . . .
D. C. Sessions
March 27, 2012 at 4:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
.. a well-lubricated weather vane, and every time the wind shifted you got a text of a Romney quote. The only sound would be wind and the squeak of the vane moving.
scienceavenger
March 27, 2012 at 4:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Daved said: I was able to observe that no matter what position you favored on a given issue, you’d be able to find a point where Romney had agreed with you.
I guess that makes him the true Biblical candidate. Eat that Frothy.
unbound
March 27, 2012 at 4:53 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Keep in mind that many of the top executives end up out of touch with the reality of the world. I remember getting an e-mail from an executive VP at my company a few years ago telling us (sent to all general manager levels) that we should be able to sell work to our neighbors. Of course, being middle class, my neighbors are certainly not going to be able to buy high end consulting services and are not positioned high enough in their companies to buy on their behalf.
The people at the top just couldn’t figure out that we didn’t all live next to C-level executives. The executives that discussed the e-mail, wrote the e-mail, reviewed the e-mail…none of them could understand that basic fact. Sadly, this is a true story.
Lou Doench
March 27, 2012 at 4:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I wonder if what we are seeing in the Romney campaign, heck the whole Republican primary campaign process, is the diminishing returns on the influx of money into politics, especially these big national campaigns. After the Citizens United decision the common wisdom has been that super-pac money would flood the process, and it has, but what we are finding is that money alone can’t win an election. In fact the money that these guys have at their disposal from the super-pacs has blinded them to the need for doing on the ground retail politics, for competent campaign staffs and good ground organization.
It reminds me of the last bad Yankee’s teams that poor Don Mattingly led. Steinbrenner had tons of money to throw around, and throw it around he did. But he was unable to spend that money well because he had neglected the nuts and bolts of his organization, the general manager, the farm system. He wouldn’t listen to anybody’s advice because he thought his money made him smarter than anyone else. I see that a lot in Romney, in many ways embodying the slur often thrown at liberals, he “just throws money” at his problems.
Another baseball analogy, sabermetricians talk a lot about marginal value, about how to best effectively spend your resources and identify your needs. You need to be able to realize how much more valuable one player you wish to accqire than the player you already have, or could you replace his production with a smaller but smarter investment.
Romney is turning out to be really bad at that kind of evaluation. The shitloads of money his superpacs are spending on ads turns out to have a lot less value than a much more modest investment in some qualified campaign professionals and organizers.
Lou Doench
March 27, 2012 at 5:03 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
OT: Ed, have you seen this piece about the most nepotistic member of congress?
http://wonkette.com/467976/and-the-most-nepotistic-member-of-congress-award-goes-to#more-467976
I’ll give you one guess…
abusedbypenguins
March 27, 2012 at 6:29 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Does Mittens know about super market price scanners? If we are lucky he is dumber than old bush.
juice
March 27, 2012 at 6:31 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
While I’d like to “not-Romney in the face” i think you meant ‘race.’
Well, right now not-Romney means Santorum, so….
R Johnston
March 27, 2012 at 7:43 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Romney is a phenomenally wealthy son of wealth. He doesn’t have handlers. He has yes men hired to fluff his ego. If you didn’t realize this before, his campaign is ample proof of the fact.
Artor
March 27, 2012 at 8:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Mitt rMoney really loves car salesmen. Some of his best friends own auto companies.
Has anyone else noticed how much he resembles Max Headroom?
Midnight Rambler
March 28, 2012 at 2:25 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Oh I’m sure it was. The thing is, a lot of Romney’s gaffes have been planned. What’s striking is how astonishingly bad he and his team are at anticipating people’s reactions to them. It goes right along with “I like being able to fire people who provide services for me”.
Doc Bill
March 28, 2012 at 9:04 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think the answer to “Why is Romney so bad at this?” is simple.
He doesn’t stand for anything. He has no principles and no commitment.
He can’t articulate a vision because he doesn’t have a vision. He can’t expound on any policy because he doesn’t have any policies.
