Newt in Florida: Fat Chance

Carl Cannon asks the question about the GOP race at the forefront of everyone's mind: can a fat man beat a thin man?

...perhaps it’s not a true test, but last Saturday, Gingrich clearly outdid three thinner men. Presidential primary elections are not purely popularity contests, and this is not high school, but in attracting more votes than Mitt Romney, Gingrich bested a candidate who is not only in better shape, but better-looking, more physically graceful, and younger.
Such a result is not unheard-of, but it defies the odds. Political consultants and presidential scholars will tell (not to mention psychologists, corporate headhunters, and Madison Avenue hucksters) that in social competition, physical qualities matter. Generally speaking, tall beats short, dark hair beats gray, agility beats klutzy, handsome beats homely. And trim definitely edges out pudgy, as any overweight kid ever called “fatso” on the playground can attest.

Hmm... does this apply in Canada? Considering the general appearance issue rather than weight alone, the old Progressive Conservatives obviously did not have the reactions of other humans, choosing Bob Stanfield over Duff Roblin and Davey Fulton and Joe Clark over Claude Wagner and Brian Mulroney, getting the electoral results you would expect. The lamestream media at least did not seem to think that Preston Manning's appearance and voice were those of a leader, although I never concurred with the worldly minded on this. Manning always seemed to me to fit the image of a leader, while Brian Mulroney came across to me as a phony blowhard of the kind who gets his position by excelling in everything superficial. I never thought that the fixed teeth, contact lenses and $750 suits helped Manning any; they made seem like just another politician. Yet when he put his leadership on the line, Stockwell Day's sleekness in a Speedo was part of his implicit case against Manning.

Whenever I see Newt appearing particularly porcine my thought is that he should have made a point of losing 20 or 30 pounds over the year before his campaign started. It would have been a sign of seriousness in a campaign which many didn't take seriously at first, of self-restraint in a man who has often seemed to lack that virtue, of stability in a man feared to be too erratic. Haley Barbour said two years ago that if he was 25 pounds lighter a year from then, you would know that he either had cancer or was going to run for president.

In choosing a candidate, GOP primary voters say that they're more concerned about electability than any other qualification,including being a "true conservative". That means that voters, rather than choosing according to their own reactions to a candidate, are trying to guess how other people will react to him. That works to the advantage of a Ken-doll candidate like Romney. You and I may be too deep to pick a president on the basis of superficial characteristics, but we don't expect that your mushbrained independents, people who can't even figure out what party they belong to, will do the same. This factor helps Romney, and as of now he seems to have halted his decline in Florida, but I will say this: a candidacy like Romney's, based not on being the guy you want, but the guy who you think other people will want, is a house of cards. If Gingrich could ever manage to seize even a small advantage over Romney in trial heats against Obama, Romney's campaign could collapse quickly like a previous "Mr Moderate" frontrunner -- Mitt's father George, in 1968.

Or,as his tide goes out, Gingrich could be left stranded on the beaches of Florida. Like a beached whale.

Dystopia

The GOP presidential campaign lacks the excitement of a real race, but one thing it has is great television ads. I just hope these ad shops still have their game when the battle for control of the Senate comes up later this year.

Explaining Bain

Bill Bennett and Fred Barnes are on the wireless worrying over Mitt's problem of explaining Bain. His advisers are spending their own intellectual capital on figuring out how to deal with this. Here's how; and if they need more advice, my rates are reasonable:

"Have you ever worked in a company that was being run into the ground? A company that was running down, that was being managed so poorly that you knew it was a matter of time before it went under and you lost your job? Or had a relative or friend who worked for a company like that? Well, we looked for companies like that, stepped in and bought them, streamlined them and turned them around. If it worked, people kept their jobs, and we made some money."

Thank you. Next problem?

An Audition for Schiffren

Mitt Romney has a bigger problem than his exploits, in his role as Robber Baron, as ruthless exploiter of the people. It’s one that we’re likely to hear more about steadily during the campaign. It’s described by many labels... inauthenticity, stiffness, distance from the average guy.

Michael Leahy describes the affliction as “failure to connect’:

...concerns about his ability to connect are casually noted by Republican insiders, even among some who once worked for him.

“This is Romney: He knows what is wrong with a car engine, and he knows how to rebuild that engine — but he doesn’t acknowledge the person driving the car,” said Doug Gross, who served as the Romney campaign’s Iowa state chairman in 2008 but is uncommitted in the 2012 race....“He’s not able to warm a room immediately or make an audience feel like he is speaking to them,” Gross said. “You’d have to put a new card in him for that to happen.”

Leahy names Tom Dewey and Michael Dukakis as two whose presidential campaigns have foundered on this not-quite-humanness. (I’m surprised that the story of Dewey’s furious outburst against a careless train engineer didn’t make the story. ) I would have thought that Al Gore definitely makes this list, and John Kerry deserves at least an honourable mention.
It would be a mistake to try to be someone other than he is, to affect a ‘jes-folks’ demeanour and empathetic mien. As Dukakis’s press secretary says,

“You can talk all you want about changing a candidate, but eventually the candidate will go back to his default position — he is who he is,” said Duncan, who along the way with Dukakis learned the most humbling truth of all, one that Romney likely has already discovered. “The attention of a presidential campaign is so glaring, so unrelenting for a candidate. Those parts of you that make you who you are eventually get exposed.”

