The Sinking of The S.S. Willard

Until this past week, Mitt Romney had been pursuing the Nixon '68 strategy of avoiding one-to-one interviews with reporters to create the atmosphere of his inevitability. The problem with this strategy is that you have to be prepared for the day you start granting interviews and his first shot out of the gate on Fox News created more gasps and raised more doubts about his suitability for both the Republican nomination and the presidency itself.

Romney's strategists have opted to have a button-down version of Mitt Romney as solely that of a businessman--a line he mentions anytime he speaks--and that he is not a politician. The problem with this is that he has been running for a variety of offices since 1995, served as a Governor of Massachusetts, and has been running for President for 10 years. And his campaign always emphasizes that he looks like a president with his hair and looks.

Remember that catastrophic interview Ted Kennedy made when he started to run against Jimmy Carter for the democratic nomination? Asked why he was running for President (remember he's going against a sitting President of his own party), he simply could not answer the question. The effects of that interview doomed his run.

Something like that happened with Mitt Romney's warehouse interview with Fox News'Brett Beier. Brett Beier simply asked Romney straight questions, which any candidate should be able to roll off fluent answers. Obviously, with Mitt Romney, it is no surprise--given his constant changing of positions over the years and even in this campaign--that Beier would ask , without mentioning the word "flip-flopping" about his different positions. Romney got the sour look My grandmother used to get and responded,"We (meaning the reporter) don't have a clean understanding of my positions." The discomfort of Romney and his innate condescension, which appears in every debate,came across and provoked comments from across the conservative spectrum and the straight media.

This is a man without the politicians touch, just as Nixon was. Bob Dole used to comment that Richard Nixon had to literally practice shaking hands and acting like a politician. Romney appears like this also. Jonah Goldberg appeared on television to comment that Romney looked like an East German creation of a robot to seem like a politician. But Goldberg's most damaging observation about the interview was that for all this pretense that he is simply a successful businessman he came across more as a politician than the rest of the Republican running.

Ed Klein, the author of this week's Time magazine profile of the Romney campaign, appeared on Lawrence O'Donnell's show last night and made several good observations. Klein noted that presidential candidates tend to give alot of face time to reporters during all the time up to the primaries and then they shut it down. He said the reason for this was to cultivate the reporters as well as for the campaign to get a feel how the candidate will run and for reporters to get a more emphatic sense of the candidate. He noted that he had a close relationship with Bill Clinton but then Clinton shut him down after Labor Day before the primaries. He said that the Romney camp would not let him interview the candidate for his piece on the pretext that Romney gave alot of interviews during the 2008 campaign. The net effect is that the candidate loses all touch with what questions he or she would be expected to answer from the press.

This morning Mitt made a second attempt by apearing on Fox and Friends and went after Newt as a Washington insider. I'm sorry but the businessman trope seems off for this election. In the doldrums of the economy last year, it would seem that the public would respond to someone who claimed knowledge of the economy and was a businessman. But with the changing dialogue created by Occcupy Wall Street, an equity fund manager no longer seems like a businessman and Mitt is so obviously a representative of the so-called 1% that it is tough to see how long this image can stand up to scrutiny over another 14 months.

Gail Collins yesterday had a terrific column in the New York Times about how Mitt Romney must be the most repressed candidate since Richard Nixon and suggested Romney take a day or two off to decide on what date his positions on everything changed and work up a rationale for this and stick to it. Most people know that Mitt Romney as a Mormon bishop, something he hasn't talked about, was very anti-abortion, even visiting women in the hospital to talk them out of the procedure. But once candidate for Senate he became pro-choice and invoked his mother and a relative who had a flawed procedure when it was illegal. So Mitt Romney doesn't have to say as he does now that he studied the issue and investigated the notion of a fetus before changing his mind. But on almost every other position, he has to draw the line when everything changed.

The sense of privilege hangs in the air whenever Mitt or one of his sons talks about everyday life. Mitt's son fondly talked to reporters about their family thanksgiving. But he referred to their $12 million home in California as a modest two-bedroom home, which reporters were quick to point out as 3,500 square feet and primo real estate.

Probably David Axelrod nailed it at the beginning of the campaign as saying that Mitt Romney was "weird". There is something totally tone-deaf about Romney. Today,unemployment dropped to 8.6%, the lowest since 2009 and private job growth this year will be the best since 2006. Romney issued a press release condemning the Obama administration for the numbers and said he would never tolerate so many unemployed. This might be plausible if his other campaign remarks didn't counter the indifference to taking measures to help the middle class. But even so, you can't spin the news the way Romney does. You can spin it but you have to acknowledge it is better news than we've heard in months.

Political pundits frequently mention the "who would you like to have a beer with" question as indicating a candidate's likeability. Romney doesn't drink beer, even though he coyly fessed up to having one and smoking a cigarette in his rebellious teens. On this, pundits have gone further that Romney's inability for small talk and retail politicking comes from never having hung out at a bar and shot the shit. When you released today that your secret vice is chocolate milk, you aren't advancing the image of your common man status.

The other issue that surfaced over the past week have been stories about Romney's volcanic temper and incidents big and small over the years. It's one thing if they were derived from frustrations with business or something people could understand, but all of them came from times when Romney was expected to act like an average citizen like have a license for his motor boat. The impression you get is a highly privileged person who can explode if he doesn't get his way, not the calming, deliberate image his campaign wants to portray. It is not like you will get to chose between calming Mitt Romney and No-Drama Obama. Obama's anger is usually signalled by his tapping his right foot.

The more Romney is exposed through debates and the campaign trial the higher the negatives he gets from the Republican base. While negatives should be expected to rise as a campaign heats up, almost all Republican observers believe he has won every debate, despite what I have said in my blogs. But the net effect is that Romney's appeal to Republicans gets worse. Since he began his campaign, his negatives have steadily risen to now 40%. In the past that was fatal but as we've seen in the last two election cycles that is no longer the rule. And there remains a mysetry as to why he just doesn't seem to break the 23-24% mark in preference polls.

While he still has not made the sale, there is the other question. In a general election, does he believe that what he has said to win the Republican primary will not be used against him as he tries to portray himself as a moderate to win independents and moderates. Remember he has not internalized the radical change in campaigning in the YouTube,twitter, Facebook era. He lost the 2008 campaign just before this became a dominant factor. Ed Klein remarked that the Romney people don't seem to understand that their candidate will have to understand that everything is open and known and that you just can't pivot like you could do in the past and assume another political persona for the general election.

Whatever you think of President Obama it seems and feels and sounds authentic. Mitt Romney does appear, feel or sound authentic and he makes plastic look real. Remember every Republican candidate in 2008 couldn't stand him. As the campaign moves on, I can't see Romney wearing well.

The GOP chairman in Iowa already has said that Romney can't win there despite the campaign's announcement that they are now playing to win the caucus. But no one ever expected him too. Tomorrow is the Mike Huckabee debate so that everyone is supposed to attack Newt Ginrgich as the next Non-Mitt. So even if Romney is declared the winner, it's not going to help.

My take is that Romney will not have a real chance to win the Presidency unless he loses New Hampshire and makes a comeback,which shows he has inner strength and the guts to pull himself off the floor. We have not seen anything to let us know whether Romney is anything but a privileged son who started life at third base, who managed to amass a fortune by leveraging other companies. We have no sense of struggle, doubt or overcoming odds.

Of anyone I think Jon Huntsman is the most sensitive to Romney's great vulnerabilities and has produced television ad after television ad that skewers him.