The headline from the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll is that the Presidential race is still deadlocked: Obama forty-seven per cent; Romney forty-seven per cent. No real surprises there—a survey carried out just before Christmas by the same pollsters produced exactly the same numbers. In the first few months of this year, as Romney’s rivals in the Republican primary tore into him, Obama opened up a seven point lead. That gap has now been eliminated, and it’s back to the status quo ante.
What is worrying Republicans is that, despite three months of poor economic news, their man hasn’t raced into the lead. The new poll reveals a major reason for this failure: voters are still waiting for Romney to unveil a credible plan to create jobs and restore prosperity. While many of them have lost confidence in Obama’s ability to turn around the economy, Romney still hasn’t given them sufficient reason to believe he could do better.
The voters are right to be skeptical. The only certainty about Romney’s economic plan is that it is opaque and uncertain. He has said he will cut taxes on workers and businesses, but, beyond some non-specific references to eliminating tax deductions for higher-income taxpayers, he hasn’t said how he will pay for them. He has promised to cut federal spending, but he hasn’t said where the axe will fall. He has said that he will strike down financial and environmental regulations, but he hasn’t said which ones. And most glaringly of all, he has pledged to cut the budget deficit in half by the end of his first term, but he hasn’t explained how he will square this with his promise to create jobs.
Romney should be doing better. It isn’t as if Obama has gotten any more popular: his job-approval rating of forty-seven per cent is two points lower than it was at the end of last year—statistically speaking, there is no difference. Almost two-thirds of Americans—sixty-three per cent—still think the country is on the wrong track. For any incumbent, these figures would be deeply disturbing.
There is more. The ABC News/Washington Post poll confirms what countless others have found: in the minds of voters, the most important issue by far is the economy, and a majority of people disapprove of the President’s handling of it. This, you might think, is where Romney could press home his advantage. If the election comes down to a personality contest, with voters choosing on the basis of which candidate understands their problems and is the more likable, Obama wins hands down. But when you are looking for a surgeon, you want somebody with expertise and experience—that, at least, is the Mittster’s pitch.
The only good news for Romney is that, at least according to this poll, voters still trust him more than Obama to handle the economy. But his advantage on this question is a narrow one—just five points—and despite a lot of negative news about jobs, it hasn’t gotten any wider over the past few months.
Why is that? The conventional explanation is that the Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney’s personal finances and his record at Bain Capital have undermined voters’ faith in his abilities as an economic manager. But while some recent polling in swing states provides support for this thesis, the national numbers from the ABC News/Washington Post poll don’t really back it up. Just twenty-four per cent of respondents said Romney’s work “buying and restructuring companies before he went into politics” is a major reason to oppose him. Practically the same number—twenty-three per cent—said Romney’s business record is a major reason to support him. Most respondents were agnostic. Fifty per cent of them said that Romney’s experience in corporate restructuring isn’t a major reason to support or oppose him.
If the G.O.P. candidate’s ties to Bain Capital aren’t holding him back, what is? The poll suggests it is his failure to give a fuller picture of how he will turn around the economy. Asked which candidate has presented a clearer plan for dealing with the economic situation, forty-three per cent of respondents said Obama and just thirty-eight per cent said Romney. The incumbent President, an economic incompetent in Romney’s telling, is scoring higher than him on his plans to fix things.
This finding confirms something Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said a few days ago: with numbers this low on the key issue of the election, “I don’t think you can beat an incumbent President, even if the economy is slow.” Kristol’s comments were sparked by a Fox News poll, which found that just twenty-seven percent of voters believe Romney has a clear plan for improving the economy. Some Republicans were critical of Kristol for breaking ranks at a crucial time, but he was only stating the obvious.
The Romney campaign, of course, claims that it has presented an economic plan—and strictly speaking it is right. Last September, Romney unveiled “Believe in America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth,” an economic manifesto that ran to more than a hundred and fifty pages. Even back then, though, Romney’s ragtag collection of proposals—fifty-nine of them, ranging from eliminating the inheritance tax, to capping federal spending at twenty per cent of G.D.P., to opening up America’s energy reserves for development—was widely dismissed as inadequate by his fellow Republicans.
In response to criticisms from his rivals in the G.O.P. primary, Romney subsequently unveiled a revised version of his plan, this one containing a twenty per cent cut in income-tax rates from top to bottom. More recently, in a series of ads, his campaign has said that in his first hundred days he will move to repeal Obamacare, cut taxes, and balance the budget. “By day one hundred,” the ads say, “President Romney’s leadership brings new certainty to our economy, and the promise of new banking and high-tech jobs.”
By no stretch of the imagination could the hastily revised tax proposals or the promises contained in the new ads be described as a credible, fully-costed economic plan. The reasons Romney still hasn’t spelled out such a strategy are twofold. For a long time, it seemed like smart politics to avoid issuing specific pledges—such as which government programs he would cut and which tax deductions he would eliminate—that his opponents could pick apart. And from an economic perspective, too, it made some sense to maintain as much flexibility as possible.
The academic economists advising Romney—a group that includes Harvard’s Greg Mankiw and Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard—are moderate conservatives: they don’t believe in right-wing fairy stories about tax cuts being self-financing and budget cuts stimulating the economy. If Romney enters office and slashes tax rates without pushing through offsetting spending cuts, the budget deficit will shoot up—just as it did following the Reagan and Bush tax cuts. If he cuts government spending without stimulating demand in other ways, the unemployment rate will rise even further. In addition, the entire situation is greatly complicated by the so-called “fiscal cliff”: the fact that on January 1, 2013, the Bush tax cuts are due to expire and the automatic spending cuts agreed upon by both sides during last year’s debt-ceiling debacle are due to be introduced.
Rather than trying to navigate these perilous shores, Team Romney settled upon a strategy of studied vagueness, for which it is now paying a political price. With the Obama campaign hammering away at the candidate’s personal finances and his record at Bain Capital, the campaign can’t pivot to his economic plan, because he doesn’t have a proper one—not yet, anyway. Obama, by contrast, can at least point to the American Jobs Act, which he promoted until most of it perished in Congress.
In the coming weeks, the Romney campaign will surely move to address these problems. Shortly before the Convention, I can see him relaunching his economic plan, highlighting some specifics and rebranding it as, say, a ten-point jobs proposal, rather than a fifty-nine-point grab bag. But a lot of damage has already been done. Many Americans, including some on Romney’s own team, regard him as a man without a plan. For a candidate marketing himself as a “Mr. Fix-it,” that is a very bad thing. Possibly, even worse than having a Swiss bank account and investments in the Cayman Islands.
Photograph by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.
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