Today, on Fox News Sunday, Mitt Romney complained about the “long and blistering” primary that created an “unfavorable impression” of him. This outbreak of narcissism and self-pity has a chance to distort our perception of what actually happened during the Republican primary season. So let us recap:
1. Romney was the only candidate who combined strong fundraising, familiarity with federal-level issues, message discipline, and debate preparation (this is all to Romney’s credit.) He also had by far the most institutional support within the Republican party. To put it another way, Romney faced a much weaker primary opposition in 2012 than Barack Obama faced in 2008. Obama seems to have done okay. The reason why the primary campaign was so “long” despite the weakness and ineptitude of Romney’s opposition, was that primary voters recognized Romney’s complete lack of principle and desperately turned to any alternative no matter how unlikely.
2. And about “blistering.” Maybe Romney should be asking Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum about the ads that Romney and the Romney-aligned super-PACs ran against Romney’s opposition. Romney and friends ran multiples of the negative ads that were run by any one of his opponents.
3. And more on “blistering.” Romney’s opponents not only had less money with which to attack him, the weird dynamics of the Republican primary process meant that Romney’s primary opponents usually faced more “blistering” debates than Romney. You would think that Romney, as the frontrunner, would be the focus of attacks from the field. That isn’t how it worked out. Whenever one of Romney’s opponents emerged as the main alternative to Romney, some of the other non-Romneys would gang up on the leading anti-Romney in the hopes that one of them would emerge as the new Romney alternative. When Pawlenty looked like the more conservative alternative to Pawlenty, Michelle Bachmann would attack him in the primaries. When Rick Perry surged in the polls, Romney launched “blistering” and effective attacks against Perry in the debates. Romney was also helped by Michelle Bachmann and Ron Paul (and to a lesser extent Rick Santorum) who focused their attacks on Perry rather than Romney. Herman Cain collapsed more from press scrutiny than anything else, but when Gingrich surged for the first time (before Iowa), Bachmann and Ron Paul attacked Gingrich in the debates more than Romney. Bachmann didn’t win any delegates, but she played an important role in the pre-Iowa debates as Romney’s goon.
Give Romney credit. When Gingrich surged for a second time between South Carolina and Florida, Romney took apart Gingrich in debate without any real help from the other candidates. But when Santorum emerged and the final challenger, you had Ron Paul focusing most of his attacks on Rick Santorum in the last presidential debate.
March 3rd, 2013 | 7:07 pm
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March 3rd, 2013 | 7:10 pm
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March 4th, 2013 | 4:29 am
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March 4th, 2013 | 5:38 am
That is all fine, but isn’t it evidence and indeed even a recap of the blog-mechanism for Mitt Romney’s simplification: “…primary that created an “unfavorable impression”.
Last I checked my notion of an unfavorable impression includes congruent room for “primary voters recognized Romney’s complete lack of principle.”
It is simply a noumena/phenomena dispute that plays around with simplification.
That is if Mitt Romney had said there was a long and blistering campaign in which primary voters “perceived that I lacked principle”, he would in effect be saying that it created an unfavorable impression of him.
There are a lot of unecessary words here about narcissism or self-pity that might lead the reader to think you disagree with Romney on this issue….but there is in fact nothing in what you say that isn’t evidence that can plausibly be rephrased in the way Romney did.
Thus there is no real issue of material fact between you and Romney. I suppose the philosophic issue if it is anything more than theraputic is a distinction between whether or not you perceive Romney to lack principle and whether or not Romney actually does lack principle. Thus noumena v. phenomena.
Romney might well look in his rearview mirror and see you (or the thousands who retweeted/posted/bloged/commented.) But you say that the Romney in the mirror is the real Romney.
Just as a sort of philosophical position, I am perfectly okay with the idea that my conception of Romney is not a) the conception he would have me have. b) his own conception of himself, or c) the actual person.
In fact even the crapola about “media bias” is at its best a tired, narcisitic derivative of the noumena/phenomenon question.(That applies more universally than just Romney, at least according to Kant or my phenomenological memory of reading him.).
Of course arguably/technically even in the mirror is phenomenon. Still it is true that no one cries for the guy that has billions of dollars with which to get his message out.
On the other hand it is also quite possible that a lot of folks adjusted for this…actually I am not sure about the message discipline point you make… I am not 100% sure he wouldn’t have done better if he hadn’t just tried going off the cuff (not that he had a Santorum like character)… But Santorum in addition to using slogans like “Real Conservative” in a very odd but still plausible way was able to convey the appearance “authenticity” or noumenistic (in a Kantian sense?) or maybe Monism. (still remember his hand jestures and touching himself as if he was the embodiement of an idea known as “conservative” see: I am real man!)
