Then, we found out about ORCA, and the fact that Stevens and his team (Moffat, et al.) still thought the system performed well because … “metrics”. Then came the revelation that Stevens had no concept of the idea that what voters tell pollsters is often quite different from what would actually influence them in favor of candidate A or B.

Then we discovered the wide disparity in both quality, quantity and reach of advertising (in Obama’s favor), despite the fact that this was supposed to be where Stevens was going to dominate and make up for months of unanswered attacks – down the home stretch the Obama Campaign and its allies outperformed Romney and every single Conservative SuperPAC on every possible measure; “[Obama] spent less on advertising than Romney and his allies but got far more — in the number of ads broadcast, in visibility in key markets and in targeting critical demographic groups, such as the working class and younger voters in swing states … Romney not only paid more for his ads but also missed crucial opportunities to advertise, for instance during the political conventions and on Spanish-language television …”

When it came to online advertising, the graph to your right tells you the entire story.

Considering the horrendous amount of what was very rightly called campaign malpractice in that WaPo piece, there actually is a viable argument that Mitt Romney could take Stuart Stevens and Co. to court for fraud.

But as they say; never attribute to malice what can just as easily be attributed to abject stupidity.

Top Romney Strategist Stuart Stevens Says Media Not ‘In The Tank’ For President Obama

Ever since then-Senator Barack Obama first took a lead in the 2008 Democratic primary, the political news media has faced the accusation that they are “in the tank” for the now-second term President Obama. On Sunday morning’s Reliable Sources, the press got a qualified defense from a surprising source: Mitt Romney chief strategist Stuart Stevens. Host Howard Kurtz asked Stevens if ” much of the media is in the tank for Barack Obama,” to which Stevens replied, “In the tank? I would say no.”

“Do you believe, today, that much of the media is in the tank for Barack Obama?” Kurtz asked.

Stevens replied, “It’s not a yes or a no question. In the tank, I would say no. So, yes or no question, I would say no.”

Kurtz pressed the line of questioning several times. “Too sympathetic to the President? How would you put it?” he asked.

“I think after the election, you’ll have a lot tougher questions that will be asked because you’re out of an election environment,” Stevens replied. “I think you’re seeing that this past weekend with this whole golf outing. I think they will be more critical now.”

A surprised Kurtz asked, “You’re saying the press should be finally more critical about the fact that President Obama went golfing with Tiger Woods?”

“The degree to which there is not a choice between him and a Republican candidate makes it easier for them to be tougher on the President,” Stevens replied. “That’s natural.”

In hindsight; there was no way Mitt Romney could have won with the team he assembled, and I am truly flabbergasted that I was so wrong to assume that Romney would bring the same A-game he brought to selecting teams to turn around failing companies to his campaign.

The fact that Stu Stevens and his team do not see and actually never saw the media’s heavy bias in favor of the President during the campaign means there was not, at any point, any path to victory for Mitt Romney. People this blind and lacking in perception would have eventually snatched defeat from the jaws of victory no matter what had gone right; these are the people who quickly advised Mitt Romney to “tone it down” after his excellent performance in the first debate and go into prevent-defense to “appeal to Independents and women.”

Even worse is the fact that these people continue to give themselves high marks for the utter fiasco of a campaign they ran.

Considering what we went through with Steve Schmidt and prior to that, the tragedy that was the Bush White House’s political and communications operation, I’ve had to come to the sad conclusion that right now, when it comes to political operatives, electoral experts, campaign strategists, etc, Democrats get the cream of the crop, while Republicans are stuck with the slimy fetid fungus that feeds on the decaying scum encrusting the bottom of the barrel.

The following is in no particular order, or organized in any particular way – it’s a number of ideas that have been percolating in my mind for a while – but, in the alternate universe where I’ve just been elected the new Chairman of the Republican National Committee, this is what’ll be on my To-Do List …

H/T – ColdWarrior: Check out this diary by John Fowler on rVotes – a system (rejected by Romney’s Campaign Consultants, of course) that is somewhere quite far along the lines of what I’m thinking about.

Most people in this country do not favor vouchers in education, because they don’t want public dollars going to private institutions or businesses. But the logic holds absolutely no water.

We have federal Pell grants that low-income students use all the time to attend private colleges. Pell grants aren’t limited to use at public universities. We have food stamps that low-income families redeem at nongovernment grocery stores. And let’s not forget about Medicare and Medicaid.

Think about it this way. Say your elderly mother had to be hospitalized for life-threatening cancer. The best doctor in the region is at Sacred Heart, a Catholic, private hospital. Could you ever imagine saying this? “Well, I don’t think our taxpayer dollars should subsidize this private institution that has religious roots, so we’re going to take her to County General, where she’ll get inferior care. ’Cause that’s just the right thing to do!”

No. You’d want to make sure that your tax dollars got your mom the best care. Period. Our approach should be no different for our children. Their lives are at stake when we’re talking about the quality of education they are receiving. The quality of care standard should certainly be no lower.

Look at the way this argument was presented – clear, sharp, evocative, and very very brutally hard to counter. Try and imagine a debate between a Republican and a Democrat, the topic being education policy and the subject just happens to be vouchers, and the Republican just repeated this verbatim.

No?

Because no Republican would ever do this – his consultants will tell him that it’ll be too harsh, too direct, too confrontational, too “divisive”. In other words, the New York Times just might publish a critical editorial tomorrow.

What is sad is the fact that School Choice presents the best opportunity for the GOP to actually make inroads into the African American community, and we’re letting it slip away.

However, we need to keep things in perspective and not throw blame willy-nilly simply to vent our frustrations.

Personally, I believe Romney ran a credible race. But his Campaign made two major mistakes – one in the last week, and one from the very beginning of his campaign.

In the last week, Romney was getting all sorts of criticism (particularly from the MSNBC folks) for asking for material donations for the people in the path of Superstorm Sandy. In the mean time, Obama was getting all sorts of positive press for his taking “charge” after the storm – simply for visiting the area – and the repeated positive contrasts drawn between him and his predecessor. The pictures of Obama standing at the podium with Chris Christie, looking concerned as he toured the area and of course, his arms wrapped around a sobbing NJ woman were electoral gold – to low-information voters, late-deciders, etc. this stuff is like catnip.

Naturally, Romney’s 5-point national lead narrowed down to a tie, together with his lead among Independents (who form the vast majority of late-deciders) declining by almost the same amount.

I wrote a diary about this a few days ago – right after both men had gone back to the Campaign trail and it was obvious Sandy had left many people in extremely dire straits and that the Red Cross and other organizations were vastly under-provisioned to handle the crisis. The key part was this;

If I were advising Mitt Romney, I’d ask him to dip into his personal bank account and not just get his bus, but also any other form of transport he can get his hands on and start getting that stuff over to where it is needed. I’d tell him to have it announced that his rally attendees should bring whatever they can, clothes, canned food, etc. to the rallies and there would be trucks that would take them to the nearest helipad/airfield to have them delivered to New York, Staten Island, the Jersey shore, etc. He should cut ads immediately to get the message out and publicly appeal to people with jets and helicopters to put them to use to help their fellow Americans.

And, I should have added, he should have made sure he got lots of Press doing it, no matter how much it went against the grain of his nature to do good deeds away from the cameras.

I wrote the diary because I remembered this same thing (a natural disaster boosting the incumbent) happening in 2002 in Germany – Schroeder was behind by seven points with one month to go, and then the floods came and he was everywhere in his raincoat and galoshes, comforting the victims and “looking in charge”. Result? The biggest one week poll-swing in German history. It was enough to carry Schroeder and his Social Democrats to victory.

The error made at the beginning of the campaign was the Romney Campaign and the GOP’s wholesale decision to once again allow themselves to be violated repeatedly by the MSM and not call them out on it. And yes, I did write about this too.

Look, we bloggers and online pundits can make all the noise we want about media bias and the simple fact is that we can be safely ignored. The Chairman of the RNC, a Presidential, Gubernatorial or Senatorial  candidate publicly accusing a news outlet of deliberately slanting the news and covering for one side of the political divide i.e. deceiving the American people – having campaigns very publicly sending fact-checks on news outlet articles/segments, releasing critical press releases and videos, bringing subjects up that they’d rather not discuss and keeping them in the spotlight – basically declaring war is not quite so easy to ignore.

