Minnick

Lessons from the Streets

For a while during his second comeback of the GOP primary season Newt Gingrich was spending more time talking about Saul Alinsky than his opponents.

“The centerpiece of this campaign,” Gingrich said at one point, “is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.” Such disconnected talk from the stump, like Rick Santorum’s Satan references or Mitt Romney singing, must leave a lot of voters scratching their heads and saying, “what’s he talking (or singing) about?” It’s a good question and let me offer part of the answer. Hint: it has nothing to do with exceptionalism or radicalism, but rather good, basic, traditional Politics 101.

As Romney stumbles out of Michigan with the win he had to have and reclaims for the fifth or sixth time the front runner label, the Republican field rolls on to Super Tuesday and what will undoubtedly be more twists and turns in this fascinating election. I’m left with two thoughts on the last day of February: there is a lot of time left between now and election day in November and, when it comes to campaigns, there is never enough time.

That second reality may prove to be the biggest challenge that Romney – and, yes, I still think he will be the Republican nominee – will face in a knockdown drag out race against Barack Obama. And that’s were the radical Mr. Alinsky comes to play. [Here’s a good primer on Alinsky.]

In a fascinating piece in The National Journal reporter Major Garrett provides a glimpse inside what Obama’s campaign has been doing while Romney has been talking about his wife’s Cadillacs and Santorum was calling the president a snob for suggesting that everyone should have a chance to go to college.

Garrett notes that Obama’s lead in battleground Michigan is now 18 points over Romney with all the talk of auto bailouts and contraception working to the president’s advantage. But Garrett’s real political insight in contained in this description of what the Obama campaign is doing on the ground in states that will be pivotal in the fall.

“While Republicans have been competing in Arizona and Michigan, the Obama campaign has been stepping up its voter-identification and mobilization efforts,” Garrett writes. “The reelection campaign already has eight offices in Michigan—in Detroit, Grand Rapids, Warren, Pontiac, Ann Arbor, Flint, Lansing, and Kalamazoo. In Arizona, three offices are open in Phoenix, Flagstaff, and Tucson. Another will open soon in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale and will focus on Hispanic outreach.

“The campaign is also aggressively organizing voter-registration drives and social events to contact new voters. From now until March 31, the reelection has 73 such events scheduled in Detroit, 22 in Grand Rapids, and 59 in Ann Arbor. The same kind of grassroots activity is planned in Arizona. From now until April 22, the campaign will conduct 69 organizing events in and around Phoenix. The Tucson area will have 40 events between now and March 29, and Flagstaff will host 16 between now and March 20.”

You can take it to the bank – or the polling place – that such organizational work is being done, often under the radar, in person, on Facebook and Twitter, in every state where the president has a prayer of winning in November. That is what you call “community organizing,” emblematic of the tactics that Alinsky wrote the book on during his neighborhood organizing days in Chicago.

As historian Thomas J. Sugrue wrote recently in Salon, “Gingrich versus Alinsky is not a battle over ideas; it’s about power, who should have it and who should not. That’s why 40 years after his death, the Chicago radical remains on the right’s enemies list.”

Come the fall, and remember it is a long time until the election, here’s betting the presidential contest will be very tight with Mitt Romney, despite all is troubles, a very serious threat to Obama’s re-election. Nonetheless, among Romney’s major worries must be the cold reality of Politics 101. While he battles for the heart and soul of the Republican Party and struggles to secure the GOP base, the president’s campaign is “organizing, organizing, organizing.”

As Alinsky’s organizing Rule 8 says: “Keep the pressure on…the major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”

Barack Obama isn’t the dangerous radical Newt Gingrich paints him to be, but he – and his campaign – are smart enough to have gone to school on that which works. They learned from George W. Bush’s masterfully organized campaign in 2004 and using the new technology now available they adapted those lessons to 2008. The pressure is on in 2012 and they’re doing it again.

 

Birth Control, Religious Freedom…What Happened to the Economy?

