E. J. Dionne on Santorum’s parting gift to Romney.
Just posted to the homepage:
Rick Santorum’s departure from the presidential race could not come soon enough for Mitt Romney. In proving himself more tenacious than anyone predicted, Santorum dramatized one of Romney’s major problems, created another, and forced the now inevitable Republican nominee into a strategic dilemma.
Republicans may condemn class warfare, but their primaries turned into a class struggle. Romney performed best among voters with high incomes, and was consistently weaker with the white working class, even in the late primaries where he put Santorum away. And Romney cannot win without rolling up very large margins among less well-off whites.
At the same time, Santorum’s strength among evangelical Christians pressured Romney to toughen his positions even as the Republican Party as a whole, at both the state and national levels, has pushed policies on contraception and abortion that have alienated many women, particularly the college educated.
This is Romney’s other problem: Among college-educated white men, Romney had a healthy 57 percent to 39 percent lead over President Obama in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. But among college-educated white women, Obama led Romney by 60 percent to 40 percent. This netted to a rather astounding 38-point gender gap, compared with a net 27-point gap among all white voters. (Thanks to Peyton Craighill of the Washington Post’s polling staff for extracting these numbers, which are based on registered voters.) Overall, the poll taken before Santorum left the race showed Obama leading Romney by 51 percent to 44 percent.
Thus the box the primaries built for Romney: He must simultaneously court evangelical Christians and working-class voters who have eluded him so far, but also reassure socially moderate women higher up the class ladder who, for now, are providing Obama with decisive margins. It’s not easy to do both.
Read the rest here.
Sure it is. Voters notoriously have short memories. For me, Mitt Romney’s greatest strength is that he perplexes. He’s as elusive and enigmatic as Bruce Wayne. He may well be Batman for all we know. Romney is so sincerely, inexhaustibly oblivious to the charge of being an irrepressible flip-flopper that he has managed to absorb like a messianic sponge all that could possibly be wrong with his candidacy and has transcended and transformed himself beyond all perceptions, labels and even caricatures. Unbeknownst to Mitt, he is the most radical iconoclast in all of history. Come election day, the voters will be simultaneously puzzled and yet entranced by this ethereally haunting Graham Greene character, that they’ll want to know more and so will decide against all rational pointers to the contrary that Mitt Romney is, for whatever reason, worth voting for. There’s something about Mitt.
Republican evangelicals hate Mormons. So they hate Romney. But they probably hate President Obama more. So they will have the choice of not voting or of voting against Obama while they hold their noses. I suspect that they are going to hold their noses and vote against Obama.
President Obama will continue to court white women voters. No doubt Mitt Romney will try to court white women voters. It won’t take long for people to forget Santorum. So Romney may be able to make some headway among white women voters after Santorum fades from their memory.
The economy at the present time is not working in Obama’s favor. So he is vulnerable. In his campaign for re-election in 2012, Obama is in the political fight of his life.
“For me, Mitt Romney’s greatest strength is that he perplexes. He’s as elusive and enigmatic as Bruce Wayne. He may well be Batman for all we know.”
Reading this made my night. Thank you.
About that Romney-Obama gender gap and alienation because of “policies on contraception and abortion” –
How did women break down between Romney and Santorum??
(I’ll give you a hint — Romney didn’t good so well in that match-up either with women.)
Romney epitomizes what everybody but Republicans hate about the Republican party, i.e., he looks like a rich guy and talks like a rich guy. He seems oblivious to the problems of people who aren’t rich. He hides a fortune in the Caymans and thinks what Americans really want from their leaders are tax advantages. He could give the downtrodden universal health care one day and pretend it never happened the next. He could sign, seal and deliver the Ryan budget without a scintilla of remorse. In other words, the guy should hop on his private jet and get himself to Thatcher’s England, where he belongs.
I keep trying to figure out Romney. Why does he seem like an empty suit? He does seem to love his family, but otherwise he gives no indication of other human characteristics. He doesn’t seem to have a temper, or a sense of humor, or empathy for suffering folk. When he’s caught telling falsehoods or reversing a position he doesn’t seem to suffer embarrasment. He does seem to care about corporations-people. (They don’t have senses of humor, tempers, empathy, or get embarrased either.) Is he a hybrid robot-human?
I hope this public debate over the “War On Women” becomes part of an ongoing discussion during this campaign (and into the future). Women have been disproportionately hurt by this recession, we still don’t get equal pay for equal work, and family leave/child care policies in the U.S. are decades behind other developed countries. While I’m a little uncomfortable with some of the political rhetoric, I think it’s long overdue that these issues get the attention they deserve.
@Ann Olivier (4/11, 10:56 pm) I keep trying to figure Romney out too, but then I remind myself that, as a politician, what’s more important is his actions.
So, in seeking political power in Massachusetts, he ran (and governed) in ways that best allowed him to win and exercise power. (We see this is President Obama as well who, for example, supported single payer health care reform early in his career in Chicago, campaigned against an individual mandate in 2008, and adopted the individual mandate in the ACA in 2009-10 when it became necessary to win passage of the law.)
