Ezra Klein sticks up for Mitt:
For the last, oh, six years, Mitt Romney has been running in Republican presidential primaries. Those are, arguably, the elections he’s least suited to win, for all the reasons listed above. But now he’s about to get a shot at a general election. And while the promises he’s made and the positions he’s taken will surely make it more difficult for him to swing to the center, he’ll nevertheless be able to run a very different kind of campaign going forward. Maybe he’ll be better at it. And it’s easy to imagine his greatest weakness in the primary — the fact that conservatives believe he’s a secret centrist — becoming his greatest strength in the general.
I'm not buying. Romney's strength as a candidate is his aw-shucks, all-American voice and affect, which helps smoothe the rough contours of his platform, which will – by a mile – be further to the right than any candidate who has ever run for the presidency in modern times. His embrace of the Ryan budget confirms this. He can't backtrack on that now, or the already ornery base will explode. The mellifluous, paternal tone works best when he's persuading liberals he's not that radical. But the fall campaign will require him to be very harshly negative toward a president a lot of people still like, and arguing for even more tax cuts for the wealthy like himself.
And Romney will be painted – probably brutally – as a plutocrat's plutocrat. I suspect his perfect fit was, actually, Massachusetts, when he could run as a reformist Republican outsider but legislate universal healthcare in a monolithically Democratic state. Hey, I'd have voted for him as a check on the Democratic machine in that state and as a moderate able to nudge the state to the right – as he did, in my view, because the individual mandate is a conservative proposal at its core. Joe Klein, as often, is on the same page as I am:
[Romney] seems a figure from the Great Depression, a combination of Daddy Warbucks and Old Man Potter. He celebrates creative destruction at a time when the destruction has been a bit too creative. He talks a lot about firing people. He just can't help himself. In Wisconsin, he talked about his father firing people in Michigan. After he won the Wisconsin primary, Romney wandered incomprehensibly into the steel-plant closings on the South Side of Chicago in the 1970s. The President, he said, became a community organizer because "he saw free enterprise as the villain and government as the solution." The man simply does not understand that most people do not see plant closings as progress.
Along the same lines, Charles Blow doubts Romney will out-campaign Obama:
Obama can be scintillating on the campaign trail. Romney has shown himself to be nearly catatonic. Obama is such an impressive speaker that it sometimes feels as if he’s trying too hard to prove something; Romney is such an awkward speaker that it often feels as if he’s hiding something. But when framing a vision, even magniloquence beats ineloquence.
And look how many completely unforced errors Romney has made so far – all confirming his image as a mega-rich Wall Streeter with an inability to connect to many voters. It's also worth noting that Romney didn't run for re-election as governor. In every campaign since, he has lost. This time, every other candidate lost first.
The Dish 