For decades now, media accounts by journalists and campaigners of how the race for the presidency is faring have complicated our understanding of the nomination and election process.
This year, the narrative has an unusual feature: a nominee presumptive, someone who has a huge advantage in the contest to win delegates, who appears unshakably unpopular. As our pollsters put it, he's "upside down," with higher unfavorable than favorable ratings.
Some say this will lead to a deadlocked convention. Others say it will seriously hamper the capacity of the Republican Party to win with him at the head of the ticket in the general election. The spreading image of this nominee presumptive is a man driving a car with a dog in a cage strapped to the roof. On the move, cruel to animals.
We do have a precedent in my lifetime: Richard Nixon, in 1968, won despite his unpopularity. Roger Ailes worked with other Nixon advisers to put the candidate in town hall settings where he could demonstrate policy mastery before a respectful audience of citizens.
However, the nominee presumptive in 2012 cannot talk effectively about his greatest policy achievement, what is known as Romneycare, because it is practically indistinguishable from Obamacare, which he pledges to abolish. That, not his wealth or his religion, is what dogs him most. It stokes the criticism that he is neither a true conservative nor an honest public speaker.
Romney needs his advisory team to devise a fresh variation on a familiar campaign format in which Romney can exhibit his best interpersonal skills and character qualities. Right now, the best he has going for him in the narrative is his wife, Ann, riding shotgun. At some point, he will have a likeable conservative in the back seat as a Vice Presidential nominee.
But there's a dog in a cage on the car roof. And we can all see it.
Last Friday I watched Mitt Romney speak to more than nine hundred people at a breakfast sponsored by the Northern Virginia Technology Council. He was wittier and more comfortable than he normally appears on our public screens. He wore a tie and dress slacks instead of his campaign uniform of open-necked shirt and denims. He wove the work of four serious authors into his remarks: Jared Diamond, David S. Landes, Michael Porter and, an unexpected choice to me, Bill Bryson. Romney's tone and text were quite blunter a couple of hours later at the Conservative Political Action Convention.
Romney offered himself as the presidential candidate of American business. He talked about a world struggle for competitive advantage (Porter's big concept) among the United States, China, Russia, and "jihadists." (Europe: our junior partner. Latin America: battleground. India and Africa: not mentioned.) Thus framed, corporate enterprise became the defenders of Americans' individual freedom against authoritarianism. (Competition among U.S. governors to land businesses in their states: friendly rivalries.) The policy prescriptions consonant with this vision revolve, not surprisingly, around paring back government regulations and top-bracket taxes.
In making his argument, Romney was subtler than his past and present competitors for the GOP nomination. He conceded a limited role for government as "facilitator" for his business heroes. The speech seemed to work to his competitive advantage with this crowd, pun intended. He received a warm but not wildly enthusiastic response from those in attendance.
At a time when media discourse teems with speculation and some reportage in search of The Real Romney, attending this event reminded me that we can't really plumb the essence of a candidate's soul in order to make an informed choice about who to support for president. Those dramatic, "defining" moments during debates and citizen encounters on the trail are of limited value; that we talk about them so much in the presidential campaign discourse is mostly a sign of our civic frustration, and our "insights" mainly project our own predilections. To discern a candidate's preferred political orientation and intentions, the best we can do is pay close attention on those rare occasions when he or she speaks with relative ease.
It's clearer than ever to me now that, as president, Mitt Romney would put the methods of management consulting to work on behalf of an economic nationalism. What that means in terms of specific policies is something that will emerge from the collison between the yield of his methods and the preferences of other political power-wielders. For example: Romney did not talk about whether he thought it would be good policy for the nation to spend more money renovating its infrastructure, perhaps with revenues derived from gas tax increases, perhaps with a small amount of government seed money and an infrastructure bank that offers great incentives to private investors. This is a topic of great interest to the Northern Virginia Technology Council and many other uncommitted donors, volunteers, and voters in the Old Dominion, likely to be a pivotal state this fall. But the candidate left that topic alone. Indeed, he may not bring infrastructure up at all between now and November, or fudge his answers. (Is there a relevant line from "America the Beautiful" he can use to evade making a public commitment on infrastructure?) After hearing him on Friday, all I can be sure of is that he would summon the data and make his decisions on transportation, communication, and utilities matters based on what his consultant teams thought would help America prevail in the global competition central to his world-view.
The funny thing is that I don't think President Obama proceeds much differently on business-related issues. Romney will of course argue differently. He brought up Solyndra, and will surely keep mentioning it as a symbol of Obama's business ignorance and malfeasance. Romney pointed out that the bad thing about the Solyndra investment was how it dampened the rest of the U.S. solar energy industry in the making. But I don't think Obama would repeat that Solyndra approach again; he's a quick, pragmatic, unemotional student of his own policy moves. And when Romney says "Solyndra," Obama will say "Detroit," and we'll be at a draw.
Meanwhile, we heard nothing Friday morning about social issues, civil liberties, war and peace. That's understandable, but frustrating. The 2012 presidential election may well be decided on those other issues, especially if the performance of the economy in pocketbook terms for non-business executives neither sends Obama packing nor shoos him into a second term.
Where do I go to hear Romney talk freely about these matters?
Thanks to several Internet giants, today countless millions of Web users will get a lesson in policy advocacy. Good on them for exercising their First Amendment rights to speak out, assemble, and petition! It's a great day for online politics.
Still, the protest against the current versions of anti-piracy legislation also illustrates the unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, dual status of media organizations as vital channels of public information and dialogue, on the one hand, and gigantic businesses with legitimate but partial interests, on the other.
"Unresolvable" means not amenable to a one-time policy fix. Which also means a greater role for political managers skilled at legislative negotiation and public dialogue as well as online grassroots advocacy. The dual status condition --the Internet as simultaneous public square and private business circle-- is a major structural feature of our social world, and the owners of the mega-platforms have to proceed carefully, on the advice and even under the partial direction of our very best politicos.
Got that, Zuckerberg?
UPDATE (6:55 pm est):
He does.
