Memo to Mitt: Politics is tougher than business

Mitt Romney is making two mistakes in this presidential race. His first mistake is that he thinks that he's tougher than Barack Obama because he's a businessman, and Barack Obama is a politician, and business people are tougher than politicians. His second mistake is that he expects the American people to automatically give him greater respect and deference because of that. He expects that when he says that something is true, or he gives his perspective on how events unfolded in his life, his explanation will be accepted at face value. 

My favorite example of people in business making this mistake of thinking that they are tougher than people in government is a tech company (I think it was Microsoft) that was being sued by the US Department of Justice. The Microsoft folks assumed that they were much tougher than the dweeby government lawyers, because they operate in the hypercompetitive environment of the computer industry, whereas government lawyers are bureaucrats who spend their hours trying to figure out how to interfere with businesses making money. What the Microsofties forgot was that prosecutors at the DoJ deal with foreign intelligence agencies (remember the KGB?), Mafia kingpins, drug lords, and other people who will lie, cheat, steal, and kill to achieve their goals. On a toughness scale, Microsoft's competitors - geeks with fast calculators who drink too much coffee - do not compare well to spies, assassins, and gangsters. Steve Jobs was a tough competitor. Unless you compare him to, say, Saddam Hussein, John Gotti, or the Soviet Union.

What people in business fail to appreciate is that they spend most of their time with people who agree with them, whereas politicians spend a lot of their time with people disagree with them. Most people in business do not have daily, direct contact with their competitors. They spend most of their time with people in their own company, with whom they have common goals. Or they spend time with their customers or vendors, people with whom they are trying to reach a mutually satisfactory accommodation. It's not necessarily easy negotiating with your co-workers, customers, or vendors. But those people generally are not doing everything in their power to stop you from achieving your goals. They may disagree with you, or even dislike you. But they're not out to destroy you. Your competitors may be trying to do that. But you don't have to deal with them literally face-to-face every day. And they rarely make it personal. In business, it's perfectly legitimate to question a competitor's product or strategy, but it's off-limits to attack their character.

The Democrats are going to attack every facet of Mitt Romney's experience, in the public and private sectors, in a way that none of his competitors in the private sector ever did. They're going to raise as many questions about his character as they possibly can. It's a nasty, unpleasant business, but anyone who thinks that the practice of democracy is all about the grandiose articulation of principles has done a very selective reading of history.

This is where Romney's second mistake is potentially fatal. The Democrats are going to raise questions in the minds of voters, and a fair number of voters are going to consider those questions legitimate. Mitt Romney is having trouble answering questions like when did he actually, officially, really, truly, honest-to-God-cross-my-heart leave Bain Capital, because he has never had to face those questions before. He has lived his life according to these precepts: the explanations of him and his lawyers will always be sufficient to answer questions about whether or not his actions were proper. If he signs a piece of paper, he and his associates have cleared it with the lawyers, so it's OK. Period, end of story. He simply has no experience with people who do not automatically accept his ability to explain fine legalistic details of his professional life. He assumes his own credibility, so he has no idea how to establish that credibility. His lawyers have both assumed that credibility as well, and worked hard to prevent anyone from even raising any questions about it. Mitt Romney has always had people around him who ran interference for him on questions of legality. It's been a closed loop; he hired people who assumed that what he was doing was legal and proper, and they then kept him in a bubble of legality and propriety. He's never had to question his own assumptions. So the Democrats are doing that for him.

Professional politicians, however, operate on the assumption that they will be questioned on those details, and they will have to explain them. They know they will be expected to release their tax returns. They know that their personal credibility is something that they have to establish very carefully, and then work very hard to maintain. They deal on a day-to-day basis with people who questions their assumptions and their legitimacy. 

Mitt Romney thinks that he, the son of a wealthy father, who had every possible advantage in life and who has spent most of his life surrounded by people who are very much like him, and who think like him, is tougher than the son of a single mother who had to use his own personal discipline and focus to rise to the highest levels of a society that, not so long ago, erected substantial barriers to success for people like him. Mitt Romney's formative experiences were in offices and boardrooms. Barack Obama's formative experiences were on the streets of Chicago. Mitt Romney may never realize that he has substantially underestimated how tough Barack Obama can be. But even if he realizes it tomorrow, it will probably be too late.