For all the crowing about their declining Nielsen numbers and FOX News dominance of the cable news market, they’re still extremely influential and can make all the difference on Election Day. We need to start thinking outside the box of the political junkie who keeps track of who said what, when, how and why – we’re most assuredly quite rare – and start thinking of the guy who finds out Senator X did Y while casually flicking through to watch “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo“.

Until and unless the GOP at all levels starts paying attention to public perception and the way the Democrats have the upper hand thanks to a Press Corps that is 90+% well to the Left of center, we’re going to have more nights like this more often than not.

NOTE: Message to Erick: The next time you’re face to face with a GOP bigwig, most especially Reince Preibus – the first question you should ask is; What the **** are you guys going to do about the media?

Apparently, the only aid agency in America is the American Red Cross.

Well, as it turns out, the Red Cross seems to be dropping the ball and while Michael Bloomberg is busying himself with the New York Marathon and other frivolous concerns, it would seem that all the stuff Romney thought to ask his supporters to bring over are exactly what is needed right now.

If I were advising Mitt Romney, I’d ask him to dip into his personal bank account and not just get his bus, but also any other form of transport he can get his hands on and start getting that stuff over to where it is needed. I’d tell him to have it announced that his rally attendees should bring whatever they can, clothes, canned food, etc. to the rallies and there would be trucks that would take them to the nearest helipad/airfield to have them delivered to New York, Staten Island, the Jersey shore, etc. He should cut ads immediately to get the message out and publicly appeal to people with jets and helicopters to put them to use to help their fellow Americans.

That’s what I’d advise him to do.

2. There is no less than a 50/50 chance that the Obama Campaign shall receive or has already received advance copies of the Debate Questions.
The likelihood is significantly higher that it will be a younger, more junior member of the Moderators’ staff on his own initiative that will fire off the email, fax or make a phone call to Chicago than the Moderator him/herself … but it is not so much significantly higher that the possibility can be safely dismissed that it could be the Lehrer, Raddatz, Crowley or Scheiffer (or a cutout – that junior member of staff) calling to have a friendly chat with Obama campaign officials. Again, recall the massive number of people in the national news media who have taken leaves of absence to serve the Obama Administration – the call need not be to Plouffe, Messina, Cutter, Jarrett, Axelrod et al. Either way, make no mistake; an obviously large majority of people staffing the newsrooms, editorial and executive suites of the nation’s major news houses have made the moral calculus that the re-election of Barack Obama is worth any sacrifice of ethics or integrity they and their institution might have. In fact, the majority may even consider it immoral, even unpatriotic, for them not to actively do what they personally can to throw the election to Obama. So my advice to the Romney Campaign is for the Governor (and Paul Ryan) to go into each debate assuming that Obama already knows every question coming his way and has already practiced the perfect poll-tested answer for each and every single one. Second, assume also that the Obama Campaign was actively involved in the setting of the questions Mitt Romney would be asked to answer – which leads us to …

3. The Debate Questions Mitt Romney will be asked to answer will overwhelmingly, or all, be “Wedgies.”
“Wedgies” are questions designed to drive a wedge between a candidate and a segment/demographic of the electorate. A perfect wedgie puts the target in a position where his answers will either outrage and motivate his opponent’s supporters and/or disappoint and demoralize his base of supporters while at the same time drive fence-sitters and leaners away from him and toward his opponent. To be sure, wedgies are not by themselves always unfair or illegitimate, and often they bring clarity to a debate. However, we can be certain that in the upcoming debates, the moderators will do their best to make sure Obama is not put into such a position while Romney will have to confront a multitude of wedgies. In anticipating these questions, the Romney Campaign has to assume that the Obama campaign and/or people who desperately want Obama re-elected (such as Lehrer, Crowley, Scheiffer and Raddatz) are setting the questions, and they should develop answers to them that not only neutralize them, but turn them into platforms for a counter-attack – this will often neccessarily include challenging the premise of the question and/or shifting the focus of the question to more advantageous ground where Romney can bring the failed Obama record and extreme views vividly into the picture for the viewers at home. Off the top of my head, based on current events, I anticipate wedgies (accompanied by practiced furrowed brows of concern) on; Abortion (and Todd Akin), Same Sex marriage, Immigration (and Arizona SB1040), Affirmative Action (and Fisher vs. University of Texas), Voter ID Laws, Right-to-Work Laws (Wisconsin). Again, it is not illegitimate to ask questions on these issues, what is illegitimate is to only ask such questions of one side.

4. The “fact-checkers” are going to put Romney under a special microscope of withering scrutiny.
The news media’s celebrated “fact-checkers” have proven themselves to be among the most partisan, shameless and fundamentally dishonest people in journalism today. They will not change for the better when it comes to the debates. In fact, it is an absolute certainty that the day after the debate will see them descend on every Romney statement whether true or false, and they will nitpick, redefine and create strawmen to ensure that he gets as many “Pinnochios” or “Pants on Fire” ratings as they can. There is no possibility that any of President Obama’s statements will receive anywhere near the same level of scrutiny, and clearly false Obama statements will be spun and recast to minimize any damage to his campaign. It is therefore extremely important that the Romney campaign establish a post-debate strategy to counter the “fact-checkers”. My recommendation is simple; respond to every “fact-check” with a thorough debunking on the campaign website and mail to all supporters and every major news outlet. Second, and almost as important, produce a video “fact-check” of President Obama’s debate statements with facts, figures and graphs to back it up and put it on YouTube, link to it on facebook and also mail links to supporters and members of the Press.

For once, I agree with the conventional wisdom.

However, Romney has another another opportunity coming up; the Debates.

The problem is that it is 99% likely that the very same pedestrian and conviction-free campaign consultants that advised him to forgo making a more forceful case for himself at the Convention are the same ones advising him now. Their names might be different, but it is important to understand that these are, for all intents and purposes, the very same people that advised John McCain to suspend his campaign to go vote for TARP, the same people that advised McCain to restrict Sarah Palin to repeating the exact same speech over and over again for weeks and then scheduled her for only two televised interviews with hostile parties, the very same people who advised John McCain to pull his punches at the debates, the same people who thought letting the Democrats entirely off the hook for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and having John McCain blame “Wall Street Greed” for the crash was a good idea. These are the same people, who, in the middle of a campaign, running low on cash, decided it was a good idea to have John McCain cut an ad congratulating Barack Obama on winning the Democratic nomination!

Again, they may not share the same names with Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace, et al. but they come from the same school of thought, share the same mindset, and the same pathological lack of imagination. Worse, the share the same conflicting loyalties – divided between their loyalty to their candidate and their desire to remain members (adjunct only, of course) in good standing of the liberal NYC-DC cocktail circuit. Running the strong campaign that they’ll need to run to defeat Obama – doing nothing more than very clearly pointing out his record of failure – is very likely to result in more than a few cancelled party invitations or for them to stop coming altogether.

So they’re going to advise Romney to pull his punches, to not take every opportunity to exhaustively detail out Obama’s myriad failures, to be as vague as possible about the policies he’ll pursue as President and pepper his answers with vapid phrases like “blame both sides” and “Bipartisanship”. In the stultified thinking that permeates the GOP’s consultant class, this enervating milquetoast approach, despite all evidence to the contrary, “appeals to moderates.”

It is just a happy coincidence that not only is this the limit of their imagination, it is also what will ensure that their cocktail invites start arriving in the mail as soon as the Election is over.

In hindsight, I have come to have some respect for Mark McKinnon for his honesty in jumping ship immediately after Barack Obama finally vanquished Hillary Clinton’s Presidential hopes in 2008. He did more of a favor to John McCain than those who stayed but were not entirely sure they wanted John McCain to win.

