The consensus out there in Blogistan is that it’s been a bad week for Mitt Romney. Some more YouTubes have surfaced, people are talking about his history on abortion and his most prominent pro-life backer offered a couple of infelicities during his first go-round with the press. As if all this weren’t bad enough, yesterday Bill Richardson praised RomneyCare. As a Romney supporter, this last development left me asking myself , What else can go wrong?
By the time I got back to Southern Soxblog Manor yesterday, I was convinced that something had to be done. But after, a good night’s sleep, I’ve come to see things differently. It’s all good. Really - this has been a great week for the Romney campaign.
NOW THAT YOU’VE WIPED the coffee off your screen, allow me to explain. What the Romney campaign has doneis effect the political equivalent of Muhammad Ali’s legendary rope-a-dope strategy.
When Ali fought the young George Foreman in the searing African heat, Ali no longer had the athletic ability to defeat an opponent as formidable as Foreman. So he surprised everyone by developing an innovative new technique – the Rope-a-Dope.
To the untrained eye, it looked like Ali was just leaning against the ropes and letting Foreman hit him. But in truth, he was letting the over-eager Foreman punch himself out to the point of exhaustion. By the fight’s middle rounds, Foreman had nothing left in the tank and Ali easily knocked out the completely fatigued champion.
In these early days of the election cycle, Romney is playing the role of Ali and the press is Foreman. Although it’s easy for us political obsessives to forget, there can be no knockouts a year before Iowa. The flip-side of that coin is also informative – Howard Dean had a perfect 2003 and wound up a distant also ran to political titans like John Kerry and John Edwards.
The press and other entities who are hostile to the Romney campaign feel like they’re landing haymakers about his purported flip-flopping. Big deal. When the press is all punched out, Romney will have $100 million and his own formidable political skills available to make his rebuttal.
The problem with going on the same offensive repeatedly in politics, as Romney’s foes are, is that regardless of the offensive’s underlying merits, there are diminishing returns. Republicans learned this the hard way with bill Clinton. After spending 7 years decrying Clinton’s moral turpitude, the then-President was caught in the Oval Office with his pants down canoodling with a zaftig intern. For any other president in American history, this would have been game, set and match. The public would have demanded his resignation.
But Clinton was fortunate. Because his political enemies had spent seven years attacking his moral shortcomings and sexual peccadilloes, the country had tuned out such matters. Even though smart guys like Dike Morris (giggle) thought the Lewinsky scandal would be a knockout blow to the president he so loyally served, it never even perceptibly moved public opinion regarding the randy POTUS.
THE OFT-REPEATED CHARGE AGAINST MITT ROMNEY IS THAT HE’S A FLIP-FLOPPER and an opportunist. As someone who knows him and who is familiar with his character, it annoys me no end to see Romney’s detractors so relentlessly peddle such an inaccurate caricature.
But there’s an undeniable political upside to this development. It will hardly be possible for the press to release a big “breaking news” story on the eve of the Iowa primary that says in effect, “This just in: Mitt Romney is a flip-flopper!!!” By the time the public is steeling itself to take a hard look at who should be its next President, the press will have punched itself out as far as Mitt Romney is concerned. Believe me – Barack Obama and Rudy Giuliani should be so fortunate.
And when the time finally comes for Romney to counterpunch after all the breathless “exposés” have been written and all the YouTubes have been aired, Romney will find his opponents in the media as easy to knock out as George Foreman was in the 8th round of the Rumble in the Jungle. The governor will be able to respond to his critics with two easy smackdowns that will be devastating when the time is right. The first is an old John F. Kennedy saw: “It’s not where you come from, but where you stand.” The second will be a completely justified swipe at the pettiness and endlessly repetitive nature of these attacks: “I want to talk about our country’s future. I will, even if the press and my opponents are obsessed with my past.”
The fact is, Mitt Romney will have enough money and enough political skill to define himself when the time is right. The fact that the hostile factions of the press will no longer be relevant when that time comes is a wonderful bonus.
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