Needlenose

How must it feel to be Mitt Romney right now, seeing Rick Santorum bubbling up to the top in the latest national polls?  Is he starting to get the hint yet that — presumptive front-runner or not — the Republican base just doesn’t want him to be their nominee for the White House?

Or maybe he just feels unlucky.  Most presidential candidates only have to defeat one major opponent in the primaries and caucuses.  Instead, despite lopsided advantages in money and organization, Romney has found himself battling what must be the most comically absurd hydra in the history of American politics: every time he decapitates a Rick Perry or Newt Gingrich, an even more unlikely challenger (such as Herman Cain or Santorum) emerges to carry the far-right banner.

This cycle has been going on so long that I felt behind the curve when I laid out the basic reasons for it more than four months ago:

Ever since Ronald Reagan showed them the way, success as a GOP presidential candidate has been defined by the ability to present the public with a bland, unthreatening face that effectively hides the party’s underlying cruel policy agenda.

This almost requires that a promising candidate can’t have too much of a record, lest the agenda be revealed too clearly — or, worse in the eyes of the base, contradicted.  Thus you get nominees like George Bush, who came across as personally innocuous but had the family name to make him marketable (otherwise, he’d have been another Tim Pawlenty).

[...] So what you’ve seen in the post-Dubya era is a disheartened Republican Party flipping channels, skipping past one unsatisfactory pretender after another… all in a vain search for a personality who captures the essential flim-flam needed to get the GOP back into the White House.

The current GOP race has highlighted another facet of this problem — the successful nominee must be utterly subservient to both the Wall Street money and Tea Party culture-war factions of the party, but obscure this as much as possible (including not showing a pronounced tilt toward either side, lest the other become suspicious).

Combined with the deluge of super-PAC negative advertising against Romney and Newt Gingrich, the most popular candidate in recent polls of the Republican electorate seems to be whoever no one has bothered to think much about for awhile.  Once the public spotlight shines on a particular contender for a couple of weeks, their past records and other flaws all become embarrassingly visible, and suddenly hardly anyone wants to vote for them anymore.

Mitt can probably still stagger his way to a victory-by-attrition by carpetbombing Santorum with harsh TV ads, but it’s hard to imagine him mustering any enthusiasm for unifying the party behind him in the fall after such an assault (which GOP insiders are reportedly begging him not to do it).

Maybe the best strategy for Mitt is to make the “overlooked candidate” dynamic work for him by taking an indefinite break from the campaign trail.  Then get word to his super-PAC to split its cash between TV commercials seemingly on behalf of Gingrich or Santorum, whoever is riding higher at the moment (in a mix of 10% half-hearted positive ads versus 90% sledghammer negative ones).

In a few weeks, everyone will be longing for Romney to come back as the party’s savior.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

The Billionaire...and the rest!

Unattributed photoshop, tip ‘o the Nose to Cannibal Buddy!

Mitt says he isn’t concerned about the very poor:

“Are there no prisons? And the Union workhouses?  Are they still in operation?  The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?  I help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.

If they would rather die [then go to prison] they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.  Besides — excuse me — I don’t know that.  It’s not my business. It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s.  Mine occupies me constantly.  Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

I wrote at my part-time gig elsewhere last week:

The frightening upshot of Mitt Romney’s clear path to the Republican nomination for the White House is that it might as well be the fall of 2012 right now.

Making full use of their respective, nearly limitless warchests, both the Romney and Obama campaigns will spend the next ten months carpet-bombing each other in the media in hopes of framing the presidential race in their favor.

Recognizing that the general election campaign was indeed about to begin, however mind-numbingly early, both sides spent the past few days test-driving their respective spins–specifically, with regard to Romney’s corporate-vampire past.  On Wednesday, Romney took this tack (via TPM):

(photo: Gage Skidmore)

QUESTIONER: Did you suggest that anyone who questions the policies and practices of Wall Street and financial institutions, anyone who has questions about the distribution of wealth and power in this country, is envious? Is it about jealousy, or fairness?

ROMNEY: You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare. When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on 99 percent versus one percent, and those people who have been most successful will be in the one percent, you have opened up a wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.

Here, Mitt is betting on a long-recognized characteristic that has benefited Republicans: working-class voters can be coaxed into sympathy for policies that favor the wealthy because they personally aspire to be (or, at least, idly wish they were) wealthy themselves.

Obviously, Team Obama’s riposte sought to push a much different frame:

Our economic crisis and endemic income inequality were caused in large part by a few who put profits over people. Taking advantage of an uneven playing field, where there was one rulebook for those at the top and another for everyone else, Mitt Romney and his friends made money hand over fist while working families lost their grip on the middle-class lifestyle they earned.

Between now and November the American people will decide whether to respond to this crisis by electing a corporate raider who profited from – and promises to restore – the conditions that caused it…

Underneath this verbiage aimed at creating or destroying sympathy for the GOP economic agenda, there will be a more basic conflict at play: how good or bad the economy actually is as 2012 progresses, and whether voters think Romney has any real ability to make things better.

President Obama’s ability to influence the former is almost over, leaving the latter as the major issue to fight about.  An email from Obama strategist David Axelrod to Greg Sargent provides an interesting hint about this:

Last week [Romney] said “productivity equals income.”

But the point is, it hasn’t for the typical American worker over the last three decades, and, particularly, over the last decade.

This is the central challenge of our time, and he doesn’t get it.

That’s a surprisingly wonky way to define a “central challenge” for a political campaign, but there’s a reason for it.  The underlying message from Romney’s side is going to be, you may not like me or even think I’m ethical, but I know how the world of money works — and I can use that knowledge to get the economy going again.

Judging from Axelrod’s email, Team Obama has a different take.  They think Romney’s flat, obviously scripted rhetoric shows (and, more importantly, will continue to show voters) that he doesn’t really get how the economy works… which opens the door for all the suspicions about only being interested in enriching himself through a rigged system.

In short, Axelrod et al. think they can win the race by betting on Romney to expose himself as not much brighter than Rick Perry or Sarah Palin.  Might not be a bad plan.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake. Thanks to Greg Sargent for the shout-out!)

With Halloween coming up on Monday, there’s going to be a lot of grown-ups attending masquerade parties this weekend. Which, unfortunately, has meant a lot of long, last-minute lines in crowded costume stores — including the one in Washington, D.C., where all the Republican presidential candidates went shopping earlier this week.

As you might expect, they all wanted to dress up as Ronald Reagan, but someone had already snatched that up before the GOP contenders got there… and things just got uglier as they all scrambled for other choices.

Michele Bachmann took the easiest route, deciding to go as Bat Boy.

Jon Huntsman settled for being the Invisible Man.  (Some thought Tim Pawlenty did, too, but it turned out he didn’t stay long enough to buy a costume.)

All of his fellow candidates wanted Ron Paul to be the Invisible Man, but he kept asking if he could be Ross Perot.  Amid all the crosstalk, he wound up as Perot’s crazy aunt in the basement.

Sarah Palin, who showed up even though she isn’t running, opted for Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

Herman Cain decided to go as Sarah Palin, but people are just beginning to figure that out.

Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich both wanted to be Elmer Gantry, which resulted in a terrible fight where they tore the costume in half.  Perry completed his outfit with a cowboy get-up once worn by George Bush — and when he worried people might recognize it, he dyed a Jimmy Carter wig to put on top of it all.  Newt combined his half with a science-fiction robot costume.

Mitt Romney took the same concept way too far, stitching together pieces from so many different costumes that no one really knows who he’s trying to be.

(Adapted from a post at Firedoglake.  Tip of the ‘Nose to Green Boy for his suggestions!)