For Romney, winning old-style was never enough
A lot has been said and written in recent days about what parts of Mitt Romney’s struggles — now verging on death throes — are the candidate’s fault, the fault of the campaign, or the fault of the modern Republican Party.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, to be sure. I’ve followed politics professionally for a quarter century and Romney-Ryan 12 is slotting in somewhere in the range of Mondale and Dukakis for sheer ineptness.
(See footnote below for why I’m talking about Romney in the past tense.)
The difference though is that nobody really truly expected those guys to win.
In 2012, a lot of pundits — and the GOP’s conservative base — thought they had an opportunity to kneecap a newly minted Democratic icon. After the 2010 mid-terms, the tea party tide seemed like a national correction.
It turns out not so much. And the time has come to look with a cool head at what portion of woe Mitt Romney has and hasn’t brought upon himself.
First, it’s only fair to point out that Romney is doing just fine among the voters who used to lift Republican candidates into office. He’s winning rural voters, whites, white men, middle class families, older voters, and military veterans, often by handy double-digit margins.
According to the latest Politico-George Washington University poll, Romney holds a commanding 15% lead voters in middle class families. We noted yesterday that a poll shows him up by similar, blow-out margins in rural parts of battleground states.
Romney also appears poised to capture at least two states – Indiana and North Carolina — that eluded John McCain in 2008, and he may well take several other states McCain couldn’t rally, including Colorado or Florida.
So give the guy credit.
The problem, of course, is that winning “old-style” isn’t good enough any more for Republicans.
Since the 1980s, the GOP’s foundational voting bloc has made up a smaller and smaller subset of the overall voting population. Which means that year by year, whopper states that were competitive — like, say, California, Illinois, and New York — have slipped out of reach.
Even safe-base states such as North Carolina and Virginia are tilting more and more purple, and may even be shading blue.
It’s not just that American demographics are changing, though that’s the biggest driver — those constituencies that lifted Reagan just aren’t enough to lift Romney to victory, unless they vote in really high numbers with nearly perfect discipline.
Also significant is the fact that modern politics are increasingly tribal, increasingly ironclad.
In their respective wins, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter both built interesting coalitions of open-minded voters.
Carter merged Northeastern moderates, blacks and southern Whites. Reagan cobbled together a weird coalition that won New York and California but lost Minnesota and West Virginia.
Romney clearly hoped to do something similar, hoping to expand the GOP’s southern and Midwestern base with wins in places like Colorado, Ohio and Wisconsin. He took a stab at chipping away the Democrats’ lead among women and Hispanics.
It just didn’t happen. And probably wouldn’t have happened, even if Romney ran a much smarter, better campaign. In fact, what would have been needed is a brilliant campaign, an over-the-top campaign. A second Ronald Reagan. A second Bill Clinton.
But you can’t run a political movement on the “Great Man” theory, hoping for a savior every four years.
So give Romney credit for doing about as well as Republicans have done over the last quarter century with roughly the same groups that powered the Bush clan to victory in three different elections.
This time around, it looks like Romney will be left holding the bag for a formula that may no longer be politically viable.
(A lot of national political journalists – folks several pay grades above me — are still arguing that this is a competitive race. Unless something unforeseen happens, I can’t find facts to support that narrative. Real Clear Politics concludes that Obama has 247 electoral college votes in his column now, and that’s without Ohio, Nevada or Virginia where the Democrat leads by more than 4 points and perhaps as much as 8 points among likely voters. Obama is also leading now in every battleground state, including North Caroline. There is also not, as some journalists have suggested, “an eternity” left in the campaign. There are 42 days. In an electorate that has budged only stubbornly all year, 42 days is exactly what it looks like…not much time.)
Well minimum wage laws apply across the board they don’t set a wage between one company and one employee, they set a national floor.
In addition wage and price controls do the same thing, they cut across the board, (they were of horrible failed policy to boot). But the essential idea that government can tell these sets of companies you have to pay this and others pay this etc, I think would be challenged legally, plus I think it is a abuse of government power that is worse than the overpayment of bad performing CEO’s.
Part of freedom is letting people and organizations make bad decisions. For me I don’t care that some guy on wall street is horribly overpaid, it does not affect me, my life would not be better if the government forced his pay lower. It would not solve any of our problems.
