How Mitt Romney's throwing away the keys to the White House

By Sir Christopher Meyer

PUBLISHED: 18:02 EST, 23 September 2012 | UPDATED: 18:02 EST, 23 September 2012

He should have been a shoo-in. But here our former ambassador to Washington delivers a devastating critique of Mitt Romney's failings

Things are not looking good for Mitt Romney in the U.S. presidential race.  For most of this year he has been neck and neck with President Barack Obama in the polls. But Obama is pulling away and only one pollster has Romney ahead, and that’s by a small margin.

It’s even worse for Romney if you look at the electoral arithmetic and the small number of battleground states that will decide the outcome of the presidential race. Obama is ahead in ten out of 12.

But as American baseball star Yogi Berra used to say: ‘It ain’t over till it’s over.’ And it ain’t over.

All over? Mitt Romney's fight for the White House seems to be drying up, as he appears to be losing momentum with winning over the electorate

Edging closer to success: Barack Obama is pulling away in the polls with only one pollster having Romney in the lead

As bad as it looks for Romney, only a fool would assume an Obama victory with seven weeks of campaigning to go.

When I first came to America to live and work in August 1988, the Democratic Party candidate, Michael Dukakis, had a double-digit lead over George Bush senior. Yet, come the election three months later, Bush trounced him in a landslide.

How has it come to the point where, in order to win on November 6, Romney will have to raise his game to unseen heights? Because, make no mistake, Barack Obama is vulnerable.

This year has looked to be the best opportunity for a Republican to defeat a Democratic president since Ronald Reagan crushed Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Most electoral campaigns are decided by economic fundamentals — whether people are in jobs, can pay their mortgages and have a general feeling of optimism about the future.

A few months ago, it looked as if the U.S. economy might at last be bouncing back from five years of economic downturn with stronger growth and big falls in the unemployment rate.

The White House confidently expected to be able to reap the political benefit in the presidential election.

But now the notorious green shoots are wilting, with unemployment still above 8 per cent and two-thirds of the American people thinking their country is heading in the wrong direction.

Many experts believe that in any case the statistics underestimate the gravity of the situation.

Opportunity: Many would argue that this election provides the Republicans with the best chance of victory since Ronald Reagan (pictured) defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980

Long-term unemployment is at its worst level since the Great Depression of the Thirties and states are slashing budgets. A situation like this is usually fatal for an incumbent President.

Obama’s vulnerabilty goes back to the Republicans’ heavy defeat of the Democrats in the mid-term elections for the U.S. Congress in 2010.

Only two years previously he had won the presidency on the wings of soaring rhetoric, a brilliantly run campaign and an extravagant promise to change America fundamentally for the better.
In particular, Obama promised a new type of politics in Washington, which would overcome partisan rancour and govern in the interests of all Americans. 

‘Yes, we can!’ was the slogan that fired his supporters and brought out young voters in unprecedented numbers. His message was the more powerful for being delivered by an African-American politician.

Hope soared in America, just as its economy was being shaken to the core by the banking crisis.

Expectations ran sky high.

I have to confess to being carried away by the emotion of the moment as I watched Obama’s moving victory speech before a vast, exultant crowd in his home town of Chicago.

But the vaulting expectations simply could not be met.

The Republicans in Congress dismissed his call for bipartisanship with undisguised contempt and from the outset have sought to thwart him at every turn.

The tough leader of the Senate Republicans, Mitch McConnell, said his objective was to make Obama a one-term president.

Downturn: Unemployment is still above 8% and two-thirds of the American people believe their country is heading in the wrong direction

Since the passage of legislation depends on a modicum of give and take by White House and Congress alike, getting Bills agreed has been a gruelling war of attrition, sometimes ending in failure.

If that were not bad enough, Obama’s signal misfortune was to assume the presidency just as the worst economic down-turn since the Depression was gathering momentum.

As a result, his fall from grace, compounded by his own mistakes as he had to learn on the job the brutal art of politics Washington-style, was extraordinarily fast.

I was in America just before those 2010 mid-term elections. Even Obama supporters were starting to talk about him becoming a one-term President.

The former governor of New York State, Mario Cuomo, once said: ‘You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.’ 

For many, Obama’s poetry had promised too much and his prose delivered too little (though, given the ferocious political and economic headwinds, his achievements are actually respectable — an economic stimulus Bill, health care reform, financial reforms and the rescue of the U.S. automobile industry).

