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NationofChange / Op-Ed
Published: Tuesday 25 September 2012
Romney’s failing isn’t that he’s a bad candidate. To the contrary, he’s giving this GOP exactly what it wants in a candidate.
The Two Major Views About Why Romney is Losing, and Why the Second is More Convincing
I’ve spent the past few days debating right-wingers — among them, Grover Norquist and Ann Coulter. This isn’t my idea of fun. I do it because apparently many Americans find these people persuasive, and it seems important to try to show why they’re profoundly wrong.
There are two major theories about why Romney is dropping in the polls. One is Romney is a lousy candidate, unable to connect with people or make his case.
The second is that Americans are finally beginning to see how radical the GOP has become, and are repudiating it.
Many Republicans — including some of the right-wingers I’ve been debating — hold to the first view, for obvious reasons. If Romney fails to make a comeback this week, I expect even more complaints from this crowd about Romney’s personal failings, as well as the inadequacies of his campaign staff.
But the second explanation strikes me as more compelling. The Republican primaries, and then the Republican convention, have shown America a party far removed from the “compassionate conservatism” the GOP tried to sell in 2000. Instead, we have a party that’s been taken over by Tea Partiers, nativists, social Darwinists, homophobes, right-wing evangelicals, and a few rich people whose only interest is to become even wealthier.
These regressives were there in 2000, to be sure. They lurked in the GOP in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich took over the House. They were there in the 1980s, too, although Ronald Reagan’s sunny disposition gave them cover. In truth, they’ve been part of the GOP for more than half a century — but never before have they held so much sway in the party, never before have they called the shots.
The second view about Romney’s decline also explains the “negative coat-tail” effect — why so many Republicans around the country in Senate and House races are falling behind. Scott Brown, for example, is well-liked in Massachusetts. But his polls have been dropping in recent weeks because he’s had to carry the burden of the public’s increasing dislike of the Republican Party. The same is true with regard to Republican senate races in Florida, Virginia, and every other battleground state.
Romney’s failing isn’t that he’s a bad candidate. To the contrary, he’s giving this GOP exactly what it wants in a candidate. And that’s exactly the problem for Romney — as it is for every other Republican candidate — because what the GOP wants is not at all what the rest of America wants.
This article was originally posted on Robert Reich's blog.
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ABOUT Robert Reich
ROBERT B. REICH, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including his latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest, an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.
30 comments on "The Two Major Views About Why Romney is Losing, and Why the Second is More Convincing"
September 26, 2012 7:37pm
My sense is that Romney has had very little pain in his life and is out of touch with how much people are really suffering. It's hard to understand pain or have empathy when the experience is so foreign. I think the American People sense this on a gut level. His affluence has insulated him his entire life.
September 26, 2012 5:45pm
I really don't know what Romney stands for. If you asked me to choose between Romney and Obama a year ago, it would have been a hard choice. At that point I thought I was knowledgeable about both candidates. Seeing Romny's performance during the Republican primaries, he looks like a threat to economic recovery and American freedom.
September 26, 2012 11:26am
I am being an optimist, I just get the feeling that the people of this country have stopped trying to be nice and are telling the Republicans to get lost. Romney has made people aware of of just how stupid the things they have been saying are. Plus that stupid laugh of his is annoying. Do you want 4 years of his excuses followed by a mirthless laugh?
September 26, 2012 8:43am
Let us not be cynical. Let us recognize that we are fortunate to have a man of Barack Obama's intelligence and humanity to restore America's promise. While he has been forced to compromise in essential areas (GITMO, for example) he has done a fantastic job against GOP efforts to paralyze him. I am not pleased with the drone attacks. I hope he can end the permanent war on terror. I hope he can restore the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of civil rights. Let us support him - and above all re-elect him! The Romney-Ryan ticket is a ticket of doom for our country!
September 25, 2012 9:49pm
The tea party, grover norquist, ann coulter. Everything for a reason. To the Republican party.... you reap what you sow.
September 25, 2012 9:16pm
Olay liberal dilusionalists-- Romney is clearly winning if the polls are done by a group not owned by your media friends and when this is done romney will be President and both houses will be lead by a Republican. Keep up your silly mantra that Romney's extreme positions of reducing excess governent spending, reducing business killing regulations, enforcing the immigration laws as they exist in law, and the idea that America is about equal opportunity not equal stuff. This idea that Romney may also believe the Seals that protect Ambassadors ought to have real bullets in their guns isn't all that insane- most Americans would agree. I bet obama's secret service guys have real bullets.
