He is the stiff technocrat chastised by the media for his awkward style and for his many changes of public persona.  He is the son of a politician, born to privilege and capable of tremendously detailed policy wonkery that bores most other people silly.  He is frequently compared to a robot or some other passionless humanoid, for which he then overcompensates with public displays of emotion.  This was the media image of Al Gore, but it is now the image of Mitt Romney.  Presumably someone has drawn this comparison before (it seems so obvious to me today that I wonder why I’d never thought of it before), but I think it is helpful in explaining why Romney has been such a weak candidate.  Both have switched positions on abortion in their ambitions for national office in their respective parties, in which they are hardly alone, but Romney has shown an even more plastic flexibility with his positions on a range of issues.  Most strikingly, like Gore’s later crusade against the evils of tobacco, Romney’s changed view on immigration has been startling…and also thoroughly unconvincing to many restrictionist voters.  Huckabee’s flip-flop on immigration has been even more dramatic, obvious and opportunistic, but he has somehow pulled it off with a lot of restrictionist voters because I suspect they are more willing to trust the avuncular preacher than the blow-dried robot.    

As with Gore, Romney’s personal associates insist that he is nothing like the public persona most of us have encountered through the media, and it’s fair to say that journalists have been even less forgiving to Romney than they were to Gore, but the public’s perception of both men was that they “did not know who they were” and were also fond of telling easily disproved whoppers about things from their past.  In fairness, Gore seems to have had a few more of these, but whether it’s his claim about his father marching with MLK or his lifelong love of the hunt Romney seems to have the same propensity to tell stories that lend him a certain authority or distinction out of the keen awareness of a political vulnerability.  Where Huckabee, like Clinton, responds to the awareness of his own weaknesses with jokes, Romney covers up for his liabilities with stories that don’t pass the laugh test, whether it is varmint-related or whether it concerns one of his serious policy shifts of recent years.  Not only has this chameleon act been transparent and insulting to the intelligence of informed voters, but it reflects a basic contempt for the public and reflects a belief that is probably widely shared in the business and political worlds that people can be made to buy anything if it is repackaged and promoted with the properly-tested marketing.  Considering our recent political history, this belief may be well-founded, but when the promotion of a candidate reeks of focus groups and consultants a great many voters will look elsewhere (I know this is hardly a novel or remarkable insight), and if there’s one thing that Romney’s chameleon approach tells voters it is that he is afraid to speak his own mind. 

Also, taking that Hayes piece into account, it’s easy to see why voters, especially late-deciding voters, frequently go against Romney and go for his rivals: these voters apparently do not decide their votes based on issues in any sense of the word, but emphasise character and those always slippery “values.”  Romney’s entire campaign has been, at least until recently, focused almost exclusively on issues and his “three-legged stool” of conservatisms, which satisfies pundits, activists and various other list-checking gnomes, and so keeps falling flat with these sorts of voters.  Until, that is, he made an appeal in Michigan that was much more politically savvy and consequently full of dubious policy promises.  For a change, he put away Mitt the Consultant to some extent (though at the same time actually emphasising his business credentials more than in previous contests), and he related to Michiganders in terms of sentiment, nostalgia and a sense of solidarity with them (as well as through his extensive campaign network and wodges of advertising cash).  The promise of federal research funding was beside the point–what mattered was that he said that he would “bring Michigan back,” a phrase as popular as it was almost certainly disingenuous.  The tagline from his ads in Michigan was “Michigan is personal for me,” which implied that he somehow intuitively understood Michigan’s problems in a way that someone with no direct connection to the state could.  When he cannot summon this combination of personal and emotional appeals, he wins a certain segment of the electorate that focuses and votes on issues, and this has usually not been enough in genuinely contested races.  Against him are ranged the master of bathos and the alleged “straight talker,” who win over voters in spite of their policy views and even, in Huckabee’s case, in the absence of them.  No wonder Romney keeps losing to them.          

P.S.  For the pedants, let me add that I am not literally arguing that Romney = Gore in all respects.  They are very comparable in the ways I have described.

