Romney's role: The HRC of 2012?

For Mitt Romney this December, its beginning to look a lot like Clinton.

Like the great, fallen front-runner of 2008, here is another well-funded, Establishment-blessed, presumptive nominee whose supposedly firm hold on his partys greatest prize seems to be slip-sliding away.

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There are differences to be sure, most centrally that Romney has yet to face a Barack Obama-like, central foe (though Newt Gingrich is now auditioning convincingly for that role) but instead has fought a series of rear-guard actions against a series of candidates-of-the-moment.

But the similarities, particularly to veterans of Hillaryland circa 2008, are remarkable.

*Like Clintons stance on the Iraq war authorization, Romney premised his campaign on an early and crucial decision not to apologize for what some partisans see as a fatal flaw: the health care mandate.

*Like Clinton, Romney has found it almost impossible to play halfway in Iowa, which has emerged as an inevitable test for the frontrunner.

*Like Clinton, Romney has abruptly dropped any pretense to be above the fray, punching hard at Gingrich after the former House speaker raced by him in the polls.

*And most striking of all, Romneys campaign, like Clintons driven by raw political necessity has smashed personal red lines the candidate spent decades erecting, racing to humanize a distant and sometimes awkward politician with tales from his time as a Mormon lay pastor.

Romney has followed the Clinton playbook so closely, her former aides say, youd think she won her partys nomination. Both began their pivots away from the classic tactics of a campaign sitting on a lead in the! same we ek of December, four years apart.

They never planned to go negative in the Hillary campaign because they planned to be winning it, recalled former New York governor David Paterson, an often-deployed Hillary Clinton surrogate. I dont think that the Romney people ever thought that somebody would get up a head of steam like Gingrich and when you go negative you have to plan it. You dont want to go too negative. What happened with Sen. Clinton, when they went negative, it came across as being more personal and more obvious, and here with Romney, yes, it is similar.

In interviews, a half-dozen former Clinton aides said they saw eerie similarities between the trajectory of the late stages of her primary campaign and Romneys.

When the (Des Moines register poll) came out showing Romney in third I actually had a shot of PTSD, said one former Clinton adviser. Four years ago, (the) biggest factor was opposition to Bush - and Obama skillfully managed to paint Hillary as timid on Bush Now (the) biggest thing is hatred of Obama, and Gingrich makes Romney seem timid. Or he seems it himself. So thats why Romney is in the box of being third in Iowa. And counting on a New Hampshire firewall that is shrinking away.

Its the whole arc of the campaign, said another Clinton vet, listing a number of similarities - dubbing themselves the frontrunner (while publicly claiming they werent), topping out with support in the primary, sitting on the lead, playing things cautiously and then, when the lead began to evaporate, moving into overdrive with a likeability tour and a hard negative pivot.