Gov. Romney Could Have Won

It looks like Mitt Romney is dropping out of the presidential race. I guess it was inevitable given all the money he spent and how few delegates he amassed. Even after winning a number of states including Michigan, he just didn't have the juice.

I wrote about Romney last summer and I confess to being pretty impressed. Indeed, lots of people I know in private equity who have worked with Romney speak incredibly highly of him. So what happened?

I think if he'd run as a contrarian, heterodox Republican he could have won. After all, the party is about to nominate one of them in John McCain. Instead, he swung way to the right on immigration and other issues. I'm willing to believe that his conversion on abortion was sincere, but leave that issue aside. If he had run for president defending his Massachusetts health plan and promoting a national version of it, it would have had more credibility. Instead, he basically proposed a leave-it-to-the-states solution that didn't allow him to capitalize on his signal achievement of moving Massachusetts towards universal coverage.

He also came to the economic issues too late and emphasized them in the wrong way. His pitch that his opponents had "never run a corner store" rang harsh where as a more nuanced, I know how China works, I now how to compete, might have played better.

Finally, I think a big part of his collapse was not his fault. It was prejudice against Mormons. Huckabee tweaked him in an ugly way by talking about how Mormons believe Jesus and the Devil were brothers. They don't.* And if you look at the low Romney numbers across the south where he should have played better, I suspect a lot of that had to do with Mormonism. Maybe those polls showing a large percentage of the country not willing to vote for a Mormon turned out to be true. But Romney didn't help matters. The irony is that he had the record to run the perfect GOP campaign--conservative but contrarian enough to push off from the Bush years. But his propensity for the inane pander--doubling the size of Gitmo was my favorite--doomed him.

His father, the pro-civil rights governor of Michigan who coined the term gas guzzler as head of American Motors, offered a better model for how to run this year, I think if Romney had been truer to his heritage as a cosmopolitan guy who, after all, moved to Boston and thrived in a liberal culture he might be on his way to being president.

*Correction: In my original version of this post I observed that Jacob Weisberg, an old friend and the top man at Slate, had said that he wouldn't vote for a Mormon for president. That's not true and I apologize. Weisberg never said that. Instead, he offered a more nuanced query in a piece last year titled, "Romney's Religion A Mormon President? No way." I'm not sure I buy his argument but that doesn't excuse my getting it wrong.