Just one month ago, Obama was reeling from May's decrepit jobs report, and Mitt Romney was gaining on him in the polls.
Now, after a string of uninterrupted victories, starting with his endorsement of gay marriage, continuing with his executive order to halt deportation of DREAM Act-eligible immigrants and culminating in his massive Supreme Court victory upholding the Affordable Care Act, Obama is riding high. He maintains a 3.5-point margin over Romney in meaningless national polls, but has a much more noticeable lead in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where his Bain attack ads seem to be doing their job, and in Florida, where his immigration order gave him a sizable bounce among the Hispanic population. If Obama wins all three of those states in November, he's set. If he wins even two of them, Romney's path to 270 becomes a hail-mary.
This is all despite the fact that the economy is just as bad now as it was last month. Romney's campaign strategy is built upon being the economic alternative to Obama. Unhappy with Obama's economy? Vote Notbama. By this logic, Romney should inching ever closer to the lead.
Instead, he's floundering. What happened? There's timing—the ACA ruling just happened to come down this week, as opposed to sometime in the spring, when it would have been swallowed up by the vicious rhetoric of the Republican primary—and then there's the fact that Obama holds office, which allows him to make decisive calls like issuing executive orders, whereas Romney can only give speeches and cut ads.
But more important, Romney's Notbama strategy is predicated on Obama's failure, and there is no set of contingencies for when he succeeds. Romney has alternatives to Obama's failed immigration performance, not his successful one; Romney has plenty to say for a president who wasted 1.5 years on a 2,000-page unconstitutional health care bill, not one who just became the only president in modern times to pass health care reform.
Romney's lack of specificity is a newer problem, one that seems to be superceding his old one of being a flip-flopper. In fact, as yesterday's scathing Wall Street Journal editorial points out, it's likely fear of being a flip-flopper that's causing Romney to refuse to make a stand on anything. When Romney was called upon to answer whether he would, as president, uphold Obama's immigration order or overturn it, Romney was unable to offer a response, even during a long speech to a Hispanic political group. This PoliticOlogist was working on a long rundown of Romney's immigration policy at the time, and waited with baited breath for the candidate to clarify that policy in his speech. Instead, the piece was shelved—it's simply impossible to divine what Romney thinks about immigration.
Romney's two-step on whether the individual mandate is a penalty or a tax—he's claimed both in under a week—is an even worse example. John Roberts gave Romney and the GOP a wide opening to attack Obama on a huge middle-class tax raise, and Romney fumbled. The WSJ rightly calls it an unforced error—Romney would have done better to have said nothing and let surrogates yell the word <tyranny>tax</tyranny> on as many cable shows as possible. Instead, he now looks confused, almost as if the man who first passed the template for the individual mandate doesn't understand the topic.
The absence of a response to Obama's successes has become Romney's response: he's poised himself as the candidate of choice in a race against a failing president, not a succeeding one. Rather than present a series of policies that he can promote as better than Obama's, he's simply presented himself as a semi-conservative void that will benefit from electoral circumstance: there are only two candidates to choose from, and one of has an economy around his neck. Game over.
It's become clear that this isn't working. WSJ is merely the latest in a string of high-profile conservative figures and groups to call for a staff shake up. Romney has stuck with a close group of Massachusetts advisors like Andrea Saul and Erich Fehrnstrom—his single, "Etch-A-Sketch," is still playing on many stations—and he's about due for a turnover.
But nobody calling for the staff replacement seems to be able to articulate exactly what a new staff would do for Romney. As we saw from both Newt Gingrich's and Rick Perry's campaigns, there's a low ceiling for what a staff switch can accomplish: Rick Perry was overmatched with his first set of staffers, he was overmatched with his second. A new staff can mitigate a candidate's flaws, but they can't displace them. Unless Romney's new campaign staff comes with briefcases full of policy ideas, it's tough to imagine what they can do to craft better responses.
It's also possible that the worst is yet to come for Romney. While the high court's Obamacare decision fired up some of his base on his behalf, Romney's not doing much to fan the flames. This haplessness in the face of a skilled campaigner was exactly what primary voters feared when they went to the polls and, in primary after caucus, cast their vote for someone other than Romney. For all the noise that was made over whether conservatives would learn to love Romney, who had a history of not-so-conservative positions, polls showed Republican support of the nominee at 90% just a week after Santorum conceded. Clearly, Romney's conservative bona fides were less of concern to GOP primary voters than was his ability to beat Obama; it didn't really matter how conservative Romney's positions were, so long as they were strong enough to cut a path to the White House.
This was always the average Republican's worry: not that Romney would sell out conservatives, but that he would sell them out for nothing, exchanging his far-right positions for muddy centrist ones that would still come up short against a charismatic opponent. Four months out from the election, that appears to be exactly what's happening.
How can Romney turn it around? Post your answer in the comments section below.
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