Diogenes-Light: Morning Jolt - An Etch-a-Sketchy Remark from a Romney Aide

Morning Jolt - An Etch-a-Sketchy Remark from a Romney Aide

NRO Newsletters . . .

Morning Jolt

. . . with Jim Geraghty

March 22, 2012

In This Issue . . .

1. An Etch-a-Sketchy Remark from a Romney Aide

2. Somebody Buy Flowers for Bill Kristol

3. Does Wall Street Love Obama? If It Does . . . Why?

4. Addenda

Here's your Thursday Morning Jolt!

Enjoy.

Jim

1. An Etch-a-Sketchy Remark from a Romney Aide

You know, just yesterday morning, I had chuckled about how Mitt Romney follows every primary victory with some terrible gaffe: "I'm not concerned about the very poor," etc.

But Romney is growing as a candidate, hitting his stride, remembering the managerial skills that helped him achieve success in life. Now he's outsourcing the gaffes, leaving that task to the folks who work for him, such as Eric Fehrnstrom.

Mitt Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom on Wednesday said that, despite a long primary fight, the general election would practically be a blank slate for the GOP presidential hopeful.

"It's almost like an Etch A Sketch -- you shake it all up and start over again," he told CNN of the general election.

Fehrnstrom was responding to questions from CNN's "Starting Point" panel on Romney's appeal to the wider Republican party.

He defended Romney's appeal to a broad base when asked if he's concerned that, under pressure from Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, the candidate is tacking too "far to the right" in his positions -- and therefore alienating centrists.

"I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes," Fehrnstrom said.

This comment left many on the Right, well, shaken.

"A candidate shouldn't have to clarify the remarks of his own communications director," suggests John Podhoretz.

Phil Klein was never a big fan of Romney, but on Wednesday he seemed somewhere between gobsmacked and apoplectic in response to the remark:

Ever since he launched his first bid for the presidency over five years ago, critics have argued that Mitt Romney's conservative positions aren't sincere, and that he would start to abandon them once he was no longer trying to appeal to the Republican primary electorate. I just never expected one of his chief campaign staffers to openly admit it. Yet feeling cocky after Mitt Romney's strong victory in Illinois, top advisor Eric Fehrnstrom did just that.

If Romney's fiercest critics wanted to come up with a way to describe Romney's approach to politics, I don't think they could have come up with a better analogy than Etch A Sketch. The fact that it's coming from one of Romney's long-time aides is stunning. An even scarier thought for conservatives: if the Romney campaign is willing to take them for granted before even clinching the nomination, imagine how quickly Romney would abandon conservatives if he ever made it to the White House.

Allahpundit calls it "a comment so stupidly vivid and vividly stupid given Romney's vulnerabilities that it ends up being more effective than 99 percent of the attacks Santorum and Gingrich have lobbed at Mitt."

"I personally fall somewhere in between the two conservative camps on this one," concludes Guy Benson in an excellent roundup on the topic:

I've raised serious doubts as to whether Mitt Romney is really the born-again committed conservative he claims to be, and I maintain many of those concerns. Given Romney's long record of changing positions and the resulting avalanche criticism, Romney's campaign should be acutely aware of jitters regarding their guy's fealty to the movement's animating ideas. That reality is what makes Fehrnstrom's formulation on CNN so astonishingly foolish. I know from personal experience that live TV can be pressure-filled and dizzyingly fast-paced at times, so I can empathize with foot-in-mouth moments. That being said, this is the biggest of leagues, and major missteps are costly. One of Mitt Romney's closest aide has managed to extend the campaign's habit of poisoning their own post-election victory lap by committing a seismic unforced error, and Team Santorum is rightly disseminating this clip far and wide, breathing oxygen into their life-support campaign. On the other hand, I tend to think Fehrnstrom really was just referring to the natural evolutionary step that virtually every campaign takes between an internecine nominating fight and a fall election.

Indeed, what Fehrnstrom did was say explicitly what every campaign does quietly when a primary ends. The goal stops being to win a majority of support among members of the candidate's party to winning a majority of support within the electorate at large. Very, very rarely does a campaign not have to change its sales pitch as the target audience changes.

