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SYEDA SABAHAT · #2 Thursday, August 30, 2012

Electoral tactics

Romney rope-a-dope?

WE'VE been talking a lot lately about Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital, but hardly at all about his tenure as the governor of Massachusetts. Why? Here's Ezra Klein's surmise:

Why have we spent approximately no time talking about Romney's governorship?

The answer, again, is that neither campaign really wants to. The Romney campaign wants to avoid it because Romney governed from the center in ways that could now alienate the right. In a Republican Party looking for a true conservative, Romney sees little but danger in his record. His signature legislative accomplishment was the forerunner to “Obamacare.” Meanwhile, his state ranked 47th in job creation during his term. (So much for the secret knowledge gleaned from Bain about how to create jobs.)

The Obama campaign doesn't want to discuss it because Romney's centrist record as governor might comfort independents, who otherwise may fear that Romney is a creature of the right. “I think people recognize that I'm not a partisan Republican, that I'm someone who is moderate, and that my views are progressive,” Romney said in 2002.

His health-care reform extended coverage to the uninsured, undercutting the image of a rapacious private-equity pirate. Although his state didn't create many jobs, unemployment nevertheless fell from 5.6 percent to 4.7 percent while he was governor. In a country that's looking for an alternative to Obama but is scared of the extremism of the modern right, the Obama camp doesn't see much upside in emphasizing Romney's moderate gubernatorial record.
This does not seem to me a stable detente. Mr Obama's reasons for neglecting Mr Romney's record in the Bay State sound to my ear like outstanding reasons for Mr Romney to trumpet it...later. Surely Mr Klein is correct that the Romney campaign has made a priority of cultivating the allegiance of those to his right. The debate over Bain, it turns out, is perfect for this purpose. Mr Obama's attempt to simultaneously attack and not attack private equity looks to me like a tepid bit of populist opportunism from a centrist Democrat who is in fact quite cozy with financial capitalism. But to stout conservatives, Mr Obama's Bain offensive looks like the revelation of his true commie colours. For example, Ronald Kessler of NewsMax asks:

Do we need to remind the president that the alternative—Soviet-style Communism—has been tried before and has failed? Apparently, we do.
Like the Soviets, Obama is for wealth redistribution. When talking about financial regulatory reform, Obama has said, “I do think at a certain point you've made enough money.”
The Soviets had good intentions. They figured that if the government ran everything and distributed wealth equally, everyone would be happy. But under their government-run economy, the Soviets had no incentive to work, to produce, or to innovate. The government paid salaries regardless.
Eventually, the system imploded.
As hilariously misconceived as this sort of thing may be, it functions to help Mr Romney with the far right. If I were Mr Romney, I'd try to keep it coming. The more Mr Obama can be made to appear a Kenyan, anti-colonial reincarnation of Lenin, the more motivated Mr Romney's right wing will be. Perhaps Mr Obama's Bain strategy has helped him equally with the left and centre, but in-fighting among Democrats over this issue is making this possibility seem unlikely.

Mr Romney's record as governor does, as Mr Klein says, belie the idea that he is "a rapacious private-equity pirate". As the race heats up in late summer, I expect we'll see Mr Romney running hard to the centre, and I expect he'll be happy to tout his moderate record as governor of Massachusetts as a counter to the inevitable charge that he's a monstrous right-wing radical long on cat food and funeral homes. No doubt Mr Romney will eventually succumb to Mr Obama's mastery at 11-dimensional chess, but for now I can see why he'd be glad to play along with Mr Obama's puzzling opening gambit.