POLITICS
Mr. Bojangles Takes Michigan
By Stump Connolly
Mitt Romney finally won one. It cost him more than $65 million to do it, and he’s gone through more positions than the Kama Sutra to find one that voters like, but Romney won a primary Tuesday, as Gloria Borger observed on CNN, by promising to be the President of Michigan.
The Republican race now moves on to South Carolina where we will see who Romney morphs into next. Before it does, let’s review how Romney danced his way across Michigan and back into contention.
It was only a week ago that I watched Romney stand before a Nashua Country Club audience in New Hampshire to announce his prescription for a “broken Washington.” Lower taxes, a balanced budget, smaller government and an end to our dependence on foreign oil topped his To Do list.
As soon as he stepped off the plane in Michigan, however, he added two more items he forgot to tell New Hampshire: a $20 billion bailout for the automotive industry and rescinding the new auto fuel efficiency standards.
Both were welcome news in a state with the highest unemployment in the country (7.4 percent) that has seen the loss of some 250,000 jobs, most in heavy manufacturing, since 1999; and Romney’s pledge to rescue the auto industry played especially well against John McCain’s straight-backed and straight-talking acknowledgement that those jobs are gone.
But the devil in Romney’s plan was not in the details, of which there were few, but the missionary zeal with which Romney pledged to help Michigan recover from its “one state recession.”
Romney stomped across the state bringing them the message that this son of Michigan had returned to lead them out of economic purgatory. He visited his old elementary school teacher (but not his private high school alma mater Cranbrook Academy), huddled with an unemployed mother who hopes to retire to Florida, and stopped by the state Capitol to pay a teary homage to a portrait of his father, the late Gov. George Romney, just days after Hillary Clinton showed it was okay to display a little emotion on the campaign trail.
Michigan was Romney’s home turf, he pointed out to all who would listen – even though he left the state in 1965 at the age of 18. He knew they called soda “pop” here; they thought they spoke without an accent; and they all had the automotive industry in their blood. He talked at times like he’d been sitting around the garage with them all these years bemoaning the demise of the old Hemi engine and now, dad gum, he was going to do something about it.
Romney started his campaign for the presidency a year ago sounding a quite different note. Acting more like the Bain investment banker he is who made a fortune in start-up companies like Staples and Domino Pizza, he scoped out the Republican field and came up with a business plan to enter the race.
He had no natural base. He had achieved some repute for successfully pulling off the Salt Lake City Olympics and parlayed that into a single term as Republican governor of Massachusetts (although that feat did require him to endorse a woman’s right to choose on abortion and tolerate same sex marriages.) But his strongest attribute was that, at 60, he was a telegenic business success whom nobody knew much about.
When Romney surveyed the political landscape, he saw it as a marketplace of ideas. If he could recast himself as a social conservative, strong anti-terrorist and fiscal disciplinarian – the so-called three-legged stool of Reagan Republicanism – he could occupy prime space in the Republican party mall. He could define himself there in the early primary states through early television advertising; and because he’d amassed $250 million from his ventures, he was uniquely positioned to do it with his own money.
Romney is not the first businessman to fancy that America might benefit from his business acumen. Steve Forbes, Ross Perot, Wendell Willkie and Romney’s own father come to mind. All follow in the footsteps of Herbert Hoover, the last business genius to successfully win the office in 1928, who promptly plunged the country into The Great Depression.
One reason businessmen are singularly unsuited to politics is that they tend to think of politics as a self-correcting marketplace. By studying the economic and moral forces at work in the consumer’s mind – Romney fondly calls it “looking at the data” – they believe they can fashion a campaign, a set of positions or, as it were, “a product” that a majority of voters will buy.
The hothouse nature of campaigns, however, often skews the data. Controversies arise out of nowhere to dominate debates; external events suddenly shift the issues; and the media, especially in this day and age, throw wildcards on the table when they are least expected. Successful politicians navigate their way through the game more by instinct than plan, with a certain trust that voters will come to find in them their core values. But a man with a plan doesn't give it up easily, or, as in Romney's case, elegantly.
The underlying fallacy of this business-like approach to politics is that nobody is buying anything, really. Voting is free. There is no guarantee people will vote their self-interest or even recognize it in a candidate. More often than not, voters choose to cast their ballot (or not) on personalities or for reasons that don’t become apparent until the exit polls are in; and sometimes, elections are won by happenstance. In Michigan, for instance, it can be argued the biggest factor in Romney’s win was a winter snowstorm that discouraged independents and Democrats from turning out for McCain.
As late as last December, when the race was still confined to newspaper columns, blogs and Sunday morning TV talk shows, Romney’s run was going as planned. He had comfortable leads in both the Iowa and New Hampshire polls. If events played out that way, the momentum of two early wins would make him all but unstoppable, the pundits said. Then the voters started having their say.
For all the money Romney spent in Iowa on television advertising - $8 million, 20 times the amount spent by eventual winner Mike Huckabee – he couldn’t stem the surge among evangelicals for the likable Baptist minister from Arkansas. Early on, Romney miscalculated that his true opposition was Rudy Giuliani and went after him for being soft on immigration. Later, taking the advice of his own consultants to “go negative,” he aired commercials attacking Huckabee in Iowa and John McCain in New Hampshire, both of whom benefited from Romney’s tacit acknowledgement of their strength.
By the time he got to New Hampshire, Romney was dancing around his own positions. His stump speech sounded remarkably the same from locale to locale, but the items on his To Do list subtly shifted up or down depending on the audience he was speaking to. The sudden assassination of Benazir bhutto in Pakistan reminded voters of America’s fragile role in the Middle East, and Romney’s slim credentials in that arena. So, ripping a play from Barack Obama’s playbook, he came up with the theme that Washington needs fundamental change, and “the same old Washington insiders (read John McCain) can’t change it.”
I admit to being baffled how Romney can run as a Republican promising change in Washington. Isn’t the current president a Republican? And didn’t the Republicans control both houses of Congress for six of the last eight years. (And isn’t Romney’s biggest backer in Illinois former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who presided over the House?) The health care stalemate, the earmarks, the ballooning federal budget, the loss of American prestige abroad and decline of the automotive industry at home – all the things Romney promises to fix – took place on the Republican watch.
But Romney got away with it in Michigan. One reason, exit polls showed, is that even among Republicans President Bush enjoys only a 53 percent approval rating. Another, clearly, is that Romney significantly outspent his rivals on television advertising in Michigan –– $2.1 million versus $554,000 by McCain and $346,000 by Huckabee –– most of it highlighting the Romney family’s long connection to the state, which was "a strong factor" in the decision of 58 percent of the people who voted for him.
So Romney is back in it. The leader, in fact, as the delegate count goes; and the only Republican candidate, except Giuliani, with enough money to advertise in the critical primaries ahead.
He got there on a hoof and a smile, waltzing across a depression economy promising that Michigan’s famous “Can Do” attitude will carry the day. You can have all the business plans in the world, but in the end, nothing beats pandering in American politics.
“ Tonight proves that you can’t tell an American that there’s something they just can’t do,” he told supporters at his victory party, “because Americans can do whatever they set their hearts on.”
And if you believe that, I’ve got a Rambler I want to sell you.
