Saturday, February 02, 2008

Beyond our Ken   [Mark Steyn]

I get more mail each day along these lines:

Mark:  I am a big fan of yours and I am sorry the Canadian bureaucrats are annoying and harassing you. 

But get your head out of your ass about McCain.  I get you do not like McCain.  I respect that—McCain deserves a good horse whipping at CPAC.   I don't like a lot of McCain positions either, but you claim Mitt Romney is the better candidate in the election?  Where does that come from, listening to Hugh Hewitt?  Mitt has had essentially every opportunity, outspent his competition 10:1, and has still lost the GOP primaries to McCain...  I respect that Mitt Romney is a successful businessman and good family man, but I want a president with brass balls.  We are still at war.  Sometimes I think even Hillary has more of that mojo quality than Romney.  Very few people of any political persuasion seem excited about Romney (even among conservatives).  Some conservatives may like Romney over McCain, but that is about it.

This problem is entirely of Romney's making. He needed a Mister-Moderator-I'm-paying-for-this-microphone moment, and every time McCain offered him one, with some contemptuous snarl in his direction, Mitt would put on his more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger expression and say prissily that he wasn't going to descend to personal attacks. It's never good to play to your caricature, and Mitt's caricature (as Kathryn well knows) is that he's an insipid technocrat Ken doll propped up by a lavishly funded campaign. I mentioned a day or two back the Powerline post about McCain's willingness to knee his opponents in their privates. By just taking it, debate after debate, Mitt gave the impression that, like Ken, he didn't even have private parts to be kneed in.

Everybody on the Romney campaign mailing list knows what it's like on debate night: You get a rapid-fire response from Mitt's guys every 15 seconds about McCain's latest "Straight Talk Detour". Cute. But at some point Mitt needed to do that for himself - to get indignant and clobber McCain back, live on TV. Iowa and New Hampshire are gone: there's no more retail politics. It's TV image now, and the image of Mitt - not the answers, not the command of policy, but something more basic - has led many Republicans to conclude there's something missing.

To return to what I said about playing to caricature, most of us know very little about Mormonism. To the general populace, the word conjures two enduring stereotypes: old-time bearded patriarchs with multiple brides, or Donny and Marie. Romney very obviously wasn't the former, and so he wound up getting dismissed as some obscure ninth Osmond brother, too nice to slug it out with the gangsta death-metal crowd. The campaign should have understood this and nailed it well before NH.

02/02 03:57 PMShare