Keep on circle jerking yourselves on this Communist website - but in November we will elect a man of accomplishment, experience, and a lifetime record of making good decisions and who has never voted present. This will be fun reading all your reasons of how Romney stole this election from your super experienced community organizer- which for the record isn't a real job is it? No boss, no paycheck right? Driving old ladies to the polls is wonderful experience to run the greatest country on Earth? This website is truly hysterical reading. Silly people.
September 27, 2012 11:47am
Romney "has has never voted present." You qualify as very confused if you think this would apply to a Governor. You were thinking of Congressman Romney, huh. Very confused, indeed.
September 26, 2012 7:42pm
You frighten me.
September 26, 2012 8:54am
Please, please hold your breath until that happens!
September 25, 2012 6:33pm
The GOP has been working diligently to dumb down the voters in this Country through their effort s to make getting an education that much harder, along with their magnificent propaganda machine that keeps repeating the lie on the major public networks that they own. At this point a large portion of the electorate doesn't know whether to $H1T or go blind. They've got the Country exactly where they want it. God save us all!
September 25, 2012 5:29pm
Yet they still have the power to manipulate/steal votes in swing states by voter ID, caging and striking voters from the roles. Greg Palast writes and speaks extensivly about this. So don't count up their loss yet it could be another stolen election.
September 25, 2012 9:18pm
How absurd- requiring voters to show ID- just like obama requires to attend one of his white house dinners. Everyone should vote right and often.... Silly people.
September 25, 2012 5:14pm
Please stop with the comments about the biased liberal media. Romney's own mouth is his biggest problem. And Paul Ryan's mouth is also his biggest problem. They cant seem to hide their contempt and disgust for anyone lower on the totem pole than the 1%. They cannot help themselves but trash the 99%. The Media (Fox news is not a real media outlet) just covers what they say, and everybody is now getting the message....
September 25, 2012 3:27pm
IF Romney lost, Reich did not mention the biggest reason. That is the outrageous support from the admittedly Bias National News Media. Fox is a small voice in the wilderness. CBS, NBC, CNN, MCNBC, etc. all "toe the Obama line". They may not completely love Obama, but it's him or no one!
With Obama's quote to Putin : "Don't worry, I'll have more flexibility after my election"(I paraphrased) it is amazing that the News Media would do this, after all the Freedom of Press would be the first Freedom to go.
September 25, 2012 5:35pm
Good Grief, are you one of those Republicans who are still promoting that BS about a "liberal media?" It's to the Republican advantage to cling to this superstition, since it pressures the neutral media to move even further to the Right.
I want you to consider the case of Bill Clinton. He was conservative as a Democrat, but he was still a Democrat, and if the media was as liberal as the wingnuts claim it is, they wouldn't have made a big fuss over Clinton's affair with that Lewinsky woman. Now, wouldn't that be so? Isn't it logical that it should be so, IF the media was "liberal"?
Yet what did we get from this so-called liberal media? Weeks, even months of gossipy blather about what Monica said! I even stopped watching the network news because I got tired of hearing, as the opening line, "today, Monica Lewinsky said..." Not, mind you, because I approved of what Clinton did, but I felt it was really a personal matter that involved Hillary and Bill and Miss Deep-Throat. It was not a constitutional crisis, Monica was not a shy and innocent intern taken advantage of, but oh how the Republican hypocrites in Congress loved it!
There's your "liberal media," Chris. Look, most of the national media today belongs to conservative conglomerates that try to sell the news like entertainment. You really think these people are going to tolerate their announcers being as "liberal" as the bigmouths on Fox are conservative?
Use your head.
I'd love to see a liberal media; maybe not all of it, but at least a choice of where I got my news reports. But there's no such thing. If the mass media doesn't bend over backwards to give everything a spin to the Right, then people like you call it "liberal."
It's well past time to retire this pseudo-myth.
September 27, 2012 11:38am
amen
September 25, 2012 3:27pm
Romney is stuck like Obama is: Romney isn't some raging right winger. Obama isn't a raging left winger.
As such, neither candidate can stoke their base.
Romney could stage a come back if he just stuck to two simple by-lines over and over again, like GW did in 2000.
(1) Americans are the chosen people! (In some form or another, and the rest of the world's populations are NOT!)
(2) We have a common enemy, and it's the LIBERAL, like Obama.
Repeat those two mantras over and over and never address any issues.
He may want to mention apple pie and hotdogs and baseball a few times too. Can't hurt.
September 25, 2012 5:17pm
That sounds like a sure fire way to alienate the rest of the WORLD. Your view of freedom is to impose the Conservative view on everyone else. Sick, sick person, who died and let you become GOD?
September 25, 2012 2:18pm
Another excellent article by Robert Reich!
Our democracy is sick. When one party becomes so extremist and ineffective the people are no longer represented. That is what we have right now.