Lisa Schiffren thinks that conservatives could do better, but is trying to accept the reality of Romney:

he is very handsome, and has such a good work ethic for a rich guy who really does not have a clue what it means to have to make the choices that normal middle-class people always have to make — which is why we don’t really trust him. Have you ever noticed how the very rich have so much more sympathy for the non-working poor than for the boring old middle class? ...Especially if he picks the right advisers. But why can’t he hire a conservative speechwriter, who knows the words and the music?

Right on point. Mitt can’t stifle himself from blurting out that he likes to be able to fire people, or that other candidates are attacking him over Bain Capital out of envy. But he can hire speechwriters who can try to evoke that sense of hope and confidence that successful candidates evoke. And hey -- Lisa Schiffren’s a speechwriter isn’t she? Maybe she has better things to do, but isn’t that the good thing about being Richie Rich, that you can keep piling stacks of money on the table until you can get people to do what you want? If Lisa won’t do the writing, she should sure be picking and supervising the people who do.

Keep a watch on who Romney’s speechwriters this campaign. It’ll tell us a lot.

Newt the Uniter

Could there be brilliant strategy behind Newt’s kamikaze attacks against Mitt? At first glance there’s no possible gain to the Republican Party or conservatism in launching a kamikaze campaign against the future presidential nominee of your party, depicting him as a remorseless capitalist vampire bloodsucker. Let’s see...you’re helping the Democrats hone their plan of attack and handing them ammunition to carry it out. You’re exacerbating divisions within the party of the kind that are slow to heal. You’re diverting attention from whatever shared positive ideas the GOP does have for the nation.

But maybe there’s silver linings. Suddenly, people like Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, and the Club for Growth, who should be spending their time right now denouncing Romney as a pathetic and useless RINO deserving of reprobation by all true conservatives, are united in his defence; now Mitt is a Hero of Free Enterprise, a truer conservative than the man who won the House of Representatives at a time when people thought the GOP would never win the it again in their lifetimes. Politics fans get the demolition derby they expect from the primary season; populist conservatives have their catharsis, their opportunity to see a lashing given to the Wall Street/Big Corporation wing of the party. At the end of the day, everyone’s anger at the state of things having been voiced, everyone can resign themselves to Mitt in the end, knowing that they are not unrepresented in the party.

Knowing Newt, if this is a brilliantly concocted masterpiece of strategy, complete with double feint, bait-and-switch and fumblerooski ploy, we can be sure that Newt will tell us.

Morning Line: 2012 GOP Nomination Odds

NEW: 2012 GOP Nomination Morning Line January 2011:

Romney 5/2
Pawlenty 7/1
Huckabee 7/1
Daniels 9/1
Palin 11/1
Gingrich 11/1
Thune 15/1
Jeb Bush 15/1
Barbour 20/1
Field 15/1

Preview:

There are two parallel GOP primaries. The social conservative primary is between Huckabee and Palin plus outsiders such as Pence and Bachmann. The winner of that primary goes up against the Establishment Republican primary, between frontrunner Romney and everyone else. The winner of the Establishment Republican primary should win the nomination. The best chance for the winner of the Socon primary is winning Iowa and running respectably in NH while Romney collapses, and then winning in South Carolina and Florida, taking a commanding lead before the establishment wing of the party can compose itself and unite behind someone else.

The candidates with the best cross-appeal to both factions are Gingrich and Barbour.
Barbour was going to be my long-choice for the nomination. The very day I was going to write about that, he shot himself in the foot in the Weekly Standard interview.They would have a great opportunity should Huckabee and Palin both decide not to run.

Despite my making Mitt the favourite, I would definitely not place my bet on him. 43 years ago his father was the favourite for the 1968 nomination, before collapsing in the winter of 1968 after admitting to/complaining about being "brainwashed" by the generals about Vietnam. Romney doesn't excite many people, has the burden of explaining the difference between his Massachusetts health care plan and Obamacare, and is still mistrusted by people who are suspicious of a Republican who tried to beat Ted Kennedy by running to his left.

Compare my odds with the results of the recent Republican Insider poll, converted into odds:

Romney 4/1
Daniels 7/1
Pawlenty 8/1
Thune 9/1
Palin 10/1
Huckabee 13/1
Barbour 13/1

I think that the Insiders underrate the degree to which Daniels has pinned a target on his back by his call for a truce on social issues. Socons will now exert themselves for his defeat. The Insiders, obviously appreciative of the difficulty that any Socon will have, still underrate Huckabee's high favourability with the race. Thune is apparently a highly thought-of establishment dark horse; Gingrich didn't even make the top 7.