Tampa Preview: Three Tasks for “Popeye” Mitt

With some of his campaign team privately conceding that his big speech on Thursday could still end up being cancelled if a natural disaster unfolds on the Gulf Coast over the next forty-eight hours, Mitt Romney faces three tasks as the G.O.P. convention in Tampa opens a day late on Tuesday afternoon. He needs to avoid the gaffes and controversies that have plagued his campaign; deliver a competent speech that reminds people why he got in the race in the first place; and, ironically enough, direct public attention away from himself and back towards his rival, Barack Obama.

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Romney isn’t going to win the election this week, but he could easily lose it. With a new Washington Post/ABC News poll showing the race essentially level, the G.O.P. candidate-elect appears to be still in with a fighting chance, which isn’t too bad considering the beating he and his party have taken over the last couple of months. But he can’t afford any more mistakes on his own part, or any more Todd Akin-style distractions. In line with the strategy that Team Romney has been pursuing all along, the role of the convention is to reassure people that their man is a competent, pragmatic problem-solver, who is eminently qualified to be President.

At this stage, Romney and his advisers have practically given up hope of establishing an intimate bond between the candidate and the voters, which is probably wise. But they still think it is possible to persuade people that Romney is the right man for the moment: a doer rather than a talker or an emoter. “I don’t think everybody likes me,” Romney said in an interview with Politico, which the Web site for political junkies posted on Monday. He continued,

“I don’t believe that, by any means. But I do believe that people of this country are looking for someone who can get the country growing again with more jobs and more take-home pay, and I think they realize this President had four years to do that…. He got every piece of legislation he wanted passed, and it didn’t work. I think they want someone who has a different record, and I do.”

Romney also repeated a line from Popeye, which he trotted out over the weekend to Chris Wallace, of Fox News, saying: “You get what you see. I am who I am.”

Obviously, the progress of Tropical Storm Isaac still hangs over everything. On Monday, there were reports of some network anchors heading for New Orleans rather than Tampa. If the storm does a lot of damage, the G.O.P. faces the nightmarish prospect of President Obama flying into the Gulf region to oversee the recovery effort, while Romney and the G.O.P. attendees are left waving flags in Tampa.

Still, Romney and his staff are determined to make the best of a bad situation. All the publicity about Isaac has drawn attention to the convention, and the truncated schedule could end up aiding the G.O.P. With just three nights of prime time to fill, the convention organizers have big-name headliners to feature every night: Ann Romney on Tuesday, Paul Ryan on Wednesday, and Romney himself on Thursday. Assuming the storm doesn’t wreak too much havoc, that is more than enough time for Romney to get his story across.

At the risk of repeating a point that has already been made ad infinitum, most Americans have already made up their minds which way to vote. For both sides, the next ten weeks is about reaching out to the five or ten per cent of likely voters who can still be swayed. Many of them are disappointed in the performance of Obama, especially regarding the economy, but they don’t necessarily harbor any personal animosity toward him. In the detailed questioning for the new Washington Post/ABC News poll, sixty-seven per cent of respondents said they think the country is on the “wrong track,” and fifty-four per cent said they disapproved of Obama’s handling of the economy. But the President’s overall approval rating was still narrowly higher than his disapproval rating—by fifty per cent to forty-six per cent—and almost three quarters of the respondents (seventy-three per cent) said he has a strong personal character.

The challenge facing the Romney campaign is to exploit the generalized discontent with the state of America and focus it on the President. For the past couple of months, the Obama campaign has brilliantly frustrated the Republicans, diverting attention onto Romney—his record at Bain Capital, his refusal to release more tax returns, his slipups on his foreign trip, and so on. But for the next three nights, Isaac permitting, Romney has an opportunity to get his side of the story across, relatively unimpeded by Team Obama and the loathed liberal media.

