Bobo is upset. His column is called “Road to Nowhere,” and he says in turning himself into an old-fashioned, orthodox Republican, Mitt Romney has made himself unelectable in the fall. What a pity. Mr. Herbert is “Still Reeling After All These Years,” and says it seems impossible that 1968, the most incredible year of a most incredible decade, was 40 years ago. Here’s Bobo:
The most impressive thing about Mitt Romney is his clarity of mind. When he set out to pursue his party’s nomination, he studied the contours of the Republican coalition and molded himself to its forms.
Earnestly and methodically, he has appealed to each of the major constituency groups. For national security conservatives, he vowed to double the size of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. For social conservatives, he embraced a culture war against the faithless. For immigration skeptics, he swung so far right he earned the endorsement of Tom Tancredo.
He has spent roughly $80 million, including an estimated $17 million of his own money, hiring consultants, blanketing the airwaves and building an organization that is unmatched on the Republican side.
And he has turned himself into the party’s fusion candidate. Some of his rivals are stronger among social conservatives. Others are stronger among security conservatives, but no candidate has a foot in all camps the way Romney does. No candidate offends so few, or is the acceptable choice of so many.
And that is why Romney is at the fulcrum of the Republican race. He’s looking strong in Iowa and is the only candidate who can afford to lose an important state and still win the nomination.
And yet as any true conservative can tell you, the sort of rational planning Mitt Romney embodies never works. The world is too complicated and human reason too limited. The PowerPoint mentality always fails to anticipate something. It always yields unintended consequences.
And what Romney failed to anticipate is this: In turning himself into an old-fashioned, orthodox Republican, he has made himself unelectable in the fall. When you look inside his numbers, you see tremendous weaknesses.
For example, Romney is astoundingly unpopular among young voters. Last month, the Harris Poll asked Republicans under 30 whom they supported. Romney came in fifth, behind Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain and Ron Paul. Romney had 7 percent support, a virtual tie with Tancredo. He does only a bit better among those aged 30 to 42.
Romney is also quite unpopular among middle- and lower-middle class voters. In poll after poll, he leads among Republicans making more than $75,000 a year. He does poorly among those who make less.
If Romney is the general election candidate, he will face hostility from independent voters, who value authenticity. He will face hostility from Hispanic voters, who detest his new immigration positions. He will face great hostility in the media. Even conservative editorialists at places like The Union Leader in New Hampshire and The Boston Herald find his flip-flopping offensive.
But his biggest problem is a failure of imagination. Market research is a snapshot of the past. With his data-set mentality, Romney has chosen to model himself on a version of Republicanism that is receding into memory. As Walter Mondale was the last gasp of the fading New Deal coalition, Romney has turned himself into the last gasp of the Reagan coalition.
That coalition had its day, but it is shrinking now. The Republican Party is more unpopular than at any point in the past 40 years. Democrats have a 50 to 36 party identification advantage, the widest in a generation. The general public prefers Democratic approaches on health care, corruption, the economy and Iraq by double-digit margins. Republicans’ losses have come across the board, but the G.O.P. has been hemorrhaging support among independent voters. Surveys from the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University show that independents are moving away from the G.O.P. on social issues, globalization and the roles of religion and government.
If any Republican candidate is going to win this year, he will have to offer a new brand of Republicanism. But Romney has tied himself to the old brand. He is unresponsive to the middle-class anxiety that Huckabee is tapping into. He has forsaken the trans-partisan candor that McCain represents. Romney, the cautious consultant, is pivoting to stress his corporate competence, and is rebranding himself as an Obama-esque change agent, but he will never make the sort of daring break that independent voters will demand if they are going to give the G.O.P. another look.
The leaders of the Republican coalition know Romney will lose. But some would rather remain in control of a party that loses than lose control of a party that wins. Others haven’t yet suffered the agony of defeat, and so are not yet emotionally ready for the trauma of transformation. Others still simply don’t know which way to turn.
And so the burden of change will be thrust on primary voters over the next few weeks. Romney is a decent man with some good fiscal and economic policies. But in this race, he has run like a manager, not an entrepreneur. His triumph this month would mean a Democratic victory in November.