Starting halfway through his one term of governor, Romney launched his campaign for president and began refashioning his public image as a conservative at the center of the Republican party. As the party has moved rightward over the past few years, so has Romney.
As for his psychological makeup, I’m waiting for someone (not Gail Sheehy) to do a study of men like Romney and Al Gore—sons who follow their fathers into the family business (politics) and who end up trying to win the office their father failed to win. I’m not sure what (if any) the conclusions would be, but I suspect it would be an interesting read.
I’m speaking here as a guy who has spent his entire adult life in corporate America: Romney exudes executive suite. The coif, the ties, the positive-mental-attitude-yet-forceful speaking style, the steely glint in his eye – basically, he’s a corporate suit.
That is not necessarily fatal, but I believe it is a problem. I’ve known some admirable executives. But there are a lot of less-than-admirable executives, some of whom have laid off a lot of voters while preserving their own jobs. Given the service base of the US economy and the rather precarious feeling that many of us have about the security of our jobs (those of us who are blessed to not actually be laid off), I think the odor of the corner office will be a negative for a lot of people.
It was just a couple of months ago that Dionne said, “Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus”.
That was when he and so many other male commentators, editors, bloggers, etc., RUSHed to join the bishops at the barricades to fight for freedom of religion.
Surely the votes of right-thinking men will neutralize those of women contumacious enough to vote for the President.
Off topic.
Thanks for that portrait, Ann. I don’t watch television and have never seen Romney talk about move about on screen. Sounds like quite a contrast to Obama, who works very, very hard at looking intensely emotional and charismatic. In this age of image, how can he lose the election? Maybe only if people sense that it’s all an act and there’s a hollow and only minimally competent man behind the mask, that there’s very little there there. But incumbents have a big advantage over challengers. He’ll probably be reelected. Then, in another four years, we’ll have another pretty face to kick around on stage. How depressing.
@David Smith (4/12, 1:14 pm) Interesting comment. FWIW, Obama has always struck me as someone who works very hard at controlling his emotions, and has a certain cautiousness about charisma.
Romney and Obama are similar by temperament but have differing backgrounds.
Romney is all business, he approaches governance as a business, health care as a business, campaigning as a business. And it is.
Obama has been involved in law, politics his whole life.
Obama does have an aloofness and lacks the common touch too.
Both have good moral character, good families. All good and fine.
I like both. However, a pragmatic choice has to be made. Personally, I would tend to lean Romney if I lived in the USA simply because I think he would be more effective on the economy and understands the nuances and subtleties of international finance.
I frequently support the NDP up here and am involved in social justice. At the same time, I am very much of a pragmatist and voting is a business decision too.
But everyone has their own calculus that they will apply.
David S. =
TV is a good way to check out body language. Maybe you should watch sometimes. There was an body language psychologist on TV recently who was sort of amazing. She was trying to draw out a very difficult teen-age girl who was warring with her mother. The body language psychologist noted a gesture of the girl that nobody else noticed — the girl actually stuck her tongue out at her mother. The psychologist had the tape replayed, and sure enough, there was this kid quickly giving her mother the raspberry. My point: if we look real hard, we can sometimes find some interesting stuff :-P
Speaking of business, John Allen has a first-rate article on the new Vatican document “Vocation of the Business Leader”. Allen notes that it is very difficult at times to draw the line between the teachings of the Church about a particular topic and an *application” of a teaching to particular circumstances. This becomes especially difficult in matters of commerce. For instance, should the bishops speak out on specific ecological damage by a particular corporation?
The very interesting answer in this document is that the Church must teach general principles, and it should take a Socratic approach to the specific answers and should *ask questions* about particular problems, not only issues about commerce but about all sorts of moral issues. In other words, it is the function of the bishops not only to teach general principles but also to *ask specific questions about specific circumstances”. Hmm. Could be revolutionary. The document was prepared mostly by a Cardinal Turkson from Ghana. Let’s hope he has a lot of support in the Vatican.
The document provides “an examination of conscience” for business persons which consists of questions which he/she should ask about his/her own business behavior. For instance, “Am I seeking ways to deliver fair returns to providers of capital, fair wages to employees, fair prices to customers and suppliers, and fair taxes to local communities?”
http://ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/vatican-document-make-socrates-proud
Fine. Fine.
(It would be interesting to ask Mitt Romney what his answers to the questions would be. Or just what he thinks of the questions.)
Luke and George D. –
Yes, Obama and Romney are similar in being cool, but I’d say Romney is all the way to frigid. Both obviously want power, but why? To accomplish something with it or just for its own sake? Actually, I get the impression that Romney is highly goal oriented, but just what are his goals besides lowering taxes and getting off of business people’s backs? Not inspiring. No wonder the Republican establishment isn’t happy with him. (But what are *IT’S* goals these days?)
Besides defeating Obama, which obviously comes first.