One of the toughest jobs in the world is selling yourself to someone who doesn't necessarily trust you, particularly when they can choose an alternative with one simple push of a button. Welcome to American politics on the national stage, Mr. Romney.

Sarah Palin vs. Mitt Romney

This is too bizarre for words. My words, anyways; read the post at DailyKos to figure out what this is all about.

What the hell, I'll take a stab at making some kind of sense of this:

(long pause)

You have got to be kidding me.

Dick Morris on McCain's VP choices

Dick Morris tries his hand at the current blogosphere game, trying to figure out who John McCain should choose as VP. This is an interesting game to play, because it's like trying to find the grey area between the absurd, the impossible, and the bizarre. McCain simply has no good options. Morris is mostly interested in why Mitt Romney would not work out. He throws out other possiblilities: Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and Joe Lieberman, with this justification:

Any of these three choices would make a "wow" statement that would make voters see McCain in a new light.

Yes, but each has serious problems. McCain has been trying to distance himself from Bush - choosing his Secretary of State, and one of his closest advisors, a woman strongly associated with his failed foreign policy, would not serve that purpose well. Colin Powell? I've heard that Powell and McCain are friends, and I don't doubt it. I'm sure Powell would be a good VP. But I think hell will freeze over and demons will carve angels out of the ice before Colin Powell campaigns against the first African American to have a serious chance at being president.

Lieberman? There's a possibility. One problem is that that's just about a guaranteed way to lose Connecticut, since people there are already upset with Joe. And who would it help with? He might swing a few Jews, which might help McCain
with Florida, but that's about it. He would presumably have to switch parties, and Democrats would have nothing to do with him, but that doesn't seem to bother Lierberman. He may go down in history as being the losing partner in two presidential campaigns, but, again, I doubt that would bother him. On foreign policy, they are obviously in sync. But on social issues, Lieberman is still very much a Democrat, and I'm not sure how happy the base would be about that. And the man is not the most charismatic politician. Against Obama, that matters. If Obama picks someone like John Edwards, it will be two fresh young guys against two old white guys. On the other hand, McCain could then claim to be bipartisan and a maverick. So I don't think I'm going to rule Lierberman out.

Morris likes Huckabee, but Huckabee, apart from his personal charm, is a good old boy from the South who would alienate suburban professionals in the rest of the country.

Morris' primary goal is to shoot down Romney. Which, of course, is not difficult. I just think Romney is one of the least worst choices McCain has.

My favorite candidate is still the dark horse that no one has mentioned in a long time: Christine Todd Whitman. She has all the advantages of Romney, with few of the negatives: she's very smart, highly accomplished, the former governor of a northeastern state. For all of those who supported Hillary but are uncomfortable with Obama, choosing Whitman would give them a reason to vote for McCain. She has some environmental credentials, having served as EPA Administrator under Bush. She didn't work well with the rest of the Bush administration, which, at this point, is a selling point for many people.

McCain-Whitman '08! Place your bets now - you'll get great odds on this one.

McCain's VP choices

In the LA Times today, Jonah Goldberg, the resident conservative columnist there, writes about McCain's choices for VP. The upshot is that he doesn't any great choices, just several almost-decent ones. My guesses for the top six:

Mitt Romney
Rob Portman
Sarah Palin
Tim Pawlenty
Carly Fiorina
John Thune

Even those six have problems. Mitt Romney came across as Mr. Flaky in the primaries, changing his position with the position of the sun. Rob Portman is strongly associated with Bush. Sarah Palin is a somewhat obscure candidate. During the campaign, I anticipate some logistical problems: won't she have to, you know, go home to Alaska to be governor every now and then? Won't that take up large chunks of time? Not a huge deal, to be sure, but it occurred to me. Tim Pawlenty sounds good, but I don't know much about him. Carly Fiorina has not held elected office, and she was fired from Hewlett Packard. In other words, there isn't any good, solid reason to choose her, apart from the fact that she's a woman. John Thune is close to the same age as Obama (47), and has similar experience: he served in the US House from 1996-2002, and has been a Senator since 2004, same as Obama. Weakens McCain's charge that Obama is inexperienced. Also, he's very conservative, and strongly associated with the Christian right, so he brings both the good and bad karma associated with believing in creationism.