Get real, Bobo. He has run like the waffling, weaseling panderer that he truly is. Here’s Mr. Herbert:
It promised to be a very good year. But then anything would be better than 1967, with its angry kids burning the flag, and the war raging, and American cities going up in flames one after another.
A Page 1 headline in The New York Times said: “World Bids Adieu to a Violent Year.”
It seems impossible that 1968, the most incredible year of a most incredible decade, was 40 years ago. As the new year tiptoed in, Americans wrapped themselves as usual in the comfort of optimism. Snow fell on the revelers in Times Square. A threatened New York City subway strike was averted and the 20-cent fare maintained.
No one had a clue about what was in store. A friend of mine, looking back, said, “Sixty-eight was the whirlwind.”
It was a presidential election year, and The Times reported on Jan. 1 that G.O.P. leaders believed that Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York was the only Republican who could defeat Lyndon Johnson. Richard Nixon might give the president a good run, they said, but would probably lose. Ronald Reagan and the governor of Michigan, George Romney, would most likely lose decisively.
“The Sound of Music” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” were hit movies, both starring Julie Andrews. “Hello Dolly” and “Fiddler on the Roof” were on Broadway. Ladies nylons at Gimbel’s were 88 cents a pair, and men’s dress shirts at Bloomingdale’s were three for $14.75.
Rock ’n’ roll, drugs and long-haired young people who considered themselves hip were ubiquitous. But it was still a pretty innocent time. That would change.
One of the astonishing things about 1968 was how quickly each shocking, consciousness-altering event succeeded the last, leaving no time for people to reorient themselves. The mind-boggling occurrences seemed to come out of nowhere, like the Viet Cong who set off a depth charge beneath the Johnson presidency with the Tet offensive at the end of January.
When Walter Cronkite learned of the coordinated wave of attacks throughout South Vietnam by the Cong and North Vietnamese regulars he is reported to have said: “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war.”
The nation shuddered. The U.S. had never lost a war, but now men padding around in black pajamas and flip-flops fashioned from discarded tires gave every appearance of battling the mightiest military on earth to a stalemate.
The New Hampshire primary was March 12. Eugene McCarthy, a quiet, cerebral and sometimes flaky senator from Minnesota who was calling for a negotiated settlement of the war, electrified the country and exposed the president’s political vulnerability by finishing second with 42 percent of the vote.
Within days, Bobby Kennedy, who had only recently said he could see no circumstances in which he would challenge Johnson, was challenging him. McCarthy was furious. Johnson was traumatized.
By the end of the month, Johnson had abandoned the race.
Euphoria reigned — among young people, and those opposed to the war, and those who believed that ordinary people of good will could change the world. For many, it was the peak moment of the 1960s.
It lasted just four days.
On April 3, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis. Violence erupted in dozens of cities, and especially in Washington, where a number of people were killed and the fires were the worst the city had experienced since the British took the torch to it in 1814.
John J. Lindsay of Newsweek magazine said that when Bobby Kennedy was told that King had died, he put his hands to his face and murmured: “Oh, God. When is this violence going to stop?”
Kennedy himself was murdered two months later. I remember people not knowing what to say. The madness had been unleashed, and there seemed no way to rein it in.
There was much more to come, more war, the orgy of police violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago, the razor-thin election of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew over Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie in November.
But an awful lot of people tuned out after Kennedy was killed. That seemed to be when, for so many, the hope finally died. The nation has never really recovered from the bullet that killed R.F.K.
Arthur Schlesinger, in his biography of Kennedy, quotes Richard Harwood of The Washington Post:
“We discovered in 1968 this deep, almost mystical bond that existed between Robert Kennedy and the Other America. It was a disquieting experience for reporters. … We were forced to recognize in Watts and Gary and Chimney Rock that the real stake in the American political process involves not the fate of speechwriters and fund-raisers, but the lives of millions of people seeking hope out of despair.”
And I’ve gotten a Bobby Kennedy vibe from John Edwards for years. Fingers crossed… Happy New Year, America.