We need to see Romney the Businessman, not just at the debates, but from now on going forward, in ads (especially), at rallies and giving interviews on TV. We need to see the sharp eyed investor with a hawk’s eye on the bottomline, giving a brutal rundown of the Obama record, with facts, figures, headlines, charts and graphs showing up on the screen, and then presenting his own plans with specifics and figures, charts and graphs to back them up. And then, of course, making sure he has his surrogates and campaign team ready to tear down the panicked, dishonest and disingenuous “fact-checks” and screeching editorials sure to follow.

Let’s face it; Romney is not the guy you’d like to have a beer with – he doesn’t even drink. Trying to turn him into that sort of guy is a fool’s errand.

All he needs to be is the guy you’d trust to manage your money, run the neighborhood watch or take care of your house while you’re away.

And for that, he needs to ignore his consultants, and start going for the jugular.

MAN and WOMAN in different locations. Both are of different races – preferably one is African American. First names and “Voted for Obama in 2008″ should show when they first appear.

WOMAN: When you’re choosing a doctor, lawyer, contractor, plumber, mechanic, an accountant or even just a babysitter …

{cut as woman is speaking to show doctor (female; in scrubs or white coat), lawyer (male: in suit), builder (male: wearing toolbelt and hardhat), mechanic (female: in dirty coveralls), accountant (male: in shirt sleeves typing on a calculator), teenage girl with a baby on her hip.}

{cut to woman}

WOMAN: … the most important thing is competence.

{cut to MAN}

MAN: You choose based on record, on results, how he did the job before. Period.

{cut to WOMAN}

WOMAN: I think you should use the same standard when choosing a President. Which is why I have to say to President Obama; I’m sorry Mr. President. I like you.

{cut to MAN}

MAN: I voted for you four years ago. But with a record like this …

{cut to montage of statistics, news headlines, graphs of budget deficit, national debt, unemployment, food stamps …}

{split screen to show both MAN and WOMAN}

MAN | WOMAN: You won’t be getting my vote this time.

I believe something like this is a shot straight at the large mass of swing voters who like Obama personally (the ones who automatically tune out anyone who calls Obama a socialist) but are not able to square the circle of liking a guy and yet voting for someone else. These are the people who are described as those who vote based on who they’d prefer to “have a beer with.”

Note that these are not unintelligent people – they’re just uninterested and not prone to thinking deeply about politics.

This sorts of forces them to re-engage their brains – the emotion and attachment free zone of the brain that deals with money and getting value for it – and forces them (if put in heavy rotation) to confront the Obama record by bringing it to them as directly as possible.

The flagship news outlet of the American media is the New York Times. This is the same New York Times that has not endorsed a Republican for President since 1952, that employs no one in its newsroom that is not 100% aligned with the far Left side of the political spectrum, whose idea of conservative editorialists are so-called “conservatives” who routinely endorse Democrats (William Safire, David Brooks) and their policies, whose ownership and management donate exclusively to the Democratic Party and other Left-aligned organizations.

It’s really no secret that you can swap out the staff of the NYT with the staff of The Nation and the typical reader wouldn’t see any difference in the output. The same (if only to a marginally smaller extent) applies to the Washington Post (you can switch the WaPo’s staff with that of The New Republic), the Big Three Networks and CNN (which largely take their cues from the NYT).

Reince Priebus, and every one of his RNC predecessors know this and have known this for the past three decades – the media is on the other side.

Of course, when the NYT, WaPo, LAT, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, etc. were the only game in town, one could understand the hesitation to declare war on the media – they had the big microphones, cameras, printing presses and transmitters, and as the adage goes went – never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.

But things have changed.

It wasn’t that long ago that Dan Rather’s fake memo hit job on George W. Bush would have succeeded in torpedoing his re-election campaign, there was a time John Lewis’ lies about being called the N-word on the Mall during the Obamacare vote would have been reported as true and repeated ad nauseum without challenge, there was a time the media’s joyful rush to pin Jared Loughner’s rampage on Sarah Palin and the Tea Party would have become received wisdom.

But that time has passed.

The instant the internet, most especially internet audio and video, and yes, blogs, came of age, that excuse became inoperative – you definitely can now get into a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel … and not only win, but win decisively.

It really is well past time the GOP had itself a major gut-check about its relationship with the so-called “mainstream media.” The fact is there is no greater enabler of biased journalism than the Republican Party. Contra Jason Hart, pointing the finger at Ohio’s newspapers for PolitiFact Ohio’s liberal bias ignores the real culprit; the Ohio GOP.

Make no mistake, as far as the editorial suites of Ohio’s major newspapers are concerned, Politifact Ohio’s liberal Democratic bias is a feature, not a bug. It is somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible that it is just some strange coincidence that when the Cleveland Plain Dealer was setting up Politifact Ohio, it could only find highly partisan liberal Democrats to be it’s fact-checkers, and that the newspapers treating Politifact Ohio’s rulings as the final word did not notice.

There really is no upside in continuing to participate in the polite fiction that these people are anything other than political actors with an agenda. They’ve proven over and over again that they’re not deserving of the presumption of good faith.

The Romney Campaign should alert every one of its surrogates and every Republican on Capitol Hill about to go one any news program that they should take a leaf from John Sununu and Newt Gingrich and assume they’re heading into hostile territory and act accordingly.

Challenge their premises. Question their integrity. Openly point out their partisanship and suggest that they’re coordinating with the White House. Refuse to let them change the subject. Counter their experts with your experts and deny their “facts.”

Reince Priebus over at the RNC should immediately launch a daily “television” program to be hosted on the RNC’s YouTube channel. I’d call it “MediaCheck”, with a set of hosts, that will, on a daily basis, identify any number of newspaper articles or broadcast segments, name the producer(s) of said piece of biased journalism, address the lies and bias contained therein, and as often as possible strongly suggest that this was as a result of dishonesty and partisanship.

No more presumption of good faith.

What I’m asking for is no less than a full-on open war on their own programs and invading their own news space so that even the most oblivious mushy middle voter would not be ignorant of it.

I’m not going to say that no one of the three men in the running for the Republican Presidential nomination can beat Barack Obama, but at this point, it’s obvious that whoever we pick, whether it be Romney, Santorum or Gingrich, none of them will face anything short of a  sheer vertical climb. It’s not just Obama and his billion $ campaign, Left-Wing SuperPACs and the wholehearted support of the MSM, it’s the fact that the candidates themselves are hideously flawed – the candidate with the most discipline and the ability to raise cash seems determined to run a standard issue risk-averse campaign and is hated beyond reason by the most active segment of the rank-and-file, the candidate with the momentum now cannot seem to avoid getting suckered (in the worst way) into the thicket of social issues when the number one issues are energy, the economy and unemployment, while the candidate with the most ideas and the willingness to take the necessary risks is the least disciplined and (no coincidence) has a personal history that is going to be hard for a lot of voters – especially female voters – to overlook.

Our best hope at this point is for another – better – candidate to leap in before the last of the filing deadlines pass in mid-March to April and get on the ballot of the last seven states. If this candidate can unite all wings of the party, it’s very likely he can win all seven and send the Party into a contested convention in Tampa. This prospect – of a disorganized, disunited and fractious party being televised for the entire world to see – rightfully terrifies a lot of the old guard.  But remember also that it is entirely possible that if this late entrant generates enough excitement with Republican voters and Independents, and it reflects in the polls that he’ll be best placed to go toe-to-toe with Obama, one (or two) of the current candidates could – could (because we’re dealing with big egos here) – be convinced to withdraw his candidacy and throw his support and convention delegates behind him even before the Party assembles for the convention.

The only thing left is to identify this guy (preferably someone who’s spent some time in a Governor’s office) and do our best to convince him to put his nation first and get into the ring.

Jeb Bush is mentioned often, but he is not that guy – and he knows it. If his name was John Ellis Smith, we wouldn’t even be in this situation in the first place because he would have wrapped this up by South Carolina – we wouldn’t need to be talking about drafting him in at a brokered convention. The problem is that his last name is Bush, and not some other Bush (like Kate or Reggie). Simply put, the average (superficial, ignorant, gullible, etc.) Independent is not going to vote for another President Bush, no matter how different us political junkies know he is from his father and brother. Nominating him for President at the Convention would be a catastrophic mistake.