Memo to CNN: in future debates don’t put candidates for president of the United States at little desks that look like they belong in a really slick third grade classroom.

Last night’s 20th GOP debate – yes, it’s only 20 times, seems like 200 – convinces me of something I thought I would never say or believe: there is such a thing as too much debating. The current campaign season should remind us that presidential candidate debates should be like eating french fries – once in a while and not too many. The candidate’s body language seemed to indicate that they are just plain fed up with the new-to-this-cycle’s debate-a-week schedule. And why not. Debates are hard, draining and require preparation. In their heart of hearts these candidates – any candidate – hate these debates even as they know they need to do them.

While we’re at it Newt looks like he hasn’t been passing on the fries.

I’m guessing today that all the campaigns – and the smart folks in the GOP who must be increasingly concerned about the fall campaign – are happy the debates are over, at least for a while. Last night’s contest found the contenders almost completely off message when it comes to the fall campaign.

What smart guy suggested to any of the GOP contenders that with a fragile economic recovery limping along – Barack Obama’s single biggest re-election liability – that they should turn on a dime and start talking about birth control, Planned Parenthood and whether Obama is going to launch a war on the Catholic Church if he’s re-elected? In the last debate last night there was more talk about birth control pills and Syria than about unemployment rates. That is a definition of off message.

This line of debate is the political equivalent of taking the drapes down for cleaning on the Titanic as the ship sinks and passengers scramble into the life boats. In other words, it is almost completely disconnected from the reality that most American voters live every day. Maybe the social issues play with the most conservative GOP base, but the task in the fall is to broaden the party’s appeal, not narrow it.

For me the highlight of the debate was the Romney-Santorum exchange over the former Pennsylvania senator’s 2004 endorsement of then-Republican Sen. Arlen Specter. Specter hasn’t gotten this much air time since Anita Hill and the Coke can. You could almost hear voters saying, “who are they talking about?”

But, the biggest mistake Romney and Santorum are making is squabbling among themselves over issues that Barack Obama has already won on, like the Michigan auto industry bailout. As the Christian Science Monitor points out today: “The Obama campaign is hitting the GOP field – and Romney in particular – with an advertisement arguing that ‘when a million American jobs were on the line, every Republican candidate turned their back’ before flashing Romney’s now-infamously headlined op-ed Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

At a time when General Motors is reporting extraordinary new profits, the GOP field is debating the details of the long-distance bailout. Obama’s new Michigan TV spot neatly wraps the whole thing around their necks.

Memo to field: quit digging when you find yourself in a hole and enough with the debates already. Go shake some hands.

 

The Name, The Man, The Message

There are few enduring truths in politics. Money usually wins would be one truism. Optimism beats gloom would be another.

The truism that once and future GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney keeps finding wrapped around his campaign axle is the old line about voters first needing to know the candidate’s name, then understand the man, and finally warm to the message. Romney keeps tripping over the man.

After running for president in 2008 and literally never stopping for breath in the three years since, Romney still seems a mystery. As hard as he works at it, Romney leaves the steady impression that he’s keeping his real self as buttoned down as the oxford cloth shirts he now wears at every campaign event.

Two new books about Romney try to pull back the curtain. Michael Tomasky reviews both in the current New York Review of Books. Here is one telling passage from his piece.

“Even R.B. Scott, a longtime magazine and newspaper journalist who is a fellow Mormon and former occasional Romney adviser who tried to enlist Romney’s cooperation in his book, Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics, cannot escape (and to his credit does not shy away from) pursuing certain dark corners of Romney’s character and identifying his weaker points:

“His inability to empathize with common folk had long been his hoary hoodoo. His father had warned him about it. As a Mormon stake [roughly, a diocese] president, he was kind if often impatient and patronizing with members who didn’t measure up or were beneath him in rank and in intellectual and spiritual prowess. And on and on it went.”

And, remember, that analysis is coming from a friend.

