Romney: Too gaffe-prone to beat Obama?

“What is wrong with this guy?” said Jonah Goldberg in NationalReview.com. Every time Mitt Romney is on the verge of sewing up the Republican presidential nomination, he says something so painfully dumb that you have to wonder if he might simply be “not a good enough politician” to beat President Obama in November. Given his $250 million in wealth and country-club demeanor, Romney can’t afford to say things like, “I like being able to fire people,” or that the $374,000 he earned from speaking fees last year was “not very much.” Romney’s biggest gaffe to date, though, came last week, when he told CNN, “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” since they have a “safety net.” In his tone-deaf way, Romney was trying to say he’d focus on the beleaguered middle class if elected president. But for conservatives trying to convince themselves that Romney is their best choice, this latest verbal blunder was very worrisome. Every politician misspeaks from time to time, said David Paul Kuhn in RealClearPolitics​.com, but “Romney’s gaffes are no joke.” Every item on his now-extensive blooper reel—including his casual offer to bet Rick Perry $10,000—feeds into the “caricature of a rich man who is out of touch.” In the general election, Obama will attempt to make wealth, taxes, and income inequality the central issues, and Romney “is framing himself as a near perfect Democratic foil.”

Look: Romney will never be a smooth, folksy politician, said Jonathan Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com. But what independent voters must ultimately decide is whether they want a clueless, bogus populist like Obama charting our future course, or “a smart technocrat who knows how the economy works.” Over his long, highly successful career in the private sector, Romney showed a real talent for “analyzing and solving problems,” and behind his stiff and awkward exterior there’s clearly a very decent, charitable, and intelligent man. Ultimately, come election time, Romney’s verbal weaknesses will be “offset by the public’s good opinion of his strengths.”

Good luck with that, said Jacob Weisberg in Slate.com. In presidential politics, personality matters—a lot. Just ask Al Gore and John Kerry. Like them, Romney is now running away from his wealth and privileged perfection by affecting a “plain-folks ordinariness” that only marks him as inauthentic. It didn’t help when the guy who pays 14 percent taxes on his multimillion-dollar income told a crowd of jobless Floridians, “I’m unemployed too,” or pandered to the gun lobby with his claim to have gone hunting “more than two times.” Romney’s in a real bind, said Paul Farhi in The Washington Post. Critics complain he’s “robotic,” yet when he goes off script, he says things that make his supporters cringe.

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Don’t write him off yet, said Michael Gerson, also in The Washington Post. Romney has shown over two presidential campaigns that he “learns from his mistakes.” And don’t forget that Obama, too, has made foolish comments (such as rural voters “clinging to God and guns”). It will be the state of the economy next November that decides this election. Maybe so, said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com, but Romney has a problem that goes beyond his gaffes. To win over conservatives, he’s promised a whopping tax cut for wealthy 1 percenters like him, while paying for it “by cutting programs for people who aren’t like him”—that is, virtually everyone else. Romney could have a tongue made of pure silver and ooze empathy from every pore, but at a time when people are hurting, that will still be a very, very tough sell.