It will be the obvious headline of many columns and posts for the next two weeks, so let me be one of the first to remark on the obvious: a Patriots-Giants rematch in the Super Bowl to determine whether the Pats go undefeated this year, after the Giants nearly stopped the winning streak at the end of the regular season, presents one of the most intriguing match-ups of the last twenty years.

I have two new posts up over there this week–one on Huckabee and the other on Romney.

One of the more remarkable results of South Carolina exit polling is the support Huckabee received from conservatives, especially from “very conservative” voters who made up 34% of the electorate.  Overall, he led among conservatives generally (35%) and among the “very conservative” he did better (41%).  In the eyes of a large number of these voters, he was the logical “conservative” alternative to McCain, just as Bush became that alternative eight years ago as he discovered that he needed to come at McCain from the right and played up to S.C. conservatives.  (In the same bizarre  way that conservatives bonded with Bush after this, the grateful anti-McCain forces might have started to see some virtue in the New Huckabee.)  For those now fretting about the Return of McCain, I would note simply that it was the conservative establishment that managed to subvert Huckabee with their relentless campaign against him over the past six to eight weeks, and and it was the vanity campaign of Fred Thompson, which must now come to an end, that paved the way for McCain to win in South Carolina and so propel him towards the nomination. 

The Great Conservative Hope, as Thompson has been treated and as he portrayed himself, facilitated the success of McCain, whom some sizeable proportion of the party and a huge part of the elite regard as unacceptable and more than a few see as not conservative.  Well, in their rejection of Huckabee they repudiated the person who, like Bush, could have halted McCain’s advance and possibly crippled his campaign.  Rather than rallying around someone who just pledged to be against amnesty, the Republicans of South Carolina (apparently half of whom favour deportation) who accepted the criticisms of Huckabee from Thompson and others have just empowered the one man most ardently committed to amnesty.  Either this was the goal of tearing down Huckabee all along, or the vendetta against the Arkansan has just come back to bite the people who have regarded him as little more than a “pro-life Democrat.”  Unwilling to tolerate the one who was probably the least objectionable, the GOP may have saddled itself with someone large numbers of Republicans will not be able to stand and who still supports amnesty in spite of everything.  The Bob Dole campaign mark II is getting ready for launch.   

Remarkably, those who voted for Romney in South Carolina have probably just ensured that their candidate loses sooner than if they had voted tactically for Thompson (or, somewhat more improbably, for Huckabee).  Romney’s “delegate strategy” relies on the same divided field coming out of South Carolina that went into it.  Rapid consolidation of the race around one or two main rivals makes that strategy less likely to succeed.  Having recognised their failure to gain ground in South Carolina, the Romney campaign nonetheless did not foresee the danger that would come from their remaining supporters there splitting the opposition to the other two.

I agree with Ross when he writes:

But with his “three golds and two silvers” and his delegate lead, Romney still looks sufficiently viable that he, not Rudy, is shaping up to be the natural “stop McCain” candidate in Florida for movement conservatives who can’t stand the Arizona Senator.

As I said long ago in the pre-Michigan era (Tuesday afternoon): 

Meanwhile, if Romney manages to win [Michigan], he becomes the default anti-McCain, leaving no room for Giuliani anywhere.  Even if Romney loses, he still has money to continue competing if he wants, while Giuliani cannot draw upon such a large personal reserve.  

Because Huckabee has decided to lay off of McCain, and prior to tonight still had strong polling in a number of Feb. 5 states, Romney faces the daunting prospect of an anti-Romney pact between the two of them, effectively shutting him out of the South on Feb. 5 and then having Huckabee drop out and endorse McCain soon thereafter.  As McCain and Huckabee divide up the spoils of February 5 and work in concert to keep Romney down, Huckabee’s withdrawal and endorsement then throw his supporters and the race to McCain.  McCain-Huckabee follows?  That might be too much for the party to swallow, but that could be Huckabee’s reward for helping to break Romney. 

P.S.  Since Romney is still the delegate leader, he was always going to be the logical opponent of whichever candidate emerged victorious out of South Carolina.

If exit polling is correct, it seems very likely that McCain has won South Carolina, and Huckabee has placed a respectable, but still disappointing, second.  Romney appears to have done a little bit better than Thompson, who seems to have fallen badly short of what he needed to get, and Ron Paul has edged out Giuliani again. 

