Is Romney’s campaign seeking a Texas-style political death penalty?

By Nicholas Wilbur

(Ed. note: I would note that this post was written before the sudden emergence of Herman Cain as a rival to Perry on the right, as well as before this past weekend's revelations about "Niggerhead." Indeed, Perry may now be on an irreversible decline, and Romney may just be able to sit back and watch. Still, without a unifying conservative figure, which some thought Perry might be, the race to me is still Romney vs. Perry at this point, with Cain not a serious contender. -- MJWS)

via New York Daily News

Behind every great political campaign there is a great team of managers, advisers and consultants.

Mitt Romney doesn't have one.

In a recent article in The New York Times, "Perry and Romney Set Clear Lines of Attack" (Sept. 24, 2011), reporters Jeff Zeleny and Nicholas Confessore unveil each campaign's approach to contrasting their candidate with the other:

 

Gov. Rick Perry and his aides in Texas have spent hours studying old footage and records of Mitt Romney, stretching back nearly two decades, building a list of issues on which they believe Mr. Romney has waffled or wavered, seeking to brand him as inauthentic. 

 

Mr. Romney's team is honing plans for an attack on Mr. Perry's readiness to be president and commander in chief. They intend to press Mr. Perry on foreign policy, demand that he produce a national jobs plan and relentlessly pursue the case that Mr. Perry is out of step with his party on how to address illegal immigration. 

 

In any political race, effectively contrasting your candidate with the other team's candidate may well be no less important than shaking hands and kissing babies.

But the strategy of Romney's campaign is flawed. Foreign policy is subject that will be mostly irrelevant in the 2012 general election, to say nothing of its importance in the GOP primary race. Immigration is a subject on which Romney has a record of waffling. And the former Massachusetts governor's record on job creation is unflattering if not dangerous. 

 

Foreign policy won't matter in 2012

Attacking Perry for his foreign policy gaffes may score a few points from media pundits, but most voters, whether in the primary or general election, don't care about foreign policy – not right now anyway, not when the media constantly remind the public that the U.S. economy may be on the brink of a double-dip recession. Perhaps voters should care, but arguing what ought to be important is no more productive than preaching veganism to a professional hunter.

Perry's alleged "neo-isolationist" stance on foreign policy isn't anti-troops or anti-military, it's anti-Bush. During the Sept. 7, 2011, GOP primary debate, he said, "I don't think America needs to be in the business of adventurism." He opposes the idea that America needs to be policing the world, but he nonetheless supports a strong military. In fact, he said in November 2010 that to be a great nation, America should focus "on the few things for which it is empowered and well-suited – such as national defense, border enforcement, and foreign commerce..."

Phelan M. Ebenhack / Associated Press

His anti-adventurism stance aligns him with the "true" conservatives who quickly disowned Bush for being a faux Republican who led the country into a costly and unjust war. It is not an unpopular position among the conservative base – or among moderates and independents, for that matter.

If Romney thinks Perry's gaffe about "the Pakistani country" is going to score points with conservative voters, he should remember how offensive it is to that demographic when President Obama so "snobbishly" – yet so accurately – pronounces the name of "that country" as "Pah-kee-stahn," rather than Packy-stan. It's not Eer-ahk; it's Eye-rack. A bumbling response to an open-ended question about America's future relationship with Pakistan isn't going to kill Perry's odds of winning the GOP nomination. In 1999, George W. Bush had a difficult time trying to name any prominent world leaders. Obviously, it didn't tank his campaign.

Furthermore, Romney has no more and no less experience when it comes to foreign policy than Perry does. Both are (or were, in Romney's case) governors. Not U.S. Congressmen, not Senators, not foreign policy advisors to past White House administrations. Their experience on foreign policy is identical, which is to say nil. If Romney had an ounce of credibility on foreign policy, a sliver of experience, this approach might register a blip on the radar of election relevance. He doesn't, and so it won't. This is a losing strategy.

Romney is a flip-flopper on immigration

On immigration, Romney would be smart to review the 2010 gubernatorial election in Texas. Perry answered charges about his stance on giving Texas immigrants in-state tuition and providing them a path to citizenship by blaming the federal government for doing nothing about the immigration problem. As a measure of how destructive that issue was for Perry, Romney should note that Perry won that gubernatorial election by a landslide. He beat his Republican challenger, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, by more than 20 points, and his Democratic challenger, Bill White, by 13.

Perry may have been booed during the Sept. 22 debate after doubling down on his support of the Texas program, but one crowd's reaction to one issue doesn't mean Romney should base an entire attack strategy around it. In the end, Perry will win this argument if only because he stood his ground in the face of an attack, declaring, "if you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason that they have been brought there by no fault of their own, I don't think you have a heart. We need to be educating these children because they will become a drag on our society... I still support it greatly."

St. Petersburg Times / ZUMAPRESS.com

Romney may think this is a sensitive issue that will resonate with the staunch conservatives of the GOP base, but he believes that only because it is what the media pundits have argued. Perry's rebuttal to Romney's charges will register with voters, because what matters is that he stood up for what he believes. He did not recant his support or run away from it under pressure.

