Although the partisan choir will say Mitt Romney delivered a just peachy speech to the NAACP and that he has now laid to rest the Bain Capital issue, many analysts in both parties and no parties don’t quite see it that way. GOPer David Frum, who often will criticize his own party, notes that it was a painfully bad week for Romney — and he puts it into a larger context in his CNN commentary:
The NAACP incident shows a hyperactive campaign war room, overcorrecting one way (“the boos are no big deal; everything’s going according to plan!”) and then overcorrecting the other way (“we weren’t trying to generate TV images of racial confrontation; why, look, here’s Condi Rice!”), spinning and counterspinning without any forethought for how this hour’s aggressive statement would sound when the next hour’s realities arrived.
And it was that “win the hour” mentality that got the Romney campaign into much more serious trouble when the Obama campaign launched a big push on Romney’s business record the next day….
….Romney’s core problem is this: He heads a party that must win two-thirds of the white working-class vote in presidential elections to compensate for its weakness in almost every demographic category. The white working class is the most pessimistic and alienated group in the electorate, and it especially fears and dislikes the kind of financial methods that gained Romney his fortune.
Romney has a strong potential defense: Bain was in the business of making companies more efficient and profitable. Downsizing and outsourcing were necessary — and often indispensable — means to that end. In a growing economy, the workers who lost their jobs should find new jobs elsewhere, and it’s precisely the relentless search for profitability that causes economies to grow in the first place.
That’s an argument that, to borrow an old joke of Henry Kissinger’s, is not only convincing but has the additional merit of being true. However, it’s not an argument that appeals much to the voters Romney most intensely needs to win. Hence his unleashing of the war room — but in the end, there’s only so much a war room can do. And this time, by trying to do too much, the Romney war room may have blasted its own side with lethal friendly fire.
Could we say that Romney retroactively retired his strongest arguments?
LEGAL NOTICE ON CARTOON: The copyrighted cartoon above is licensed to run on TMV. Reproduction elsewhere without licensing is strictly prohibited. See great cartoons by all the top political cartoonists at http://cagle.com. To license this cartoon for your own site, visit http://politicalcartoons.com
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.