Romney's John Kerry Problem

Patrick Ruffini does a little analysis of the problems that Mitt Romney is having in getting conservatives to believe what he says:

I know I’m sort of questioning a big strategic assumption behind the Romney campaign here, but I really have to wonder whether the brick wall in polling that he’s hitting is because his campaign has become all about issues and not his incredibly compelling bio.

Here’s the problem.

Despite spending gobs of money, despite eclipsing Fred Thompson in the invisible primary, he still can’t quite connect with conservatives. Yes, he barely won the FRC straw poll, but only after he and the other ballot stuffing strawpoll-centric campaigns figured out they could phone it in for the in-person contest and focus exclusively on running up the score in the online vote. Filter out the online votes, and you have a pretty organic (and one sided) protest vote for Mike Huckabee.

Romney’s speeches are built on the assumption that he can out-conservative Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee by out-talking them. His words are a litany of conservative talking points.

Earlier this year, when his conservative credentials were genuinely in question, the issues-talk might have helped. But now his problem has morphed into something far worse: an authenticity problem centered around flip-flopping. And arguably, each time he opens his mouth and spouts platitudes, he only makes it worse.

Romney has done to himself what the Bush campaign did to John Kerry. The Bush team made it so that every time Kerry opened his mouth, he hurt himself, thanks to the perception that he was talking out of both sides of his mouth. Kerry couldn’t help himself by saying the right things because nobody believed what he was saying.

Romney’s situation is further complicated by the fact that issues are actually friendly terrain for Rudy Giuliani. Huh? That’s right — because people assume Rudy’s positions are liberal, when he talks conservative, that’s reassuring. When Romney talks issues, people assume he’s pandering.

You can read the rest of it here. I'm having a hard time understanding the attraction of Mitt Romney to some conservatives, like Patrick's blog boss Hugh Hewitt. To date Romney has been a blip on the polling except in Iowa and New Hampshire where he's poured millions of dollars of his own and his campaign's money into those relatively cheap ad rate early primary states. Elsewhere, he's staggering in the single digits and the ad rates get a lot more expensive when you start hitting the major markets.


Romney's got a "slickness" problem that doesn't play well with the voters. They don't want somebody that looks prepackaged and carefully primped and planned. That's why Rudy and Fred come out looking so much better when compared to Mitt.

Anyone who has paid attention to Romney's political career has to be suspicious of his relatively recent conversion to conservative positions. The ad prepared by a gay Republican group was especially damaging as it points out in living color the very liberal positions espoused by Romney just a few years ago.

Bottom line - Romney can't win a national election. I still think the Mormon issue is going to be way too much to overcome even if he didn't have the other problems working against him. Whether accurate or not, Mormonism is viewed as a cult by many Americans and cult membership is not a resume' enhancer for a presidential candidate.

UPDATE: My GodBlogCon buddy Matt Anderson has more thoughts on the Romney campaign that are worth reading.