Romney Finds His Formula In Michigan

National Review Online: Can GOP Hopeful Take His New Strategy All The Way To The Nomination?

(National Review Online)  This column was written by Byron York.

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Tony Paskus is an engineer with Ford Motor Company, born and raised in Michigan, and he doesn’t hesitate for a moment when asked why he voted for Mitt Romney. “I’m turning selfish this election,” Paskus tells me as we wait for Romney to make a victory speech at the Embassy Suites Hotel here in suburban Southfield. “I’m very selfish this time. I want somebody who will take care of Michigan.”

“Everybody’s been ignoring us,” Paskus continues. “The Senate, Congress in general, even our president has been ignoring us. And we’re hurting. So this is our best chance of somebody at least paying attention to what’s going on here.”

That somebody is Romney. And if you multiply those sentiments by a few hundred thousand, you have what happened in Michigan Tuesday. Michigan, suffering from high unemployment and general economic decline - they call it a “one-state recession” here - wants help. Romney promised more of it than anyone else.

When rival John McCain said - probably correctly - that some of the state’s lost automotive jobs wouldn’t come back, Romney answered, “Baloney.” He also promised the auto industry $20 billion in federal investment, along with relief from mileage standards and burdensome employee health-care costs. Looked at from the voter’s perspective, one candidate, McCain, offered Michiganders little understanding - the Michigan equivalent of McCain’s opposition to ethanol subsidies in Iowa - while the other, Romney, promised to throw them a life preserver. The guy with the life preserver won.

After Iowa, where he unsuccessfully tried to portray himself as far more socially conservative than he was just a few years ago, and New Hampshire, where he quickly re-cast himself as the candidate of change, Romney finally found the formula in Michigan. He presented himself as the man with the business experience and the fundamental understanding of the local economy - “I’ve got cars in my bloodstream,” he said the day before the election - to fix Michigan’s problems. Nobody else came close, and Romney picked up a nine-percentage-point victory over McCain, 39 to 30.

What’s not clear is whether Michigan voters bought all of Romney’s pitch, or just part of it. Were they swayed by the Washington-is-broken-I’m-the-man-to-change-it appeal, or did they just respond to his offers of assistance? No one really knows. “He did a very good job talking to the people of Michigan,” Saul Anuzis, head of the state Republican party, tells me. “He made people feel that he understood the issues that are affecting people here.”

But conditions in Michigan are, by general agreement, somewhat singular - “We’re the only state in the country that has lost jobs five years in a row that hasn’t been hit by a hurricane,” Anuzis says. Will the campaign strategy, built heavily on Romney’s personal connection with the auto industry, that worked in a state with a “one-state recession” also work in other states in different condition?

That’s a question for later. Right now, Romney has found his theme as the outsider who is going to fix the failures of Washington. “Tonight marks the beginning of a comeback, a comeback for America,” Romney tells the crowd in the tiny room where he had scheduled his victory celebration. (Was the campaign, disappointed before, being overly cautious in site selection, choosing a location that would look crowded even if few people showed up? “The pessimists must have chosen this room,” says one Romney supporter jammed into the space.)

Romney’s full-fledged outsiderdom will mean changes in his campaign style. For one thing, it will probably force him to become more critical of George W. Bush. In speeches, he sometimes mentions that Bush has kept the country safe from terrorist attack for six years, but he says it in an at-least-let’s-give-him-that kind of way, not as a show of overall support. From the victory podium, Romney sends a clear message that from now on, he’s willing to ignore pretty much everything else when it comes to the president. “I take my inspiration from Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush, who took their inspiration from the American people,” he says. “Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush said we are a great and good people, and it’s exactly what we are.” Romney is all for President Bush, just not the one who’s in the White House.

Traveling to Michigan, I ran into a person on the Romney team who explained the way Romney’s aides interpreted the results of Iowa and New Hampshire. Voters there didn’t want to toss a vulnerable major contender out of the race, the strategist explained. In Iowa, they didn’t want to kick Mike Huckabee out, or Barack Obama, either. In New Hampshire, they didn’t want to send John McCain to an early exit, or Hillary Clinton either. The strategist believed that Michigan voters would do the same thing with Romney, would say that there’s no reason he should be out of the race. And they did.

