Are The Republican Grassroots Really Going To Reject The Party Establishment's Pick? It Would Be A First

The Mormon Church, Karl Rove and the cadres of multimillionaires and billionaires-- mostly from the finance sector-- behind Willard Romney's quest for the presidency must be tearing their collective hair out. With no plausible primary competition, it looked like a waltz to the GOP nomination. At first he adamantly refused to get down into the muck and slime of the Republican id and looked down condescendingly as Bachmann, Perry, Santorum and Newt battled for the far right of the American fringe. Unfortunately for Willard, the far right of the American fringe has become the heart and soul of the Republican Party. He's gone from being a shoo-in whose strategy was to smile benignly at his sparring partners while attacking Obama, to a desperate and frantic little man out of his depth as he pleads with skeptical right-wing activists that he's a "severe" conservative, whatever that is. He used his money advantage to buy the worthless CPAC straw poll win. And his "big comeback" in Maine is... at best embarrassing, and, at worst, not even a win at all. And now Santorum is winning his home state-- one of them; people as rich as Romney have homes everywhere, but he was raised in Michigan. According to recent polling, almost no one in Michigan sees the predatory vulture capitalist with the Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island tax shelters as a hometown boy.

Michigan is perceived as a state where Romney really has a home field advantage, but only 26% of primary voters actually consider him to be a Michigander while 62% do not. Only 39% have a favorable opinion of George Romney with a 46% plurality having no opinion about him. Romney really doesn't have some great reservoir of goodwill in Michigan to fall back on. Only 49% of voters have a favorable opinion of him to 39% with a negative one. That's down a net 28 points from our last poll of Michigan in July when he was at +38 (61/23).

Romney's cumbersome, stilted zombie-like campaign apparatus is still attacking the broke and broken corpse of Newt Gingrich-- while Santorum is busy securing the Not-Mitt slot in the minds of the grassroots conservative base of the GOP. Even intrepid Romney cheerleader David Frum is starting to publicly fret. He attended the CPAC shindig and he saw the writing on the wall-- and it wasn't "We Love Willard" or even, "OK, We Give Up, We'll Vote For Him."

The most quoted speech at CPAC this year was Mitt Romney's, but my vote for the most significant goes to Grover Norquist's. In his charmingly blunt way, Norquist articulated out loud a case for Mitt Romney that you hear only whispered by other major conservative leaders.

They have reconciled themselves to a Romney candidacy because they see Romney as essentially a weak and passive president who will concede leadership to congressional conservatives:

"All we have to do is replace Obama. ...  We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate."

The requirement for president?

"Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared."

This is not a very complimentary assessment of Romney's leadership. It's also not a very realistic political program: congressional Republicans have a disapproval rating of about 75%. If Americans get the idea that a vote for Romney is a vote for the Ryan plan, Romney is more or less doomed.

To date, sad to say, Romney has worked hard to confirm this image of weakness.

Nobody wants a president who acts as the passive instrument of even generally popular groups like labor unions. (Did you know that-- despite decades of declining popularity-- unions still have an approval rating of 52%? I didn't until I looked it up.)

But a candidate who appeases the most disliked people in national politics? That guy will command neither public affection nor respect.

Mitt Romney badly needs his Sister Souljah moment. Instead, he's running as Jim DeMint's doormat.

Maybe this would be a good time to go back and read Frank Rich's great New York piece on Willard, Who in God’s Name Is Mitt Romney?. Here's how he starts (and the rest doesn't disappoint):

Back in the thick of the 2008 Republican presidential race, I asked a captain of American finance what he had made of Mitt Romney when they were young colleagues at Bain & Company. “Mitt was a nice guy, a smart businessman, and an excellent team player,” he ­responded without missing a beat. Then came the CEO’s one footnote, delivered with bemusement, not pique: “Still, whenever the rest of us would go out at the end of the day, we’d always find ourselves having the same conversation: None of us had any idea who this guy was.”

Here we are in 2012, and nothing has changed. What Romney’s former colleague observed of the young Mitt at close range decades ago could stand as the judgment of most Americans watching him at a cable-news remove now. That’s why his campaign has so often been on the ropes. That’s why, in a highly polarized nation, the belief that Romney is a phony may be among the very last convictions still bringing left, right, and center together. As a focus-group participant evocatively told pollster Peter Hart in November, Romney reminded him of the “dad who’s never home.” Nonetheless, this phantom has spent most of the campaign as the “presumed” front-runner for his party’s nomination. Amazingly, this conventional wisdom held up throughout 2011, even though 75 percent of Romney’s own party was searching so frantically for an alternative that Donald Trump enjoyed a nanosecond bump in the polls.

UPDATE: The Ad Barrage Begins

Romney's billionaire and Mormon-funded SuperPac will now systematically destroy sweater vest-wearing doofus Rick Santorum. Here's the first ad, which went up on the air today in Ohio, Michigan and Arizona: