Romney struggles with ‘likability’
Former Massachusetts governor’s Las Vegas win tarnished by comments on America’s poor
Say this much for U.S. Republicans — they love giving their presidential candidates second, even third, chances to make a first impression.
It was true for Richard Nixon, embraced by his party and American voters eight years after losing the White House to John F. Kennedy in 1960.
It was true for Ronald Reagan, who lost the GOP nomination to Nixon in 1968 and to Gerald Ford in 1976, before finally winning in 1980.
And it was true also for George H.W. Bush, for Bob Dole and for John Mccain — all of who were welcomed as GOP flag bearers after initial rejection.
Now Mitt Romney, bridesmaid to Mccain four years ago, seems finally to be making the most of his second chance with the Republican rank and file.
His weekend win in the Nevada caucuses was his most impressive yet, a 25-point drubbing of Newt Gingrich that further clears his path to the nomination.
The key stat from Nevada: Romney won a majority of votes from self-identified conservatives.
It’s a sign the GOP base (having gone through periods of denial, anger, bargaining and depression about their presidential field) is reaching the stage of acceptance that Romney is their most likely nominee.
But — and there always seems to be a “but” with Romney — the former Massachusetts governor’s triumph in the land of dollar slots and foreclosed Mcmansions was not an unvarnished one.
Yes, he put another nail in the coffin of Gingrich’s presidential ambitions.
And yes, he proved Florida was no fluke.
Two images from the campaign’s past week, however, could stick with American voters longer than the memory of Romney’s victory speech in Las Vegas.
The first is of Romney’s stunningly tone-deaf riff on CNN about the plight of America’s most downtrodden citizens.
Romney insists that he “misspoke” on the morning after his Florida win when he said he was “not concerned about the very poor” because they have an available safety net of food stamps, Medicaid and housing vouchers.
This explanation is plausible only if you believe the definition of “misspoke” is saying something three times in different ways and not actually meaning it.
When a politician tells you poor people are “not my focus” and that Americans “will hear from Demo- crats (about) the plight of the poor,” voters can fairly assume he’s speaking his true mind.
So how did Romney seek to correct the impression he’s out of touch with the travails of folks struggling to make ends meet in post-recession U.S.A.?
By standing at a podium the very next day to accept the endorsement of Donald Trump, a billionaire real estate tycoon whose personal jet has gold-plated seat belts. Think about the optics. Romney’s idea of a great photo opportunity is to go a state with a 12.6- per-cent unemployment rate and embrace a reality show host who — at the height of the Great Recession in 2010 — built an entire season of The Apprentice around the premise of firing contestants who were already unemployed in real life.
He might as well have held up a sign at the Trump news conference that read, “Mitt Romney — Man of the (Rich) People.”
Just one month into the Republican primary process, Romney is danger- ously close to losing control of his political narrative.
Romney’s campaign has always been built on the foundational premise that voters, in a period of economic distress, will go for the candidate who knows how to take a bad situation and make it better.
And his biggest selling point as a presidential candidate is his corporate and political resume. He’s the private-equity executive who balanced budgets in Massachusetts and saved the troubled Salt Lake City Olympics.
“I think that people are hoping that Mitt, once he gets to the right job, can actually do something about turning this economy around, and I have seen him do it,” Romney’s on-message wife, Ann, said last week. “He is a turnaround guy — he fixes things.”
Romney’s problem is that he’s done a perfectly awful job himself of getting that message out. Since Iowa, the headlines have all been about Romney’s Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island investments and revelations he paid a 15-per-cent tax rate on $42.7 million in income.
Now, Americans are by nature not an envious people. But it does little good for Romney to be reinforcing perceptions he’s less with the 99 per cent than the one per cent.
Recent polls suggest that Romney, at the very least, is in a dead-heat with President Barack Obama. That may still be true even if the U.S. jobs picture continues to improve heading toward November.
Unfortunately, polls also show the GOP primaries have done little to endear Romney with the voters outside the Republican party. According to the most recent NBC/
Wall Street Journal poll, only 31 per cent of voters viewed him in a somewhat or very positive light.
With each unforced error in the GOP primaries, it becomes a bigger challenge for Romney to overcome this “likability deficit,” and change those first impressions.