Though its impact on the delegate count is small and the outcome of its beauty contest non-binding, Maine's presidential preference caucus on Saturday had developed during the week into a make-or-break event for at least two of the four GOP candidates.
For Ron Paul, the libertarian Congressman from Texas, Maine was a chance to finally win one straight up--no mere bragging rights to a solid second or third place, or the chance simply to crow about a sweep of college town counties. Paul could claim a true win. For Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and once heir apparent to the GOP throne, it was a chance to break a short but potentially costly losing streak. Rick Santorum had snatched victory from Romney in three states last Tuesday, and two of those states were Romney's to win or lose. Romney could seize on a victory in Maine as proof that his candidacy was not falling into second place.
So even through Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum worked in other locations within the 48 contiguous states, the Pine Tree State carried great weight for Gov. Romney and Dr. Paul. Some analysts had gone as far as to suggest that the relevancy of Paul's candidacy might come into question if he failed to win in Maine, though clearly Paul feels his candidacy has a higher meaning and that his presence in the race is driven by his supporters, not the pundits.
Nevertheless, Romney and Paul battled it out in Maine to a virtual draw. Romney won, but by a scant 194 votes statewide. Neither Santorum nor Gingrich had canvassed the state, but Santorum still managed to pull in a decent third place showing with 18%.
Like legendary football coach Bobby Bowden, Mitt Romney will take a close win as a win, and it is not likely he will waste time debating the merits of the close call. The state that produced Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Stephen King--not to mention L.L. Bean--had pulled Romney out of the fire...for the moment.
Rick Santorum's three-state sweep of Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri had been such a setback for the presumed front-runner that more than a few Old School reporters (read: people like me) saw a resemblance to Ronald Reagan's multi-state trouncing of Gerald Ford back in the spring of 1976. Ford, after some success in the early contests, later experienced such a run of bad luck as the primaries moved west and south that his re-nomination seemed in genuine jeopardy. The setback for Ford was severe, and the resulting change of momentum put Reagan and Ford into a toe-to-toe slugfest that lasted all the way to the convention.
Though Romney's resources and skills may yet pull him from harm's way, it's a long way to the Republican convention in Tampa in August, and Rick Santorum shows no signs of backing down.
Romney was able this week to also claim a moral victory of sorts as a result of the Conservative Political Action Conference's (CPAC) endorsement of the former Massachusetts governor. Romney had won 38% of the attendees votes, compared to Santorum's 31%. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul took third and fourth places respectively with much smaller vote totals.
Gingrich and Santorum had also appeared at the conference, but it was Romney's speech that attracted the most attention. During his remarks, Romney had used the word (or described himself as) conservative nearly fifty times. Sure, he was after all at the nation's foremost conservative political meeting, so using the word--liberally, as it were--is acceptable. But the fact that Romney had been forced to trumpet and defend his credentials so vigorously to the assembled faithful was another indication of the difficulties ahead for the man who had won this same organization's endorsement so easily four year ago. At one point Romney described himself as "severely conservative," an odd thing indeed to say when just plain "conservative" ought to be enough to close the sale.
But things have changed, or so it seems. The long season of challengers is closing in on Romney. The non-Romney wing of the GOP had fallen in love--then fallen out of love--with many suitors: Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain. Gingrich surged, and they swooned. Then he sank again, only to re-emerge in time to win the day in South Carolina. Gingrich's huge victory in the Palmetto State forced Romney to take stock of his campaign and its tactics, and after ten days of negative attacks and ads directed at Gingrich, Romney seemed back at the top of his game in Florida.
Now, collective anti-Romney momentum that seemed to be flowing to Gingrich is flowing to Santorum.
Republicans, it seems, just won't fall in love with Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum's persistence has robbed Romney of four states so far--Iowa, Missouri, Colorado and Minnesota. Two of those states, Colorado and Minnesota--should have been easy wins for Romney. Equally easy should have been Maine, a New England state only a short drive from Romney's Massachusetts. Yet in the end there was Ron Paul, a Texan and a libertarian, keeping the question of the Pine Tree State alive until the very last moment.
On the whole, Romney has had only two easy wins: New Hampshire and Nevada. His victory in Florida seems on the surface (and in the delegate math) huge, but a close inspection shows the undercurrent of resistance to Romney through the non-establishment wing of the GOP. (See my articles from February 1 & 10, 2012).
Gingrich and Santorum have essentially engaged in a Tag Team assault on Romney since Iowa, a process that has repeatedly forced Romney and his handlers to lower expectations and move their firewalls back on the calendar. The real danger for Romney is now looming in the near future. Super Tuesday (March 6) carries a big punch in many of the states where Romney performed poorly in 2008, especially in the Mike Huckabee Belt. The Huckabee Belt has become the Santorum Belt--only bigger. This year's Super Tuesday includes Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia.
Romney will win easily in Massachusetts and Vermont.
Santorum (depending of course on Newt Gingrich's staying power) stands to win in North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and possibly in large portions of Virginia.
Ron Paul may do well in Idaho and Alaska.
Gingrich will take Georgia, but he may also have to share parts of the Peach State with Santorum. And the biggest prize, Ohio, may prove to be pivotal in the contest. Gingrich chose to skip active campaigning in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado to focus his time and resources on Ohio, which has become the former Speaker's firewall.
The results of March 6 may be ambiguous at best for Romney, or at worst, a partial win only on his safest turf of New England. One week later, on March 13, Republican voters in Alabama and Mississippi go to the polls. Romney stands little chance of winning these socially conservative states even if he wins in the big cities like Mobile and Birmingham. And if Gingrich fails to survive his Ohio gambit, Santorum alone will be left to challenge Romney. Would-be Gingrich support in the Huckabee Belt could migrate in large numbers to Santorum, who seems the natural heir at the moment to the anti-Romney energy.