In another passage, Scott quotes Romney’s father, George, the one-time governor of Michigan and a Nixon Administration cabinet secretary as telling his son: “Forget your handlers. Connect with the people. Speak from your heart.”

I watched Romney’s speech last night when it was becoming clear that he had lost two contests – Minnesota and Missouri – and might well lose a third in Colorado to Rick Santorum. Romney delivered a well-prepared, even clever, take down of Barack Obama that compared the president’s oratory following the Democratic convention in 2008 with the subsequent record.

In a way, Romney’s speech was devastating in its detail, but still it seemed flat. What was missing was the man Romney. What is he going to do? What in his approach and preparation helps establish that he can conquer the country’s epic problems? Just who is this guy and can we trust him? He can certainly deliver the take down line, just ask Newt Gingrich, but he can’t seem to muster the lift up line.

Of course, Romney’s entire run is predicated on him as the outsider, the business executive whose lack of Washington experience is just what the country needs. He is also counting on the fact, as base Republican voters know and appreciate, that he is not Barack Obama. Still, we know what he isn’t. but what is he?

Americans have little history of rewarding a resume such as Romney’s, particularly when the voters struggle to connect with the candidate as a person. What they have rewarded, from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, and yes, Obama, too, is an authentic personality. Granted, Obama is cool and distant, but still not nearly the mystery that Romney presents.

Ronald Reagan was most assuredly the outsider that Romney wants to be, but the force of his personality, his warmth and humor – not to mention his ideas – provided the smooth elixir of connection with the votes. Romney just doesn’t have it, or at least hasn’t shown it yet. In fact, rather than projecting Reagan’s sunny optimism and good natured manner, Romney tried to wrest away the Gipper’s mantle by criticizing Gingrich for only once being mentioned in Reagan’s diary. It was a debating point in search of a human response.

The other current book on Romney – The Real Romney – by two Boston Globe reporters describes him as “A wall. A shell. A mask.”

Writing in New York magazine, the admittedly very liberal Frank Rich, no fan of Romney, quotes a fellow he describes as “a captain of American finance,” and a former Bain & Company colleague, as saying of Romney: “Mitt was a nice guy, a smart businessman, and an excellent team player…Still, whenever the rest of us would go out at the end of the day, we’d always find ourselves having the same conversation: None of us had any idea who this guy was.”

Romney has, of course, compounded his “who is he” problems with his many sided approach to many issues and his confounding comments about liking to fire people and not worrying about the poor. It may well be that the Romney cake on these issues – Times columnist Frank Bruni calls it Romney’s “pink slip of the tongue” problem – has been baked and that is as much as we’ll see for the rest of the year, but I hope not.

If this guy is smart, as everyone says he is, and has a warm and decent side, as many suggest, the country would benefit from seeing it. Both the Franks – Rich and Bruni – suggest that the real Romney is buried out of sight in his deeply held Latter Day Saints faith, which, ironically, is one place the campaign and the candidate clearly don’t want to go.

Once we know about Bain and Romneycare, Rich asks what is left to know? He answers his own question:

 “Mainly, [Romney’s] unspecified service to his church and his perfect marriage. That reduces him to the stature of the Republican presidential candidate he most resembles, Thomas Dewey—in both his smug and wooden campaign style and in the overrating of his prospects by the political culture. Even the famously dismissive description of Dewey popularized by the Washington socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth—as “the little man on the wedding cake”—seems to fit Mitt.”

In 1948, Tom Dewey, a moderate northeastern Republican governor at war with the right wing of his own party, seemed the perfect candidate against an enormously unpopular Harry Truman. Dewey was a smart, polished and disciplined. He was the inevitable nominee with a record of accomplishment. Ultimately, against the blunt and human Truman, he become a vacuous and terrible candidate; reduced to the little man on the wedding cake.

In that famous election in 1948 Dewey took inevitable and buttoned down and turned it into mechanical, boring and loser.

Mitt Romney. We know the name. It’s the man we are struggling to figure out.