I don’t trust the government to make those sorts of decisions, it by its very nature would make those decision’s politically, it is what the government does, they give favors to their friends and punish their enemies. The government is run by politicians, do you trust our politicians to have that sort of power? I don’t it is the reason we have a Constitution and a division of power.
Mervel, how many times do I have to say that I am not advocating the government setting anyone’s compensation? I am advocating policies that would provide a disincentive to high executive salaries generally. I’m not at all clear on how best to do it, and I rather doubt it can even be done– after all, whatever attempt is made, lawyers will immediately seek out workarounds. And well-paid lobbyists will fight tooth and nail to ensure that no effective regulations ever make it into law. Still, better to try…
Walker,
I said it was incipient communism, a subtle but important distinction. It’s starting to look like I’m not the only one who doesn’t get it.
“…incipient communism, a subtle but important distinction…”
It’s neither subtle nor important. If regulating capitalism is incipient communism, we’ve been at for over two hundred years.
I suppose it makes you feel better to think that what you advocate is nothing new, but it is. Artificially influencing the relationship between labor and capital began in earnest during the New Deal, a communist inspired and influenced program (read Witness, by Whittaker Chambers for a long list of New Deal bureaucrats who were agents of the Soviet Union). Artificially influencing the relationship between capital and management is the next step, hence my use of the word incipient. Seems like nothing is important to you unless it comes out of your mouth or supports your position.
So I suppose it is your position that laws instituting the 40-hour week, overtime, a minimum wage, child-labor restrictions, and of course, allowing labor unions, all constitute “incipient communism”? And let us not forget that the abolition of slavery was an early instance of governmental interference into the relationship between labor and capital.
British labor law, in effect at the time of the American Revolution, fixed scales of wages and enforcement of labor contracts. Medieval trade guilds gave rise to modern unions, and those guilds came to the new world with the first settlers.
The first modern labor union in the U.S. dates to 1827. Anti-trust law was used to challenge unions in the early 1800s, but the 1842 Supreme Court decision, Commonwealth v. Hunt, established that unions were legal and the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act stipulated in law that unions not be “construed to be illegal combinations or conspiracies in restraint of trade, under the antitrust laws.”
Larry, your ideal of wholly unfettered capitalism has never existed in the U.S. And the notion that reasonable governmental regulation of labor is “incipient communism” is simply wrong. History shows countless examples of countries that have adopted labor laws that have not become communist nations. Clearly, one can “interfere with the relation between capital and labor” without winding up establishing common ownership of the means of production.
Its the domino theory, once we pass these laws then we fall to communism, once we go the world falls one by one.
It was a very compelling theory then (I bought it), and it is still compelling today.
But in the end its not true.
Totalitarianism is the problem not communism, communism per-se in its pure form needed and produced totalitarianism to make it work thus the connection.
As long as we defend our constitution, we can implement government protections for the weak and vulnerable and for some societal changes.
Larry, you have an oversimplified and glorified view of capitalism that ignores how things actually are in the real world. Your defense of how corporate CEO pay is determined is an example. You have provided only a 7th grade explanation of that process as if is that simple while ignoring all the research Walker and I have provided that shows it is a much more complicated artificial process.
Corporations themselves are artificial entities. They exist solely because we permit them to (and some countries regulate them much differently than we do). Corporations are a form of organized capital that we have allowed to become much too big and powerful while requiring little accountability. Large multinational corporations dominate many industries and have undue influence on legislation that either protects their market share or provides tax and regulatory preferences that allows them to become even bigger and more domineering. Corporatocracy is destroying American capitalism.
And you are worried about “Artificially influencing the relationship between labor and capital.” Please, in today’s form of corporate capitalism nothing is “natural.” All the relationships between labor and capital and government and business are artificial. Everything is affected by money and power, rules and regulations, tax deductions and tax incentives, etc.
Capitalism is far superior to Communism. But unregulated capitalism can result in conditions just as oppressive as Communism. And Corporatocracy is destroying American capitalism.
“[The domino theory] is still compelling today.”
Really? Communism is pretty much toast these days, Mervel, unless I’ve missed something.
