Game On: Gingrich’s Last Testament is the First Shot of the General Election
Daniel Berman reckons Newt Gingrich may have finally made thsi election matter, but it won't please Obama or Romney.
20 Jan 2012, 13:30
Newt Gingrich
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times – the opening to a Tale of Two Cities could probably be used to describe the experiences of presumptive Republican Nominee Mitt Romney over the last two weeks. He has all but wrapped up the nomination, and fended off attacks from New Gingrich about his tenure at Bain Capital, but the domination of the campaign coverage by those attacks have transformed the battleground of the general election.
This is not because the ads themselves were effective at damaging Romney. On the contrary, for all the dramatic music and lighting, and interviews with now-unemployed workers, the charges against Mitt Romney included in King of Bain never genuinely amounted to more than the fact that he did exactly what he has always maintained he did at Bain, namely that he took over failing businesses and fired workers in order to turn them around. In the eyes of the electorate this is what many voters want to happen to government, and it was never made clear in the midst of the attacks, how what Romney did was significantly different than Obama’s takeover and turnaround of the Michigan Auto-Industry, a process that also involve the removal of workers.
But in the case of the King of Bain Advertisements, their real impact was to change the topic of conversation, and to tie Mitt Romney to his work in the private sector. If the battle to define Bain capital remains unsettled, the battle to define Mitt Romney with it was more or less settled.
This is because for all practical purposes, the last two weeks were the first time many voters were genuinely introduced to Mitt Romney. The very insular nature of the Republican primary electorate this year, and the even more eccentric nature of many of the candidates has up until recently resulted in a campaign whose major issues and developments were of purely esoteric interest to many voters. Many of the issues brought up in the debates either quite simply did not matter to the average voter, or the level of discourse on issues such as Foreign Affairs was devalued to such an extent by the ignorance of various also-rans on stage that no serious discussion took place.
In the days after the New Hampshire primary all of that changed. For two weeks the major topic of conversation across virtually all newspapers, websites, and cable news stations has been Mitt Romney and his business background.
The Romney Campaign and its supporters in the Conservative media have in many ways reinforced this popular linkage with their responses to the attacks. For all that Mitt Romney will be the nominee, the fact is that he remains in a Republican primary, and one in which the next major contest is in one of the more conservative states in the country. As a consequence, they have adopted a full-throated defense of capitalism, arguing that Bain created more jobs than it destroyed, and suggesting that America needs more, and not fewer, Bain Capitals. Romney, in tense confrontations with hecklers, has reaffirmed that he believes that firing incompetent employees is a good thing, and that corporations are a positive force for change.
While effective at all but destroying Gingrich, Romney has in effect conducted his audition before the American people not on the issue of his political record, or on how it differs from Obama. Instead, he has used his interview to talk about his business background. And it is what voters will remember him for.
Democrats are expressing glee about this Romney’s new status as the “Man From Bain.” They see Romney’s recent remarks as “gaffes” that have the potential to damage him in the general election, but they fail to grasp that Romney’s business record, and even his remarks about firing people are not inherently bad things in public view. If Romney can establish in the public mind that those lay-offs were necessary, that they led to greater employment later on as he has successfully done over the last two weeks, then they will be assets in the general election. It is only if Democrats succeed in establishing Bain and firms like it as evil entities, that Bain will become a millstone around Romney’s neck.
In effect therefore the most important battle of the general election is suddenly no longer going to be about either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney themselves, but rather about a vision of the country and what sort of economy it should have. Obama and the Democrats, after having avoided a clear embrace of the Occupy Movement, are now all but obligated to embrace it, and to blame not just the nation’s current ills on “bankers” but to make a larger case that the decline of the middle class over the last few decades is directly attribute to the type of economics that Republicans have embraced since the time of Reagan. Republicans by contrast are now obligated to make a defense of those very same policies, and rather than throwing around terms such as “middle class tax cuts” its likely we will see a full-throated defense of the profit motives, and the downsizing of workers at failing firms and in failing fields.
If Romney wins this battle, its unlikely that attacks on his record in Massachusetts or supposed policy shifts on social issues will matter that much, because in the public mind he is Venture Capitalist Romney rather than Governor Romney. At the same time if loses, and the public embraces the vision of the left that inequality is a fundamental problem, that firms like Bain are responsible for the state of American manufacturing, its unlikely that his attacks on Obama’s economic stewardship over the last four years will resonate when Romney and people like him are blamed for three decades of industrial decline.
Despite the potential gains, the sort of campaign Obama thrives in. Judging by their press releases and YouTube postings, the Obama team seems to have spent the last few months preparing a campaign hitting Romney as an unprincipled flipflopper. Transitioning to Romney’s business experience also by implication makes the economy the main focus of the campaign, and the question of who would better manage the economy is one on which Obama trails Romney substantially even in polls where he leads overall.
Team Romney cannot be fully pleased either. The last few days have been dominated by stories about his unreleased tax forms, and class-based appeals have a bad happy of working in the long-run even if they flop initially short-run. Obama has bought time for attack ads in early February, and Romney’s campaign must suspect what they will include.
Neither the Romney or the Obama teams necessarily wanted this campaign, no more than any strategist in a conflict ever wants to be pinned down by a position they have to hold at all costs. But the last real contribution that Newt Gingrich ever makes to US politics may well turn out to be that he made this election about something, rather than the nothings it was heading.
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