The GOP has become the party of the wealthy 1%, corporate greed, the military industrial complex, the insane far right religious extremists, Neo-Cons, anti-government extremists, the deeply ignorant and race based haters.
That said, the extremism of the GOP has allowed the corporate manipulators to move the Democratic Party into the vacuum created on the moderate right that used to be occupied by the GOP before the Reagan era.
What we need is a law that forbids giving a politician money or gifts for any reason-ever. They would be restricted to their salary and nothing more. I doubt we could achieve such a measure, but that is my hope.
September 25, 2012 9:28pm
Funny- obama bails out stupid banks that practiced your egalitarian lending and bails out stupid insurance companies and uneconomic stupidly run car companies and you don't think Obama is a corporate pawn? Really. Romney says companies should suffer the consequences of their poor decisions - but he is a corporate shill?
You liberal people are truly the very confused in our world.
September 25, 2012 1:58pm
Americans need to understand a fundamental truth. In life there will always be winners and losers. And the degree of civilization of a nation is defined on how it treats its losers. The gap between the winners and the losers should not be enormous, like it is now. Human dignity is perhaps the most important thing. And hope. The basic human needs of everyone should be covered. It is increasingly clear that military power is becoming more a burden than an advantage. These trillions of dollars that have been wasted in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars should have been used to launch a new society in which the people's happiness is the goal...
September 25, 2012 5:13pm
That's a great thought, but do you think that the '"real" people in power want the people's happiness as a goal? If not, then these "real" people in power need to be knocked down or gotten rid of.
September 25, 2012 1:11pm
I am 70 year old white male who was a Republican in Northern Michigan when I began to vote. Over the years since Dwight Eisenhower through George Bush, I have seen the Republican Party destroy it's self.
Now at the end or death of the Republican Party we have the party taken over by Tea Partiers, nativists, social Darwinists, homophobes, right-wing evangelicals, and a few rich people whose only interest is to become even wealthier. All of which are too self-centered and ignorant to realize they are going over the cliff.
The moderate Republicans have gotten old and lost the courage to stand up and fight for what they know is the right thing to do for the country.
The Republican Party that I was a member of has totally lost my respect and support. I and my Republican Party always put Country and fellow citizens before Idealology. When (TN) Senator McConnell and the Tea-Party leaders of the Party met secretly and vowed to vote against anything the President and the Democrats wanted no matter what it was, just to make him be a one term president. When they choose to attack women, Social Security, Medicare and to Fillibuster anything that the President or the Democrats might pass.
That was the day that I said I would NEVER vote for or support another Republican no matter what office they were running for.
September 25, 2012 12:39pm
Can we have a substitute with an average american included in the voting choices that way we can elect someone randomly from the general public
to run our country ahhhh!! that sounds much better than the two choices we have now.
September 25, 2012 12:31pm
Though we do have one foot in the grave, maybe there remains a breath of the American Spirit that may bring this nation back to the living and spare us the reading of our epitath.
September 25, 2012 12:28pm
Actually, Dr. Reich, it's both. Gov. Romney is a terrible candidate and the GOP is out of touch with the nation. Even worse is that they are so willing to try to sell snake oil with lies, half truths and distortions. I am constantly amazed when I read letters to the editor which parrot the GOP line of nonsense. It is one thing to be uninformed, it is another to deny reality while accepting as true the falsehoods and conspiracy theories put out by right wing propagandists. Are we really so collectively stupid? Have we lost all sense of reality? Hopefully the majority of voters have figured out what is going on here.
September 25, 2012 12:02pm
Yes lets keep pretending that what we have is better and somehow more viable when the simple truth is that your vote for either party is a wasted corporate vote guaranteeing more of the same. Wake Up! Let me guess, Reich will never waste a sentence on the real issues in any upcoming article but will continue to earn his keep bashing one side of the corporate wheel ...
September 25, 2012 5:44pm
MAUIPAUL:
So here you are again, saying both parties are no damned good, which probably means that you'll be on the sidelines in this election, and you'll justify it by claiming you're too smart and sensitive and upright to soil your hands by voting for either candidate.
Yes, sit in your corner and gripe, but don't do anything PRAGMATIC to make things better. You can always come here and piously declare, "they both stink, so there!"
September 25, 2012 11:59am
These are frightening, times when power and money are so important that people will twist the truth, spread propaganda and block progress for the American economy causing many to suffer. What's even worse, there are people who believe? or support? the Republicans at all. Hopefully they are just blind and not dumb and there eyes will be opened.
September 25, 2012 11:54am
Thanks for the posting. Yes the GOP does not represent the spirit of America now. In the midst of all the violence in the Middle East and the problems here at home, people are tired of the lack of values in the modern practice of politics.
We are looking for hope and pragmatic solutions.
The GOP feels antiquated and out of touch.