Mitt Romney should drop the 'man-of-the-people' pretence, says John Avlon. Instead he should explain to America why he's the best man to hire to turn around an economy.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney
It's all but official: Willard Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee. But who is this Mormon from Massachusetts who might be president?
By some accounts, he is emerging from the primary slugfest as the most damaged Republican candidate in recorded history.
But others point to his Teflon tenaciousness, his striking success in business and his remorseless discipline on the campaign trail. No one but a fool would count this candidate out – especially given a still-rocky economy and America's essentially centre-Right political sensibilities.
So let's look at the man in full, both the good and the bad. And as an added bonus, I'll throw in some free political advice: the best case that Mitt can make to the American people.
On the surface he is the political equivalent of a Ken doll, with a Mount Rushmore-esque profile that would make Reagan weep with envy.
He is a man of faith and family and fabulously wealthy – earning more in a single day from past investments than the average American family makes in a year.
And though his father was a successful CEO and governor of Michigan, Mitt made his money on his own, founding Bain Capital, a high finance turnaround firm, after a stint at Harvard Business School.
He capped off a string of successes by being elected governor of his adopted home state in 2002. Two years into the effort, he was tapped to head the Republican Governor's Association and then declined to run for a risky re-election, choosing instead to run for president in 2008.
Here's where the storybook ascent hit some turbulence.
It doesn't take a political scientist to see that the Massachusetts electorate is a very different crowd than conservatives who vote in the Republican primary.
This might prove a problem for a lesser politician – but not Mitt Romney. The consummate salesman simply switched his positions – a clean 180 from the days when he pledged to support a woman's right to choose on abortion and be gay-rights friendly.
To Republican politicians who'd grown up in the age of Reagan, this was the worst sort of apostasy – Romney was seen as the opposite of a conviction politician, willing if not eager to switch his positions on social issues for political convenience.
But to Romney, the resentment must have seemed strange. After all, to this salesman it was just logical – of course you change your pitch to suit the audience. To less corporate-trained eyes, Romney's approach can seem perilously close to the ends justify the means.
After losing the 2008 nomination to John McCain, he entered the 2012 race as the presumptive front-runner, but conservative suspicions about Romney had only grown in the intervening years as the Tea Party became ascendant.
The Republican Party respects the rules of primogenitor and Romney ultimately proved no exception.
He outspent his rivals an average of 5 to 1 – with a signature carpet-bombing blast of negative ads – but he lost 10 of the first 25 states and a majority of Republican Primary voters consistently favored the other candidates, despite it being generally considered the weakest field in recent Republican history.
Most devastating is the erosion of support seen for Romney among women and independent voters after the rush to the far Right of the primaries. A recent poll found President Obama beating Romney 2-to-1 among women under 50 in swing states. Romney was beating Obama among independent voters before the primaries began, now he trails by almost double digits.
And Romney's unfavorable ratings have climbed above 50% - unprecedented since the advent of modern polling.
This problem has been compounded by a flat-footed tendency to remind people that he is among the out-of-touch super-rich at a time when most Americans are still struggling to rise up out of the great recession. A steady stream of sound-bites reinforced this narrative – my recent favorite: when asked whether he followed NASCAR - the US stock car racing events - Romney replied that several of his friends owned franchises.
But a week is a long time in politics, and the seven months until election day is an eternity.
Romney will no doubt pivot back to the center using his conservative critics as a character witness. And if he picks someone like Florida Senator Marco Rubio as vice-president, he can add youth and a much-needed dose of diversity to his ticket, bringing a few swing states toward his column.
Obama is already walking an electoral tightrope and Romney's Mormon faith is unlikely to prove a statistically significant negative, except possibly in the few evangelical swing states, like North Carolina.
Romney's best case is to drop the man-of-the-people pose that Republicans usually affect. Instead, he should try to use his determined awkwardness on the campaign trail as a sign of authenticity, arguing that he might not be the best politician, but he is the best man to hire to turnaround an economy.
After all, he spent his life improving the competitiveness of once proud companies, a corollary to the current anxieties afflicting the US.
And while polls show that people like President Obama personally, we're always willing to fire someone if they can't get the job done.
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