Leave it to Mickey Kaus to find the counter-intuitive thought in all this: "The Etch-a-Sketch has legs. But now it's a bit *harder* for Mitt to abandon tough immigration/union positions, no?"

2. Somebody Buy Flowers for Bill Kristol

The Fernstrom maelstrom hadn't even broken when Bill Kristol greeted Wednesday with distinctly uncharacteristic gloom:

Looking back at the day's news, I must admit I'm having trouble maintaining my customary good cheer.

Watching Mitt Romney's victory speech in Illinois didn't reassure me about his chances against President Obama. (Watch it yourself to see if I'm being unfair.) Romney's remarks consisted basically of the claim that the business of America is business, that he's a businessman who understands business, and that we need "economic freedom" not for the sake of freedom but to allow business to fuel the economy. It's true that Romney will have plenty of time to improve for the general election, if, as seems likely (but still not inevitable!), he wins the nomination. But if he sticks with this core message, we'd better hope Republicans and independents are really determined to get rid of Barack Obama.

Nor was I reassured by reading about Republican political consultants wringing their hands over the risks of Paul Ryan's budget, nor by seeing some on the right foolishly disparaging it as too timid. Meanwhile, the House GOP leadership, apparently eager to move away from discussing the budget, announced a press conference tomorrow to introduce a gimmicky small business tax break. None of this reassured me that most Republican elected officials and candidates will keep their nerve or manifest much intelligence over the next few weeks and months.

"Winning the nomination will not make Romney's weaknesses go away. They're still real and still significant," sighs Jill at Pundit and Pundette.

Michael Walsh, who has been quite skeptical of Romney through much of this primary season, saw some sparks of life Tuesday night:

Good to hear Mitt Romney making all the right noises last night after his win in Illinois. . . .Mitt's running on a "jobs" platform, but there's a much larger issue at stake than simply "putting America back to work." What if half of America doesn't want to go back to work? What if the half that pays no federal income taxes likes the current sponge-and-freeload system? How do you get through to folks who've grown reliant on the government man to show them the money? How do you get them down from the Big Rock Candy Mountain, where the handouts grow on bushes and they hung the jerk who invented work?

Not by telling them they can grow up to be Edison or the Wright Brothers or even Steve Jobs, but by destroying the matrix that keeps them in a state of perpetual semi-servitude, and explaining the Faustian bargain the Democrats have made with them: a humiliating subsistence in exchange for their votes, their dignity, and their souls.

This election is not about the most efficient running of the regulatory state: It's about its dismantlement and the rebirth of personal liberty. If, by virtue of the long primary battle, Romney begins to articulate that, as he did last night, terrific. Even better if he actually believes it. But if it's just Say-Anything Mittt elling the rubes what they want to hear so he can finally put Gingrich and Santorum away, then all the moderates in the world won't save him from electoral defeat by a motivated Left and a dispirited Right.

3. Does Wall Street Love Obama? If It Does . . . Why?

Two contradictory reports emerged yesterday on Obama's ability to raise money from Wall Street employees -- i.e., the much-demonized 1 percent.

The good news for Obama:

President Barack Obama's largest campaign donors last month included employees of Wells Fargo & Co., (WFC) JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission records. Their support indicates that Wall Street, which gave Obama $16 million for his successful 2008 White House run, is opening its checkbook again for the president.

The bad news for Obama:

It's also true that Mr. Obama is trailing expected numbers in big-ticket donations -- a fact the president has tried to remedy by holding Manhattan fund-raisers to reel in big donors. At one such event earlier this month, he noted the difficulty of being both a populist and a cash magnet. "So many of you have had to defend me from your co-workers over the last three years," he told the assembled bankers, hedge fund managers and private equity honchos.

DealBook spoke to one politically connected hedge fund manager this week who said that Mr. Obama's cash crisis was real -- and that the campaign knew it.

"What he's done is insulted every guy on Wall Street," said the manager, who has supported Mr. Obama in the past and spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I don't take it personally, but a lot of people do. He's going to have a hard time raising money."

4. Addenda

No Tim Tebow jokes yet, I'm still processing it all.

Ben Howe offers the GOP front-runner a helpful suggestion: "Romney should say 'I'm not an Etch-A-Sketch. I'm like Light Brite, Light Brite. I turn on the magic of colored light.'"