I'm going to narrow my choices down to Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, and John Thune. Choosing Palin would be a bold choice, but she's younger than Obama (only 44), and her experience in office is so light it makes Obama look like an elder statesman - she was elected governor in 2006, and before that was the Mayor of the city of Wasilia, Alaska, population around 8,000. Say what you will about Obama's experience, next to being the mayor of a suburb of Anchorage, state senator in Illinois suddenly has a lot of weight. She has a lot of time to make her mark, I don't think this is her turn. But having a woman on the ticket young enough to be his daughter would only highlight McCain's age. On the other hand, her approval rating is in the 80's. Of course, the fact that she's very pretty doesn't hurt.

Pawlenty is a bit older (48), still young enough to be McCain's son, but has been governor a little longer than Palin (since 2002), and before that was a state represenative. Again, not a huge contrast with Obama. He doesn't really have any foreign policy experience, but that's not much of an issue for McCain. He's very conservative, which might help with the Republican base, but not so much with independents. Sounds like he's pretty hardcore on cutting taxes, which is not as popular as it once was. So he's attractive, but not perfect.

Thune has the problem of the other two, i.e. that he doesn't have much to compare against Obama in the realm of experience. Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996, Thune was elected to as South Dakota's sole US Representative in the same year - not a huge difference. Having another senator on the ticket would also reinforce Obama's claim to be running against Washington insiders.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that Mitt Romney may be the best of the lot. He has more experience than Obama with running things. He's older than Obama, but still younger than McCain. He's energetic. But he's also strongly associated with the kind of capitalism that has resulted in spectacular income inequality - not going to go down well with the blue collar voters.

If I were McCain, I think I would have to go with either Pawlenty or Romney.

Final results from Pennsylvania

The final tally from the Pennsylvania primary:

Clinton: 1,245,911 54.6%
Obama: 1,037,953 45.4%

(hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

I've heard some commentary about the exact percentage. Looks like it is 9.2%, although Andrew Sullivan calls it 9.1%. I'm not going to bother with the exact math. Some people think it's significant whether or not it's 10%, because that would be a double-digit victory.

Please. Calm down, people. Hillary won, and that's that. In two weeks, no one will remember the percentage. Eventually Obama will prevail, and Hillary will thank all of her supporters, inlcuding those in Pennsylvania. And all of the elected Democrats in PA will start rallying around Obama, and most, but not all, of the drama in this particular election will be forgotten. The particular dynamics that defined this primary cannot be ignored, but the important thing at this point is to move on.

Apart from that, there were these tidbits from this election. There was a Republican contest. McCain, of course, won that one. But he only got 72.8% of the vote. Mike Huckabee got 90,304 votes, or 11.4%, and Ron Paul got 126,265 votes, or 15.9%. I think Paul is technically still in the race, so that's not terribly surprising. And Huckabee, of course, has a strong connection with his constituency, and he's got stage presence to burn.

One thing I noticed is that not one of the other Republican nominees got a vote. None for Mitt Romney or Rudy. Or Fred Thompson or any of assorted other wannabes. Just Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee. Many Democrats are legitimately worried about an intra-party conflict. But the split within the Republican party is alive and well, just currently below the surface. McCain has nomination, but he still doesn't have the love from all of his fellow Republicans. More than a quarter spoke their minds and expressed their displeasure with the establishment candidate.

What's interesting about Paul and Huckabee is that they are both grass-roots phenomena. Romney, Rudy, and Thompson were all media darlings at some point during the campaign, garnering lots of attention. Now that they're gone, they have absolutely no constituency left. But Huckabee and Paul are still winning significant chunks of the population, long after either of them were the subject of any kind of media attention. The impact that each of them has had will last well past November.