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The price of desperation / Romney forgot the Prime Directive: It's the economy, stupid
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There's a saying in politics: No campaign is ever as good as it looks when it's winning nor as bad as it looks when it's losing. In Mitt Romney's comments on Libya, you see part of the reason why.
A few months ago, the Romney campaign had a clear theory of the campaign: Keep the focus on the economy. When other issues came up, they had a clear strategy for dealing with them: Acknowledge them, issue some restrained comment, and then, if possible, end by saying we need to remain focused on the economy. Everything was about the Romney campaign's Prime Directive: It's the economy, stupid.
That Romney campaign would have known just what to do on Libya. A simple, restrained statement condemning the murderers and expressing sympathy and solidarity with the victims. A few lines on Mr. Romney's resolve to hunt murderers like these down. Make Mr. Romney look presidential, but whatever you do, don't interrupt the underlying dynamics of the election. This is, by and large, the template that other major Republicans followed in their responses to the attacks.
President Barack Obama, after all, has a wide lead in the polls on who is better at handling foreign policy and terrorism. If the campaign turns to those issues, that might well help Mr. Obama. Which gets to the corollary of the Prime Directive: If the election isn't about the economy, then Mr. Obama might win, stupid.
But the underlying dynamics of the election are no longer seen as helping Mr. Romney. He trails Mr. Obama in the polls and received little-to-no bump from his convention. The economy isn't proving sufficient to beat Mr. Obama. That means the Romney campaign's strategy isn't proving sufficient to beat Mr. Obama.
When campaigns are losing, they get desperate. And when they get desperate, they make riskier political decisions. And so, Tuesday night, the Romney campaign made a risky decision. They released this statement: "I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It's disgraceful that the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."
Wednesday morning, given a chance to walk it all back as the full details of the attack revealed themselves, the Romney campaign doubled down on that statement.
The Romney campaign isn't run by amateurs. They knew this statement was incendiary. And, presumably, they knew it was wrong. It conflates a statement from a staffer in the U.S. embassy in Egypt, who was trying to calm a potential mob, with the Obama administration. It conflates unrest in Egypt with the murder of an American diplomat, among others, in Libya. And it accuses the Obama administration of something that they not only didn't do, but that would have been horrific of them to do: To sympathize with terrorists who had just murdered one of their ambassadors.
The backlash has been brutal. Time's Mark Halperin tweeted that it was the "most craven+ill-advised move of '12."
Mr. Romney's comments were, to be sure, unusually noxious and indecent. But this is also what happens when campaigns get desperate. Like a gambler who's already lost too much, they begin taking risks in the hope of making it all back. And then, more often than not, they pay the price.
First Published September 14, 2012 12:00 am
