2016's GOP Message: "We're Not Really Romney Any More"

It will be hard for Paul Ryan to distance himself from the stench of Mitt Romney's loss last year. But that's exactly what Ryan's competitors for the 2016 Republican nomination are all doing. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, et al, all of whom endorsed Romney and campaigned for him, are now trying to distance themselves from him and from his elitist agenda, an agenda every single one of them has based his career on.

Right-wing populism is all the vogue now in Republicanland and that's looking like the emerging play for 2016. None of the new crew will be caught dead disparaging the 47%-- let alone the 99%-- despite the fact that almost all of them are heavily financed by wealthy special interests and despite the fact that their political careers are about nothing but bolstering those special interests. But, so far, in Iowa and New Hampshire we see Cruz, Paul and Santorum doing their best to appeal to working class voters.

Yesterday afternoon, we talked a little about European right-wing populism... politicians preying on the fears of workers who are being screwed by the economic system but can be easily manipulated into blaming it on scapegoats-- Moroccans, Turks, Romanians, Poles who steal their jobs and mooch off the welfare system. Just substitute those groups for Hispanic immigrants and you have the new GOP populism. Santorum's been trolling this territory longer than most of the Republicans. He said that Republicans at the 2012 presidential nominating convention in Tampa focused too much on business owners and not enough on workers.

“Not one time did we see someone from the factory floor walk out there and talk about working for the man or women who built that business and how that helped them and their families,” he said of last year’s convention speakers. “We need to be able to communicate to the folks who hold the jobs and tell them and put a platform together that focuses on them.”

Democrats spent hundreds of millions of dollars painting Romney as an economic elitist. Some Republicans now think he helped the opposition’s messaging operation by failing to reach out to lower-income voters. Romney played into Obama’s game plan with cringe-inducing gaffes such as claiming that 47 percent of Americans are dependent on government and think of themselves as victims.

Cruz says Romney’s campaign message should have been more inclusive of people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

“Every policy we think about, we talk about should focus like a laser on opportunity, on easing the means of assent up the economic ladder-- on how it impacts the least well off among us,” he told conservative activists at the Family Leadership Summit.

He said Romney could have improved upon the slogan he picked for the 2012 convention: “You built that.” Intended as a jibe at Obama’s claim that business owners succeed in large part because of community assistance, Cruz felt Romney’s message left out aspiring entrepreneurs.

“It was directed to those who already built their business, who had already succeeded. How much better would it have been if what we had said was, ‘You can build that’?” he said.



Paul also called on his party to be more inclusive during a recent trip to New Hampshire, a crucial primary state.

“We're going to win when we look like America. We need to be white, we need to be brown, we need to be black, we need to be with tattoos, without tattoos, with ponytails, without ponytails, with beards, without," Paul told the audience at a GOP dinner in May, according to the Concord Monitor.

"We need to be that party that can express it in a way that shows that we care about people,” he added in what appeared to be a subtle jab at Romney. “We need to care about people even if they are on government assistance."

Republican strategists are split over whether their party should adopt a more populist tone, which has traditionally been the strategy of Democrats.

...But others say these candidates are too focused on running against the party establishment at the expense of bringing new ideas or policy proposals to the debate.

“It sort of cracks me up that a Republican would try to get left of President Kennedy on the issue of a rising tide lifting all boats,” said Jon McHenry, a Republican pollster with North Star Opinion Research.

“It’s interesting to me to hear Cruz talk about how we have to reach out to minorities, whether its African Americans or Hispanics, which is true, but then not to offer any solutions about what you would do with the immigration system,” he added.

But McHenry said the message is likely to play well among conservative activists in Iowa, who “are probably also the people who have that populist strain."

Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, noted Pat Buchanan, who ran for president in 1992 and 1996, performed well in New Hampshire by running on a populist anti-trade, anti-establishment platform.

“I think Cruz and Santorum, especially Cruz, are the best examples of this to date,” he said. “What they’re really getting at is the idea that Mitt Romney’s campaign was trying to corral the small-business vote, which is probably already pretty well corralled for the GOP, but he offered nothing to any other group in America.”

Trende has noted in published analysis that Romney was hurt by a drop in the white vote between 2008 and 2012. He estimated that many of those voters who failed to turn out to the polls were of working-class and low-income backgrounds.

Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist who worked on Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) 2008 presidential campaign, said George W. Bush was the last GOP nominee who effectively reached out to blue collar workers. His campaign message of “compassionate conservatism” helped him beat Al Gore, who centered his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles around a populist message.

“Since 2005, the biggest problem in the Republican Party with respect to connecting with voters has been language,” he said.

He said Republican lawmakers and politicians are learning “if they watch their language and use a populist tone they do a heck of a lot better job and the reason is most people don’t know the mechanics of policy.”

Yep... you can fool most of the people, pretty much all of the time.