The Romney gaffes

World Spins Madly On – The Weepies

Alright, so we’re a little bit removed from the blowback surrounding a series of very stupid Romney comments. While I can’t help but feel just a little bit of glee about these things, I do want to talk a little bit about whether this stuff really matters. Unsurprisingly, I think that the effect is both understated and overstated.

It’s overstated in ways that are pretty obvious. This kind of thing doesn’t reveal who the ‘real’ Romney is. It doesn’t give us a window into his soul, nor does it clarify what the Romney administration would look like. Taken in a loose fashion, there is something to this argument, just not a whole lot. That is: it is potentially relevant to notice that Romney reacted pretty rashly to the attacks in northern Africa, and prioritized politics in that response.

But those are actually pretty insignificant issues. Romney isn’t occupying any office right now. He doesn’t have any REAL responsibility to deal with those issues. It doesn’t tell me much about what he would do if he faced a crisis while in office. We’re currently in the midst of an election; of course he prioritized politics. ANY response would have prioritized politics. The only thing we really have to complain about is that he did a poor job of figuring out what the political effect would be. Which does matter, just not that much.

As for the 47% comments, they mostly don’t matter insofar as they are just a really bad phrasing for something that we pretty much already knew. To wit: Romney isn’t particularly interested in improving the quality of life for the poor and middle class—and he knows that his agenda won’t be targeted at those goals. Which is not to say that he ‘doesn’t care about those people.’ Obviously he wants their votes and doesn’t believe that if he were president it would be terrible for those people. He just doesn’t prioritize their problems.

But again, we already knew this. That he has now stated it in such a damaging way is important to the extent that it helps the Obama campaign make this argument. And it certainly helps that it’s a clandestine video, where the blue team can spin it as revealing his true hidden desires.

But in most cases, that’s just about the limit of the importance of a gaffe. It needs to allow the opposing campaign to make an argument they were already trying to make in a more damaging fashion to really have much lasting effect.

These two events certainly provide some of that, and if Romney does end up losing they will probably feature prominently in the postmortem. But I think they only really matter because other things were already going against him. And I urge caution to my liberal friends who see these gaffes as putting a nail in the coffin of the Romney campaign. Don’t get me wrong, I am certainly now more optimistic about Obama winning than I was a month ago. But this is by no means settled, and it remains quite close.

I’d say there’s about a one-third chance of the gap widening, and this turning into a secure and easy Obama win. But if that doesn’t happen, we could end up very similar to the 2000 and 2004 results, where it comes down to just a few votes in a few states. And at that point it’s anyone’s game.