Just look at those numbers on immigration policy.  Huckapandering works like a charm.

P.S.  Early returns are currently showing Romney running weaker than exit polls suggested he would, and Huckabee is running stronger.  Here’s hoping for 7% or better for Ron Paul and fourth place for Romney. 

Update: Romney ended up in fourth, but Paul managed just 4%.  That’s a bit of a let-down after a second-place, double-digit result in Nevada, but not out of line with most of the polling.

Everything in the exit polling breaks down much as you might expect, but one thing that continues to puzzle me is Romney’s strong performance among Catholic voters, which is not limited to South Carolina.  As  I mentioned earlier today, 38% of Catholics in the Nevada caucus supported him, and the same pattern has emerged in the earlier contests and in Florida polling.  Among all Catholics in South Carolina’s primary, he got 24%, and 28% of weekly church-going Catholics backed him.  Despite finishing a distant fourth overall, he placed second among weekly church-going Catholics.  If there are numbers breaking down Romney’s Catholic support before his religion speech and after I would be very interested to see what they are, because I would wager a nice steak dinner that his support among Catholics increased significantly after that speech and remained strong ever since.  My guess is that the themes he outlined in that speech did nothing to assuage the doubts and concerns of evangelicals, but it may very well have won over a substantial bloc of Catholic voters.  In a strange way, the anti-Mormon problem for his candidacy may have started to boomerang and work to his advantage.  Perhaps it benefits him by providing a kind of sympathy specifically from Catholics.

So Romney has easily won Nevada, which virtually no one else was actively contesting, except for the presence of some Ron Paul staffers.  With 78% reporting, Ron Paul is slightly ahead of McCain in state delegates, and they are both at 13%.  Once again, Romney leads all other candidates among virtually all demographic groups.  Granted, this was a caucus and necessarily had a make-up skewed towards activists and certain groups more than others.  According to entrance polls, Mormons turned out at a disproportionately higher rate than almost any other group (7.5% of the population, but 27% of caucus-goers), and supported Romney almost unanimously (Ron Paul was in an extremely distant second among Mormons with 3%).  Some find this troubling, but I can’t say that I do.  It is perfectly appropriate if Mormons want to vote for a Mormon candidate based on nothing more than their shared religion (and it would be perfectly appropriate, if they were so inclined, for them to refuse to vote for a non-Mormon candidate on the same grounds).  Presumably, these caucus-goers also liked what they heard from the candidate, but even if it were a purely identity-driven result I wouldn’t necessarily find it at all troubling.  It may not be the best way to make a voting decision, and it may not result in the best choice, but it is a normal and inescapable part of democratic politics.  (I could add that this is one of the reasons why a democratic system produces such poor government, but I think I’ve made that point already.) 

It appears that Romney would have won handily had he received the same level of support from Mormons that he did among Protestants or Catholics (43 and 38% respectively).  The strong Mormon backing turned a convincing win into a rout.  Huckabee locked down his quota of about a fifth of evangelicals, but as usual has not expanded much beyond that.  Ron Paul ran quite well among voters 18-59.  It was the voters older than that who made up a plurality of the total who gave a boost to McCain.  Interestingly, Romney led McCain among Latinos 41-25, which will become a bit of fodder for the immigration debate.  Giuliani once again is bringing up the rear in sixth place with just 5%–this in a state where he was polling in double digits just a month ago.

On the Democratic side, it seems that my Obama pick doomed him to a second-place finish.  Clinton has been projected as the winner, and Edwards suffered a humiliating blowout, which is all the more severe given his reputation of having supposedly strong union backing. 

Update: Counting only pledged delegates, Clinton and Obama are tied.  At this rate, unless Obama can win a lot more endorsements and gain many more superdelegates, he will lose the contest.  Update: Apparently, the Democratic caucus in Nevada is even screwier than we thought.  It seems that Obama may be awarded more delegates in the end because of counties with odd numbers of delegates congressional districts that he won, which would give him a lead among pledged delegates, while Clinton continues to have a massive lead thanks to her superdelegates. 

