Is Mitt Romney the Al Gore of 2012?

The media's coverage of Mitt Romney is showing signs of the pathologies that afflicted its coverage of Al Gore in the early stages of the 2000 presidential campaign.

In 1999 and 2000, the press pummeled Gore, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, with absurdly trivial and hostile reporting and commentary on the number of buttons on his suits, his cowboy boots, and the color of his attire, which were framed as evidence that Gore was a phony who was reinventing himself to get elected. These factually dubious claims were used to manufacture a narrative of Gore as a calculating liar that may have contributed to his puzzling underperformance in the 2000 election. While any politician changes and evolves over the course of their career, Gore's trajectory was framed as a series of phony personas (a sample from Howard Fineman: "By my count we're on about the fifth or sixth Al Gore now").

Mitt Romney, the leading Republican presidential contender in the Intrade futures market, is starting to be covered in a similar way. A Los Angeles Times profile on Saturday emphasized the supposed change in his attire in the headline and lede:

A whole new Romney for 2012 presidential run

The early Republican favorite is wearing Gap skinny jeans and going tieless on network TV. But despite his makeover, he still has a hard time connecting with voters.

Defying his reputation as a 1950s square, the new, more casual Mitt Romney is popping up around the country as he readies a second run for president. He's going tieless on network TV, strolling NASCAR pits in Daytona and sporting skinny Gap jeans bought for him by his wife.

His latest campaign book, just out in paperback, opens with a regular-guy scene: wealthy Mitt in a Wal-Mart checkout line, buying gifts for his grandsons and comparing the surroundings to Target, another discount store he says he's familiar with.

The image tweaks are part of a broader makeover as Romney prepares to run from what should be an enviable spot: He's the early Republican favorite — though far from an inevitable nominee.

Similarly, a Boston Globe report framed around questions about Romney's "authenticity" questioned his attire at a NASCAR race:

...Romney popped up in Florida at the Daytona 500.

Romney is a true auto buff, a Mustang owner who is the son of a former American Motors president and was raised in Michigan, home of the American auto industry.

That a potential presidential candidate would show up at the biggest NASCAR event of the year, or glad-hand among potential supporters, is hardly out of the norm.

Yet when photos surfaced of Romney working the crowd, he was wearing a "Bass Pro Shops" shirt as if he were a regular angler or race sponsor.

New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny also highlighted these points in an article Saturday:

Mr. Romney is trying to present a more relaxed image to combat impressions that he is unapproachable and stiff. He has not been seen in a necktie for months — not in television appearances, meetings with donors or political dinners, including the one Saturday evening, where he was one of the few men wearing an open-collared shirt.

He turned up in the pit area of the Daytona 500 last month, mingling with race car drivers while wearing a Bass Pro Shops shirt. And last week, Mr. Romney, who put his wealth four years ago around $200 million, walked into Tommy’s Barber Shop in an Atlanta strip mall for a haircut. (Aides sent out a picture of him in the barber’s chair via Twitter.)

Romney's evolution as a candidate is also being reframed, like Gore's, as part of a series of personas. For instance, NBC's influential First Read newsletter described him as "Romney 3.0":

This, in short, is Romney 3.0. Romney 1.0 was the socially moderate businessman who won election as Massachusetts governor in 2002. Romney 2.0 was the socially conservative presidential candidate who ran to John McCain’s and Rudy Giuliani’s right on abortion, stem cells, and illegal immigration in 2007-2008. And Romney 3.0 appears to be the repeat presidential candidate who will focus more on the economy and his business record than on social issues.

In both cases, of course, detractors of Romney or Gore will argue that the candidate really is especially phony or inauthentic. Even if this is true, the problem is that the perception that a politician is phony encourages reporters to manufacture misleading narratives to reinforce that frame (as we saw with Gore in 1999-2000). In reality, almost every politician is calculating in the clothing they wear, the images they present, and the events they stage. Any reporter can deconstruct this stagecraft or write stories about how candidates are reinventing themselves (indeed, this is one of the few sorts of criticism allowed under what NYU's Jay Rosen calls the view from nowhere). But they tend to only write these stories about candidates for whom the narrative of phoniness seems to apply. For instance, Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee senator who briefly ran for president in 2008, had a homespun manner. As a result, the story that Thompson pretended to drive away from a public event in his signature red pickup truck before transferring to a luxury car got little attention.

Two other factors tilt the playing field against Romney and Gore. First, Romney, like Gore, is the leading contender for his party's nomination (though Gore had a far more commanding lead at this point). The press tends to be more negative towards frontrunners. More importantly, however, both come from states that are relatively poor fits to their presidential primary electorates. Any politician who succeeds in a hostile state (like Massachusetts for Romney and Tennessee for Gore) has to take moderate positions and make compromises that are relatively unpopular with their own party's base. As a result, the transition to the national stage requires changes in their profile and issue positions. The most skilled politicians who accomplish this feat tend to be seen as slick (like Bill Clinton*), while less skilled ones like Gore and Romney tend to be seen as inauthentic. By contrast, those politicians who are seen as authentic are often ones whose districts or states match their party's electorate well (e.g., George W. Bush in 2000), giving them the luxury of not having to adjust their issue profile or public image.

* Notably, Barack Obama got a pass on this process. He didn't face a competitive race in 2004, allowing him to make the awkward transition from positions that fit his state senate district to those that could win a statewide race for senator in Illinois without serious public criticism. As a result, he could run for president in 2008 without making significant additional changes in his public profile. For more, see here and here.

Update 3/8 10:55 PM: As Dana Houle pointed out on Twitter, one important distinction between Gore and Romney is that the Romney changed his positions on a number of policy issues recently (Gore changed his position on federal funding for abortion early in his career, but that was long before his 2000 presidential campaign). By contrast, Gore was perceived as reinventing himself stylistically rather than substantively. These are all fair points, but they still don't excuse the sort of coverage described above.

