Romney taps Reagan’s optimism and gives himself hope

Saturday, October 06, 2012

OUT of the ring for four years and off form, a tired US President Barack Obama lost last Wednesday night’s debate to republican nominee Mitt Romney.

There was no knockout blow, but Romney clocked up points as the ponderous president failed to confront his opponent or convince his audience. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, and older than President Obama, looked fresher and was more to the point.

Agility, instinct, and street smarts are the life forces that win politicians elections. High office, the reward for these gut instincts, can also become the quicksand they disappears into again. A political beast on form, and on the hunt, is one of the most formidably instinctive of animals. But the jungle has laws. In Denver, on Wednesday night, President Barack Obama forgot that. Politicians sell hope. They enjoy power only so long as they give hope. When they run out of hope, they run out of road.

Romney had learned the lesson of his own failure and of others’ success. Having tacked sharply to the right to appease the Tea Party during the Republican primaries, he has now turned forcibly to the centre to win the presidential election. He governed Massachusetts as a moderate New England Republican. From the beginning of this year’s primaries, the Republican right accused him of being a fake, a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

They sought every potential alternative, from former Senator Rick Santorum, of Pennsylvania, to former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, of Georgia, to Governor Rick Perry, of Texas. Only the failure of each forced them to turn in 2012 to the Romney candidacy they rejected in 2008. Romney is not loved by the Republican base, but he is all they have to oust Obama, and for now that is enough.

On Wednesday night, in his demeanour and persona, Romney was Ronald Reagan reborn. One might retort, as vice-presidential candidate and Texas Senator Lloyd Bensten did, in 1988, to his opponent Dan Quayle, who incredulously compared himself to JFK, “I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy”.

Surely, Mitt Romney is no Ronald Reagan. But he served himself sunny side up in Denver: he offered optimism, he conveyed energy, and he repackaged voodoo economics as plain common sense.

Voodoo economics was George Bush snr’s damning critique of Reagan’s policies, when they faced off against each other for the Republican Party nomination in 1980. Shortly after, when Reagan had won the nomination and Bush had signed as his vice-presidential candidate, incumbent President Jimmy Carter attempted to turn Reagan’s policy positions back on his challenger.

In the last debate of that campaign, just a week before polling day, Carter was momentarily and slightly ahead in some polls, an astonishing comeback for an unpopular president. He was potentially in striking distance of re-election. In the debate, the president recited a litany of Reagan’s failures to support better health care for more Americans. Reagan just stood back, chuckled disarmingly, and said “there you go again”.

A smiling, sunny and deprecating Reagan had flummoxed a tense, earnest and long-winded Carter. The American people were reminded why they didn’t like the piously ineffectual Jimmy Carter as president. He had foolishly defined his presidency with what he called the “malaise” affecting America, morally and economically, after Watergate and the 1970s oil crisis. For Reagan, there was never any malaise, only boundless opportunity and endless optimism. By 1984, his slogan for re-election was ‘It’s morning again in America’. For the pre-eminently successful post-war American president, hope sprung eternal.

Romney had just enough of the Reagan elixir on Wednesday to reintroduce a staid, buttoned-down, distant and technocratic multi-millionaire to the American people.

President Obama looked exhausted by office. He had not been in the ring with an opponent since, as a young, untried senator, he faced off against Senator Hillary Clinton four years ago, and then went on to face Senator John McCain in the general election. It is impossible in Ireland to conceive of the distance and the deference that protects an American president. The president doesn’t have the weekly hurly burly of parliamentary questions, which forces politicians here to deal with all comers and all issues. The media across the Atlantic rarely get up close with, or into the personal space of, a US president.

A hot pursuit by an undaunted press corp, of the sort that saw the Taoiseach back-flip over flower pots to escape, would be unthinkable. Then there is the deference. Having met American presidents in the White House, and seen how they are received by even their opponents on Capitol Hill, I can say there is something of the unelected king about the office. The power of the reality far exceeds the chimera of the pretence. It is a power to which only a few have continuing access to speak the truth.

If acquired untrammelled on the hustings, it can wither in the hot house of the oval office. Carter and George Bush snr lost their political instincts in that office. Barack Obama is now in danger of losing not just the presidency, but a place in the pantheon of great Americans.

There is a remedy. It is neither new nor elegant. But it may be effective. In 1994, an overweight, lumbering and reputationally diminished Senator Ted Kennedy faced off for his survival against a young Mitt Romney.

Kennedy looked like, and was, believed to be a prize fighter in deep decline. In their debate, Romney put himself within reach of Kennedy on the issues of healthcare and abortion. The aging fighter took hold of his young opponent and delivered a rhetorical punishment beating that was devastating to behold. Kennedy went on to recovery and to better days.

Romney returned to become governor of the state that had rejected him as potential senator. In the two debates to come, Barack Obama has a chance to dig deep, to remember that he is a politician on the streets before he is a president in the oval office. That office is the leash holding him down. He needs to understand that he must go for broke, offer hope, and remind Americans that, yes, they can, again.

* Gerard Howlin is a public affairs consultant, and was a government adviser from 1997 to 2007.

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