 

If Perry's campaign aides are smart – and given the fact that he has never lost an election in 26 years as a public servant, I'd say they are – they will rebound from Romney’s attacks by sticking to their guns (perhaps literally), and boasting their continued support for the immigration program and offering an observation that no one can deny – that while Perry won't represent every Republican voter on every issue, at least every Republican voter will know where he stands on every issue. Romney, conversely, was for amnesty before he was against it – although he was against it before he was for it. You figure it out.

 

This issue also is a loser for Romney.

 

Perry needs to write a 161-page jobs plan?

On domestic policy, a primary candidate's creation of a jobs plan is irrelevant. See Romney's economic plan as an example. MSNBC ran an article titled, "Romney jobs plan: cut taxes, slap China, drill oil," which pretty well sums it up. In 161 pages comprising 59 individual proposals, Romney hit on virtually every major economic Republican talking point of the last 30 years. He also boasted it would create 11.5 million jobs while lowering the unemployment level to 5.9 percent – in four years. Before it was dismissed by the media as laughable, Romney's plan was regarded for about two days as a hypothetical neo-Clintonian miracle.

This issue also risks blowback. While Perry can boast about how Texas secured half of the jobs created since the recession hit, Romney's state ranked 47th in job creation while he was governor.

 

This is why Romney thought he needed to come forward with a jobs plan. Perry does not have the same albatross around his neck. In fact, he would be wise not to outline a detailed jobs plan.

 

There is a time for issue-specific plans, and it's called the general election. In the mean time, primary voters are trying to gauge each candidate's character and beliefs. No one is going to read a 59-point economic strategy when there are character wars to be fought.

Romney seems to have missed the memo about the New Right's 2012 campaign strategy. Long-winded legislative proposals have been replaced by anti-government rhetoric.

Perry will get away with not proposing any detailed plans because conservatives don't want more laws, they want less government.

Michele Bachmann gets this. She was applauded when, during the Sept. 22, 2011, GOP primary debate, she said that Americans should pay no taxes at all: "You earned every dollar, you should get to keep every dollar that you earned. That's your money, that's not the government's money." It was ridiculous, especially coming from a Congresswoman whose salary is paid by taxes, but it was revolutionary. It contrasted her and today's Republicans with the Democrats, Obama, even yesterday's Republicans – including the big-spending George W. Bush.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives gets this, too. Rather than creating laws, Republicans have spent the last nine months as the majority party in the House trying to repeal them. They understand what the Tea Party has demanded, and they've put it into action. Today's lawmakers aren't elected to make laws. They're elected to repeal... well, everything.

And of course Perry gets it. When he announced his presidential campaign, he said, "I'll work to try to make DC as inconsequential in your life as I can."

From a strategic standpoint, these talking points will have a much greater influence on the conservative electorate than any 161-page blueprint ever could.

A difference in strategy

In the Times article, Perry adviser Mark Miner says of Romney, "He doesn't stand for anything. He runs to the left. He runs to the middle. He tries to pretend he's a conservative. You never know which Romney is going to show up or what he's going to say."

Contrast that with Romney's chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, who says of Perry, "He just does not seem like someone you would trust as president."

Perry's campaign is targeting Romney's already well-known and highly publicized record of flip-flopping – on abortion, gay marriage, health care reform, the assault weapons ban, auto industry bailouts, stem-cell research, campaign finance reform and spending limits, immigration reform, "Don't Ask Don't Tell," the provisions of the American Jobs Act... (I could go on but won't.)

Miner and the rest of Perry's staff are making the case that Romney isn't credible or trustworthy by relying on an already understood framework that Romney is inconsistent in his policy stances and is willing to disown his own beliefs whenever the political winds change. (See the revisions of his book, No Apology, for a perfect example of this.)

Romney's camp, on the other hand, plans to go after Perry for being someone who doesn't "seem" like a potential president you could trust.

It's the difference between knowing what you're doing and winging it. It's an identical message but a different delivery. Semantically, it's the difference between an aggressive declaration and passive inference. Perry may "seem" like someone you couldn't or wouldn't or might not want to trust, while Romney "doesn't stand for anything."

 

You get the point.

Romney is setting himself up for embarrassment  

Despite campaigning for president for five years, Romney still doesn't know what he's doing. That's not to say he can't still win the GOP nomination – in a race like this, with candidates like this, it will be wide open until the convention.

That said, harping on Perry's lack of foreign policy experience is hypocritical, targeting Perry for his immigration reforms in Texas will backfire when Perry reminds voters of Romney's support of amnesty in 2005, and calling on Perry to formulate a jobs plan will only make conservative voters more supportive of Perry when he doesn't – because it will save them from having to read another government manifesto full of empty promises, pie-in-the-sky projections, and boring, bureaucratic jargon.

So far, no electable candidate has emerged that a majority of Republicans support. If Romney doesn't step up his game, non-Tea Party Republicans will stay home throughout the primaries, Perry's boot spurs will glimmer in the spotlight as he ascends the stage at the GOP convention to announce his acceptance of the nomination, and the Republican Party will become the butt of more political jokes than when Sarah Palin took that stage – because they will have picked an unintelligent, unelectable, unqualified embarrassment not merely as a running mate but as their presidential candidate. 

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)