[Vision2020] Mitt, Grits and Grit

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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March 9, 2012
Mitt, Grits and Grit By CHARLES M. BLOW

“I’m learning to say ‘y’all,’ and I like grits. Things, strange things are
happening to me.”

Those are the words<http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=labA4Joa6zA>of
Willard Mitt Romney campaigning in Pascagoula, Miss., this week.

Wow. Note to Mitt: As a Southerner, I’ve never known us to find caricature
endearing. But welcome to the Deep South anyway, Mitt. I wonder if you’ve
been introduced to one of my favorite Southern sayings: the backhanded
“Bless your heart.”

By all accounts you’re going to need it. No one expects you to do well on
Tuesday when Mississippi and Alabama hold their primaries.

(Kansas holds its caucuses on Saturday, and Rick Santorum is leading the
polls there.)

When Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi endorsed Romney on
Thursday<http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57393918-503544/mississippi-governor-endorses-romney/>,
he tried his best to humanize him, saying: “He just has a warm, comfortable
way about him. I like to see a man when he’s holding a baby. And he looks
like he’s held a baby before. Let me tell you, this man is connecting with
the people of this nation, and it is about those simple things.” He knows
how to hold a baby? Nice try, governor. Bless your heart.

According to Gallup<http://www.gallup.com/poll/152459/Mississippi-Conservative-State-Liberal.aspx>,
Mississippi is the most conservative state in the union, and Alabama clocks
in at No. 4. Romney continues to struggle with more conservative voters. In
the 2008 elections, 7 out of 10 Mississippi primary voters described
themselves as born-again or evangelical
Christians<http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/epolls/>.
Romney has also struggled with that group.

Last Tuesday, in the primaries in the states of Oklahoma, Georgia and
Tennessee, about 70 percent of voters said it was important that their
candidate share their religious views. Romney won no more than a quarter of
those voters in each state. Welcome to the Southern G.O.P. Bless your
heart.

Some argue that this is inconsequential and that all Romney has to do is
win the nomination and rank-and-file Republicans will fall in line. They
even argue that his less-than-strident, often inconsistent, views may be an
asset in a postnomination tack to the middle.

It is true that these states are in no danger of swinging Democratic.
Mississippi and Alabama haven’t voted Democratic since 1976. And since
Mississippi started holding primaries, no Republican candidate except the
eventual presidential nominee has won the state, according to Catherine
Morse, a University of Michigan government and political science librarian.

In fact, Obama lost both states to John McCain in 2008 by large margins,
and the votes were largely along racial lines. In both states, 88 percent
of whites voted for McCain, while 98 percent of blacks voted for Obama.

Obama will not win Mississippi and Alabama, period. But that’s not the
issue. The issue is enthusiasm, which has a way of bleeding across borders
and ideological boundaries.

In elections, enthusiasm has two sources: for your candidate or against the
other. We know well that there is a high level of hostility toward Obama on
the right, but he still maintains a number of liberal devotees. Although
there are some on the left who have softened on him, he still has a wide
swath of passionate supporters who seem to feel that he is moving in the
right direction and deserves a chance to finish the work he has started. In
fact, according to Gallup, at this point in the race, Democrats are more
enthusiastic about
Obama<http://www.gallup.com/fvideo.aspx?i=4DrURoP26Vss7RnBuuiE0waa>than
Republicans are about Romney.

The elections will boil down to a duel between anger and optimism, and in
general elections optimism wins. Energy wins. Vision wins.

If the message that emerges from the nominating process is that Republican
voters lack confidence in their candidate, that is not a message that can
be easily sold to swing voters.* It’s hard to point to your candidate’s
good qualities when you’re using your hands to hold your own nose. *

If the Republican nominee can’t appeal to his own base, how can he expect
to draw from the middle and the left?

This is the conservative conundrum.

The Republican Party had an opening as wide as the Gulf of Mexico to unseat
President Obama, but it appears that it could close with a weak candidate.
The president has been hammered by a sputtering economy and hemmed in by an
intransigent Congress. All the Republicans needed was a presidential
nominee who could capture their discontent on a gritty, granular level and
put a positive, big-picture, forward-looking face on it.

Instead, they find themselves with a scraggly lot of scary characters, each
with a handicap larger than the next. And the one who’s likely to win the
nomination is the one whom the base has the biggest doubts about. He has
the good looks of a president but not the guts of one. The only view that
he has consistently held is that he wants to win. Everything else is
negotiable.

He projects the slick feel of a man who’s trying to sell you something that
you don’t want by telling you something that you don’t believe. People
don’t trust and can’t fully endorse it, even the ones who deeply dislike
the president. In fact, poll after poll finds that the longer the
nomination fight drags on and the more people come to know Romney, the
higher their unfavorable opinions of him climb.

Furthermore, postnomination pivots have become more difficult in a world
driven by YouTube, social media and citizen activism, where prenomination
politicking lives forever online in a candidate’s own voice (and often on
video).

Unfortunately for Romney, grits don’t give you grit. Dabbling in dialectic
speech won’t quench people’s thirst for straight talk. Being called warm
and comfortable doesn’t remove the gut feeling that you are cold and rigid.
There is something missing from the core of the man, and people can see
straight through him.

That makes places like Mississippi a real litmus test — of Romney’s ability
to convert his base by connecting with it. Mississippi is a world away from
Massachusetts. It’s a ruby-red state and the heart of conservatism.
Mississippi is where he has to sell himself.

Bless his heart, y’all.

•

I invite you to join me on Facebook
<http://www.facebook.com/CharlesMBlow>and follow me on
Twitter <http://twitter.com/CharlesMBlow>, or e-mail me at
chblow at nytimes.com.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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