While Obama gets a negative rating on his handling of the economy and a majority of people don’t think the country is on the right track, voters don’t seem convinced that Romney could do a better job of fixing the economy.
When asked how confident they would be that the economy would get back on track in the next year or two if Romney was elected, 55% said they had little or no confidence that would happen, while 43% were more or less confident it would. Those are almost exactly the same numbers as Obama polled — 56% not confidence and 43% confident.
So it doesn’t matter at this point whether George W. Bush or Alan Greenspan or Barack Obama is more responsible for the parlous state of the economy — or whether the candidate is a fabulously wealthy private-equity investor or a former community organizer — if the two men running for president are seen as essentially the same in their ability to cope with it going forward.
Voters, it seems, are not buying Romney’s argument that successfully running a business makes you an expert at job creation. Or perhaps they are wary of trickle-down economics after it has failed to produce any positive results for them after three decades. Or maybe they realize that you can’t be serious about cutting the deficit if you’re not willing to raise taxes.
In any case, the Romney campaign has pivoted away from the economy to focus on winning white voters with attacks on Obama’s putative “gutting” of welfare reform by removing the work requirement — a charge that most charitably could be called misleading — as a not-so-subtle dog-whistle appeal to, uh, ethnic differences.
Faced with Obama’s huge lead among Latinos, African-Americans, and women, the Romney campaign has little choice but to rally white males who can relate to a “Catholic deer hunter” like the presumptive vice presidential nominee, Paul Ryan.
Can the attacks on welfare, or the equally misleading attacks on Medicare plans, survive a face-to-face debate between the two presidential candidates?
It’s not likely that a scripted convention will suddenly make Mitt Romney likable or give him a Teflon coating for his Bain record or his tax returns.
His best chance to win over those voters who are not firmly in one camp or another will be the televised debates this fall. Romney may try to brazen out his misleading charges about welfare and Medicare, but he’s not likely to score many points when Obama is right there to cite chapter and verse refuting these claims.
And here’s where the likability factor comes in — think Reagan versus Jimmy Carter, or Clinton versus the senior George Bush.
A word of advice for Romney: Don’t look at your watch halfway through the debate, wishing it was over.
That was a mistake made in 1992 by the senior Bush, a former businessman on his way to losing to the more likable Clinton, who was just a smart guy with no private-sector experience, even in a year with its own economic issues.
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