Update 3/9 9:45 AM: For more, see Paul Waldman and Jonathan Bernstein.

One other note: If anyone isn't convinced that journalistic perceptions of authenticity are malleable, consider the example of George W. Bush, who invented a Texas rancher lifestyle focused on brush-clearing that might have been portrayed as inauthentic if adopted by, say, Gore. Instead, it was typically portrayed positively (or at least in a neutral fashion) by the press covering Bush.

Update 3/15 7:50 PM: I've updated the language above to clarify that Gore changed his position on federal funding of abortion.

Comments

[David in Cal]

Nice post, Brendan. You make several important points:

1. The media tend to choose a narrative and fit their reporting to the narrative.

2. The media's chosen narrative can be a trivial aspect of a candidate or even entirely false.

3. Media bias can have a significant effect on an election.

4. Barack Obama got a pass in this process.

I would quibble with a couple of points. To say Gore's underperformance of the Bread and Peace model was "puzzling" is really a way of saying that the model was deficient in not including media bias as a potential factor.

In my lifetime the media have generally given a boost to the Dems, starting with Eisenhower supposedly being dumber than Stevenson and underplaying Kennedy's limited experience. How many voters knew about Reagan's expertise in policy matters? Presidential election models fitted to past results have built into them the assumption that the media will lean left. However, in 2000 the media were equally unfair to both candidates. When the media is balanced, the models will be off.

Kudos to Brendan for acknowledging the media's kind treatment of Mr. Obama. However, I don't think that the reason was that he didn't face a competitive race in 2004. Conservative media had no trouble finding evidence that Obama's record was far-left, contradicting his claim to be a centrist. I think the media "fell in love" with Obama. IMHO Obama will continue to get favorable media treatment, which is one reason why he's likely to be re-elected.

[David in Cal]

IMHO Romney resembles Gore in making issues sound complex. They're right: most issues are complex. Dealing with that complexity shows people that Romney and Gore smart and knowledgable. However, most voters cannot follow their reasoning. By comparison, Reagan, G. W. Bush, and Eisenhower, simplified (or oversimplified) issues. That approach made them sound more authentic and made them two-term Presidents.

Romney can wear jeans and shop at Walmart, but IMHO he won't connect with voters until he starts explaining things in ways voters can understand (or think they understand.) Unfortunately, Romney seems not to realize that he needs to make this change.

An example is his op-ed yesterday on the Misery Index. Romney wrote:

When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he hung the Misery Index around Jimmy Carter’s neck. It consisted of the sum total of unemployment and inflation. Today, we have a different set of ailments. Instead of unemployment coupled with inflation, we have a toxic blend of unemployment, debt, home foreclosures, and bankruptcies. Their sum total is what we can call the Obama Misery Index. It is at a record high; indeed, it makes even the malaise of the Carter years look like a boom. Unemployment has fallen, but it’s fallen to a level that is still, by any historical marker, a national disaster. To suggest it as an achievement is to engage in what Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously called “defining deviancy down.”

Romney totally missed the point of Reagan's Misery Index: it was an actual number that one could calculate and verify how much it has risen. Romney's Misery Index isn't a index at all. One cannot add figures for unemployment, debt, foreclosures and bankruptcies, nor does Romney attempt to do so.

Instead Romney refers to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's phrase “defining deviancy down.” That phrase may be familiar to us superannuated political junkies, but I suspect it has little resonance to most voters.

[metrichead.blogspot.com]

Brendan, I thought Obama had to change some of his positions, like once being in favor of a single-payer health care system and then opposing it when he ran for president. If I'm not mistaken, the Clinton campaign ran a video clip of him making these comments to a local union supportive of his Senate run.

Second, doesn't this article kind of fly in the face of previous arguments you've made about fundamentals? If the economy was doing so well, why didn't Gore blow Bush away in the general election? Aren't you pinning Gore's loss somewhat on the media then, and not on the man himself?

[bnyhan]

Obama did have to change some positions. I think most of those transitions took place during the Senate run under relatively little scrutiny, but I suppose it's an empirical question. As for Gore, the 2000 race is clearly an anomaly. One explanation is the way the media covered him, but probably the most important is that Gore didn't take credit for the economy effectively in his campaign, which resulted in him underperforming the fundamentals.

[Sam]

Obama has flip-flopped on gay marriage, heatlh care, Guantanamo, and more. He gets a pass. Mitt Romney has flip-flopped on abortion. That's it.

[Carolerae]

Don't fret, Obama's uniform during the campaign consisted of Navy Blue suit, crisp white shirt, nice tie.....I noticed he's mingling more neutral basic colors like gray, brown, and black, along with the occasional pinstripe suit. I'm sure he'll get a lot of press about it any day now.

Obama hasn't flip-flopped on Gitmo, the Congress simply denied funding for closure and purchase of a prison in the US. NIMBY won. Also, a great new law that authorizes Congress ONLY to move prisoners to a new location. He can't fund the closure.

Nor gay marriage, he's still "struggling" with that. He said during the campaign that DOMA was unfair and should be repealed.

[Crust]

Gore changed his position on abortion early in his career, but that was long before his 2000 presidential campaign.

But note that Gore did not switch from pro-life to pro-choice as it is often misstated. He changed his position on the public funding of abortion (from opposition to support in some cases; there is one vote that is sometimes considered to be definitively pro-life, but that's not how it was viewed or described at the time).

Really, overall it's remarkable how constant Gore has been in his positions, more than most major pols. That said, while it's certainly not at War on Gore levels, I agree with your argument that Romney probably gets more grief than he deserves.