If Rick Perry were to jump back in with a revamped (i.e. entirely new) campaign team and a viable plan to rebuild his image after his disastrous initial foray into the race, he may be able to get the GOP Primary electorate to take a second look at him and build the momentum necessary to carry him to Tampa as a viable option in a contested convention. But this would be monstrously tough in this day and age of YouTube and a media that is shameless in its open shilling for the incumbent.

So I’m throwing out one other name; Robert Francis McDonnell. He may be only two years (three years by inauguration day 2013) into his tenure as Governor of Virginia but he seems to meet every other requirement – better yet, it’s still far more executive experience than Barack Obama ever had before he started running for President. Another thing to note is that he is term limited (Virginia does not allow their Governors consecutive terms) so he can’t run for re-election, so it won’t be like he’s abandoning ship – especially given that his approval ratings generally top 60% and that he’s on everyone’s shortlist for Vice-President. If he can resign his office to be VP, why can’t he resign it to be President?

Second, he is a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel – something i.e. military service, that will always be a strong plus with the average GOP Primary voter. Third, academically he’s no slouch – he has degrees in Business (B.B.A. and M.B.A.) and Law – which would make it very difficult for the media to fit him into the same “dumb” narrative they applied to Rick Perry (and George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan before him). Fourth, he looks the part – something that is of very high importance to Independent voters. Fifth, he is the current Chairman of the Republican Governors Association – meaning establishment cred; having both the base and the “establishment” on the same page is always better than when they are at loggerheads.

Sixth, and in my opinion, very important, is that he ran a magnificent campaign in 2009. From his website to his messaging and GOTV operations, his team’s work led to him ruthlessly pounding into the ground (by a 17 point margin) an opponent backed by the Washington Post and the Obama White House’s political muscle. His election emphatically took back a state the pundits all thought Obama’s victory in 2008 had forever shifted to the Left. Bob McDonnell as our candidate puts Virginia firmly back in the GOP column on Election Day and neighboring North Carolina as well.

The only problem is that he has already endorsed Mitt Romney, but like OH Attorney General Mike DeWine, nothing prevents him from withdrawing his endorsement if he sees that Romney is not able to close the sale.

Bob McDonnell for President.

Milton Friedman in a nutshell elegantly explains why I believe that Mitt Romney is going to end up pleasantly surprising Conservatives if he’s elected President. Unlike Jonah Goldberg, I don’t believe he’ll be a Conservative out of gratitude, i.e. because he’ll “owe” us – it will be because he’ll have no choice. Keeping the GOP’s conservative rank-and-file happy would not be just be a matter of political profit for a President Romney, it will be a matter of political survival.

Like I’ve written before, when I look at Romney’s record, I add in 800 vetoes (700+ overturned) and factor in an 85% Democratic State Legislature and a 100% Democratic Governor’s Council (which signs off on judicial nominations). I also count eight overturned line item vetoes in the Massachusetts Health Care Insurance Reform Law (AKA RomneyCare), multiple attempts to cut taxes and the fact that he came in facing a $3 billion deficit and left office with a nearly $600 million surplus.

I believe Romney would be a strong and able President and he would be fiscally better than George W. Bush and most importantly stratospherically better than Barack Obama. I believe he will be pro-life and pro-gun in word and deed throughout his Presidency and that he would nominate conservative judges and push them through the Senate.

I believe all this because I believe that a President Mitt Romney would seek a second term in 2016. He’s too ambitious not to, and if there’s anything no one can doubt, it’s the breadth and depth of Mitt Romney’s ambition. And he certainly would not want to be a one-term President. Which is where we’ll own him, lock, stock and barrel.

Jonah Goldberg’s Case for Romney has as a subtitle; “A president who owes you is better than one who owns you.” My case is somewhat different; “A President you own is better than one who owes you.”

Let me spell it out; 2016 will see a whole bunch of people finishing up their sixth years as Governors in their states – people with names like Susana Martinez, Brian Sandoval, Nikki Haley and Scott Walker(!). A man named Chris Christie would actually be rounding up their seventh year in office while another guy named Bobby Jindal would be just one year out of the Governor’s office in Baton Rouge. There’s also a guy named Bob McDonnell who would be three years termed out of office in his home state of Virginia, perhaps even serving in the Senate. And speaking of the Senate, there are one or two former Governors who are young enough to try their luck if a President Romney is stupid enough to provide them with an opening, not to mention a rising star named Marco Rubio and old veterans with names like John Thune.

In other words, unlike 2008 and 2012, in 2016 Conservatives are going to have lots and lots of … options.

And you’d best believe that a President Romney and his staff are going to be well aware of those options and what would happen if he fails to walk the line – and the need for him to do so would be even more acute given how little he’s trusted by Conservatives in the first place. No Republican White House would want a repeat of 1992 – and with so many viable alternatives, and a significantly more organized conservative base, it’s not so much that a President Romney would fear not being able to win the General Election in November 2016, it’s that he might just become the very first sitting President to experience the humiliation of failing to win his own Party’s nomination in the Primaries.

That’s why I will vote for Mitt Romney in my state’s upcoming primary -  not only do I believe that he’s the most electable in a General Election of the three candidates left, I believe he’ll govern as a conservative because I believe he’s much more conservative than he’s given credit for.

And because we’ll have him by the cojones.

1. Get united around someone.
2. Convince him (or her) to throw his hat in.
3. Help him  win some of the Primaries he can still qualify for …

… and hopefully he would have gathered the support he’ll need to make him a viable choice for the nomination by the time we get to Tampa. That’s the only way we get an acceptable alternative to the three men we are currently having to choose from. We have to identify someone, have him step up and demonstrate that he can unite all the Party’s various factions and convince people that he can defeat Barack Obama.

The idea that the decision would go down to the convention  floor in Tampa and someone acceptable to all, who had previously not declared himself or campaigned for the nomination in any way, would magically be drafted (and save us all) is a pipe dream. This didn’t happen in the last somewhat-contested convention in 1976 – Reagan had already put himself out there and mixed it up with Ford before everyone got down to Kansas City – and it’s not going to happen now. Even in 1948 – the last truly brokered GOP convention – every single one of the names on the ballot had already thrown their hats into the ring.

So, for us to head into a brokered convention just to pick between Mitt, Rick and Newt is nothing more than a waste of time. It becomes significantly less so if Rick Perry were to withdraw his endorsement of Newt, acquire better communications skills and a new campaign team and aim to win at least ten states. But the possibility is, if anything, lower than that of a brokered convention actually happening.

Either way, Al Cardenas, boss of the ACU – which runs CPAC – is already calling out the name of his fellow Floridian – Jeb Bush as a possibility should it come down to a contest on the convention floor. But we all know that dog won’t hunt – if Jeb Bush had been Jeb Smith, he would not need to be drafted as a last resort at the convention because he would be far and away the frontrunner and I won’t be writing this because the race would have been over three weeks ago.

But using Jeb Bush as a template – someone articulate, late fifties-to-early sixties, with some executive experience (preferably in a Governor’s office), a record of conservative accomplishment in office, success at the polls i.e. reelected at least once, a strong home base of support and without the baggage from being the brother and son of Presidents widely perceived to have failed in office …

Off the top of my head, this leaves us with people like  John Hoeven (who might have to shave off his mustache) and Mike Johanns, both of whom are in the first terms in the Senate, both of whom have been Governors for more than a single term and both of whom come from states that are reliably Red. Of course, there would be an immediate influx of people who will declare that they can never ever vote for one or the other because blah blah blah …, but I do not foresee any major problem with any one of  them winning support from all the necessary wings of the Party.

That is, if they can be coaxed to enter the meat-grinder that is a Presidential election.

Good luck with that.

In the interest of full disclosure, after Rick Perry dropped out, my support has returned to my 2008 choice, Mitt Romney. Frankly, I can’t quite fathom how he went from being the conservatives’ alternative to John McCain in 2008 to the most liberal Governor in the history of the entire world in 2012 – especially since he left the Governor’s office in 2006. Furthermore, I’m not convinced he’s just itching to get into the Oval Office to be a one-term President, especially considering the number of still youngish people with names like Christie, Sandoval, Martinez, Walker, Jindal, Haley, etc. that would be just about rounding out six (or more) years in Governor’s offices – which is right around the time Governors start feeling Presidential – by 2016. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, we’d have Mitt Romney in a position where it is politically profitable for the “wrong [person]” to do the right things.