Don’t waste your time, Walker, supposing that you understand my position. You and your fellow traveler myown have resorted to the time-worn liberal tactics of insult, misrepresentation, outrage and denial to overcome and obfuscate positions opposed to your own. Your disingenuous references to history (such as your reference to the abolition of slavery) wouldn’t even fool people with a 7th grade education. Many of your theories (greedy CEOs, evil multinational corporations, the unending need for gevernment intervention, etc.) are so much old wine in new bottles. People like you and myown are the creeping edge of the “socialist glacier” that has been relentlessly covering the USA since the 1930s. The tragedy is that you don’t even realize it. How ironic is it that the country that started it is no more but the country that defeated it continues down the same road to the same oblivion.
Jeesh, walker my point was that the idea of a domino theory is compelling intellectually, it is why so many people, so many smart people really believed it when it came to communism from the 1950’s through the 1990’s. But it was incorrect.
My point was that today it still has some adherents, I think mainly with the idea not about communism but about radical Islam; that if one country goes “Islamic” the whole thing falls like domino’s and the countries become breeding grounds for “terror”.
It can also be applied to socialism as Larry believes, a long march toward socialism with each piller of our US culture falling one by one. If we lose health care we lose the whole country to socialism for example.
I would rather look at things from a constitutional perspective.
“Fellow traveller”! Wow! Larry that’s straight out of the Joe McCarthy play book.
“…time-worn … tactics of insult, misrepresentation, outrage and denial…” Sounds just like that noted liberal Glenn Beck.
So you think that “greedy CEOs and evil multinational corporations” are a theory, Larry? Enron and Harken were upstanding corporate citizens? Citibank and Goldman Sachs are just bigger than usual players in the magic of the marketplace? (Incidentally, how do you feel about the revolving door relationship, in which its employees and consultants have moved in and out of high level U.S. Government positions?) The LIBOR scandal was just a hiccup? The Bhopal disaster and the BP oil spill were just little oopsies? Qwest and WorldCom — boys will be boys! Blackwater and Halliburton? Nothing to see here, move along…
If it weren’t for government regulations, Larry, corporations would run roughshod over us all, like they did in the 1920s before the crash and before that in the railroad building and trust busting eras. (Did you know that anti-trust legislation goes all the way back to 50BC Larry?)
Wake up Larry. You’re living in a fantasy world.
You miss the point entirely. It is a giant step towards socialism to go from anti-trust legislation to limiting compensation in private enterprise and one I do not think we should take. Implying that I do not take seriously or somehow approve of corporate misconduct is ridiculous and misleading. Actually, you go a long way towards proving my point about how liberals deal with opposition.
Incidentally, the term “fellow traveler” predates McCarthy by over 30 years, and was, according to Wikipedia, popularized by Trotsky.
Took me a few minutes to get it, but you just couldn’t resist the obligatory Bush reference could you, even though it has little to do with the original topic?
Hi guys – I’m going to shut down this thread and give everybody a breather.
Have a great Saturday and Sunday.
–Brian, NCPR
“It is a giant step towards socialism to go from anti-trust legislation to limiting compensation in private enterprise…”
Larry, where have I advocated “limiting compensation in private enterprise”?
Brian, I didn’t see your post. Looks like you haven’t actually shut the thread down yet.
“I am advocating policies that would provide a disincentive to high executive salaries generally.
Walker, with all due respect, if what you are advocating above is not a limitation, what is it?
You can’t see a difference between a limit and a disincentive?
Let’s see, if I limit you to 30 lbs of carry on luggage, that’s a limit– you can’t take 31 lbs onto the plane. If I charge you $10 per pound for every pound over 30, that’s a disincentive– you can do it, but it’ll cost you. Get it?
OK, Walker, if you want to take refuge in semantics, I guess I have to agree. Either way, though, someone gets less, and I guess that’s your objective. Isn’t that somewhat like saying the penalty for not joining Obamacare is OK because it’s a tax, not a penalty or maybe like the Clintonian definition of sex? Ahhhh, liberalism!
No, Larry, I’m taking refuge in the common meaning of ordinary words. I’m not saying that it depends on what the meaning of is is.
If you were trying to board a plane with 31 pounds of luggage in my example, you’d find that the semantic difference was quite real.
Have a nice weekend everybody.
At the request of the author, comments have been suspended on this post. Dale Hobson, NCPR