OP-ED COLUMNISTMr. Negative vs. Mr. Complacent
By ROSS DOUTHATPublished: August 4, 2012
If you’re an undecided, stuck-in-the-middle kind of voter, the president isn’t meeting you halfway on the issues, or pledging to revive the dream of postpartisanship that he campaigned on last time. He’s just saying that you’ve got no choice but to stick with him, because Romney is too malignant to be trusted.
By taking this line, Obama is testing the conceit — beloved of MSNBC hosts and left-wing bloggers — that a harder-edged, more ideological liberalism would be a more politically successful liberalism as well. And at the moment, the president’s continued lead in swing-state polls provides modest but real evidence that his strategy is working. If the election were held today, I’d bet gingerly on the president eking out the necessary 51 percent.
But Obama’s current edge may have more to do with the Romney campaign’s complacency than with the genius of his McGovern-meets-Nixon approach.
In Romneyland, it seems to be an article of faith that 2012 will be a pure up-or-down vote on the president’s performance, and that the most generic sort of Republican campaign — hooray for free enterprise and low taxes, with the details To Be Determined Later — is therefore the only kind of campaign they need to run.
But as The New Republic’s William Galston has pointed out, even a referendum election tends to involve a two-step process, in which voters first decide whether they’re willing to eject the incumbent, and then decide whether they’re willing to roll the dice with his opponent.
In this case, that roll of the dice involves handing the White House back to the Republican Party just four years after the Bush administration failed (and then some) to deliver on its promises. And by running a generic campaign in the aftermath of those failures, Romney isn’t giving voters any reason to think that he won’t just deliver the same disappointing results.
The Romney campaign is clearly afraid of talking too much about its candidate’s biography (all that money, all that Mormonism ...) or offering anything save bullet points and platitudes on policy (because details can be used against you ...). But a Republican candidate who won’t define himself is a candidate who’s easily defined as just another George W. Bush.
A Romney campaign that loosened up and actually took some chances, on the other hand, might find that the Obama White House’s slash-and-burn liberalism had opened up some unexpected opportunities.
Because Obama has moved left on fiscal and social issues, there’s more space in the center — assuming, that is, that Romney can get over his fear of offending his own party’s interest groups.
Because Obama has gone so negative, there’s room to accentuate the positive, and run as the candidate of (right-of-center) hope and change.
Because Obama’s message depends so heavily on voters’ unhappy memories of the Bush era, Romney can do himself an enormous amount of good just by exploding the premise that he’ll govern as “Dubya, Part II.”
Or he can keep doing what he’s been doing, in which case he stands a very good chance of losing oh-so-narrowly, and joining Thomas Dewey in the ranks of Republican presidential nominees who mistakenly believed that they could win the White House by default. |
