There's an awful lot of near-apocalyptic analysis these days about Mitt Romney, who, depending upon your pundit of choice, is either A) on the verge of losing the GOP Presidential nomination to Rick Santorum; B) soon to be supplanted by a white knight savior like Jeb Bush; or C) salvaging the nomination by dooming himself in the general election.
Let's get a little perspective. It's still very, very likely that Romney will win the nomination handily, and while he's taken some damage, he'll be ready to go with a strong, competitive general-election campaign that will most likely be determined more by economic realities that anything that he's done on the campaign trail to this point.
Yes, Romney is finding it a rough road to Tampa. But that's not surprising. As I wrote two years ago, the campaign was well aware that Romney could probably only win the nomination through a difficult slog:
To win the Republican nomination without the
South, Romney needs a blue-state strategy. By sweeping winner-take-all
delegate primaries in the Northeast, the West Coast, and the industrial
North, he could capture the GOP ticket.
I would in fact argue that, on balance, more things have gone better than expected for Romney's campaign than have gone worse.
I mean, just to take one example, the odds had to be poor that the thrice-elected Governor of Texas would run the single worst political campaign in all of recorded human history. So, that was a break for Mitt.
Truth is, two years Romney would have been thrilled to know that he would win New Hampshire, Nevada, and Florida; that the Iowa winner would lose badly in South Carolina; and that his leading opponent would enter February with barely a million dollars in his campaign account.
Things actually went so much better than expected, that the campaign began to think it just might be able to wrap the thing up early. That turned out to be wishful thinking, but the campaign is still more on schedule than off.
No doubt, there are problems on the Mitt train. One is the continuing embarrassment of his fundraising, which is simply not even close to where it should be. It's also increasingly clear that he hasn't figured out how to get voters to like him -- or, at a minimum to not actively dislike him -- but that was going to be an issue whether he swept the nomination or not.
He has stupidly tied himself to some unnecessarily unpopular positions and rhetoric, but my guess is the bigger problem there is the root cause, not the specific positions. That is, something's amiss in the decision-making process that is leading Romney to make dumb mistakes, and if he doesn't identify and correct that problem, he's going to make real costly errors down the line. I don't know what that problem is; it might be some advisors who are off-base, or it might be Romney himself. I'll be honest, I'm beginning to wonder whether Mitt's drifted into actual hyper-partisan conservatism after these years of weird, self-imposed insularity, which exposes him only to a small corps of trusted individuals who are all highly aggressive partisans.
In any event, Romney's skill as a politician should not be underestimated. Don't write him off yet.
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