But it was more than that. In Michigan, Romney made a personal offer of help. He understands the auto industry better than any other candidate, and he is more willing than the others to come up with federal programs to solve, or attempt to solve, its problems. Beleaguered voters got the message. “He’s our best chance,” Tony Paskus tells me. “All I know is that Mitt would protect our jobs as much as he could.”

[perception5]

America is the largest enterprise in the world and only Mitt Romney is qualified to run that "enterprise".

Do you really what a bunch of "lawyers" running this enterprise/economy?

Washington DC is broken and only Mitt Romney has the "proven" knowledge and the ablility to work with either political party to fix it.

............GO MITT ! the most qualified candidate running from either party this year, no doubt about it!

[Razzl]

Romney''s strategy is simply to tell people what he thinks they want to hear, at the risk of being believed by no one in the end. The longer the strategy goes, the more it falters...

[doctor--o]

There were a substantial number of Michigan Democrats who voted for Romney for the sole purpose of tampering with the Republican primary since the Democratic primary was already messed up by the Michigan Democratic Party. This isn''t second hand information on my part. Look at the facts and figure it out. LOL

[gkc99]

Weird! CBS censors the word o-r-i-f-a-c-e!!!

Must be one of Rupert Mordork''s unfavorite words.

[gkc99]

Romney is Bushit''s Neocon heir. That''s why the Nasty Repulsive *** supports him.

Romeny loves wars, but is too chickenshit to fight in his, nor will he subject his dear sons to a war that Nigras, Mexs, and Po Whites should be dying in.

Romney loves corporations, helps them avoid paying taxes, helps them send business offshore to the Caymans, and is rewarded with hundreds of millions from the Corporate Masters.

No wonder the *** supports him.

[noloyalisti]

Remember that whoever of the mainstream candidates gets in we still get fascism. We need to completely revamp the rotten systems (health care, voting regulations, campaign finance, trade agreements).

The only one who makes sense on all these issues is Dennis Kucinich. On the issues alone, he is the only one who deserves to be president.

[logicanada]

Romney is lying outright to the unemployed in Michigan.
Save for a foreign auto maker moving in to take advantage of the desperately unemployed by offering minimum wage jobs, there will be no rejuvenation of the US auto sector.

[samthetvcat]

Michigan needs to find new opportunities.
Posted by afmca

It''s not just Romney who was making claims though, because McCain too was making a claim that he could bring in new opportunities. Perhaps ppl were weighing the viability of reviving an existing industry against all the failed attempts to introduce job retraining into the area and figured Romney really was being the more realistic of the two (?)

[afmca]

What Romney promised were lies and the fools were fooled once again. Romney''s message of "saving" Michigan will be lost once he moves on to South Carolina. Remember many of those lost auto jobs now reside in the non-union South where lower wages, poorer benefits, and less environmental rules made Michigan auto workers expendable. Will he tell the residents of SC that they need to accept unions so Michigan will stay competitive to SC, AL, and TN? I doubt it. McCain was more honest in that those jobs are lost forever. Michigan needs to find new opportunities. The voters in Michigan would rather live in a fantasy than reality. Romney can keep catering his message to the individual states. Once he hits the National level he will be exposed.

[samthetvcat]

Yeah I noticed that trend of breathing life into the candidate on their last legs. But yeah, ppl have to see something in that candidate that makes them worth saving to do it. And ppl still don''t seem convinced that Thompson is wholeheartedly committed to wanting to lead the country enough for SC to probably save him. I think Rudy''s fostered some resentment with his unorthodox primary strategy, but his handling of 9/11 is something most of us still hold in high regard.

Another observation is that when there are two candidates who are do or die, then when one beats out the other that counts as a true win. Iowa was do or die for both Obama and Edwards and Obama won that head to head.

Also, when it''s do or die for neither candidate, that ought to be a better gauge of where ppl stand - Nevada (and beyond) for Barack and Hillary, SC (and beyond) for Huckabee and McCain.

Those are going to be nail-biters! :o