Spare a sympathetic thought, if you have one in you, for the Mittster. There he is, diligently preparing for his big week down in Tampa, when along come the hapless Todd Akin and some self-styled visionary called Paul Ryan espousing views that, if the Democrats and their media allies succeed in pinning them on him, would make it a near mathematical impossibility for him to be elected President. At a moment when the G.O.P. candidate-elect is understandably eager (make that desperate) to talk about debt and jobs, the political-news media is consumed with abortion and Medicare. What does a public-spirited private-equity tycoon, a devoutly religious fellow who tithes a tenth of his income to his church, have to do to catch a break?
Not for the first time in this campaign, it seems as if somebody from Team Obama is scripting the story, putting in pratfall after pratfall for the unfortunate Mitt. As my colleague Amy Davidson points out in her Daily Comment, yesterday brought news that the Republican Party’s official platform for Tampa includes calls for a constitutional amendment banning abortion, and a “right to life” plank for unborn children that rules out exceptions in the cases of rape or incest. This comes on top of the barrage of publicity about Ryan’s plan, endorsed by Romney, to convert Medicare to a voucher system. Ever since Ronald Reagan came to office, the G.O.P. has demonstrated that its grasp of elementary arithmetic isn’t the greatest. (Big tax cuts + big increases in military spending = deficit reduction.) But even the most math-challenged Republican strategist can surely figure out that if the Party alienates women and seniors, having already alienated Hispanics and young voters, it doesn’t have much chance of winning.
Actually, Team Obama shouldn’t be given too much credit for events largely beyond its control. As a new e-book about the Obama campaign makes clear, the political operatives in the White House and Chicago are hardly geniuses. Like all political campaigns, Obama 2012 has been plagued by missteps, miscalculations, and internal rivalries. If Axelod/Messina/et al. were going up against a stronger candidate representing a more attractive party, reporters might well be writing stories about the disastrous mistakes they and their boss had made. (Where is Obama’s positive message? How did the White House miss the rise of the Super PACs? Why did the President go out of his way to alienate businesses large and small?)
It would also be a mistake to place all of the blame for Romney’s troubles on him. Yes, in picking Ryan he invited all the stories about privatizing Medicare and slashing food stamps. But there’s something bigger going on here than the political failings of one man. Romney, should he fail to turn things around before November, will be the fourth G.O.P. Presidential candidate out of five to come a cropper, joining George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, and John McCain on the list of losers. The only Republican to defy the trend, George W. Bush, scraped home in 2000 despite losing the popular vote and then, following 9/11, rode a wave of nationalism to victory in 2004.
The problem isn’t the candidates: it’s the G.O.P. In its modern incarnation, it’s a protest movement rather than a party of government. Even in the most favorable circumstances, it’s barely electable at the national level. Take right now, for instance. In any place on earth where the unemployment rate was running at 8.3 per cent, and almost two in three people believed their country was going in the wrong direction, the opposition party, even one saddled with a weak candidate, should be running well ahead in the polls. But the G.O.P. is trailing the Democrats. In a CNN poll earlier this month, just thirty-three per cent of respondents said they approved of the Republican Party, and fifty-nine per cent said they disapproved of it. The Democratic Party scored much better: its approval rating and disapproval rating were both forty-seven per cent. Thanks to redistricting and the vagaries of electoral geography, the G.O.P. will probably hold on to its majority in the House of Representatives. But after the antics of Akin and other G.O.P. ultras, its hopes of taking over the Senate appear to be fast disappearing.
The reasons for the G.O.P.’s unpopularity aren’t mysterious. On social issues, entitlement reform, and immigration, its hardline policies are out of line with popular opinion. And after eight years of George Bush, the old mantra that tax cuts will solve everything has lost some of its appeal. Increasingly, moderates and independents view the G.O.P. as a radical organization, which is historically accurate, as the political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein pointed out in their recent book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks”: “The Republicans have become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed to the established social and economic policy regime.”
If you are running for national office representing a party that is unpopular, the logical thing to do is to distance yourself from its extreme elements. To a greater or lesser extent, that is what Bush Sr., Dole, Bush Jr., and McCain tried to do, at least for part of their campaigns. But the mechanics of modern campaigning make this a very tricky strategy to pursue. Since 1988, only Bush Jr., with his embrace of “compassionate conservatism,” has pulled it off—and he only just managed it.
It isn’t just a matter of having to appeal to the right in order to be nominated, although that’s part of it. In order to wage a national campaign, the successful candidate is utterly dependent on the support of G.O.P. activists, donors, and pundits, all of whom have views to the right of the mainstream. Hewing to the center immediately after the primaries might seem like the obvious thing to do. But for all but the richest candidate, who could afford to spend a billion dollars funding his own ads and constructing his own ground operation—a Michael Bloomberg, say—going moderate isn’t a practical option. Inevitably, the candidate-elect who emerges from the primaries finds himself still scrabbling for the support of the G.O.P. base. That explains why Bob Dole picked Jack Kemp as his running mate and why John McCain picked Sarah Palin.
Romney has met the same fate as his predecessors. On issue after issue—health care, immigration, abortion, tax cuts, gun control, environmental protection—he’s been obliged to veer to the right. The selection of Ryan, who in the past has co-sponsored some of the House G.O.P.’s most provocative anti-abortion legislation, amounted to a final public recognition on Romney’s part that his original idea of courting conservatives during the primaries and then shifting to the center wasn’t a practical one. His adviser Eric Fehrnstrom was wrong when he said back in March, “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”
No, you can’t, Eric, not in today’s world. As long as the G.O.P. nominee represents the Republican Party, he has to run as a Republican. And that, right there, is the problem. Until the Party changes its policies and adopts a far more inclusive approach to Americans who don’t necessarily agree with all it stands for, it will never again be the Party of government that it was between 1952 and 1992, when it held the Presidency for twenty-eight out of forty years. And that is a potentially insurmountable hurdle for any Republican Presidential candidate, even one far more skilled than Romney.
Photograph by Aram Boghosian/The Boston Globe/Getty Images.
