Category: Election 2012

... then you might hope that Romney wins the election in November.  Here's my thinking on this crazy notion.

We know what Washington looks like if Obama is President but the Democrats don't have the House and don't have 60 votes in the Senate.  Republicans dig in.  The Democratic agenda doesn't move forward.  It's gridlock.  If Obama is re-elected but the Congress doesn't shift strongly Democratic, we can expect more of the same. That's just the way it is with Republicans on Capitol Hill these days.  We can speculate as to whether House Republicans would feel more or less empowered opposing a re-elected Obama.  Maybe less right after the election, but growing over time as Obama becomes more of a lame duck President.  And history doesn't favor an improvement for the Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections if they control the White House.

But now consider what happens if it is President Romney.  We can presume that if there was enough sentiment to make that happen, the Republicans will not have lost ground in Congress.  So what is Romney's record in the organizations that he has run?  It has been pointed out many times that he does not seem to be driven by ideological principles.  It is less often emphasized what he is driven by.  He is results oriented.  He tries to turn things around and add value.  It was true at Bain.  It was true in the 2002 Winter Olympics.  And, most instructively, it was true of his time as Governor of Massachusetts. 

So how would a President Romney get things done?  He wouldn't make the mistake of trying to transcend politics.  He would play politics to the hilt.  Unencumbered by restrictive ideological principles, he would work very hard to get 60 votes in the Senate while retaining a majority in the House, so that he could take credit for the results while he's in office. The need to get those 60 votes in the Senate is what allows the centrist part of the Democratic agenda to move forward.

I believe that the way to understand the Romney campaign is simply to acknowledge that his ambition is to be the guy in charge who gets things done on the grandest scale possible.  That means being President.  Nothing he has to say or do in the process of getting elected will substantially affect what he does when he gets there.  And that would be good news for centrist Democrats, even if it would be a bitter pill to swallow.

The results from Iowa with over 90 percent of precincts reporting show Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney in a dead heat with 25 percent of the vote each, with Ron Paul third with 21 percent of the vote. 

This is not a surprise.  The Republican party has three factions: religious conservatives, economic conservatives, and libertarians.  Each faction is represented by one of these three candidates (in the order listed above).  What shifted over the past few months was which candidate would represent the religious conservatives.  It turned out to be Santorum, rather than Bachmann or Perry.

The Iowa caucus is not supposed to determine the nominee.  It is primarily the media circus surrounding it that makes it appear to be more consequential than it is.  Ezra Klein had a good post on this a day ago.  Iowa matters beyond the delegates it awards because it provides information that is useful to others who are deciding which candidate to support -- and because an abysmal showing might convince a marginal candidate to drop out of the race.  That might be Bachmann here.  Huntsman ignored Iowa to focus on New Hampshire, and Perry might as well hold on until South Carolina.