A Sober Look at Romney the Candidate

This time it's Quin Hillyer who takes a look at Romney ... and his conclusions are those drawn by an increasing number of sober minds:

I try to look at these things from three perspectives based in my own experience. [MUCH MORE]I've been a political activist/political professional/presidential campaign state executive director/presidential caucus organizer/leadership Hill staffer, so I have a participant's perspective. I've been a PR executive, so I then try to look at it from a marketing perspective. And I've been a journalist/columnist for 15 years, so there's the close observer/outsider perspective. (This is not to boast about my background, but only to explain HOW I arrive at looking at things, from different angles, as a way to check my assumptions -- althought I do have a long record of getting it right.)

Anyway, here's what I see. I see, first, a candidate who "fails to inspire." This is hugely important. It's the old Dole/McCain/Bush 41 thing again: Without energizing one's base, it doesn't matter if you can get a few extra percentage points from "swing" voters (even assuming it's true that those extra few points are achievable -- which is probably not true anyway, because if you aren't inspirational, you aren't inspirational, period, meaning you don't inspire the middle either). It's also true that millions of voters really can decide to stay home; remember that Karl Rove estimated that up to 4 million expected Evangelical Bush backers stayed home in 2000 after being disgusted by last-weekend news that Bush had had a drunk driving arrest way back when. The result, of course, was a race that took six extra weeks to decide.