Because the man and his Campaign messed up. Bad. He had the opportunity to introduce himself to the nation that any candidate would give his right arm for and he flubbed it. It was like watching a slow-motion trainwreck. Worse is that it was not the media’s fault, it was not the so-called “Establishment’s” fault, it was not the fault of either Romney, Gingrich, Paul, Santorum, Cain, Huntsman or Bachmann, it’s not Obama’s fault , it’s not even the fault of those damn RiNOs in Iowa and New Hampshire – the fault was and is entirely in the hands of Rick Perry and his campaign.

Let’s not forget that Rick Perry entered the race to an incredible outpouring of support – he was clocking 40% in some polls and he was the immediate recipient of torrents of cash. That wasn’t some “Establishment” plot. He had it virtually sown up. All he needed to do was deliver a Bachmann-level performance at the debates or just simply tout and defend his record of service, and it would have been a two-man race between him and Romney – with Romney firmly on the bad side of the bet.

But, of course, the Perry Campaign entered the race with the odd (and fatally arrogant yet firmly held theory) that “Debates Don’t Matter” and decided to forgo any semblance of debate prep or wargaming to figure out his weakspots and most importantly, figure out a proper defense and counter-strategy to neutralize them and get them off the table. Whatever else you may think about the quality of the debates (and the moderators), the fact that millions of people (AKA voters) all across the nation were going to be watching them, and afterwards even more millions would be seeing snippets of them on the news broadcasts, and the fact that they’ll be on YouTube (gaffes, warts and all) for all eternity, made them matter.

That the Gardisil, instate-college tuition rates for long-resident illegal immigrants and Trans-Texas Corridor issues obviously caught the Perry Campaign by surprise had me scratching my head in confusion. How the #@ck could every single upper-echelon member of the campaign have failed to warn the Governor about these issues when they were front and center of almost every Perry “Will-He?-Won’t-He?” discussion online and on talk-radio for weeks? How could his only response, whenever statistics were called out by moderators to make Texas (the only reason he’s on anyone’s radar) sound like some Third World country was “… blah blah get America working again …”?

The truth of the matter is, with the sole exception of their fantastic handling of the infamous 53-Second Oops moment, no campaign team has so ill-served their candidate on the national stage, and I’m including Cain’s platoon of bumbling amateurs. But thanks to “Debates Don’t Matter” coupled with a cookie cutter campaign and utterly non-responsive devoid of any kind of innovation (seriously – just take a look at the farce that is rickperry.org), Rick Perry’s 11 year record of achievement in Texas – a record that has every other candidate on the stage green with envy – never became a (much less the) factor in the race that it was supposed to be.

Even worse, it seems the entirety of the Perry Campaign missed what everyone else (even a thorough non-professional like me) was worried about when we were still at the “Will-He?-Wont-He?” stage; will the voters be ready to send another Texas Governor to the White House so soon after the last one left under such a (largely self-inflicted) cloud?

Of course, every Republican candidate, to some extent during the general election campaign, would be forced, in some way, to disassociate themselves with George W. Bush. Even if the Obama Campaign neglects to mention it (highly unlikely) at every opportunity, his Amen Corner in the Press certainly would not i.e. “Willard Newt Perry, a Republican, like George W. Bush …” Perry would have had a much harder time of it of course, given that not only do Rick Perry and George W. Bush come from the same party, same state, and hold the same office in Texas before seeking the Presidency, they were even on the same ticket.

Nonetheless, being a Republican, a Texan and a Governor of Texas like Bush, even being George W. Bush’s Lt. Governor, all of which would be helpfully pointed out early and often by many journalists in breathless and ominous tones, is something any competent campaign can survive. Being also perceived as dumb – “like Bush” – in addition to the aforementioned things in common, is, I submit, something else entirely. It still stuns me that despite the Press telegraphing their intended narrative template when covering Rick Perry i.e. stupid, with multiple liberal columnists and talking heads all chiming in at the same time (Journolists in action) with articles bearing helpful tell-tales titles like “Is Rick Perry Too Stupid To Be President?”, the Perry Campaign still needed three debates to finally decide that debate prep was a worthwhile investment.

Of course, neither George W. Bush nor Rick Perry is dumb – the United States Air Force has never been in the habit of putting multi-million dollar pieces of equipment which can kill lots and lots of people in one single moment of carelessness in the hands of low IQ individuals. But this is politics, and in politics, perception trumps reality. Otherwise, how the heck could a first-term Senator, with no history of accomplishment, all sorts of questionable associations, virtually no paper trail, and certainly no executive experience of any sort, win the Presidency of the United States?

Because the simple fact of the matter is that the number of voters who go out of their way to research candidates’ records and scrutinize their every word and deed is actually very very small. What is at least a heavy plurality, if not a majority, of voters (even among the generally more engaged and knowledgeable Primary electorate) are political morons who vote based on gut feelings and impressions of the candidate that they get from watching coverage of the candidates on TV and from a quick glance at the headlines of newspapers and magazines at the checkout counter. For many Americans, that is the full extent of their research into who gets their vote to be the Leader of the Free World. And there’s not much to suggest that Republican Primary voters are really that much different.

The problem here is that the Primary voter who casts her vote for Mitt Romney because “he looks Presidential” counts just as much as the politics junkie voter who decided to give her vote to Rick Perry after her careful objective line-by-line scrutiny of every candidate’s record. A successful candidate needs to figure out how to appeal to the bulk of voters between these two extremes. In other words, a candidate needs to figure out that combination of style and substance to get the voters’ attention, win them over and keep them on side. Think of it like running a successful restaurant, taste (substance) matters above all but so does presentation (style).

Instead the Perry Campaign came up with “Debates Don’t Matter” and of course that came along with the bone-headed resulting lack of preparation over not one, not two, but three debates. Then they decided that debates may matter but only in the service of repeating the same campaign buzzphrases (i.e. “Get America Working Again”) and talking point of the day irrespective of the question asked. By the time they figured out that the debates (no matter what you may think of them) were actually quite important, Rick Perry – with a record in executive office any Presidential candidate would envy – had been tuned out by most voters as a dud, and is now basically seen as either just another dumb Governor from Texas who just happened to be around when Texas was doing good.

This – that a Presidential Campaign needs to appeal to more than its base of support and tailor its messaging and delivery to suit its intended audience – is something many Perry supporters online seemed incapable of understanding. So when anyone pointed out, at least here on RedState, that Perry was not doing a good job on the media and communications front (especially at the debates) with fence-sitters, the typical Perry devotee response was that Perry had them convinced so anyone thinking Perry should make any adjustments should go pound sand. One particular lady thought it was good idea to repeatedly tell people who (no matter how politely and/or carefully) expressed any concern about Perry dropping the ball at the debates, or simply mentioning his precipitously dropping poll numbers, to shut up and “vote for someone else!”

Well, a lot of people obviously took her advice in IA, NH and apparently were going to do so in SC. I’m still not quite so sure how telling people to “vote for someone else” helps your candidate but I dont’t doubt there was a lot of passion but not quite as much logic involved.

Speaking of which, and again, focusing on RedState and its more passionate Perry supporters, Perry won every single debate, every (usually non-responsive) answer was a home run, every move his campaign made was a distillation of brilliance in its purest form. And of course, the drop in his poll numbers was a sign of some vast Left-Wing Media and GOP Establishment conspiracy to get Romney elected – the debates (which didn’t matter because “Debates Don’t Matter”) themselves were a part of the conspiracy to bring him down because “everyone” apparently knew he would flub them and stubbornly refuse to change course until it was too late.

Of course, the reality is rather more mundane; his campaign – quite apart from its boneheaded approach to the debates – sucked. A competent campaign, upon seeing that their candidate is not good at debates, would have flooded the zone with videos of Perry in other forensic formats (i.e. one-on-one interviews, townhalls, etc.) that he’s obviously more comfortable with. A competent campaign would have had a better website than the plain sad one that was rickperry.org. A competent campaign would have responded more aggressively to the Washington Post’s “N#$%erhead Rock” hit-piece.

