Maybe Mitt Wasn’t Long Term Material
In the National Gallery in Washington hangs one of my favorite
paintings, Gilbert Stuart’s The Skater. Stuart, who is better known for his
“dollar-bill” George Washington, was in London in 1782 when the Scotsman
William Grant, later a Member of Parliament and distinguished jurist and
politician, visited his studio. Grant
apparently observed that the day was better for skating than sitting, so the
two headed off to Hyde Park. Later that
afternoon, they returned to the studio, and Stuart hatched the idea of doing a
standing portrait (unusual in that day).
The resulting portrait, with a young, vigorous, red-from-the-cold-faced
Grant, his arms crossed and looking sideways over his left shoulder, placed on
dull and icy background, jumps off the canvass at you. The
Skater was unsigned, and, a century later, it was exhibited at the Royal
Academy, where there was a debate over its authorship. The
Daily Telegraph attributed it to the English painter George Romney (really,
life does imitate art), but The Art
Journal disagreed “A more graceful and manly figure was surely never
painted by an English artist, and if Gainsborough were that artist this would
be his masterpiece.” Eventually, Stuart
was properly credited.
The other day, I received an email from a friend and reader that
reminded me of The Skater, and set me
to wondering about the gender gap. She
mentioned that she was planning a weekend with an old boyfriend, and I asked if
it were serious. No, she liked him a lot, but “he wasn’t long term
material.”
At that point, I thought it wise not to ask whether he was
“graceful and manly.” I’ve seen the
Cheerios “Shut up Steve” ad and otherwise been happily married for twenty-five
years and generally understand the value of silence. But what she said stuck in
my mind, and after Mitt made his now infamous “gift” remarks, I wondered if
women just had a better sense of what made Mitt Romney tick, and saw something
they didn’t like. Was Barack Obama
better Long Term Material than Mitt Romney?
Larry Sabato, of the University of Virgina’s Center For
Politics, analyzed some of the election results in his November 15, 2012
Crystal Ball. Using New York Times Exit
Polling data, he created a chart showing voting by gender going back to 1972,
when Richard Nixon crushed George McGovern.
The first two election years, 1972 and 1976, shows no appreciable gender
gap. But, with the nomination in 1980 of
Ronald Reagan and the ascendance of the modern conservative movement, men were
persistently and quite strikingly more Republican than women. 2012 marked the 9th consecutive
election that the Democratic candidate did not crack 50% among men, and in only
two elections (Clinton in 1992 and Obama in 2008) did the Democrat even get a
plurality. By contrast, women have decisively
broke Democratic in the last six elections.
In 2012, women supported Obama by 55 to 44, while men went for Romney
52-45.
Why? Perhaps women
are more turned off by the angry edge to contemporary Republican politics. Women
are community builders, and this election, in particular, was ugly, with a lot
of dark undercurrents. The GOP,
apparently confident in their victory, and perhaps looking to lay down markers
for a mandate, spent so much time telling so many people they didn’t want their
support that they might truly have achieved an unwanted success. People believed them. And voted Democratic.
So, when Mitt made his charming assertion to his big donors
that Obama gave “gifts” to buy the election, he was only reinforcing a point
that many Obama supporters already suspected.
Much has been made of Obama’s turnout machine micro-targeting possible
voters, but those people were motivated, in part, because Romney and the GOP
were so open in their disdain. When you
run off a list of all those folk Romney didn’t feel were his kind (mainly,
people less fortunate than him and Latinos) and add in everyone else that the
national Republican party didn’t care for (any woman who wanted a say in procreation,
gays, people who believe in science, etc.) there were, shall we say, a lot of
marketing opportunities.
Perversely, Romney’s post election gaffe is actually a
windfall for the GOP, since it allows party spokesman to quickly and ruthlessly
cut Romney out of the herd. Some of this
is strictly self-protection: while many leading Republicans agree completely
with the substance of Romney’s comments to his high-rolling contributors, they
also recognize that the “class warfare” albatross they tried to hang around Mr.
Obama’s neck just didn’t stick. Some,
however, is pure animus. It is
astounding how few Republicans really like Romney. Long time GOP consultant Ed Rogers, who had
spent his summer and early fall extolling Romney, was quoted in the Washington
Post: “There is no
Romney wing in the party that he needs to address. He never developed an
emotional foothold within the GOP so he can exit the stage anytime and no one
will mourn.”.
Romney’s
comments did, however, clarify for me something I found puzzling from the
beginning of the primaries: Why did Romney run away from his past successes and
his past positions? The moderate Massachusetts Governor and Olympics fixer Mitt
Romney, I thought, would have had the greatest chance of success against
Obama. Why did he tack right so hard,
and so harshly, on so many issues? I
realize that he thought he needed to prove his bona fides, but no one really
believed him anyway, and it just gave him the appearance of inconstancy. Why wasn’t Mitt Mitt?
The
answer, I suppose, was implicit in his “gift” comments to his friends. Mitt was Mitt. He really belives that America is divided up
into two groups; the worthy, meaning people like him and his major
contributors, and the inferior, pretty much everyone else. Ideas and positions, whether they relate to
foreign or domestic policy, are merely things to be packaged (and repackaged)
to win.
After
the Republican Convention I thought that Ann Romney had done a wonderful job of
humanizing her husband, of sending the implicit message that she had done well
with Mitt, that, on top of being Presidential and graceful and manly he was
also “Long Term Material.” And, for a
time, aided by the first debate, the gender gap essentially disappeared in the
polling.
But,
in the end, the electorate, led by women voters, decided otherwise, and
apparently correctly. They knew something was missing, and maybe that was
heart.
Gilbert
Stuart’s subject, William Grant, never married. Perhaps that’s because a
canvass, no matter how vividly painted, is not a substitute for human feelings.
The
same is true with an etch-a-sketch. When
you shake it, all you get is a blank screen.
MM