Four years of grinding out these and other initiatives have turned Obama from the liberal utopian of 2008 into a pragmatic, Centre-Left politician getting his successes where he can find them. It is hardly surprising that there has not been much poetry in Obama’s campaign this time round.

Mitt Romney’s problem is that he is all prose and no poetry.

I met him years ago in Salt Lake City, where he was successfully saving the Winter Olympic Games from incompetence and corruption.

He was, I thought, a typical mainstream, under-stated Republican, with moderate Centre-Right views.

When he became Governor of Massachusetts in 2003, he brought with him from the private sector a managerial, chief executive style that allowed him to reach across the partisan divide to Democrats without too much difficulty.

All prose, no poetry: Mitt Romney is a typical mainstream Republican with moderate Centre-Right views

Indeed, his centrist credentials were reinforced by his successful enactment of universal health care in Massachusetts, which became, irony of ironies, the model for President Obama’s health care reforms.

True, he is a Mormon, which for many in Britain is pretty odd. But America is a country suffused with religiosity emanating from all kinds of weird and wonderful churches and sects.

I have known a few Mormons and found nothing eccentric about them at all. The older President Bush had two on his senior staff — Brent Scowcroft, his National Security Adviser, and Roger Porter, one of his economic gurus. Both were distinguished public servants. Romney’s problem is not just an uninspired campaign style. It is that he has been forced to adopt policies and positions with which he is uncomfortable in order to win the Republican nomination.

One of the big changes in the American political firmament over recent years has been the shrinkage in the number of those who call themselves Republican, accompanied by a shift to the Right forced on the party by its core supporters.

The Tea Party movement of back-to-basics Right-wingers (which is ferociously hostile to high-spending government and taxation) has been only the latest manifestation of years of drift rightwards.

I know from friends in common that this is not Romney’s natural political habitat.

It explains the lack of authenticity in his campaigning, which many voters intuitively sense.

It explains also the policy flip-flops, the disorder in his election team (with his campaign co-chairman Tim Pawlenty quitting last week), the gaffes, the desperate efforts to retain the commitment of his party base with the need to reach out to the centre ground of American politics, where the undecided voter is monarch and elections are won or lost.

Romney’s dilemma is perfectly encapsulated in the appointment of Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, a move more desperate than inspired.

Desperate? Mitt Romney has chosen Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate

Supporters of Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan and Presidential candidate Mitt Romney are seen outside during a Ryan campaign stop at Versailles restaurant in Miami

Nothing could have been more calculated to enthuse the Republican Party faithful and get them to the polling booths on election day. But on the other hand, nothing could have been more calculated to drive away the independent voter and retired people dependent on Medicare, the government-funded health care programme, than the scary cost-cutting of hardliner Ryan’s notoriously unrealistic budget proposals.

Above all, this explains why so far he has been unable to exploit Obama’s vulnerabilities, especially on the economy.

Romney still has time to correct his course. Money will not be enough. He has raised far more than Obama in the most expensive presidential race in American history. Cash is, of course, indispensable. But it is not sufficient.

Romney still has time to correct his course but he must start to connect more on a personal level with voters

The history of American elections is littered with the corpses of very rich candidates, who found that their wealth was not enough to overcome handicaps of one kind or another.
Romney’s cardinal handicaps are a failure to connect on a personal level with the voter and an urgent need to fill in the policy gaps, especially on how he would grow jobs and cut the deficit. 

He will have his last, best chance in three televised debates with President Obama, the first of which takes place in nine days.

These can be game-changing events. The older Bush put a nail in his political coffin when he looked at his watch in a debate with Bill Clinton. Reagan knocked out President Jimmy Carter with the simple riposte: ‘There you go again.’

Who should we in Britain be rooting for?

The key thing to remember is that there is no such thing as a ‘British’ candidate — no necessary correlation, for example, between the Republican Party and the Tories, or between the Democrats and Labour.

We should use a different yardstick. This is a dangerous and disorderly world, and it is getting worse — witness the explosion in tension between Japan and China over territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Though we should drop the delusional sentimentality of the Special Relationship, the U.S. remains our most important ally.

It is in our national interest that American foreign policy should be guided by an experienced and prudent hand.

That means, I believe, that the British interest will be better served by the incumbent, not the novice.