A competent campaign would not have failed the simple task of securing enough signatures to get on the Primary ballot in Virginia.

There are many knowledgable Primary voters in IA and NH, who went out to research his record and genuinely would have loved to vote for Rick Perry. But they ended up voting for other people because just simply observing his campaign, it was clear that there was no way he could beat Obama’s billion dollar machine.

That’s why Rick Perry is back in Texas today.

There’s a lot of people who are absolutely discombobulated at the thought of Mitt Romney winning the nomination (as it looks like he’s going to do). Some are distressed at the thought because they’re positively convinced that Romney simply cannot win against Obama, and others are even more distraught because they are convinced that he could actually win and end up being inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States.

Suffice it to say, both sides are convinced that Romney is a no-good scumbag who would be almost as bad and perhaps even worse than Obama – to the extent that we have more than one or two swearing that they would sooner vote a thousand times for Barack Obama than ever consider voting for Romney.

Cool.

But I’m curious … for those who are absolutely convinced that a Romney Presidency would be a thoroughgoing disaster, what exactly is it that you think he’ll do?

Do you believe he’ll introduce Gun Control?
Raise taxes?
Surrender the United States to the Taliban?
Force all states to legalize gay marriage?
…

This is how you win the argument.

Let me spell it out; get a bunch of your statisticians and Think Tank (e.g. The Buckeye Institute) folks, have them sit down with a bunch of Adobe Flash animators (heck, hire the same folks the MacIver Institute and AFP folks did in Wisconsin) and get something like this explaining the facts and figures, and the hows, whys, whats, wheres and whens. Cut it down to five minutes (if at all possible). This really should take no more than two days, three days at the max.

Remember Obama’s informercial? Who says the same tactic can’t work for Republicans? Spend all the money necessary (don’t flinch) to have it put on Ohioans TV screens for the last three to five days before the referendum – can you honestly say defeating the unions would not be worth a few million dollars, even tens of millions of dollars? I’d also recommend putting it on a web page with a nice big PayPal logo right beside it.

And, oh yeah, put it online as well all over your websites – every Republican elected official in Ohio should have it embedded on the front page of his or her website.

End point; you win. The voters in the “middle” need things thoroughly spelled out for them otherwise they go with what they see on their TV screens. This does exactly that.

His problem is the fact that his campaign up till now remains enamored of ridiculous notions like “debates don’t matter” (which may have been valid in Texas but never on the national stage), but also the fact that both he and his campaign have been hideously amateurish and apparently completely at a loss competing at this level. The fact that Dave Carney’s last two Presidential campaigns were Bush-Quayle ’92 and Dole-Kemp ’96 is not particularly confidence-inspiring.

Even more confidence-sapping is the fact that no member of the Perry campaign’s upper echelons was able to figure out that running for President of the United States (where debates – no matter what you think of these ones in particular – do matter) is very different in both degree and kind from running for Governor of Texas. It took not one, not two, but three profoundly underwhelming debates (not to mention poll numbers steadily crashing like Obama-era economic growth numbers) before Dave Carney, Rob Johnson & co. realized “Oh s***! Hey Rick! Let’s try something different … Let’s prepare this time!”

I’m no expert, but if I were advising Perry, I’d tell him that the solution is for him is not to carry on with this obsession with Mitt Romney, and it’s certainly not to ape Sir Robin and bravely run away from the debates, but to shift the cross-hairs away from Mitt Romney and firmly settle them on Newt Gingrich.

Not as a target for destruction, but emulation.

So far the only person who looks wholly better after these debates than before them is Newt Gingrich.

So why not study what obviously works and try and modify it to work for you?

To me, the first thing to notice about Newt’s debate performances is that, by and large, he answers the question asked. Once you realize that, it’s really no mystery why he always comes off well from these things. His answers are always topical to the question – which means he’s not always returning to the same buzz-phrases and slogans e.g. “get America working again” when the question was about America’s relationship with the EU or restarting the NASA shuttle program. It really does grate on the ear.

So here’s my strange new idea for Governor Perry; answer the question. You may challenge the premise, force the moderator to ask it differently, or restate it yourself so you can answer it the way you want, but you must at least be seen to engage with the question and provide an answer to it. You can’t just respond to a question on, for example, stem cell research with “get America working again.”

Second, and just as important, Newt obviously knows who the real enemy is, and its not any one of the men or the woman on the stage with him. His sharp refusal to allow himself to be led into attacking his fellow Republicans when the real enemy is Obama and his passionately loyal support staff in the supposedly non-partisan objective media (who are clearly using these debates to make the Republican candidates bloody themselves and create divisions within the GOP’s activist base), probably won him more hearts and minds among the GOP Primary electorate than the entirety of his campaign prior to then.

The GOP base may despise the DC Republican establishment and harbor a deep intense dislike for Barack Obama, but it absolutely, positively, white-hot hates the mainstream media.

So here’s a novel idea; tap into that. Pull a Gingrich, with some Perry thrown in.

If I were advising Rick Perry, I’d advise him to take the first opportunity he has, look into the camera at the next debate and say something like this;

Over the past few months, we’ve had several of these debates and with the exception of one or two of us on this stage, we’ve all fallen into the news media trap of just beating up on each other instead of focusing on the big picture – how to get America working again. The first step of getting America working again is making sure that Barack Obama is a one-term President, that his continued assault on the American economy with job-killing taxes and regulations, on business, on our industries and job creation and job creators stop. And the only way that will happen is if we make sure that come the end of January 2013, Barack Obama would be referred to as the former President of the United States.

And you know what? Every single person on this stage, any one of them here, would be a better President than the man we have in the White House today. So I’m making a promise right now, that whoever wins our great party’s nomination, I’m going to support him, or her, 100%. Because we absolutely cannot afford another four years of Barack Obama. So I’m going to make a promise right now, that I’m not going to be attacking anyone on this stage again. You don’t build yourself up by tearing someone down. Instead, I’m going to be talking about how we can get our fiscal house in order, how we can make America energy independent, how we can get our investors to start investing again, so our economy can start growing again, and we can get America working again.

If Perry can successfully pull something like this off, he’s going to make millions of Republicans who have already written him off sit up and take notice. Better yet, he will take the elder statesman role and make anyone who attacks him look like an ******e.

If he can then make sure he does the following …

1. ---

   Defend Texas: Don’t (let anyone) mess with Texas. This means no longer letting moderators or his fellow candidates get away with talking smack about Texas’ wages, health insurance, unemployment rate, education, etc. In Nevada, Perry was asked about the “high” number of uninsured in Texas and he only spends about ten seconds pointing out that most of the uninsured are illegal aliens and instead of going deeper into the havoc caused by illegal immigration to Texas’ statistics – thereby neutralizing the issue, he then turns around and spends the remaining time attacking Romney on his former landscaping company.
   

   ---

2. Explain and defend his Policies: His energy and tax reform plans are certainly going to come under fire, from Romney, Santorum, et al. and certainly from the moderator who may or may not be repeating Obama campaign talking points. He needs to get his facts and figures right, he needs to get his delivery and word choices right so the average viewer would be able to understand how it all works. This means taking the time to research and anticipate where the attacks are going to come from and how he’s going to respond to them in his own voice. This means practice.
   

   ---

3. Defend himself: The Gardasil Executive Order, Trans-Texas Corridor, the so-called Texas DREAM Act, etc. He needs to work with his people and come up with the best way to explain his position and close the door on them. I’ve found that explaining exactly how the instate-tuition program works i.e. 1 year for citizens versus 3 years for non-citizens, no taxpayer funding for tuition, apply for citizenship and the fact that only 1% of Texas college students are under the programs tends to make a difference in how the program is perceived even in the most conservative circles – not necessarily good, but not a deal breaker either.
   The N*****head Rock issue hasn’t come up yet – I’m not betting against anyone who says it will. Perry needs to very carefully repeat the salient fact that neither he nor his parents actually owned the place and that they immediately painted over the sign as soon as it was brought to their attention and that they ultimately turned it over so it would not be seen. Then he needs to go all medieval on the Washington Post – call it a partisan hit-piece based on the hearsay of conveniently anonymous sources with its only aim being character assassination. Last but not least, state the belief that Stephanie McCrummen, with the knowledge of her editors, made up most of her anonymous sources.
   Another issue that is certain to come up is Perry’s unfortunate decision to mess around with the Obama Birth Certificate issue. My advice to Perry; put this to bed immediately. Say again that you were messing with the interviewer and poking fun at Obama – then, without any equivocation, clearly state that you believe that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii to an American mother, making him the legitimately elected President of United States … until January 2013.
   

