With Regard to Zingers

The Romney camp's big plan for Wednesday night's debate is to have a lot of different "zingers" ready to go that Mitt Romney can deploy to throw the President off-balance and, ultimately, fundamentally re-make the race.

This is what they told the New York Times. And this tells you everything you need to know about the Romney brain-trust. Here's some problems with the plan:

1) Romney is not good at zingers. If you can name one zinger Romney has used in his political career that was memorable enough to affect any race, I'd like to know what it is. Indeed, the fact that the Romney camp is referring to them as "zingers" as opposed to "great points" or "strong arguments" tells you what year they're living in. Imagine you needled your friend with some particularly good line and someone said, "Wow, great zinger!" You'd have no choice but to say, "Zinger? Really?" Romney is a character from 1950 and his campaign reflects the man.

2) Zingers don't win presidential elections. If you think about the most famous zingers is presidential/vice-presidential debate politics, you'll see what I mean. Reagan's, "there you you go again" did not change that race. Reagan's great joke about Walter Mondale's "youth and inexperience" did not change the election. Lloyd Bentsen's "you're no Jack Kennedy" did not change the race. George H.W. Bush looking at his watch (not really a zinger but a widely-discussed debate moment) didn't actually affect the race. Did Al Gore's sighing affect the race? No, there's no evidence it did. John McCain's use of "Joe the Plumber" was much-discussed ... but it had no effect.

3) The whole idea of a zinger is that it took everyone by surprise. You know ... as in ... ZING!!! If you tell the New York Times ahead of time, the zinger doesn't zing. It falls flat. Moreover, you've now raised expectations. Everyone is expecting and anticipating the well-rehearsed line. It can't possibly live up to expectations. There is now considerable danger that the zinger will fall flat. Finally, you've yet again allowed Obama to play the role of adult in the room. And, predictably, the Obama campaign is talking about how they aren't going to have any zingers and they are going to talk about their ideas. Oy.

All of this points to a campaign that is just not reading the public mood properly. As Ezra Klein points out, the Romney campaign still believes they just need to point out that the economy is very bad and that will be enough to win.

The idea that this election can be reshaped by a zinger speaks to a deeper problem in the Romney campaign’s fundamental view of the race. As they see it, Obama’s record is an obvious disaster and their job entails little more than pointing that out over and over again. That the polls haven’t seemed responsive to this theory hasn’t dissuaded them.

This thinking is wrong. And it is one of the reasons Romney is in such a deep hole right now.

Will Romney Be a Credible Alternative?

Presidential campaigns in which there is an incumbent running for re-election are really about whether people want the incumbent to stay in office for 4 more years. There are generally two pre-conditions that must be satisfied in order for an incumbent president to lose: First, the incumbent needs to be unpopular. The most obvious measure of this is the president's job approval rating. When President Bush was re-elected in 2004, 51% of voters that day approved of the job he was doing (according to exit polls) and he received 51% of the vote. But job approval over 50% is not the only pre-condition. Even if the president is unpopular, the challenger must be a credible alternative. Generally, the party out of power does a good job of choosing someone who is a credible alternative. That, after all, is what the primary process is about. John Kerry satisfied that condition in 2004 but Bush was just popular enough to win a second term. Bob Dole was certainly a credible alterative in 1996 but President Clinton was quite popular. Bill Clinton was a credible alternative in 1992 and 41 was quite unpopular so Clinton won. A fair argument can be made that the last two major party nominees to not quite be credible alternatives facing incumbent presidents were McGovern (1972) and Goldwater (1964). Both lost in blowouts and both were facing presidents with strong approval ratings.

Let's take a quick look at where we are on these two measures. First, job approval:



Obama's job approval has improved steadily since the summer of 2011 and the improvement has arguably been driven by two things - improving consumer confidence and the ramping up of the Republican primaries which have made Obama look pretty darn presidential. Forgetting about the positive trajectory, it seems as if Obama is at a point right now where he would be likely to be re-elected if job approval were the only thing that mattered. But he's not a tremendous distance from a place where the second question, the credibility of the alternative, would matter. So let's take a look at the favorability ratings for one Willard Mitt Romney:



This is not good. Romney's unfavorables have shot up in the last few months. To give that the most negative spin, we might say that just as the American public has gotten to know Romney better and just as the American public has had to start digesting the idea of Romney as a potential nominee and a potential president, they have found more and more to dislike about him.

UPDATE: First Read posts favorability numbers for some recent party nominees. Romney compares rather badly. Most notably, John Kerry (also trying to beat a somewhat vulnerably incumbent) was at 42/30. To be fair though, Kerry already had the nomination effectively locked down for a few weeks by this point. I expect Romney's numbers to improve at least a little once the party rallies around him. But he still won't be where Kerry's numbers were and Kerry ... ya know ... lost.

A more sympathetic read of Romney's numbers might be that this has been a bruising primary and, when it is over, Romney's numbers will start to improve. That's probably true to some extent. But one thing about unfavorable numbers is that it is particularly hard to move the unfavorable numbers down. Voters who don't have a strong impression can certainly be brought over. Voters who do have a strong impression are hard to move. And negative impressions are harder to change than positive impressions.

The 2012 election is going to be about Obama ... as long as Mitt Romney is a credible alternative. If he's not, then Obama has a bit more room for error with the economy, Iran, gas prices, whatever. In 1980, Jimmy Carter lost because voters did not approve of the job he was doing but that was not enough. It was Reagan's credible performances in the debates and in the campaign generally that allowed voters to vote for him in the general election. It is a long way to go until November. But Romney has not yet passed that threshold and he seems to be moving in the wrong direction right now.