Alright, we’re a month into the campaign and already things are
looking more favorable for Mitt Romney than anyone might have
expected. He’s pretty much wrapped up North Carolina and made
Michigan and Wisconsin competitive. If nothing else, this will mean
Obama must divert resources from Colorado and Ohio, which he’s
absolutely going to have to have in order to win the electoral
vote.
The stickler is going to be Virginia. It seems like it should be
a Republican state, judging from the most recent gubernatorial
election. But the vast reach of federal employment into northern
Virginia seems to be having an impact. Washington, D.C. is the only
city in the country that has prospered in the Obama Era and it
appears as if enough of this prosperity might filter out to
northern Virginia to win the whole state. It would be ironic indeed
if the final impact from Obama’s financial blowout were to buy
enough votes in his back yard to turn the election.
But not to worry. We’ve still got a long long way to go.
The most important thing about this election is that Obama has
painted himself into a corner. He won in 2008 because he was able
to widen his appeal to broad swathes of the electorate, including
most of Wall Street and people making more than $100,000. With
nothing to show for his four years, however, he’s turned to
demonizing these people. Lots of luck. He’s managed to turn all
that money against him on the wild gamble that somehow all this
will appeal to the “middle class.”
But the middle class isn’t looking for handouts. It didn’t vote
for him in 2008 and is even less likely to this time. Only the
truly poor really respond to this “grow the government” stuff. Thus
Obama’s only hope is that he has forced enough people out
of the middle class and into poverty so that they will vote for
him. With the generation just coming out of college, it may work.
These kids have no memory of Reagan and don’t even know what a
thriving private sector looks like. But anybody who can remember
the “malaise” that hung over the nation during Jimmy Carter and the
jolt of creativity that came when Reagan took over knows it can
happen again.
In such a situation, Romney’s strategy is surpassingly simple.
Be the happy warrior. Be positive, exude confidence, attract people
to your cause. Tour the country spreading good cheer while The
President remains huddled in a defensive crouch in the White
House. “America’s best days are still ahead of us.” That’s
exactly right. I haven’t heard one false note out of this campaign
and the people running it obviously know what they’re doing. This
bus trip over the past week was a stroke of genius. I think he
should do about six more before the end of the campaign. (Remember,
it was a bus trip that launched Bill Clinton and Al Gore on the
road to victory in 1992.) Romney has to mix it up with the public.
He’s got to gain more of the common touch. It’s not just a matter
of photo ops, it’s the education he’ll get himself.
Romney has obviously led a somewhat sheltered life. He’s been in
prep school, Harvard, Bain Capital. There’s a lot he doesn’t know
and a lot he has to learn. But he can learn and if he
does, it will show through quickly. If Romney rolls into the fall
having learned things on the road, with a much firmer grasp on the
pulse of the country, he will prove not only that he can do the job
but that he can learn on the job, which is something Obama
hasn’t been able to do at all.
The only thing I worry about now is Romney’s speaking style.
Here I think he could learn a lesson from the President. Barack
Obama supposedly learned his intonations from the Reverend Wright
and that’s not surprising. Anyone who ever heard a good
African-American preacher rousing his flock has had to
wonder, “Gee, what would happen if one of these evangelizers
decided to go into politics?”
It’s one of the strange and overlooked ironies of the age of
Twitter and Facebook and instant communication that one of the
biggest assets a candidate can have is the ability to give a good
speech. Look at the Obama himself. He candidly admits his ability
to give a good speech is his best (perhaps only?) asset. I was at a
humdrum Washington event about a year ago when one of the speakers
was a frumpy Tennessee Congressman who looked like he had just
rolled out of bed. I was frankly wondering how he had ever got into
his office when he took the podium and launched into a stem-winding
oration that had everyone mesmerized.
The South has always been the home of great political speakers,
but it’s true everywhere. The current Brooklyn Borough President is
a politician named Marty Markowitz who has made an entire career
out of firing up audiences with his tumultuous speaking style. I
once saw him address an all-black church in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He
climbed into the pulpit amid a few nervous titters and immediately
roared, “I woke up this morning and knew it was going to be a
beautiful day because I WAS GOING TO BE SPENDING IT WITH THE
CONGREGATION OF THE AME ZIONIST CHURCH!!” He had the crowd on its
feet within seconds.
Now I’m not saying Romney should try channeling Martin Luther
King or William Jennings Bryan. That obviously wouldn’t be him. But
he could be more poetic. I saw the news clips after Obama made his
colossal gaffe in saying “the private sector is doing fine.” Romney
picked it up but there was no cadence, no drama to his remarks. He
sounded as if he were still addressing a seminar at Harvard
Business School. “He thinks the private sector is doing just fine.
Do you think the private sector is doing fine? I don’t think the
private sector’s doing fine.”
Come on. This is the time to roll out the rhetoric: I look
around me and I see unemployment lines filled with hard-working
Americans who haven’t been able to find a job in two years. I see
college graduates saddled with tens of thousand of dollars of debt
and who realize their only hope is a two-year unpaid internship. I
see families who never imagined themselves as anything but middle
class applying for food stamps. I see a whole generation facing the
prospect that they nay never be able to gain a foothold onto the
ladder of success. And this President thinks the private sector is
doing just fine? I don’t think this President even knows what a
private sector is. He thinks the way to grow the economy is to have
the federal government borrow more money from China and give it to
state and local governments to hire more… “teachers and
firemen”?
Whoa, wait a minute. How did we get to teachers and firemen?
People in Wisconsin and Iowa aren’t objecting to hiring teachers
and firemen. They just don’t want to be bankrupted paying for
pensions so teachers and firemen can retire at age 55. You don’t
criticize state and local governments by talking about people that
everyone respects. You talk about an institution everybody hates —
like THE DEPARTMENT OF MOTOR VEHICLES. President Obama wants to
tax people out of their earnings and borrow more money from China
so we can HIRE MORE PEOPLE FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF MOTOR
VEHICLES. There, that’s it.
Oh well, it will take time. Fortunately, we’ve still got plenty
of it. Martin Luther King didn’t think up his “I Have a Dream”
speech standing on the Capital Mall that hot August afternoon He
had given it dozens of times before to smaller audiences. William
Jennings Bryan had given his “Cross of Gold” speech a hundred times
before addressing the 1896 Democratic Convention. You try out
different themes, different metaphors, different phrases and gauge
the audience’s response until you find something that works.
It will happen, I have no doubt. At some point in the next few
months, standing in front of the bus in some small town in Iowa,
Romney is going to find the right words, the right phrases, the
right tone of voice. Then everything will fall into place.