   ---

4. Attack the Media: In my idea of an ideal debate performance (or interview) where Perry has to deal with the Birther issue, he’d shut the issue down as described above and then immediately segue into noting that the news media didn’t seem quite so exercised when Sarah Palin was being accused of not being the mother of her own son. Segue from that to noting that the media was also not so concerned when so many people on the Left, including many celebrities were accusing George W. Bush of bringing down the World Trade Center …
   My advice for any of the candidates, not just Perry, when they’re asked about the Occupy Wall Street protests is to acknowledge their right to free speech, and immediately start noting the difference in coverage when it was the Tea Party that was exercising their own right to peacefully assemble and protest.
   In other words, make the news media’s many instances of ideological hypocrisy the focus of your answer whenever you can. When they ask about your religious views, start talking about Jeremiah Wright and the news media’s curious lack of curiosity when it came to 23 years of Barack Obama sitting in his church.
   Bottom line? There’s nothing quite as effective for capturing the hearts and minds of Republicans as making an open enemy of the news media.
   

   ---

… then I would bet anything that he would be rocketing back to the top of the polls.

After the debates, Perry’s major problem is convincing the GOP Primary electorate that he is good enough, that he’s the better bet -  not that Mitt Romney (as if it’s news) is a flip-flopper.

As it stands, he was given the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to introduce himself to the American people that every other person on the stage would have killed for, and he not only botched it, he gave ammunition to his detractors, both from within and outside the party to help them solidify the memes they had been spreading about him – yet another dim-bulb from Texas who was just lucky enough to be around when his state was doing well.

I’ve seen all sorts of interesting (often contradictory) excuses for Perry’s poor debate performances – his back (surgery, y’know?) must’ve hurt (what about painkillers and sitting down during the commercial breaks?), he just doesn’t debate well (so?), he wasn’t prepared (wasn’t he an Eagle Scout? “Be Prepared”?), he must have been tired (Red Bull?), he was overcoached (not a comforting thought), and so on. Well, color me unsympathetic – he’s running for President of the United States; did he think it was going to be an easy mosey on down to the Oval Office?

The bulk of the punditocracy seems to have settled on Perry simply not preparing for the debates – and his campaign’s patently absurd “Debate-prep is for sissies!” stand sorta gives weight to this conclusion. But I happen to think Perry and his campaign did prepare. The reason I think this is because seven years ago, I watched another Texan deliver a virtually identical performance – the same non-responsive answers, the same repeating of the same tired old talking points, the same retreats to shallow poll-tested pabulum. Which is ironic, considering that reminding anyone of George W. Bush is clearly something Perry campaign really wants to avoid – it’s bad enough the poster to the right (and others like it) is going to be all over 2012 if Perry actually does secure the nomination.

September 30th 2004, I was in the UK and five hours ahead of EST, so I had to be up at 0200 the next day to watch the live broadcast of President Bush squaring off against John Kerry in the first Presidential Debate at the University of Miami. The next day, still livid, I posted a comment on (I think) Bryan Preston former blogging digs, (junkyardblog.net – if I’m not mistaken) wondering why anyone who had invested any time, effort and money to make sure America returns President Bush to the Oval Office would feel in any way encouraged to continue anything beyond the bare minimum when the President himself very obviously could not be bothered to offer his supporters the courtesy to prepare for a debate.

I discovered this was the consensus view of the blogosphere on the Right – Bush (providing us with a preview of the next four years) simply let Kerry get away with murder, and wasted numerous opportunities restating the same tired old talking points instead of forcefully defending his administration and aggressively challenging Kerry’s barely masked allegations about “letting” Bin Laden “escape” at Tora Bora and (over the course of the campaign) lying the nation into the War in Iraq with falsified intelligence data.

The sole exception was one commenter who claimed to be an employee of one of the “top Republican political consultancies” in the country. And in his “professional” opinion, the President’s performance was right on target. By shoe-horning his campaign talking points into practically every answer, even when that was at best only tangentially related to the question, the President was “reinforcing” his message. By refusing to challenge Kerry’s allegations about Iraq, he was showing viewers that he was above such petty bickering and “looked like a statesman.” By avoiding any specifics or even the smallest amount of complexity in his answers, he was avoiding getting the viewers “lost in the weeds”.

The sad thing about it is the realization over the next four years of the Bush Administration that this wasn’t some guy who was going off-script – his view actually represented the current thinking of the Republican Party’s top thinkers and strategists on campaigning and political communication – a view designed (and not very well even then) for the media environment of the 20th Century – with the same conventional wisdom and polite fictions that, given modern technology, simply don’t work anymore. It is blind to the concepts of narrative, meme, public perception or the need to influence them to your advantage. The decision by the Bush Administration to not counter the increasingly accepted narrative that Bush lied the nation into the War in Iraq is a direct offshoot of this view.

Another perfect example is the 2008 McCain campaign (much like the Huntsman campaign of 2012), which continued to operate as if the endorsements of the Washington Post and New York Times were actually up for grabs – a key part of this view is the polite fiction that the mainstream media plays it straight down the middle. To show just how blind to narratives and public perception this view is, the McCain campaign decided that instead of John McCain pointing at the Community Reinvestment Act and recounting the Bush Administration’s multiple attempts to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that were all were blocked by Congressional Democrats, McCain’s answer, when asked the cause of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, should be “Wall Street greed.”

The loud groaning sound emanating from Massachusetts’ 4th District was Barney Frank heaving a sigh of relief, and the clapping sounds from Hope & Change Central was Obama’s Campaign staff high-fiving each other; once again, John McCain had stupidly jumped up to redirect ordnance to fall on his own side. No campaign with any awareness of narrative and public perception would have failed to realize that the flag bearer of the party most commonly perceived to be friendly to Wall Street is not going to be helped by that talking point. If the problem is “Wall Street greed”, then the obvious solution is to vote for the party that is more likely to place shackles on Wall Street; the Democrats.

Here’s another boneheaded blind-to-narrative move – in response to the spreading narrative that Sarah Palin is too dumb to be Vice-President, thanks in part to an interview stupidly arranged with a hostile interviewer, what do you do? Do you (a) arrange more interviews and press opportunities in both friendly and hostile venues and prepare Palin to combat the narrative or …(b) hide Palin and give the narrative all the space it needs to grow? The answer is obvious to a typical Republican campaign consultant, (b)!

Perry (and probably every other Republican candidate) has the same problem – staffers who come to work in the morning and first of all reach for their copy of the New York Times, who never read blogs, see no utility beyond fundraising in social media, and still think “Never quarrel with someone who buys ink by the barrel” is still a valid aphorism to live by. Given a choice between hiring Erick Erickson or David Frum to help them reach out to the GOP Primary electorate and beyond, most of these people would go with David Frum. Newt Gingrich’s oft-expressed contempt for (particularly Republican) political consultants as unimaginative pencil pushers isn’t entirely due to his recent troubles with staffers, he’s been launching broadsides at them since Barack Obama was just some weirdly named unknown State Senator in Springfield.

How is it possible that the Perry campaign could be caught by surprise on the Gardasil issue? It was all over the blogosphere even before his formal announcement at the RedState Gathering – worse; it was all over RedState. His problematic stance on illegal immigration and in-state tuition is another obvious flashpoint they seem to have missed as issue that would come up.

