Help the poor? Not on your life...

Mitt 'Mittens' Romney and the Republican Challenge On the Economy

By Paul Waldman

Like many liberal bloggers, I can barely contain my glee at the prospect of yet another Mitt Romney presidential campaign. I say that not because I look forward to mocking him (though I'm not going to deny that), but because I genuinely find him to be a fascinating character, and I know there will be plenty to write about with him in the race. The fact that he's willing to go through another campaign after losing in 2012 demonstrates that within Mitt there burns a fire of ambition and persistence that is either incredibly admirable or completely deranged.

But what will the Romney '16 campaign be about? Here's a quote from Maggie Haberman and James Hohmann's article about it: "Besides a focus on helping the poor, the other two pillars he's told people he would build a new campaign around are supporting the middle class and a muscular foreign policy, an area where he believes he was strongly vindicated from his 2012 campaign against President Barack Obama." A "muscular" foreign policy, obviously—Mitt smash!—but the other two pillars of the campaign will be helping the poor and supporting the middle class. Remember, this is Mitt Romney we're talking about.

If you think it's going to be awfully hard for any Republican, but particularly Mitt, to convince voters that the GOP is the party of the little guy, you aren't alone. I have a post over at the Plum Line about this today; here's an excerpt:

Republicans start out at a significant disadvantage in this debate for a number of reasons. First, they tend to talk about the economy from a level far removed from that of ordinary people. Enact policies like low taxes and light regulation on corporations, they say, and the result will be growth that ends up benefiting everyone. But now they're acknowledging that they have to talk about middle class and even poor people, and offer them something more specific. That runs into their second problem, that because they believe in small government, unlike Democrats they aren't likely to support policies that offer direct, immediate benefits. 

The policies they do support, furthermore, will immediately be characterized by their opponents as being one of two types: attacks on the poor being deceptively offered as efforts to help them (like devolving responsibility for safety net programs to the states) or moves to help rich people being deceptively offered as a boon to the middle class (like most Republican tax cuts). 

Republicans will, of course, say that these criticisms are unfair. But the default assumption voters have is that the GOP is the party of the rich. That means that in order to persuade them, Republicans can't can't just come up with some reasonable policy ideas, they have to offer something twice as compelling as what Democrats are proposing. And when Democrats are saying something straightforward, like "Our plan is to give you a thousand bucks and pay for it by taxing Wall Street," while Republicans are trying to explain how block grants would bring a more efficient allocation of benefits, it isn't hard to see who's going to win the argument. Just try to imagine how much work someone like Mitt Romney—he of Bain Capital and the "47 percent"—is going to have to do to convince voters that he's really the one who's on the side of the middle class.

Maybe Mittens's advisers are right, and they and their candidate are going to correct everything they did wrong in 2012, show America how committed he is to regular people, and ride on to the White House. I guess anything's possible.