R.I.P., Mitt Romney
Mitt made multiple mistakes that will lead to his defeat on Tuesday. Some of them date all the way back to 2008.
The campaign has come down to a race between Mitt’s media and Mitt’s mistakes—and the mistakes are winning.
We have now crossed the billion dollar mark in ad purchases. In Ohio alone, the two sides, Super PACs and all, are spending $30 million in the closing week—and in the battleground states overall, Romney forces are outspending Obama by $30 million.
But the contest is not as unbalanced as the numbers. The Obama money goes further because more of the total buy has been placed by the campaign itself, which by law pays less for television time than outside groups. Obama’s strategists also got more for less than the Romney enterprise by buying well in advance, when the so-called lowest unit rate was lower. In any event, the airwaves in the swing states are saturated. The Thursday before the election, the noon news on the CBS station in Columbus, Ohio, featured 22 political spots one after another. A lot of it, perhaps most of it, is so much electoral wallpaper.
What matters more is what happened months or even years ago, when Mitt Romney inflicted serial damage on himself that can’t be wiped away by a last-minute ad barrage or a barnstorming tour through the final hours.
Go all the way back to Nov. 18, 2008, when Romney wrote that op-ed in The New York Times headlined: “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” Few pieces have had as long or relevant a political life. Michigan, Mitt’s original home state, and Ohio, home to 850,000 auto industry-related jobs, have proved stubbornly resistant to a Republican nominee who seems so conspicuously hostile to their livelihoods. If the President carries both states, Romney’s prospects next Tuesday look about as promising as the Edsel’s in the 1950s. For those too young to remember it, the car was a landmark flop. Wikipedia offers a commonly accepted explanation: it was “a supreme example of the corporate culture’s failure to understand American consumers.”
Romney’s op-ed was a supreme example of a corporate guy’s failure to understand American voters. He can quibble that he favored “a managed bankruptcy”—without the use of federal funds. The Obama campaign—and most experts—respond that in the depth of the financial crisis, there was no private capital available to keep the auto companies in business while they were reorganized. That’s true, but almost beside the point. What’s indelible, immediately apprehensible, persistently top-of-mind is the headline itself. Romney could have claimed he didn’t write it; he didn’t. He could have argued it wasn’t what he meant. Instead, he doubled down, telling an interviewer: “That’s exactly what I said—the headline you read—‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.’” /snip
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along came Mitt. I concur.
