The political discourse swarming around Mitt Romney in NH focuses on the wrong argument. Voters are asked to consider the wrong facts. They are wasting their time.
Let's start over.
OK, you are a Republican voter somewhere in America and will soon have to vote or attend a caucus and support a candidate from your party for the presidential nomination.What do you care about? First you want a candidate who already has a track record - ignore what they promise to do, watch what they've done - of supporting the core values - social, economic mostly - that your party stands for. Secondly in these economically difficult times you want the next President to be effective at boosting our GDP, at healing the economy; and again here you'd like some evidence that they can do that. Notice I didn't say you want a guy who says all the right stuff when you give him a microphone. That can be phony and you know it.
So on the first count you've got Rick Santorum, a steady champion of conservative social beliefs. No argument. Michelle Bachmann was a winner there too but she's gone. To some extent Ron Paul hits some good notes here but he's also scary. Newt was more of an economic warrior. Romney on the other hand was never known to support conservative social values when he was governor or in speeches prior to this campaign.
As for healing the economy - "creating jobs" - Perry has a good record in Texas(which doesn't hold up too well upon scrutiny) but the main aspirant here is Romney who says he knows how to create jobs. But does he? The issue here is not whether he did or didn't create jobs as a leveraged buyout capitalist; rather the much more relevant question is how successful he was in an elective position in government - governor of Mass.for 4 years - in improving their job totals there. He is not running to head up a private sector firm again; he is running to head up a government. Well here is the evaluation from USA Today this week on his Mass. experience:
"Romney took office during an economic uptick. Massachusetts had a net job growth of 1.4 percent under Romney. However, that was far slower growth than the national average of 5.3%. As Romney's opponents have frequently, and correctly, noted, Massachusetts ranked 47th in job growth over the entirety of Romney's term."
So candidate Romney's main claim to your support - based on his record - is economic know-how. How's he doing?
Republican voters have been asking the wrong question.