Feb. 8, 2008
Romney Had Substance, But No Spark
National Review Online: Massive Campaign Infrastructure And Money Weren't Enough
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Play CBS Video Video GOP Torn Over Romney Departure After disappointing results on Super Tuesday, Mitt Romney voluntarily suspended his presidential campaign, leaving a void conservatives are divided over who will fill. Chip Reid reports.
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Video Romney Puts Campaign On Ice Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is stepping aside, all but surrendering the GOP nomination to John McCain. What will happen to the conservative vote? Susan Roberts reports.
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Video Romney Suspends Campaign "CBS News Raw": Mitt Romney suspended his presidential campaign saying that he did not want to aid in "a surrender to terror" that he says would happen if the Dems win.
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Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney waves to the crowd after making a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference to announce that he's dropping out of the presidential race on Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008 in Washington. (AP)
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Photo Essay Mitt Romney He turned around companies, and the Olympics and ran for president pledging to turn around the country.
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Video Library On The Campaign Trail An up-close look at life on the road with the major presidential candidates.
Last week, I was talking with a prominent political figure in South Carolina, working on a post-mortem of the Rudy Giuliani campaign. We moved to Romney and his problems in the state. Romney had poured millions of dollars and lots of time into South Carolina, yet it hadn’t worked out; shortly before the voting, Romney decamped to Nevada in part to distract from his failure in South Carolina. I asked if the simple fact that Romney was from Massachusetts, where Republicans have to lean left to succeed, had anything to do with it. The political insider told me that South Carolinians can relate a lot more to a New Yorker like Giuliani - they visit New York City and like it - than to a Massachusetts candidate like Romney. How could he win there and still be the conservative he appeared to be in South Carolina? “Massachusetts is Ted Kennedy,” the pol told me. “I heard it all the time about Romney: You’re from Massachusetts?”
Massachusetts, the place, meant something not entirely favorable to some conservative voters in South Carolina. But for Republicans across the country, Massachusetts was a symbol - a symbol of the problem at the heart of Romney’s candidacy: he was from one place, ideologically, and he acted as if he were from someplace else.
When Romney tried to present himself as the most conservative of conservative candidates - remember when he said, playing on Paul Wellstone’s old line, that he represented “the Republican wing of the Republican party”? - a lot of conservatives in Iowa and South Carolina and beyond didn’t quite know what to think. When they saw video of him in the fall of 2002 - not that long ago, during a debate in his run for Massachusetts governor - vowing to “preserve and protect a woman’s right to choose” five times in a relatively brief period of time, they didn’t quite know what to think. When they saw video of him almost indignantly saying that “I wasn’t a Ronald Reagan conservative” and “Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan/Bush; I am not trying to return to Reagan/Bush” - they didn’t quite know what to think. And when they read the letter he wrote saying he would “seek to establish full equality for America’s gay and lesbian citizens” even more than Ted Kennedy, they didn’t quite know what to think.
Romney’s run from his past left a lot of voters asking: Who is this guy? He says he believes certain things deeply now, but he believed other things deeply not that long ago. And each time, it seems, his deeply-held beliefs jibed with what was most advantageous politically.
And now that he has left the Republican race, the question remains. What was Romney thinking? No one outside a very, very tight circle knows. He is an extraordinarily disciplined man, and during the campaign he applied that discipline to making sure that he never said anything too revealing or that might be taken the wrong way. So if you were a reporter, or a supporter, or anyone other than his wife and perhaps his children, and you thought that Romney revealed something special and private to you, you were most likely wrong.
Given that, no one knew what meant the most to Romney. What were the core values that lay deep inside him, things that meant so much that he would give up everything for them? Voters want to know that about a president; they piece together an answer by watching a candidate over time. With Romney it was hard to tell, so they were left to guess. For what it’s worth, my guess is that at the core of Romney’s being is his church and his family; if Romney were asked to surrender all his worldly success for them, he would.
I can’t answer the question any more definitively about John McCain. But if I had to guess, I’d say the things at his core are the United States of America and the defense of its national interest.
