The GOP’s effort to warm voters to Romney

What happened

The Republican Party crowned Mitt Romney as its presidential nominee this week, using its national convention in Tampa to reintroduce the candidate as a warm-hearted problem-solver committed to helping his family, his church, and his country. The centerpiece of the party’s efforts to humanize Romney was a speech by his wife, Ann, who testified to his steadfast nature. “You can trust Mitt,” she said. “This man will not fail. This man will not let us down. This man will lift up America.” Romney’s campaign is keenly aware that many voters still view the wealthy venture capitalist as stiff and remote, and have yet to warm to him personally; a poll this week found that only 31 percent of voters viewed him favorably, 23 points lower than President Obama. “I know there are some people who do a very good job acting and pretend they’re something that they’re not,” Romney said this week. “I am who I am.” His own speech to the delegates came just after The Week went to press.

The GOP also highlighted the poor state of the economy, with a parade of speakers emphasizing the ballooning deficit, and criticizing what they see as President Obama’s hostility to the business community. A national debt clock was installed in the arena, and an entire evening of speeches was dedicated to mocking Obama’s comment, “If you’ve got a successful business, you didn’t build that”—which Democrats say was taken out of context.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What the editorials said

This election is still “incredibly close,” said the Washington Examiner, with new polls showing Obama and Romney essentially tied. And while party conventions rarely make a big impact on a presidential race, they do allow the party’s leading candidates to “introduce themselves to the electorate and hone their campaign message.” Republicans delivered in spades, said the New York Post, by daring to tell voters that the country is headed off a fiscal cliff of runaway spending. Unlike Democrats, the GOP has the courage “to speak the hard truths and treat Americans as adults.”

Hard truths? Rarely has a national political convention relied so heavily on “truth-twisting, distortions, and plain falsehoods,” said The New York Times. The keynote speaker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, failed to mention that his own clumsy budget-slashing has resulted in a higher unemployment rate than when he took over. Rick Santorum, meanwhile, simply parroted Romney’s “blatantly false advertising” about how Obama has gutted the work requirement for welfare.

What the columnists said

Finally, Republicans have fallen in love with a Romney, said David Frum in TheDailyBeast.com. The prospective First Lady’s “warm and charming” homily to her husband succeeded in emphasizing Romney’s unwavering reliability and won her a standing ovation. She also tried to counteract the Democrats’ “war on women” storyline, said Rebekah Metzler in USNews.com, by emphasizing that the economy has a major impact on moms and grandmothers, who, she said, “always have to do a little more.” Her attempt to forge a bond with women voters was “naked, but effective.”

It wasn’t effective to women who don’t share her privileged perch, said Alec McGillis in TNR.com. Behind Ann Romney’s perfect smile, ordinary women can detect a “hardness” and “not-always-suppressed self-satisfaction” about her family’s enormous wealth. Sure, Mitt loves his wife and his family, but where is the evidence “he gives a damn about the rest of us”?

What voters need is competence, not good intentions, said Steve Huntley in the Chicago Sun-Times. Romney has succeeded in everything he’s done in public and private life, including saving the Salt Lake City Olympics. Behind his façade of niceness, Obama “has no new ideas, only a record of failure.”

Yes, likability is a “silly metric with which to judge prospective presidents,” said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. But Americans have a “strangely intimate” relationship with their president, given that we spend four years with him in our living rooms. Romney will never get voters to swoon for him. But to win over the few remaining swing voters, crossing the “threshold of minimum likability” remains his biggest challenge.