Romney out - what next for him?

Very disappointed but ultimately not completely surprised given the odds that Romney conceded the race today. I wonder if Huckabee will now drop out at some point, since he's achieved his objective of preventing Romney from winning and needs to make some kind of concession to McCain to get the VP job he's really after at this point.

All this leaves me wondering where Mitt will go from here. His CPAC speech was - like the last one - one of his best (one of my biggest frustrations about his candidacy has been the way he is sometimes right on the money, energised and fired up, and other times just seems to be going through the motions). When this guy is in the right mood he's amazing, so as a starting point he's going to have to figure out how to achieve that mood more regularly.

Jim Geraghty of the National Review has a piece which I think sums up nicely where Romney could go from here. It waffles on for several seemingly irrelevant paragraphs but finally gets to this:

McCain is likely to get the nomination, and he will face a tough race against either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. There may be a Republican president running for reelection in 2012, or there may not be. Even if McCain wins, there may be room for a conservative to challenge a sitting Republican president (a true rerun of Ford vs. Reagan). President McCain may decide one term is enough, and a conservative may find himself contemplating a challenge to McCain's vice president.

Mitt Romney's going to learn a lot from this race, no matter how it shakes out. If he doesn't win the nomination, he has four years to spend tending to the vineyards of conservatism, to make his dedication to pro-life, pro-gun, and other conservative causes beyond question. He will be able to wonder if he should have spent less here and there, focused a bit more on South Carolina, made a play for more winner-take-all states on Super Tuesday. (His success in caucuses suggests he's the favorite of those willing to commit several hours to a presidential primary choice.) He may figure out how to jab his opponent without seeming negative, how to show appropriate, steely anger, and how to effortlessly rebut an opponent's attack.

A little less than four years from now, Mitt Romney may enter another Republican primary looking different, and perhaps more complete as a candidate.

I think he hits the nail on the head there in the last two paragraphs. But who knows what Mitt will want to do between now and then, and whether he will be willing to give it another go in four years' time. One thing I find extremely unlikely is that Romney would ever want to serve as VP or even a cabinet member under another president - this guy has been top dog in everything he's done since 1984 - that's 24 years of running the show and if I were him I'd find it very difficult to go back to being just a member of a team where someone else calls the shots.

Romney Super Tuesday post-mortem

Now that I've had a day or so to get my head around it, I wanted to do a bit of analysis on what happened to Romney on Super Tuesday.

First, a look at where he won:

• His home states (Utah, Massachusetts)
• Two other Western states with high Mormon populations (Montana and Colorado), although the latter is also the home of Focus on the Family and a cluster of evangelicals
  
• Some others that were less obvious: North Dakota, Minnesota and Alaska. And he won the first ballot in West Virginia, although subsequent tactical voting by McCain supporters gave Huckabee the win in the end.

The media has essentially written off his wins in the first category (even though with three home states Romney arguably has an edge over McCain and Huckabee, who only have one each). They've also to some extent written off the second group for much the same reason (although they don't seem to expect Southern Baptists or evangelicals in general to vote in blocs for Huckabee, or exhibit the same dismissiveness when he wins Southern states where they form a substantial part of the electorate).

I haven't heard good explanations for his strong performance in the other states - Ron Paul had a stronger local operation in Alaska and was expected to win, and neither North Dakota or Minnesota are obvious ones for the Mitt column. West Virginia would have been particularly impressive and if McCain's supporters had split by their own preference rather than tactical voting he might well have taken it. One explanation would simply be that where neither Huckabee (in the South) or McCain (in more liberal coastal areas) has a natural edge, Mitt actually does very well, even with little advertising, presumably as a result of honest assessments of qualifications for the job.

Overall he did well outside the South, put in a reasonable showing in a couple of other Mid-Western and Southern states, and unfortunately did equally well/badly in almost all the California congressional districts, giving him very few delegates to show for his 34% of the vote.

