Romney is too far removed from ordinary voters to ‘go with the flow’

THE guys who are currently preparing Mitt Romney for the first big presidential election debate are caught between a rock and two hard places.

They have a candidate in whom impulsivity is twinned with indecision — a lethal combination. They have a candidate who is stilted and charmless. And they have a candidate who initially positioned himself to the extreme right in order to be selected and now hasn’t enough time to pivot back to the centre.

Despite national disappointment in the Obama presidency, despite the fact that the incumbent has become a shrunken, joyless version of his earlier self, it is this triad of personal traits that most endangers Romney in televised debates.

Coverage of the last time Mitt Romney put himself forward for election constantly mentioned his indecision. For a business dude, this seemed surprising, yet the word from his camp was that Romney always wanted more research done, more expert inputs made, more data produced. But then, Romney was never an entrepreneur, a manufacturer, or the CEO of a business that actually did practical things like serve people food or make computers work better. In any of those roles, he would have had to make quick decisions. Good CEOs do it all the time. That doesn’t mean they don’t love data. But they do not get mastered or emasculated by it.

Bad CEOs, on the other hand, hope that enough data can be found to effectively make the decision for them. If it doesn’t work, they can point to the overwhelming preponderance of information that led to the decision: Nuthin’ to do with me, guv, had to go with the info. If it does work, they still get to take credit for it.

Indecision — or at least an almost obsessive insistence on getting more and more information before making a decision — is not an insurmountable problem for a presidential candidate. Obama has something of the same mindset. The difference — the key difference which endangers Romney in the upcoming debates — is that Romney also suffers from impulsivity and Obama does not. Indeed, when Obama encounters impulsivity, it seems to puzzle him the way he might get puzzled by a dancing chair. Remember when the pizza parlour owner lifted the president off the floor of his establishment in a bear hug? Obama’s elegant hands opened behind the back of the man who held him two feet off the floor in a gesture of “what’s this about?”

Impulsivity in public appearances is loved by media and can put the heart crossways in communications advisers. It’s loved by media because it provides a nick in the carefully constructed brand of a candidate, allowing a glimpse of unplanned authenticity. Now, whatever about hisimpulsivity in other areas of his life, Bill Clinton’s spontaneity in public debates allowed voters a wholly beneficial glimpse of his authenticity. In one TV encounter with George Bush Sr, when asked the same question, Bush gave a data-rich competent answer, and then was wiped out by Clinton demonstrating informed empathy with the questioner. On the fly, so to speak.

If you’re a Clinton adviser, then you want him to be as spontaneous as the situation demands, because he not only has a huge brain full of policy data, but he listens indiscriminately to everybody he meets and has a real awareness of the circumstances in which people find themselves. He can sing the harmony line to their melody without even thinking about it.

Mitt Romney doesn’t spend enough time with ordinary people to begin to get a sense of their melody. Some of Obama’s TV ads, currently running, show the exterior of one mansion after another, with a voiceover establishing that this is the kind of place where Romney does his brainstorming, and end with a visual of a much more modest middle-class home, while the voice comments that this is where real people live and struggle. Implication: You won’t find Mitt Romney in such a location, because he doesn’t get out much to visit real people.

Much has been made of Romney’s gaffe dissing almost half the electorate. Of much more importance, in preparation for the debate, is the possibility of him reaching for self-revelation and offending even more of the unpersuaded. A billionaire who seeks commonality with the poor by saying he too has no job right now cannot be safely advised to be honest, be himself, ad lib, go with the flow. Whenever he tries it, it puts him in situations like the one recently where he offered to put money down on a bet that he was right on a claim. Clever, one-of-the-boys instinctive action. Except for the amount of money involved. Couple of dollars? No. Fifty? Uh, uh. His bet was $10,000. Doesn’t quite put him up there with the working stiffs who smack 25c on the back of their hand as a bet to settle an argument.

Those who prepare politicians for big debates and other TV appearances are always seen as enemies of the authentic. In fact, the opposite is the case. If you know your candidate to be smart, well-informed, funny, fearless, idealistic, and emotionally connected with voters, then your task is to kick away any obstacle to him or her revealing all of that on TV. Preparation, in that context, may consist of repetitious rehearsals geared to make them comfortable in a pressured situation like a crowded TV studio and capable of listening to incoming questions, rather than becoming hazard-fixated on the questioner or (as happened with John McCain and Hillary Clinton) on the other candidate.

THE difficulty is where someone’s authentic self is so narrow in its beliefs and emotional connectedness that when you push them, in rehearsal, to mine their deepest realities, not a single usable nugget emerges. Romney may, as his wife testifies, have been warm and loving to her. But he can’t say that, and even if he did, is that the only example of him being anything other than rich and Mormon? If he produces stories of (say) sick or impoverished people he’s recently encountered, the audience will say “Oh, so they put a human sample of the distress you don’t plan to address in front of you for three minutes, did they? Because otherwise, in the normal course of events, you’d never have met them, would you?”

Big TV debates are actually less significant than they’re claimed to be. They’re measures of an already-existing reality, rather than creators of a new reality. A bit like fundraising, where the myth holds that the guy who raises the most money wins. In fact, it’s the other way around. The guy who’s going to win raises the most money. And Obama has pulled ahead in the fundraising stakes.

Last time around, Obama needed to be the personification of change and hope in the face of disaster. This time, Romney needed to make all voter disappointment stick to Obama while himself personifying a clear alternative. He hasn’t done it so far.

If he manages to do it in the televised debates, it will break every known mould.