So there was in my opinion a strange and lurking philosophic difference accentuated by the presence and shoe string media budget of a Santorum. If some of the things he said weren’t flat out crazy, and if he had actually properly registered in all 50 states…(his message discipline might have destroyed him against Obama anyways…probably).
But there was certainly already going to be a noumena/phenomena split with Romney that was going to be plain…but Santorum’s populist/evangelical catholic moment style monism really, really accentuated this hypothetically theoretical/theraputic philosophic divide. No philosophy text is going to make the noumena/phenomenon problem clearer than the juxtaposition Romney faced v. Santorum… It was almost strawman Dualism v. Strawman Monism (except that Santorum is real man!…Jury/mirror et al. is still out on Romney).
Ron Paul attacked Santorum in part because his “Libertarian” beliefs are just as engrained/monistic/authentic as Santorum’s “Catholic” ones. So there is room at least on a theoretical philosophic basis for unity between Santorum+Ron Paul on the Monism v. Dualism question. The attack was perhaps what Lawler might call Creepy Locke v. Catholic Moment.
As something of a Kantian(it isn’t a noumenistic quality of my Being) I would say Creepy Locke and Creepy Catholic.
Personally I think Romney has principles and these are revealed in his policies (indeed policies are built from principles…see also Principles of Accounting, principles of taxation, and all sorts of other boreing books).
But Romney appeared not to have principles because “principles” themselves in the course of the republican primary came to be understood in the Anti-Romney, that is Anti-Dualist sense. That is not as the Romney policy bi-furcations/Harvard Law building blocks a la (Standing, proximate cause, jurisdiction, Mootness), nor as a grasp of federal level issues, but something which guided, grounded and explained the candidate as a human being and authentic individual with conservative integrity.
That is Ron Paul and Santorum were really building from something in the soul of the populist tea party, that they had mixed their labor with and come to own at a level of PRINCIPLE, which they had a certain Natural Right or Moral Right to articulate/ or represent as the case may be, and which Romney lacking this relation to PRINCIPLE could not by Right Alienate even if he paid networks to do so..
So Mitt Romney came out of the Republican primary without the Moral Right to alienate Conservatism (or represent a relation to Principle (which is much the same thing) that was not mechanical/legalistic).
Paul Ryan’s deficit focus was an extention basically of the principles of taxation…or of a relation to Principle which Mitt Romney shared and could coherently alienate.
Obama also expertly played the over-extension of the reply to “You didn’t build that”. And the commericals against Bain Capital were to emphasize that Romney’s relation to property, including owning property in a principle wasn’t something that he had built but had expectly packaged(Harvard Law style) and alienated the good will of old corporations whose trademarks he kept even as he sold out pensions and shipped jobs to China.
That is Romney is so Rich he doesn’t stand in a monistic position vis a vis his property, or his principles(intellectual/personal integrity property), but rather in a technocratic/legalistic position to all forms of alienable property. Anyone but Romney, as it was expressed by the candidacies of Santorum and Ron Paul was basically saying… Romney didn’t build that…. he has no principles(or is not a principal of its genesis, and the two are not equivalent.)
Of course in a certain honest sense, which was reflected by the etch a sketch surrogate comment he was okay with not building that (the tea party)…as he was representing the dualistic sense of the world and a more modern/legalistic view of property.
In a sense Obama’s anti-bain capital commercials were just an extension of this republican primary revealed truth…Romney sweeps in using connections and buys a thing he didn’t build, fires the people who built it, gets folks to build it cheaper (replacing the personalism of the thing with canned speech/message discipline) and sells it to folks at the love/commodity fetishism premium built up by the founders.
So I think I can agree with you and with Romney that the condensed version is that he suffered a long and blistering” primary that created an “unfavorable impression” of him.
To turn the psychological on you your objection to Romney is that his summary(while I think accurate) undermines the complexity and richness of experience you experienced second hand. On the other hand in this case I think Mitt Romney did build that (his own capaign)…but in so far as he didn’t…that is in so far as your parallel narrative built it…(your phenomena)…your relation to this property rebels at being effaced by his summary… Which is also an example of narcisim and self-pity. Mea Culpa?
March 4th, 2013 | 7:39 pm
John, I only had the energy for the first couple of paragraphs.
“Last I checked my notion of an unfavorable impression includes congruent room for “primary voters recognized Romney’s complete lack of principle.”
Romney was arguing that the blistering length (or the lengthy blistering) of the primary created the unfavorable impression. My read is that his obvious lack of principle led to a lengthy primary campaign and that Romney was the most responsible for how “blistering” the primary was.
Last I checked, the notion of being an orphan includes congruent room for having killed one’s parents. So the context matters.
March 6th, 2013 | 4:58 pm
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