Only three words are important to Romney: President Mitt Romney
Romney is not interested in governing, he’s only interested in being the Big Cheese. I think he figures that if Bush got by on such meager skills, so can he.
As a result of having no principles nor commitment, Romney bought a bill of goods that he had to court the Stupid Vote: social “conservative” Christian evangelicals, i.e. sexually repressed sociopaths. I would have liked for Romney to dump the Stupid Vote and stake out the middle but that would require commitment to principles.
d cwilson
March 28, 2012 at 9:36 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Doc Bill @#36:
I think you hit it. Romney has no core beliefs except that Mitt Romney should be president. I would, however, say that most republicans on the national stage these days have no real interest in governing, only in wielding power. That was certainly true of W. You could tell how bored he was with all the wonky policy details. And like Dubya, Romney considers himself the “big picture guy” and thinks he can just leave all the minutiae of actual governance to his underlings. Saint Ron was the same way.
Where Romney is different from Dubya or Saint Ron is that the latter two had certain princples that they believed in. They may have been truly awful principles, but they believed in them. Romney truly doesn’t and he’s not good at faking it. He’s a like a slightly younger version of Montgomery Burns who just has no clue how to communicate with the middle and working classes in any meaningful way. When tries to, it just ends up looking really awkward and painful.
The other thing about CEO types is that they tend to surround themselves with people who resemble themselves. So it’s hardly surprising that his advisors are just as clueless about how the “Etch-a-Sketch” remark played right into the perception that Romney believes into nothing.
Michael Heath
March 28, 2012 at 7:45 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
d cwilson writes:
Your conflating Messers Bush and Romney’s fierce desire to be president along with no desire to successfully govern has been convincingly validated with President Bush and is speculatively compelling with Mr. Romney. But President Reagan did govern and quite well when it comes the governance perspective of the job, successful enough he’s lauded by many management experts.
As someone with both a degree in management and decades of successful management experience from lower level to executive, Reagan’s approach and results as a manager were near text-book perfect given his type. President Reagan certainly had loads of cringe-worthy moments, a handful of personal gut-wrenching performance failures, lots of policy initiatives to justifiably criticize, and a few really bad staffing decisions just like we see from all presidents (Ed Meese, James Watt), but his performance staffing and administrating the executive branch along with working with Congress vs. Bush’s performance is comparing a president who distinguishes himself on this to the point he’s an exemplary textbook case example vs. President Bush was the most apathetic bungling administrator since some of the antebellum presidents.
While my own management style is far more closely aligned with President Obama’s, in fact I grin when his aloof analytic approach is criticized since it’s a great way to lead at that level, coupled to my policy preferences matching Obama’s almost exactly except a few issues, it’d be a failure of character for me to assign Reagan’s ability to govern with one of the worst simply because I’m such a fierce critic of conservatism. Instead we should acknowledge he was a great manager but that’s an outlier for today’s set of nationally-known conservative politicians who demonstrate no such capabilities. I exclude Mitt Romney from Reagan and the set of outliers for one simple reason. Romney’s demonstrated in both the ’08 and ’12 campaigns credible authority on how to manage a presidential campaign (in spite of his gaffes which I think his critics over-emphasize), while also revealing he hasn’t even boned-up on the very tasks of the presidency. Anyone whose read Reagan’s speeches prior to the 1980 election could not make any such claim of him. He spent his years between his governorship and 1980 arduously studying and putting together a sphere of influence that put together an impressive level of administration personnel – which President-elect Obama was smart enough to recognize and attempt to emulate. [Obama's transition team used the Reagan administration as their benchmark of excellence on doing transitioning from president elect to an inaugurated president.]
Michael Heath
March 28, 2012 at 7:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
d cwilson writes:
In my twenty years in the electronics industry working at all levels of management up to executive VP, I can think of only a handful of CEOs who didn’t have complementary teams. And those few were failures.
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