http://www.nytimes.com/...
There appears to be no shortage of helpful advice from the right as to how Mitt Romney can overcome his patrician pedigree and capture the vote of the working stiff he so desperately craves. The latest strategy appears to be for Romney to embrace his inner millionaire and just be himself, rather than trying to portray himself as a commoner.
His performance among lower-income and even middle-income voters is uneven. While Mr. Romney has consistently won high-income voters in primary states so far, working-class voters have been less loyal to any candidate, and Mr. Romney and Rick Santorum sometimes split their allegiance.
But fellow Republicans say that Mr. Romney’s business experience would be more of an asset if he cast it in a different light.
* * *
He cannot change his private equity wealth “any more than he can change the color of his eyes,” said Steve Schmidt, who managed Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008. His campaign should show how his expertise could help others, Mr. Schmidt said, adding, “He would be in a stronger position if he framed the race not through the prism of his biography but what his biography can bring to the American people.”
To be fair, Mitt Romney probably spends very little time interacting with folks who make less than six figures. It's likely his contacts in this realm are limited to the driver of the limousine that shuttles him to his private jet, and perhaps the people who water his grass and rake up the leaves at his mansions. So it's easy to understand why he might have some trouble communicating with the folks who make up the Republican base.
But he has to. And not only the Republican base, but the great unwashed rabble making less than $100,000 per year are essential to his election prospects:
[W]ith the rapid growth over the last four years of minority groups who tend to vote Democratic, white working-class voters have become an ever-more essential part of the Republican coalition. In 2008, John McCain won the white-working class vote by 18 percentage points, he said. If Republicans are going to win in November, they will have to increase that margin to 23 to 25 points, Teixeira said.
“In a general election, Romney will have to run up a landslide margin among white working-class voters, a demographic that so far he hasn’t shown any signs he’s appealing to,’’ said Teixeira, whose organization works closely with Democrats. “So therefore, it’s not only a challenge, it could be his biggest challenge.’’
So this is no minor point. If Romney can't connect with these people, he's toast.
The plan to transform Richie Rich into a Horatio Alger hero manifested itself in the weird appearance of Doctor Romney in Ohio:
“If I were a doctor and I saw somebody who was obviously suffering from some condition, I would want to do something to help,” Mr. Romney said, at a town hall-style meeting in Bexley, Ohio, this week. “Well, my experience is not in medicine. My experience is in business.”
His goal, he told the crowd, is “to use what I’ve learned to try and help.”
Romney doesn't specify which doctor he'd like to emulate in his "treatment" of the country's ills (although certain candidates come to mind) but thematically this represents a shift in the campaign's philosophy about handling their candidates's obtrusive wealth. Faced with a seemingly perpetual sequence of foot-in-mouth gaffes reflecting a privileged lifestyle utterly alien to most voters, Romney's new focus (some might say by default) is to emphasize how his vast wealth empowers him with special abilities and knowledge, the kind that would be useful to, say, a President, for example. The reasons why the former CEO of a venture capital firm could possess useful knowledge of practical application to a pluralistic system of government is never actually fleshed out. In fact,
Republican backers touting this approach appear to assume that Americans will accept this as a given, largely focusing on vague but pleasant themes like "decision making abilities" and "surrounding oneself with the best people."
However, as pointed out in New York Magazine, for such a strategy to succeed Romney still must make some semblance of effort to show that he cares about anyone with a net worth in the mere five-six figures.
Of course, in order to truly make that point, Romney will have to overcome his other seemingly unchangeable quality: His struggle to give the impression that he actually cares about poor(er) people. Urged by a voter at the aforementioned townhall meeting to “show the American people that you have a lot of heart and that you love Americans,” Romney gave it a shot, explaining that, while he could have just gone on living his, “Successful life off with my family and my kids enjoying our little circle,” he felt compelled to get his hands dirty on behalf of the American people: “It breaks my heart to think about families at the margin when gasoline prices go up like they are, when health care costs go up like they have, when food prices go up.”
In other words, he deigned to step off his Olympian thrones when he saw the poor conditions his subjects were living in. Unfortunately, the touching theme of "stepping down and offering his assistance" is at odds with the facts.
Romney began running for President in 2007, when the economy, gas and food prices were all relatively stable. Of course, it is possible that the unique abilities he possessed due to his vast wealth gave him the prescience to foresee the coming crisis and the urgent necessity of his involvement. It is possible, like Tom Cruise in that infamous Scientology video, that he innately knew that he, and only he, had the ability to help us in our time of need.
Or it's possible that the economic situation of average Americans had nothing to do with his desire to be President. As noted in the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger may have summed up Mitt Romney best:
http://www.tnr.com/...
This puts me in mind of a fine line by the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger, with whom I rarely agree. A few months back, he wrote: “The enthusiasm flowing to [Chris] Christie came from the same people who had hoped to see Congressman Paul Ryan in the race, or Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush. All of them made clear they understood we had arrived at a big moment for the nation. Mr. Romney, by contrast, leaves the impression that the country has arrived at his big moment.”
The theme that millionaire venture capitalists or other career CEO's have any worthwhile skills to contribute to American government would have to ignore the dismal performance of the former inhabitants of the White House, CEO's and business owners themselves who managed to tank the entire economy and start two pointless, unfunded wars, while contributing little if anything of benefit to the population at large. Their "business acumen" essentially left millions of Americans nothing but a legacy of financial ruin. The track record of the "CEO Presidency" is not a good one. Romney's attempt to "repackage" his experience in buying, selling and looting companies for profit as a positive quality for the Presidency should be viewed with the same skepticism.
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