Tag: ELECTION

One week after his run for the White House went up in a puff, Mitt Romney and company are still trying to figure out what went wrong.

Most of the polls that did not give him a slight lead had him in a statistical dead heat with President Barack Obama. Surging crowds filled the venues of his rallies, following his strong performance against a sedated Obama in their first “debate.” From rally to rally he rode on a wave of enthusiasm, whereas Obama’s supporters sulked in quiet resignation.

In that debate, Romney twisted himself into so many different shapes and sizes that if the contest had been for the contortionist-in-chief of the United States, he would have won it that night for all practical purposes. The one who had made a virtue of being “severely conservative” cut the middle ground from under Obama’s feet with a brazenness that left the usually unflappable Obama utterly confused.

And it worked, splendidly.

In another clime, Romney would have been undone by that debate. For he confirmed his public image as a person without a core, a person who would say anything if he thought it would help him win, inauthentic. Not for nothing did one of his opponents in the race for the GOP ticket, Jon Huntsman, compare him to “a perfectly lubricated weather vane.”

But in America, where politics is a game like almost everything else, where appearance – they call it “optics” — counts far more than substance, Romney’s contortions catapulted him to front runner.

Nobody remembered anymore his comment about the 47 per cent of Americans who see themselves as victims and have settled for an easy life of dependency, nor the wealth he had salted away in off-shore tax havens, nor yet his sworn determination, in the face of established practice, to release no more than two years of his federal income tax filings.

Not even Obama’s superior performance in the two subsequent “debates” could arrest the Romney momentum. The race dragged on, oscillating within a minuscule window, leading commentators to project all kinds of possible outcomes.

One candidate (Romney) might win the popular ballot but lose the Electoral College vote to Obama, in which case Obama would have to contend with a fresh legitimacy issue that would provide fresh ammunition for the Tea Party crowd and its punditocracy that had spent the better part of the past four years trying to de-legitimise him.

A winner might not be known for several months, and it might fall again to the Supreme Court again, the Republican Party in judicial robes to determine the outcome, according to another scenario. They even conjured up one curious scenario under which Romney would be president, and Obama’s running mate and vice president, Joe Biden, would continue to serve in that capacity in the Romney Administration.

In these permutations, Obama figured only as a secondary actor.

One of the few pollsters who came to a different conclusion was Nate Silver, the computer geek and resident statistician for The New York Times. While others predicted an outright win for Romney or a squeaker at best for Obama, Silver gave Obama more than eight chances in ten to clinch the race outright. For this, he was denounced endlessly by Romney’s supporters.

Then, a deus ex machina that not even Sophocles could have devised supervened. Hurricane Sandy struck across 15 states in the North-east, wreaking devastation on a scale America has not seen since Katrina.

Hurricane Sandy called to mind another deus ex machina that had supervened at a critical moment in the 2008 presidential election contest between Barack Obama and John McCain. The race was a ding-dong affair. Obama had the crowds and the enthusiasm, but this did not translate into a significant lead in the polls.

The collapse of the stock market changed all that.

McCain called off scheduled rallies and headed to Washington DC, saying he was going to help fix the economy. Obama kept his cool, consulted quickly with the experts, and staked a position that Americans found much more reassuring than McCain’s panicked and erratic conduct. The rest is history.

Hurricane Sandy concentrated national attention on the ruin it had loosed on a vast swathe of the United States and to the efforts to deal with its aftermath. It offered President Obama to do what he does best – uniting the nation at a time of grief, and playing comforter-in-chief. There, on splendid display, and unsullied by the bitterness that has been the hallmark of the campaign – there was the essential Obama.

But I am not persuaded that it slowed down or arrested Romney’s momentum, as his camp is now claiming. Right up to Election Day, they believed that they had the game in the bag, and their own internal polling and a good many of the independent polls appeared to back them.

Romney and his inner circle certainly believed it.

He had written and tucked in his vest the acceptance speech he would deliver moments after Obama would have called to concede. Boats moored along Boston harbor, had been detailed to launch a spectacular eight-minute fireworks to herald Romney’s victory. This was, to be sure, an incongruous move in the major city of a state that had just rejected him overwhelmingly at the polls. But then, nobody has ever accused Romney of subtlety.

A web site for President-elect Mitt Romney was already up and almost running. Offices had been acquired in Washington DC to house his transition team.

Romney was set to hit the ground running, as they say here, though he would have to wait until taking office on January 20, 2013, or Day One as he called it on the stump, to abolish “Obamacare,” the health care delivery law enacted by the Obama Administration and affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States. It did not matter in the least that it was modeled on the law Romney had enacted as governor of Massachusetts.

By the time they called Ohio some three hours after the poll closed, it was all over for Romney. Nate Silver, the resident statistician at The New York Times, had it right all along.

Hurricane Sandy undermined the Romney mantra that big government was an aberration, whereas the private sector is the answer to every problem under the sun. It exploded Ronald Reagan’s oft-cited dictum that there are no words in the English language more terrifying “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

But in the end, I think it was Romney’s phoniness that brought him to grief — his lack of a core, his inauthenticity, his cavalier treatment of politics as an amoral game in which winning is the only thing that counts, his belief that he could fool all the people all the time.

This was what Obama distilled into a powerful closing argument in the final days of the race. “You know me,” the drained and bone-weary candidate seeking re-election said at each stop. “You know what I stand for. You know that I say what I mean. You know that I mean what I say. . .”

Romney had no answer to that one.

Former President Clinton, who played a pivotal role in the Obama campaign, drove home the point to teeming admirers who remember his tenure as an era of prosperity.

The genius that has sustained the United States through the centuries prevailed. A bourgeoning progressive majority that cut across class and color and creed and tongue and gender and sexual orientation saw through the flakiness. It refused to submit to the fear-mongering, the race baiting, the xenophobia, the homophobia, and the demagoguery that constituted the pillars of Romney’s bid for the White House.