Romney made a lot of mistakes that didn’t seem like mistakes at the time. Drawing on his enormous success as a business consultant, he put together an impressively well-organized and professional campaign. That was good. But he never fully understood that the voters were looking for some spark in a candidate that connects him to them. Instead, Romney placed his faith in his magnificent organization and his PowerPoint analyses.
He hired a lot of people, spent millions to build organizations in key states, and then spent millions more for television and radio advertisements. The day after the Iowa caucuses, I dropped by WHO radio in Des Moines, and a top station official told me that Romney had been WHO’s second-biggest advertiser in 2007. (First was Monsanto farm chemicals.) In all, Romney pumped $1 million into WHO’s bank account. In South Carolina recently, a local politico marveled at how much money Romney’s in-state consultants made from the campaign. “Those guys made a mint out of him,” the politico told me. “It’s sinful how much they made.”
As a result of all that spending, Romney ran a campaign on a deficit, deeply in debt. Of course, it was in debt to Romney himself, who put $35 million of his own money into the campaign as of December 31, and likely a lot more since. All that money freed Romney and his team from making some of the tough decisions that other campaigns had to make every day. You could argue either way whether that was good or bad.
Just before the Iowa caucuses, I was at a corporate headquarters outside Des Moines, asking a few questions of Eric Fehrnstrom, the press secretary who usually traveled with Romney. Fehrnstrom looked at Mike Huckabee’s campaign and saw a ragtag lot. “We’re going up against a loose confederation of fair taxers, and home schoolers, and Bible study members, and so this will be a test to see who can generate the most bodies on caucus day,” Fehrnstrom said.
I interrupted for a moment. “Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those groups?” I asked.
“Not that there’s anything wrong, but that’s just a fact,” Fehrnstrom continued. “That’s just where he has found his support. I have a theory about why Mike Huckabee holds public events in Iowa like getting a haircut or going jogging, or actually leaving Iowa and going to California to appear on the Jay Leno show. It’s because he doesn’t have the infrastructure to plan events for him. And when he does do events in Iowa, he goes to the Pizza Ranch, where you have a built-in crowd, so you don’t have to make calls to turn people out. We’re very proud of the organization we have built in Iowa.”
They had reason to be proud; it was a good organization. But in a bigger sense, they just didn’t understand what was going on. Fehrnstrom, like his boss, placed a lot of faith in Romney, Inc. How could a bunch of seat-of-the-pantsers like the Huckabee campaign possibly beat the Romney machine? Well, they could, in Iowa, and McCain could in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and then in Florida and on Super Tuesday. The race was never about the imposing infrastructure Romney had built. It was about that ineffable something that voters look for in candidates. With Huckabee, some of those voters saw an intriguing and refreshing figure. With McCain, a larger number saw someone who wanted, above all, to defend the United States. And with Romney - well, they didn’t quite know what to think.
By Byron York
Reprinted with permission from National Review Online.
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Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
lol, Well said!
As someone who grew up in Washington DC and watched every president since LBJ I can tell you Mitt was the best since Ronald Reagan.
If Mitt Romney had been promoted like Obama in our corrupt MSM wolfpack press he''''d be the GOP nominee right now.
And a lot of Americans are sick of America''''s corrupt MSM wolfpack press.
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Posted by perception5 at 02:25 PM : Feb 08, 2008
+ report abuse
Yep old Romney has so many new and exciting ideas to attract the attention of the media I just can''t figure why they didn''t follow him 24/7? His idea''s of Cutting Taxes while borrowing the money to do so was so new and different because they''d never been tried before. The failure of the Media to cover that is beyond belief! ROFLMAO Isn''t it time you freaks took off the blinders? We have tried this idea and tried it yet again. It DOES NOT work. Sieg Heil Bush
The days of the Neocons are over. Rush ******** and Anne Cunter just don''t have the moxie they used to. People have come to realize just how full of SHEEYIT that crowd is.
Bye bye Romney!
As someone who grew up in Washington DC and watched every president since LBJ I can tell you Mitt was the best since Ronald Reagan.
If Mitt Romney had been promoted like Obama in our corrupt MSM wolfpack press he''d be the GOP nominee right now.
And a lot of Americans are sick of America''s corrupt MSM wolfpack press.