Does anyone else feel like Mitt Romney's campaign seems kind of...familiar? I can't help but feel like we've seen all this before, although not quite from this angle. It's kind of surprising, really. After all this time hearing that Republicans were superior campaigners, that they had this great team of dedicated election wonks with a ruthless fundraising juggernaut, I'm a little bit confused as to why they seem determined to re-enact John Kerry's 2004 campaign.
Think about it. You have a sitting President who's a polarizing figure, loved by his base for the most part and despised by the other party's followers, but still a figure of respect among the undecided voter. The opposition party decides not to run on their ideological opposition, and chooses a candidate who's seen as a relative moderate, ignoring all his obvious baggage and discarding more ideological candidates because they assume that an all-out assault on the President's ideology won't play well with undecided voters. (In the case of Kerry, it was because the country was seen at the time as united behind the President against the War on Terror. Now, it's because the Republican stance on social services is abhorrent to anyone with a functioning conscience.
With an opposition candidate who's determined not to bring up ideology, and with a President too popular to directly attack, the only option left is to run on competency. "The President is a nice guy," the candidate says, "but he's in way over his head trying to run America. Vote for me, I'll do more or less the same thing only better." As a line of attack, it was weak in 2004--virtually everyone agreed that by not going after the ideological underpinnings of Bush's rationale for war, Kerry ceded a lot of ground to Bush--and it's worse now. Romney doesn't even have the experience that Kerry had of decades in the Senate. (And he doesn't have Kerry's justification for changing positions. Virtually every Senator at some point has to hold their nose and vote for a bill with positions they don't like; Bush's team made political hay of those compromises. Romney just flat-out drifts with the wind.)
The question becomes (assuming you agree with my basic assertion that Romney and Kerry are running similar campaigns) Why would you do it? Why would you go with a strategy that was a loser in 2004 (a close loser, granted, but Bush seemed even more vulnerable in 2004 than Obama does now) instead of trying to forge a different strategy? Why wouldn't you learn from your mistakes? (Assuming, that is, that you intend to win the election. It does seem that in the early stages of the Republican primaries, when it might have been most possible to run a candidate who could both oppose Obama on ideological grounds and appeal to moderates, the candidates who could do so decided to look at 2016 instead. Why run against a sitting President when you can run against his successor?)
I think that the answer has to do with the differences between tactical thinking and strategic thinking. As a whole, it might seem obvious that you shouldn't run a candidate that doesn't appeal to your base, and you shouldn't cede the basic ideological grounds to your opponent and run on finely-split hairs such as the exact definitions of "too close" for Iran's nuclear program. But the closer you get to each decision and the more it looms as the immediate and important one, the more likely it is that you're going to make the decision that seems best at the time.
If the choice is between a polarizing figure with high negatives like Gingrich or Santorum and a figure that nobody has strong feelings against like Romney, you're going to go with Romney. If the choice is to run on a platform with high negatives like privatizing Social Security and a bunch of vague platitudes about how you agree with the President but you think you can do a better job, you're not going to mention Social Security. If you want to appease your base, well...nominating someone up-and-coming and far more ideological than you are works well. (Hopefully Ryan's time in the spotlight will work the same magic for his career that it did for John Edwards.)
Every decision, in a vacuum, seems like the best one you can make. It's only when you look back at them in the full context of events that you realized you've nominated a candidate that actually is what you caricatured John Kerry to be. And by then, it's (hopefully) too late for anything but the recriminations and the tell-all biographies. This one might be close...2004 was close, too. But the Republicans are following the exact same playbook that they mocked the Democrats for using eight years ago, and with a worse candidate and a better President. I can't imagine that going well for them.