On the Republican side, there are not nearly so many unpledged delegates to obscure the results from actual voting.  Romney has a significant lead in the pledged delegate count: 64 to Huckabee’s 21 and McCain’s 15.  The problem is that Romney has gained a large part of this lead from winning two basically uncontested caucuses.  Without the 26 he received from Wyoming and Nevada, his lead is nowhere near as impressive.  It remains the case that he stands to come out of the four major January contests as of tonight with one victory despite extensive investment of time and money, and even that victory, as impressive as it undoubtedly was, was in his old home state.  When he can organise large numbers of supporters, spend great sums to turn out his people and skew the results in his favour, as he has successfully done in two caucuses now, he wins.  When he has to win voters in broader-based, less-controlled contests, he tends not to do very well.  Is that really the candidate that Republicans want for a general election?

Let me see if my cursed predictions can doom another pair of candidates to defeat.  In Nevada, Obama and Romney win.  In South Carolina, it will be McCain and Obama (next Saturday).

This recent tussleamong the Democrats over invoking Reagan–even to make an obviously pro-progressive, pro-Democratic point–reflects the character of the Democratic race and the nature of some of the lukewarm progressive response to Obama that you see expressed in the netroots.  Obama cited Reagan as an example of someone who “changed the trajectory of America.”  Now, as I understand modern progressive demonology regarding the 1980s, most Democrats agree with this, but often view the change in question negatively. Obama’s use of Reagan here, his rivals’ responses to it, and the criticisms from Democratic pundits and activists all capture quite nicely the main tensions on the Democratic side this election year.  Obama talks endlessly, constantly, incessantly, about change–his is allegedly the “change we can believe in,” while Edwards’ change is that for which you fight, and Clinton’s is the change that is no change at all (but for which you have to work really hard).  So Obama invoked Reagan as an example of someone who could build a large political coalition and bring “change,” while Clinton belittled this as she belittles everything Obama says, because her public persona and her record, such as it is, epitomise the Democrats’ response to the Reagan years from the “defensive crouch” on foreign policy to her overall mostly “centrist” positions and she and her husband memorably demonised the Reagan years as the “decade of greed,” etc.  Meanwhile Edwards is, as ever, in adversarial, fight ’em-to-the-death mode and wants to make clear that he has no truck with any of those lousy Republicans.  Yeah, John, we get it–you’re a tough guy!  The typically flabbergasted netroots and progressive pundit responses were all along the lines uttered by Edwards: how dare you mention the name of the ancient enemy!  For progressives, this is just the kind of seemingly conciliatory language that makes them wary of Obama, whom they regard as lacking in the necessary zeal. 

At one level, I can sympathise with this response.  My family and I cringed when we heard Newt Gingrich give a much more fulsome paean to FDR in January 1995 when the new Republican majority took over the House.  But this is actually different–Gingrich actually admired FDR and what he did, and was making peace with FDR’s legacy, while Obama was not accepting, much less endorsing, what Reagan did.  He was acknowledging that Reagan had been a significant political player who had turned the country in a different direction.  In other words, he was acknowledging that Reagan was successful at implementing his agenda (or at least some of it) and thereby saying that the same opportunity might be available for Democrats in this election (with the none-too-subtle and none-too-modest implication that it would be a missed opportunity unless the Democrats nominated him).  This is a clever move, in the same way that Tony Blair paying respect to Thatcher’s legacy was clever, but it entails none of the ideological baggage that usually goes with these sorts of statements.  Unfortunately, because of the Democratic response to his remarks, the implicit comparison between himself and Reagan, who was vastly more qualified for the job in either 1976 or 1980, is not seen as evidence of the man’s delusions of grandeur, but is instead taken as another example of his transcendent power to unify America.  Well, I’m not buying.  I have generally dismissed or viewed very skeptically claims for Obama’s “transformational” potential, whether in foreign affairs or domestic politics.  These theories attribute too much importance to symbolism and vague rhetoric, and they take Obama’s views too little into account.  However, I might be willing to see how Obama represents the possibility of the Democrats’ reconciling themselves to Reagan and the Reagan-Bush years, in part because there may be good reason to think that the political era that began in 1980 is coming to a close.   

Cross-posted at The Americann Scene