The worst moment for me in the first debate with Perry on the stage was when Brian Williams painted Texas to be some sort of Third World country and Perry went to the tired old “get America working again” bromide instead of challenging Williams on his portrayal of Texas. That was a missed opportunity to put up a stirring defense of Texas’ record on education, wages (and the low cost of living), healthcare and highlight the massive number of people immigrating to Texas and the unique problems presented by having the longest border of all Southern states with Mexico and how those impact on Texas’ unemployment numbers despite massive job growth. In other words, Perry allowed Brian Williams to mess with Texas and get away with it. Worse is that it was entirely predictable that an NBC moderator would try to undercut a record so threatening to Obama’s re-election efforts.

The perception the viewer is left with is that Texas’ job growth numbers came at the price of starving, sick and illiterate children naked and dying on the streets because their illiterate burger flipping parents can’t afford to buy food or aspirin on their microscopically low wages, let alone health insurance. Of course, it would have been easy for Perry to have blasted this perception to tattered pieces. The information is out there – this infamous blog post on “Rick Perry And Texas Job Numbers” by Matthias Shapiro over at PoliticalMath should have earned him a personal thank you call from Rick Perry (even if Shapiro has explicitly stated that he’s not a Perry supporter) – but I’d bet you all anything that not one top Perry campaign staffer has even heard of it.

That’s the problem Perry’s got on his hands. Priority one; he needs to do whatever it takes to get his debating skills up to par – and then, take a good hard look at his media and communications team …

… to be continued.

But the reality is that some would be a harder sell than others.

I’m hoping Rick Perry leaps in because of this – among the people running now, and granted that he is not perfect (who the hell is?) he would be the GOP’s “easiest sell” to the voters by far.

He has the executive experience and the record to prove it – Governor for 10 years of the nation’s second largest state with the best record on job growth and development in the nation. Another cool fact is that the Democrats would have a hard time throwing the credit to the last Democrat Governor – especially since his predecessor was not only not a Democrat, but actually George W. Bush.

And even if “critics” point out that the Lt. Governor is more powerful in TX (which is arguable), he can point to the fact that he was Lt. Governor for a while – so he’s got that covered too. Going further, he’s got military experience – a 5 year veteran of the USAF and he’s got significantly more communications skills than W.

Which brings us to the main chink in his armor – TX and the aforementioned George W. Bush. Will the American people be ready to give the Presidency to another Texan so soon after the last Texan left with approval ratings in the toilet? Again, I think his record in TX can take care of that … and again, he can very firmly and respectfully say; “My name is James Richard Perry, not George Walker Bush.”

Add all that to the fact that it’s no secret that the Bush clan openly despises him (witness the endorsements of Kay Bailey Hutchison last year by so many Bushes and Bushies) and he can shake off the attachment quite easily.

And last, but not least, and note that this is extremely important to “moderate” (especially moderate female) voters, he “looks” Presidential.

To complete the ticket; if he can find a socially and fiscally conservative (important) African American or Hispanic running mate – ideally a veteran who’s held flag rank with no skeletons in his (or her) closet, I think it’ll be a ticket that’ll keep the Left up at night. Does anyone know if General Kip Ward a Republican?

That said, and maybe my reasoning for this is not “Conservatively Correct” but I would recommend Michael Williams for everyone’s consideration before Ted Cruz – who is still young enough to go for the seat Rick Perry is vacating in 2015.

My logic is this; since both Cruz and Williams are equally conservative and electable (especially Williams who has been elected three times statewide), we need to look at other factors – and the most salient is race, and what it would symbolize when a Republican stronghold, a Southern Republican stronghold at that – the state of George W. Bush, sends an African American to the Senate.

The truth is that the election of any minority as a Republican is an utterly painful event for the Left. But the GOP having a black man as a member of the US Senate caucus, sent there by conservative voters from a conservative state, would be nothing short of excruciating.

Let’s be clear, electing Williams to the Senate serves two purposes – getting a great conservative to the Senate and shooting a below-the-waterline hole into the “Republicans are Racists!” meme in a way electing Ted Cruz simply would not. The fact of the matter is that racism in America is inextricably tied to the African American community by history itself in a way that matches no other group, including Hispanics.

That said, this may not win the GOP any major inroads into the black community – in fact, the likelihood is that he would become the target of a full blown hate-campaign of character-assassination and calumny by the entire plethora of “civil rights” organizations. But for those who are persuadable in and out of the black community it will help us win votes. It’s an undeniable symbol that the GOP truly practices what it preaches about being color-blind … and I need not tell anyone here that symbols are important in politics.

So I ask you to imagine having the only African American member of the Senate being a Republican. From Texas.

Better yet, imagine Jennifer Carroll in Florida throwing her hat into the ring against Bill Nelson in 2012. Now imagine again the absolute nightmare it would be for the Left if the only *two* African American members of the Senate, and both from the South, are Republicans.

What’s not to like about that?

PS: Just to remind everyone, both Ted Cruz and Michael Williams are good guys. Let’s not allow what happened with the primaries in NV last year happen here. The fact that you prefer one over the other should not in any way be taken as license to launch a campaign of destruction on the other just to get your guy to win. This is what happened with Nevada last year – some people took their preference for Sharron Angle as a reason to attack the integrity and commitment to principle of Sue Lowden and Danny Tarkanian. That was unnecessary.

Here, especially when we have such an embarrassment of riches in these two guys, we should be future-oriented – the fact that at least one of them is not going to be the next United States Senator from Texas does not mean that same guy is not going to be the next Governor of Texas. Let’s do our best to keep this particular contest civil in preparation for the next fight after it’s done.

Anyway, sometimes this is harmless.

Other times – like now – it is giving them the proverbial inch that gives them the wherewithal to take a mile.

For example, every single time a Republican or Conservative went along with a liberal host who claimed that Jared Loughner’s murder spree in Tucson in any way reflects something or other about the “political climate” or “tone” (anymore so than CAFE standards or Hurrican Katrina) just conceded the argument. From there, it is no difficult thing to start claiming that the Right somehow made it more likely that some deranged idiot would open fire on a Congresswoman.

In this case, the transparently contrived “controversy” about “blood libel” – anyone who, in a bid to appear “reasonable”, concedes that Sarah Palin’s use of the phrase “blood libel” is “inappropriate” or “over the top” is doing the exact same thing. Accepting a blatantly false liberal premise and essentially conceding the argument.

And besides, who, after the way this woman has been treated since 2008, actually failed to predict that the Left – desperate after the backfiring of their ghoulish attempt to blame her for a deranged man’s murder spree – would pick on something no matter what it was Palin said?

And just to be clear; the idea that prior to Sarah Palin, the use of the phrase “blood libel” had always been exclusively used to denote the smear against Jews of using children’s blood in rituals is so blatantly false it borders on the ridiculous. So ridiculous and blatantly unfair that an arch-liberal like Alan Dershowitz had to jump in …

The term “blood libel” has taken on a broad metaphorical meaning in public discourse. Although its historical origins were in theologically based false accusations against the Jews and the Jewish People,its current usage is far broader. I myself have used it to describe false accusations against the State of Israel by the Goldstone Report. There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim. The fact that two of the victims are Jewish is utterly irrelevant to the propriety of using this widely used term.

As Jim Geraghty is all-too-easily demonstrating – and it shocks me that it actually needs to be pointed out – it’s been used as a metaphor in every major news outlet from the AP to the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal by people ranging from Mark Levin (this morning) to steaming brown puddles of mendacity like Frank Rich and Andrew Sullivan in their columns.

So the proper response to any liberal hemming and hawing and huffing and puffing about the supposed hitherto unprecedented use of “blood libel” by Sarah Palin, whether on TV, radio, on the phone, in the streets, etc.?

“Are you &%@! kidding me?!! First you try to pin a murder on her and now this …?!! Are you idiots really that &@#! desperate …?!!”

NOTE TO ERICK:
Here’s an idea – if you are on air and some Lefty starts bloviating about the supposedly unprecedented use of “blood libel” by Sarah Palin, you should immediately challenge the guy to put his money where his mouth is.

Challenge him to a bet; if you can find more than five metaphorical uses of the phrase “blood libel” in any mainstream media outlet prior to today, then he must give ten thousand dollars to charity.