But of course he has a huge mountain to climb now, with the following states remaining:

• February 9th - Louisiana (Southern, so likely to go Huckabee), Washington (caucuses - coastal, but Western - McCain and Romney likely to both be strong) and Kansas (mid-Western, so likely to see strength from all three candidates like Missouri)
  
• February 12th - DC, Maryland and Virginia (clumped together in a single media market - if Romney wanted to spend the money he could probably do well. His WV showing suggests he may be able to put in a strong showing. But MD and DC in particular may lean liberal and therefore McCain)
  
• February 19th - Washington (primaries - see Feb 9th), Wisconsin (tough to call - might be influenced by neighbouring Michigan and the George Romney factor)
  
• March 4th - Ohio (MO/KS), Vermont (McCain?), Texas (Southern but also very varied - McCain should be strong, but Romney may be able to compete) and Rhode Island (close to MA, so Romney gets a bump? But McCain likely strong too)
  
• March 11th - Mississippi (Huckabee has to be the favourite)
  
• March 22nd - Pennsylvania (Depends a lot on ad spending - if it follows the NYC cluster it will go strongly McCain)
  
• May 6th - Indiana (KS/MO), North Carolina (could go like South Carolina, but lots of business in the Raleigh metro - perhaps they lean Romney?)
  
• May 13th - Nebraska (KS/MO)
  
• May 18th - Hawai'i (who knows? liberal but also a large Mormon population)
  
• May 20th - Kentucky (Huckabee), Oregon (see WA, but perhaps more liberal so McCain?)
  
• May 27th - Idaho (Romney)
  
• June 3rd - New Mexico (close run between McCain and Romney), South Dakota (Romney again as in ND?)
  

It would take a major shift in the race to allow Romney to win what he needs from these remaining states to be close to McCain in total delegates - likely only his opponents running out of money and/or Huckabee and/or Paul dropping out would do it. He can continue spending on ads and that will make a difference, but not enough to put him into real contention. On the other hand, unless someone drops out, it will also be hard for McCain to go into convention with a majority of delegates. Of course, Huckabee's are likely to swing behind McCain at that point in return for the VP slot, but potentially things could still go another way. But Romney ending up as the nominee has to be a minority probability at best.

The Statesman or the Politician?

The question keeps coming back to me: what do we want for a president: a statesman, or a politician? In the debate last week McCain came across as every bit the politician, with not an ounce of statesmanship in him, persisting with his nasty slurs about Romney's positions on Iraq withdrawal and sneering unpleasantly most of the time while Romney was speaking. And then there's the "I Hate Mitt Romney" Club I posted about previously, and more sleaziness like this trick McCain pulled on Sunday and Monday. Apparently keener to "get into Romney's head" than to lead, he again reinforced the perception (at least in my mind) that he's more politician than statesman.

Contrast this with Romney, who remained above the fray and pretty much unflappable during that debate and has been polite and dignified throughout the process. I know which qualities I prefer in a president, and I imagine others do too.

The "I Hate Romney" Club

Time Magazine has an article which even I found shocking, describing the personal animosity other campaigns harbour against Romney. The headline is The I Hate Romney Club and the article shows just how vicious the other campaigns are. Although McCain is now the only candidate of the four mentioned who still has a chance of winning, it's clear that they all hate Romney. The reasons given just don't cut it for me as explaining the strength of feeling exhibited by these candidates and you just have to wonder what's really behind it all. I can't figure it out, but it just doesn't make me feel good about McCain as a human being, especially after the display he put on in the last debate.

Strategy memo from Romney campaign

A strategy memo from the Romney campaign citing figures from Florida exit polls has made its way into the blogosphere and shares a lot of my own thoughts about how Romney wins - some key points:

• McCain has won around a third of the vote even in states where he won overall. This means two thirds of the vote is up for grabs by Romney (at least theoretically)
• Romney leads McCain in several important categories and if he can reinforce these and switch some voters to his cause in certain others this will be enough to be at least competitive on Super Tuesday
• If you take away the effect of McCain's misleading comments about withdrawal timetables in Florida, that race would have been even closer.

