Romney campaigns in Henderson
KSNV coverage of Mitt Romney making a campaign stopping in Henderson the day before the Republican Party Caucus, Feb. 3, 2012.
Sun archives
Mitt Romney wanted to use his CPAC speech Friday to allay concerns about his candidacy on the Republican right, but with one ad-libbed word he reinforced conservative fears that he’s not one of them.
“I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” Romney told the annual gathering.
The response was immediate.
“Severely?”
“I have never heard anybody say, ‘I’m severely conservative,’” Rush Limbaugh noted on his show.
“That didn’t get a lot of applause,” firebrand Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) observed with a tight smile.
“Some things are too funny to comment on,” a laughing Newt Gingrich commented as he walked into the conference to give his own speech.
Romney’s address won repeated applause. He outlined his conservative credentials, both in his public and private life, and offered a strong indictment of President Barack Obama. But by going off-script to use an awkward modifier that no movement conservative would ever affix to themselves, he made clear why, despite vast advantages in money and organization, he’s still struggling to win the trust of a party base needed to secure the GOP presidential nomination. He’s just not a natural fit.
Success at CPAC is hardly a perfect indicator for how a candidate will perform with the Republican electorate. Romney knows this well, having captured the straw poll here in the past only to lose the nomination to a candidate, John McCain, who was booed when he addressed the conference just weeks before securing the GOP nod.
Yet Romney’s trio of losses Tuesday and his all-out effort to woo the base here — he used some variation of “conservative” 25 separate times in his speech — underscores the degree to which the party has shifted in the four years since McCain captured the nomination.
The old nominating game standbys, the notions of inevitability and success begetting success, have proven irrelevant in 2012. Romney rolled in Florida and cruised in Nevada — and then, without an aggressive campaign, had nothing to show for it in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado. This election has proven momentum-proof to date.
Romney’s still the smart-money favorite to become the Republican standard-bearer, but it’s increasingly clear that he’s going to have to make a more compelling case to conservatives to ensure victory.
The central question now looming over the race is, to borrow a phrase, just how severely the party has moved right. How profound is the scale of resistance to Romney?
“You’ve got to have a trust factor, you’ve got to make sure he’s genuine,” said Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), a leading tea-party freshman, in attempting to explain conservative unease with the front-runner. “And with Romneycare there are a lot of similarities with the Affordable Care Act.”
The depth of Romney’s challenge with the base was demonstrated by what took place after his speech. After the candidate made no mention of his signature accomplishment as Massachusetts governor, health care reform, a panel took the stage and devoted significant time to fulminating against the individual mandate.
The man who’s making the latest bid to become the once-and-for-all Romney alternative, Rick Santorum, all but grabbed the CPAC activists by the lapels in his speech Friday, arguing that conservatives ought to nominate one of their own this time.
“Conservatives and tea-party folks,” Santorum said near the top of his remarks. “We are not just wings of the Republican Party — we are the Republican Party.”
The GOP, he argued, “will no longer abandon and apologize for the policies and principles that made this country great for a hollow victory in November.”
Later in his address, Santorum directly brought up the tea party-infused Republican 2010 wave, claiming that Republicans won because they were enthusiastic about their candidates.
Turning to this year’s election, and clearly alluding to Romney, the former Pennsylvania senator asked: “Why would an undecided voter vote for a candidate of the party who the party’s not excited about?”
Santorum’s introducer and the chief patron of his super PAC was more blunt.
“It didn’t work with Bob Dole, it didn’t work with John McCain,” said Foster Friess, warning against nominating establishment favorites.
But with Santorum re-emerging and Newt Gingrich still lingering, Romney is making a newly aggressive case about what separates him from both Dole and McCain and his current conservative rivals.
“I happen to be the only candidate in the race … who has never worked a day in Washington,” Romney said in his speech, noting that he has no “old scores to settle or years of cloakroom deals to defend.”
The address and his campaign’s line of attack this week makes clear that Romney’s plan is to target Santorum’s decades in Congress and his decision to remain in the capital after his 2006 defeat — in other words, to effectively do to Santorum what the campaign did to Gingrich in Florida.
In a brief exchange with reporters after his speech Friday, Santorum sought to highlight the limitations of such a strategy.
“Hopefully, people have already figured out that Gov. Romney going out and just slamming and slashing and burning whoever is in front of him is not going to be a particularly effective tactic to beat Barack Obama,” said the former senator, arguing that money won’t be decisive in the fall.
To the sort of conservatives who dutifully come to this conference every winter, Romney’s new offensive is a reminder that he’s learning the wrong lessons from Tuesday.
“It’s nice to know that Romney has never lived in Washington, but people are looking for more specifics,” said Jeff Bell, a grand old man of the conservative movement who was part of the 70’s-era New Right.
Bell, echoing other Republican veterans, said he’d never seen anything like this topsy-turvy race. “A candidate gets eliminated and then all the sudden they’re back!” he exclaimed.
Asked what explains the fluidity, Bell didn’t hesitate: “The lack of confidence in the front-runner and his agenda.”
Romney didn’t only attempt to assuage such concerns from the podium here — he also met privately with a couple dozen conservative opinion-makers at the hotel Thursday.
But according to attendees, he only got mixed results. One said Romney mostly listened and handled himself well. But two others left disappointed and complained about his ill-at-ease manner.
“Tepid presentation,” complained one prominent conservative who went to the meeting. “[He] still doesn’t seem comfortable.”
Romney may never channel the anger of conservatives as effectively as Gingrich or Santorum, but he used language in his speech that suggests he knows he has to do a better job trying.
“This country we love is in jeopardy,” said the former governor, calling the election “a battle for the soul of America.”
Some of the CPAC diehards will resist Romney for as long as they can. But many of them can almost never be fully pleased.
“The last race I was enthusiastic about was ’84,” admitted one longtime conservative who comes here every year.
The good news for Romney, if he is the nominee, is that the prospect of not just beating Obama but also rolling back his achievements, will be motivation enough.
“Conservatives are going to support the nominee and are going to be enthusiastic when they have a nominee,” said King, calling 2012 “a destiny election.”
But will they be enthusiastic for Romney — or just for ejecting Obama from the White House?
“I don’t know,” King replied.
— Jonathan Martin
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