Romney must close the deal or his battle with the insurgent wing of the GOP will drag on for many months.
In the meantime Ron Paul's candidacy would, on the surface at least, seem to be in the gravest of danger. Paul however is unperturbed by his narrow loss in Maine, and unconcerned for the moment that he has not won a single primary or caucus. Speaking to supporters after he came within 194 votes of winning Maine, he seemed as enthusiastic as ever.
"Just remember," Paul said, "the revolution is only beginning." Paul also said his candidacy "is not going away."
So where does the resistance to Mitt Romney come from within the larger Republican audience? And what does this skepticism tell us about independents, Reagan Democrats, and non-aligned voters of all stripes?
One could safely argue, and many Democratic strategists agree, that President Obama faces serious strategic challenges this year.
The economy is still stuck in recession. The job market remains anemic, with millions unemployed or underemployed. Business contraction forced--or allowed--companies to downsize or move many jobs overseas, with little chance that these jobs will return to the U.S. Home prices seem stuck in the basement, with very little indication that homeowners will see relief soon. Gas and energy prices have crept upward again, and prices at the pump threaten to trigger more recessionary ripples. And recent stumbles by the White House--last week's nasty flap regarding employer health plans and birth control being an example--have undermined Obama's veneer of competence and legislative skill.
The President's approval ratings, once the envy of contemporary chief executives, now sits stubbornly below the waterline. By any modern measure or criteria, the Republican Party has a remarkable opportunity to reclaim the White House in November.
But Mitt Romney, the GOP heir apparent, carries with him the sort of baggage that seems to make even many Republicans uncomfortable. Four years of continuous campaigning have not erased or mitigated this opinion deficit, and recent vetting by independent groups as well as fellow Republicans seem to have made things worse.
Earlier in the week, after Romney's much-quoted characterization of himself as a "severely conservative" governor, reporters and analysts began yet another look at his actual record. Whether as a gubernatorial candidate or a U.S. Senate candidate or Governor of Massachusetts, the videotaped recordings of Romney's own words found airtime across the networks. CNN's Anderson Cooper took some of Romney's remarks at this week's CPAC and held them up to direct comparison to Romney the governor and Romney the Senate candidate--and the resulting contrast was at times jarring, especially on social and cultural issues such as abortion, gay marriage rights, gun control and stem cell research.
That Mitt Romney has been inching rightward over the course of the last five or six years has been obvious enough to political watchers. Politicians are given some leeway to adjust their opinions, and it is a combination of street skills and sincerity that voters respect in these personal shifts. Ronald Reagan famously shifted from his early days as a union man and liberal to the very definition of conservatism. Al Gore made a careful leftward trek, moving from Democratic centrist in the 1980s to dedicated liberal by the end of the 1990s. Other contemporary politicians, from Richard Nixon to Richard Gephardt, have found success--and sometimes failure--in the artful dodge and the change-of-heart. Politics in a democracy is, at its core, a process of compromise.
But the ire that Romney generates among some Republicans seems to flow from a suspicion that the former Bay State governor is a serial flip-flopper and a congenital equivocator. Romney seems, to many at least, to be in a self-induced state of denial about his own record on issues as narrow as Roe v. Wade and as large as health care. This unease about his sincerity (or lack thereof) will surely spill easily and without resistance into the decision-making processes of independents and non-aligned Democrats, and you can bet the farm that the Obama strategists in Chicago already have a game plan to portray Romney as an empty suit.
And the political effects of five years of recession have taken their toll as well. Having now traveled full circle, the economic blame game has worn thin. Romney, for better or worse (even among many Republican faithful) seems simply a more mature version of the one thing millions of Americans have little patience for: a rich guy who made his multi-million dollar fortune through buying, selling, and in many cases downsizing, vulnerable companies. Romney's many arguments about the number of jobs he created while working as a private equity manager at Bain remain fluid and spurious, and even Romney has been forced on too many occasions to tweak the jobs figures up or down, in some cases depending on the audience. Romney is a one-percenter in an economy where some of the lucky ones live paycheck-to-paycheck, and he is a reminder to both Democrats and Republicans that this recession still hurts.
Again, the Democrats and the Obama campaign will waste little time deploying the negative ads. Romney will be portrayed as a polite version of Gordon Gekko. It will be, to employ an old bromide, like shooting tuna in a barrel.
On the other hand, Romney's gifts are numerous and deep. He is competent and generous almost to a fault, and his cool-under-fire style makes him perhaps the perfect match to compete with Barack Obama in the general election. This would be symmetrical politics at its best: two towering figures of managerial skill and patience and equanimity facing each other in debates. And Romney's understanding of the complex relationships between Wall Street and Main Street make him a plausible catalyst of economic recovery, and perhaps the ideal foil to Obama and a tepid job performance during recession. Skill and talent and equitableness still matter, and Mitt Romney projects these attributes easily and without effort.
Eventually, Mitt Romney may become acceptable to the insurrectionist wing of the GOP. If Newt Gingrich tires of the chase and Rick Santorum runs out of operating cash, Romney can simply jog the remainder of the race to the convention in Tampa. Ron Paul will offer no more serious challenge than the one already afoot. Tea Partiers, social conservatives, evangelicals, culture warriors and just plain anti-Obama types will, surely, coalesce behind Romney if he becomes the Republican nominee.
Mitt Romney has precious little time to convince the skeptics in the GOP to fall in love with him--or at least to like him. In the meantime, the former Massachusetts governor must find the music of sincerity.
Copyright 2012, Thursday Review
