Romney's obituary
Mitt Romney suspended his campaign today at CPAC. Everyone's going to be writing obituaries of what went wrong. Here's mine.
Early last year, the Romney campaign surveyed the Republican field to try and chart a course through the GOP primaries. At that time, Rudy Giuliani was the prohibitive favorite, and the Romney campaign made the very reasonable assumption that his best percentage option would be to end up in a two man race attacking Giuliani among both the economic and social conservative wings of the party.
Admittedly they overestimated his ability to claim the social conservative mantle and left the Huckabee flank open, but his mistake, his very reasonable core mistake, was to believe in Giuliani.
Also, How does this shape up for McCain now? Suddenly, all that opposition is going to flow to Huckabee. I think McCain still wins but he's likely to suffer repeated embarrassing exposures over the right's dissatisfaction with him as the candidate.
(It's not a good sign when the CPAC organizers have to direct the attendees not to boo McCain. Unbelievable.)
And, We shouldn't leave out Romney's positioning for 2012.
Early last year, the Romney campaign surveyed the Republican field to try and chart a course through the GOP primaries. At that time, Rudy Giuliani was the prohibitive favorite, and the Romney campaign made the very reasonable assumption that his best percentage option would be to end up in a two man race attacking Giuliani among both the economic and social conservative wings of the party.
Admittedly they overestimated his ability to claim the social conservative mantle and left the Huckabee flank open, but his mistake, his very reasonable core mistake, was to believe in Giuliani.
Also, How does this shape up for McCain now? Suddenly, all that opposition is going to flow to Huckabee. I think McCain still wins but he's likely to suffer repeated embarrassing exposures over the right's dissatisfaction with him as the candidate.
(It's not a good sign when the CPAC organizers have to direct the attendees not to boo McCain. Unbelievable.)
And, We shouldn't leave out Romney's positioning for 2012.
posted by mikevotes at
1:07 PM
5 Comments:
Question: If not for Huckabee would Mitt be the GOP nominee?
By
-epm, at 1:25 PM
Maybe.
Would he have won Iowa without Huckabee? Would a Fred Thompson have been able to tap into that?
The key was the Iowa loss because that's what focused the questions on his "conservative" credibility.
If he'd won Iowa, he'd have looked a ton stronger early.
He definitely would have done better on Super Tuesday.
But the question is, if he'd known he'd end up running against McCain/Huckabee, how different would his early effort to define himself have been?
He positioned for a race that never came.
(And, he did beat Giuliani for whatever that's worth.)
By
mikevotes, at 1:31 PM
I'm hoping by 2012 Romney's brand of politics will be just an embarrassing reminder of a period of American mass insanity.
By
-epm, at 8:58 PM
They've been building this brand for a generation, so I doubt it's going to go away, especially since McCain isn't one of them.
At the CPAC conference, George Allen was one of the best received figures.
By
mikevotes, at 9:21 PM
The brand may still exist, but the mainstream acceptance of the brand may not. So the CPAC types may go the way of the George Wallaces: vocal, but mostly impotent to field a national candidate. I hope this is the case anyway.
By
-epm, at 10:10 AM
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