Our political Quote of the Day comes from the New York Time’s Ross Douthat who suggests there is an “elephant in the room” that may be scaring voters away from Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney — one Romney has not effectively addressed in a way to reassure voters: the memory of former President George W. Bush’s last four years in office.
He notes that conservatives are now piling on Romney and the way he’s running his campaign (correctly) arguing that in this economic environment the GOP ticket should be doing much better than it is doing in the polls. He recounts the first four years when Bush seemed to be riding high and Bush’s political “brain” Karl Rove was even openly dreaming of a long lasting era of Republican political dominance. And, then:
Four years later, the dream was dead, and the public’s trust on both fronts was all-but-exhausted. The mismanagement of the Iraq occupation, piled on top of the W.M.D. fiasco, cost Bush’s party its reputation for foreign policy competence, while the Bush boom, such as it was, delivered weaker returns to the middle class than either the Reagan or the Clinton expansion – and then the financial crisis undid even those meager gains.
Since Bush left office, conservatives have been willing to acknowledge his failures as a fiscal conservative and to promise more responsibility on deficits and debt. This has been a necessary and important shift, responsible both for the energy of the Tea Party in the 2010 midterm elections and for the current Republican ticket’s (relatively) brave proposals on entitlement reform.
But the shift toward fiscal rectitude is the easy part, in a sense, because it just involved calling conservatives back to their principles, without necessarily acknowledging the places where ideology might need to adapt itself to new realities. It’s made the Republicans more serious than they were in January of 2008, but it’s left the party’s post-Bush weaknesses on the economy and foreign policy conspicuously unaddressed.
A presidential nominee could have filled this breach with fresh rhetoric and creative policy, but Romney, compromised and uncourageous, hasn’t been the right man for that job. On economics, he’s shifted awkwardly between a message that focuses (sensibly) on the struggles of the middle and working classes and a much more conventional right-wing celebration of entrepreneurs and “job creators.” On national security, he’s campaigned as a by-the-numbers hawk, with barely a hint that hawkishness might have delivered America into difficulties during the last Republican administration.
The bottom line is that GOPers are falling into the common tiresome cliche trap of 21st century America. We no longer have parties, but political sports teams where you defend your own sports team no matter what, you overlook or paper over their poor performances or fouls. Those who don’t feel they have a vested interest in the victory of a team and who aren’t part of one look at this and see blind loyalty, political hypocrisy and assertions sometimes at varience with reality (now, isn’t that a nice, creative way of not using the word “lying”?).
On the other hand, there many voters — particularly independent ones — that would think even less of the GOP if it signalled that it is making a 100 percent breaking with every aspect of how George W. Bush governed and instead fully embraced totally the Tea Party and social conservatives.
It’s this political tightrope that Romney is trying to walk –and his wire is increasingly shaky and he seems to be slipping.
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With unemployment still over 8 percent, he may be able to win with this kind of uncreative message. But the economy is stagnant, not collapsing, which means he’s not going win a big majority just by showing up.
To win the kind of victory that conservatives seem to think they should be winning, the Republican Party needs two things: A domestic agenda that offers more to hard-pressed families than just generic conservative rhetoric about the genius of capitalism, and a foreign policy program that reflects the hard lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Indeed: that kind of AFFIRMATIVE program — shall I spell that out? a-f-f-i-r-m-a-t-i-v-e program — that focuses on serious content rather than tiresome political slogan bilge (“Yes, we built it…Socialist…Marxist..Apologizes for America..”) could be highly appealing.
Why did Bill Clinton hit a home-run at the Democratic convention? It wasn’t just charisma. He crammed his speech with specific content and made his case, trying to argue in a way to appeal to voters as intelligent consumers of programs who were shopping for a 2012 Presidential product. Too many GOPers at the Republican convention seemed to be auditioning for talk shows or writing snappy slogans to be included in tiny slips of paper in fortune cookies.
This is the simple reality of presidential politics in 2012. Americans don’t want to give the White House back to the Republicans because they remember the Bush era all too well. If they continue to be disappointed at the polls, conservatives will eventually recognize this problem, and grope toward some sort of solution. Until then, the fault for their party’s underperformance will lie not in the stars or the structure of our society, but in their own stubborn selves.
Sloganeering and Obama hate and using the word “Democrat Party”(as Don Lemon recently said and I’ve said, then the Republican Party would be the “Republic Party”) may feel good, but until GOPers embrace a politics that is truly content heavy and offers voters specifics on what its Presidential candidate would do a)differently than Barack Obama b)differently than how it was done during the Bush administration if it’s in a politically dangerous area, it runs the risk of being unable to win over some voters who don’t want a restoration.
And this is worth adding: Jeb Bush, even with his name, could probably be one to pull this off. He wouldn’t have to diss his brother, just explain to voters in great detail what he would propose to do, putting it within the framework of his Florida governorship. Unlike Romney, Bush isn’t running away from his record as Governor.
It took years for Republicans to trascend the political imagery of Herbert Hoover. It took years for Democrats to transcend the imagery of the bad parts of the LBJ years. It took a Bill Clinton to be able to transcend Democratic Party hubris and the image of a hapless Jimmy Carter.
And it may take years for Republicans to transcend the imagery of GWB.
The right person may come along.
But it doesn’t seem to be Mitt Romney.
FOOTNOTE: If Republicans and conservatives are wise, they’ll ignore the advice of those who think the key to victory is to do more personal attacks and less policy content.
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.