How to lose a race

Mitt Romney might need to rethink his campaign strategy.

Waiting for all the other candidates to destroy each other has not worked exactly as Romney hoped.

Back when there were nine candidates, he famously said that any one of them would make a better president than Barack Obama. Since then, voters have been taking Romney at his word, trying out every other possible candidate.

Signs have been around for months, if not years, that Romney and the Republican party have a strained relationship.

In one caucus, John McCain supporters actually switched to Mike Huckabee just to prevent Romney from winning. This event perfectly encapsulates Romney’s problem with Republicans.

Romney just does not seem like the kind of man who will represent the desires of the conservative base. He is from a blue state on the East Coast and, after years of trying, he still has not learned how to communicate with the far right.

The last Republican president campaigned with the slogan “compassionate conservatism.” Since George W. Bush was culturally in tune with the right wing, he needed a phrase calculated to appeal to centrist voters in the general election.

Just a few years later, the Republicans are being offered a candidate who seems tailor-made to appeal to moderates, and he might never fulfill his appointed task because of his difficulty convincing actual Republicans that he is one of them.

The newest cringe-inducing iteration of the issue was Romney’s recent attempt to rebrand himself as “severely conservative.” I can’t wait to see that on yard signs.

Everyone farther to the right than David Brooks will smile indulgently at this silliness and hope for a Chris Christie write-in campaign. Meanwhile, independents will be rethinking their momentary flirtation with the Republican party.

It is not just that the tone-deaf phrase “severely conservative” brings to mind every caricature of conservatism that Republicans have been battling for 50 years. The real problem is that Romney thinks he can negate his entire political record with a simple catchphrase.  

It is fitting that the final stages of the Romney campaign’s slow motion crisis would involve clumsy public relations efforts. His father, George Romney, was himself a presidential frontrunner in 1968 until he claimed he might have been brainwashed after a trip to Vietnam.

Unlike his father, Romney has not made any single, spectacular gaffe, but instead seems determined to pile up minor missteps while remaining everyone’s second-favorite presidential candidate.

I don’t know if anyone has told him, but in a two-person race, that is not a recipe
for success.

­— jzsoldos@indiana.edu