In short, there's still everything to fight for. Good to see that the Romney campaign thinks so too.

Time's debate scorecard - McCain won??

Time's debate scorecard for last night's debate demonstrates some incredible mental dexterity from Mark Halperin, who gave McCain a winning B grade (Romney got a D). The following quote is the first two thirds of his blurb on McCain's performance:

As a testament to his suddenly strong position in the battle for the nomination, he showed off all of his worst traits — and still won! Alternately cranky, elderly, caustic, equivocating, inarticulate, passionless. But he flexed his ability to intimidate Romney as needed, usually with an arch one-liner that was 3/5 mean-spirited and 2/5 light gag. Made little effort to defend his own tax record or negative Florida attacks, and failed to drive a positive message.

And this is the guy who won? It reads like satire. The idea that Romney was intimidated bears no relation whatsoever to what actually happened in the debate, where Romney stood very firm and countered all of McCain's smears. In the last third of Halperin's summary he suggests that questoiners and the other candidates treated him as the front runner. No doubt the questioners did - this has been their line for the last several weeks, even when McCain was badly lagging Romney in the delegate race. But given there are only two serious candidates left in the race, who else was Romney to go after? Huckabee? Paul?? And McCain certainly focused his attention on Romney - does this mean he thinks Romney is the front runner? The whole thing is bizarre, and another sign that the media is desperate to have McCain as the nominee - either because they believe he will implode or because they like his centrist positions better than Romney's conservative stance.

The media's refusal to call Mitt a front runner

I've been increasingly frustrated over the last several weeks by the media's insistence that McCain, not Romney, has been the front runner. It happened despite Mitt's wins in Michigan and Nevada and his strong second place showing in two more states. He was leading by a wide margin in delegates until Florida, and had he captured just a few percentage points more there would now be streaking ahead instead of lying in a close second.

The usual story is that, since Romney has outspent and out-campaigned (horror of horrors) the others in some key states, that his results don't really count. To which you have to counter, "have you seen who he is running against?" and "have you seen the stories they write on Mitt?"

First, who he's running against. McCain and Giuliani have been the only serious candidates in this thing from the start. Ron Paul certainly has his small but vocal fan base, and Huckabee and Thompson likewise had their niches, but the front runners in national polls all along have been McCain and Giuliani. McCain has run previously and as such has high name recognition and a following built up over the last eight years. Giuliani was the high profile mayor of the first mainland American city to be attacked in living memory. These guys don't need the advertising because if anyone doesn't know who they are at this point, it's not because they haven't seen enough ads but because they are completely disengaged from the political process.

Then you look at the stories which have been written about each of the candidates from the beginning of the campaign. Paul has lots of articles about his plucky Internet supporters, Huckabee benefited from stories about his (brief) "surge" in the polls just before and after Iowa (and perhaps the occasional piece about weight loss and the Fair Tax). But all the pieces about Romney are in one of four camps: "he is outspending all the others with his vast personal fortune", "can a Mormon really be elected?", "Romney is a flip-flopper" and "isn't he too perfect?" All the other candidates have at least merited a serious evaluation of their policies and achievements, but not Mitt.

So what's he supposed to do but go on the attack, advertise like crazy to get awareness of his candidacy but more importantly awareness of his positions and achievements out there? And when through this well thought out strategy he takes, as he puts it, two golds and two silvers and leads the early running, who do the media call the front runner? McCain. Which is ultimately a self-fulfilling prophecy, since people like to vote for winners.

All of this goes back to the fact that these primary campaigns have always been about momentum, and the media has always enjoyed the opportunity to call the election by anointing front runners. Their frustration this year has been that simply calling one candidate a front runner and writing off others hasn't been enough because it's been such a tight race with at least two real contenders on each side. But they keep reverting to type by attempting again and again to call the election prematurely for their favoured candidate. It hasn't worked so far (except perhaps by pushing McCain over the top in Florida) but we certainly have to hope that the electorate is smart enough to recognise that there are two front runners on both sides and vote their consciences and not what the media tells them to.