[Willard Mitt Romney's] Hopes for wrapping up the nomination with a quick-strike victory, which would require a strong showing in Iowa, are fading, write Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman and Reid J. Epstein for POLITICO.com in a story titled Gingrich surge prompts Romney reboot
Martin, Haberman, and Epstein continue:
Romney’s comments effectively marked a public concession that the play-it-safe approach he’s held to so far this year – limiting his interviews and doing only modest amounts of retail campaigning – simply won’t cut it anymore [...]
The stealth-campaign that amounts to an anti-campaign is the solution to voter intensity problem:
[...] Romney’s advisers long ago digested the absence of love for Romney among Republican voters and constructed a campaign designed to win in spite of that problem rather than trying to do something about it, writes Dan Balz in a Washington Post story titled Can Romney prevail if few are excited about him?
Their theory is that voters are not looking for inspiration or empathy so much as they want someone with the experience to turn around the economy. They may believe, with some justification, that in a choice between Romney and Gingrich, Republican voters will see Romney as the safer and better bet.
They may turn to surrogates like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to provide the charisma and excitement lacking in their candidate. Ultimately, they will sell Romney as the most electable candidate to the rank and file, who find little else to inspire them about him. But Romney’s challenge will be to make that sale more effectively than he’s done so far.
Republican leaders are counting on anti-Obama sentiment to keep the enthusiasm gap tilted in their favor next year, regardless of the limitations of their own nominee. Perhaps they are correct. But if they end up with a candidate that even many of their own voters see as not someone who walks among them and for whom they feel so little passion, that intensity gap may be perilously small [...]
The true risk of Romney’s anti-campaign is not just low intensity in the form of commitment but actual resentment. Back to Martin, Haberman, and Epstein of POLITICO.com:
[...] Alex Castellanos, the veteran strategist who worked for Romney in his 2007 race but is neutral now, said that such a raise-the-drawbridge approach has hurt Romney.
“Romney has yet to demonstrate character, to tell us who he is, or what he’s willing to fight for, other than something he got wrong, his health care law — and even his commitment to that, at times, seems more like a calculated attempt to display political courage, than a hill he would fight and die on,” he said.
“I wish he would run a campaign. Everybody who runs for president should. Weakness is never a good strategy. Weakness attracts wolves,” Castellanos said. “I fear Romney is putting voters in a terrible spot. He’s not really competing for their votes. He’s just allowing his competitors to fail. Some Republicans, I fear, see that as the Romney campaign rubbing his inevitability in their face, telling them, ‘You have no choice but me.’ That builds a lot of resentment in the pressure cooker” [...]
Romney proposes not to develop a coalition of interest in support of his nomination but to disable other candidates. Hence his is not a campaign so much as an anti-campaign by an anti-candidate with no natural base, neither regional since he can carry the one state that he was once said to govern, nor ideological since the two principal political formations of the GOP activist base—the Tea Partiers and social conservatives—reject the premises of a Romney nomination: Gingrich Does Better Among Conservative Republicans and Tea Party Supporters, says Gallup in a blog burst titled Gingrich 37%, Romney 22% Among GOP Voters Nationwide
Only a month before the Iowa caucus itself does the former corporate raider realize the error of the assumptions of his non-strategy. Go Mitt! And by go I mean depart into the ignominy of complete obscurity.
yours &c.
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