GOP leaders say Romney short on specifics
Candidate blames Obama ‘gifts’
LAS VEGAS — Top Republicans meeting for the first time since Election Day say the party failed to unseat President Barack Obama because nominee Mitt Romney did not respond to criticism strongly enough or outline a specific agenda with a broad appeal.
In conversations at the Republican Governors Association meeting in Las Vegas, a half-dozen party leaders predicted the GOP will lose again if it keeps running the same playbook based on platitudes in place of detailed policies. Instead, these leaders asserted, the party needs to learn the lessons from its loss, respect voters’ savvy and put forward an agenda that appeals beyond the white, male voters who are its base.
“We need to acknowledge the fact that we got beat,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said.
Little more than a week after Romney came up short in his presidential bid, the party elders were looking at his errors and peering ahead to 2016’s race. Some of the contenders eyeing a White House run of their own were on hand and quietly considering their chances. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie scheduled a private meeting on the sidelines with Haley Barbour, the former Mississippi governor who is widely seen as one of the GOP’s sharpest political operatives.
“We need to have a brutal, brutally honest assessment of everything we did,” Barbour said. “We need to take everything apart ... and determine what we did that worked and what we did that didn’t work.”
With polls in hand and shifting demographic trends in mind, these Republicans are looking at how best to position the party to make inroads with growing numbers of Hispanic, black and young voters who overwhelmingly voted Democratic last week.
In the hallways at the conference, the governors and their top advisers uniformly blamed Romney’s loss on an uneven communications strategy. They said Romney let himself be branded a corporate raider who put the interests of the wealthy above those of middle-income voters.
“This was all personal: that Romney is a vulture capitalist who doesn’t care about people like you, ships jobs overseas, is a quintessential plutocrat and is married to a known equestrian,” Barbour said.
Jindal, however, attributed Romney’s loss to a lack of “a specific vision that connected with the American people.”
“You have to have a vision, you have to connect your policies to the aspirations of the American people. I don’t think the campaign did that. ...”
Romney cast his loss in a different light, at least in a phone call with top donors. He asserted Obama won because of the “gifts” the president had already provided to blacks, Hispanics and young voters and because of Obama’s effort to paint Romney as antiimmigrant.
“The president’s campaign, if you will, focused on giving targeted groups a big gift,” Romney said, citing immigration proposals aimed at Hispanics and free contraception coverage that appealed to young women. “He made a big effort on small things.”
White House press secretary Jay Carney disputed Romney’s assessment, telling reporters traveling with Obama to New York City on Thursday that policies allowing more young people to go to college or stay on their parents’ health plans are good for the country and the economy.
Romney said his campaign, in contrast, had been about “big issues for the whole country.” He didn’t acknowledge any major missteps and said his team had run a superb campaign.