That assumes, of course, that the week goes off without any distractions from the likes of Donald Trump, Sheldon Adelson, and the Koch brothers, all of whom will be in Tampa for at least part of the week. With more than seventy per cent of Americans already believing that Romney’s policies would benefit the wealthy, according to another new poll, this one from the Pew Research Center, the last thing he needs is more publicity about his unseemly rich backers, or any other G.O.P. nasties. One promising note: Congressman Akin has promised to stay away. (On Monday, no less a personage than Karl Rove predicted that Akin, if he stays in the Missouri race, would lose by the widest margin of any candidate in recent history.)

Assuming the G.O.P. can avoid more self-inflicted wounds, the division of labor is pretty clear. In her speech on Tuesday, Ann Romney will attempt to humanize her husband, and her appearances during the G.O.P. primaries, when she often introduced him, suggest she is well-equipped for the task. Doubtless, she will regale us with stories of Romney dating her in Bloomfield Hills and at Brigham Young, her introduction to the Romney family, and their years bringing up five sons. If only Seamus, the family’s Irish setter were still alive, she could bring him on stage to let people see he didn’t suffer any lasting damage from the infamous dog-on-the-roof trip. Sadly, though, he died of old age some years ago.

Come Wednesday, Ryan’s mission will be to beat up on Obama and enthuse the G.O.P. base. He, too, seems well-suited to the task. Herein, however, lay some potential dangers to the Romney campaign. Judged by his past speeches, Ryan will cast the election as a choice between national bankruptcy and rebirth, an epochal decision that will determine the fate of a great nation. That’s O.K.—as I just indicated, the polls suggest most people agree with Ryan that things are going to hell. But the Veep candidate will have to go easy on laying out his preferred alternative to Obama-style social democracy: privatizing Medicare, slashing government programs, cutting the top tax rate to twenty-five per cent. All the polls—the latest one from Wapo/ABC News included—indicate that Ryan’s conservative visionary shtick turns off at least as many people as it captivates.

Finally, it’s up to the Mittster, who, if he is to be believed, has been working hard on his speech. That’s a bad sign. As he showed in last fall’s debates, Romney is a competent debater, but an orator he isn’t. If he were truly the efficiency expert he claims to be, he would have outsourced the speechwriting duties months ago to somebody far more qualified than he is, such as Michael Gerson, George W. Bush’s point man for the English language, or, better still, Peggy Noonan, who put mellifluous words into the mouth of Ronald Reagan. While one good speech won’t turn around public perceptions of Romney, it could tear a hole in the portrait of a heartless plutocrat that the Obama campaign has been assiduously constructing.

The context is important. With Obama due to speak in Charlotte just a week from Thursday, Romney needs to lay down a challenge to the President and preëmpt his remarks. He told Politico that in preparing his own speech he went back and watched Obama’s oration at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver. “I happen to know that he will deliver an eloquent speech,” he said. “I haven’t seen it, but I know it will be eloquent. I know it will have grand promises. What I hope people do is remember what he said in Denver, and look to the promises there and compare that with the record, and they will say he promised one thing and did entirely different things.”

From the beginning, the notion that Obama has failed to deliver has been the premise of Romney’s candidacy. All along, the intention in Beantown was to turn the election into a referendum on the President, with the promotion of Romney’s own candidacy taking a secondary role. Given the widespread discontent in the electorate, this was an eminently defensible strategy to pursue. But its success also depended on making a majority of voters comfortable with the notion of Romney taking over as President, a threshold he has so far failed to cross. This week, he gets another chance to reassure the country—one he simply has to take.

Despite all the fun I’ve had at his expense over the past months, my hunch is that he will make a decent fist of it. Like Reagan, back in 1980, he has one thing going for him: expectations are low, especially among the media classes. If he delivers a decent speech, including one or two memorable lines, a few self-deprecating remarks that puncture his image as a monumental stiff, and a sincere pledge to work his tail off to turn the economy around, he may well emerge from Tampa on Friday morning with a bit of momentum.

Once again, that’s Isaac permitting.

See our full coverage of the campaign season at The Political Scene.

Photograph by Mark Wilson/Getty Images. Illustration by Maximilian Bode.