The Occasional Observer

Just as in pro sports, where winners aren't chosen on paper, politics doesn't always lead to best candidate on paper getting elected. When this cycle started, I identified Mitt Romney as the candidate who I most wanted to see get elected. As the cycle has gone on, that opinion stands, although most of the field would be acceptable to me (Rudy leaves me feeling shaky on social issues, Fred on whether he's up to the job). Two candidates, Rep. Hunter and Gov. Huckabee, are in many ways equally appealing to me as Gov. Romney, though I still don't believe either is a bona fide 1st tier candidate. Huckabee is making pretty solid progress in the polls, particularly in IA, and could get to 1st tier status.

But it's Mitt I want to focus on here. Because while I judged Mitt to be my preferred candidate, I also judged him to be the most likely to win. And that judgment is seriously in doubt at this point. He still has a chance, but he's bleeding through assets faster than every other candidate, and despite an extremely focused operation, hitting the early states hard, he's seeing his NH numbers slip noticeably. If he fails to win IA and NH, I think he's sunk, b/c his national numbers aren't there yet. He needs a slingshot effect out of the first few states.

So why is a candidate who is so highly qualified, so ideologically compatible with GOP primary voters (at least in his current incarnation), so adept at raising funds, so glib in front of the microphone, and so camera friendly, failing to move up in the polls?

Jennifer Rubin gets to the heart of it here:

As [Romney] stood next to Fred Thompson at the Dearborn debate looking puzzled, one was reminded of the Saturday Night Live skit in which the Michael Dukakis character looked at the George H. W. Bush figure and said incredulously, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”

There are several popular explanations, ranging from his now-renounced liberal past to his religion, but it is also something more fundamental than any of that: Mitt Romney is the least adept politician in the field and comes across as the least in tune to Republicans’ dominant concerns.

In interacting with voters, he often appears to be at a shareholders’ meeting, impatiently waiting out an obstreperous protestor so he can resume his prepared remarks.

In New Hampshire’s Red Arrow Diner earlier this year, he seemed unmoved as a waitress described her family’s medical difficulties, robotically informing her of his Massachusetts medical plan’s low deductibles.

And when he has been forced to think on his feet, he has displayed a remarkable tone-deafness. His “let the lawyers sort it out” answer to a question at a New Hampshire debate about the need to consult Congress about stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, a perfectly corporate approach to a nettlesome problem, was a perfectly awful answer. As all three of his major rivals piled on, he stubbornly insisted for days that his answer was just fine until forced to write an explanatory letter to The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Romney has also made a fetish of checking the policy boxes for social conservatives and rolling out a slew of policy papers with accompanying PowerPoint presentations. Voters soon sense that he has many ideas but little gravitas. He has lots of pitches—the “three-legged stool” of conservative values, “change” and “private sector experience”—but no overarching theme or core. If Mr. Giuliani is tough and Mr. Thompson is soothing, what is he?

Making matters worse, his manicured appearance and cautious language (he really likes “apparently”) fail to convey a robust commander in chief profile that conservatives crave. Promising to “double” the size of Guantanamo seems a comical attempt to keep pace with his more macho rivals.

As a result, Mr. Romney has the highest unfavorable rating of any candidate. He doesn’t seem to like his audience much, and they don’t like him.

Ms. Rubin offers a 3 point plan for Mitt to follow, which I'll not evaluate here. For me, Mitt's still my candidate. But I need to see more than his skills on paper: I need to see him successfully execute on the field. If he doesn't, it's not that he'll lose my support, but he won't have a real chance come NH.