Obama’s Weakened Challenger

Mitt Romney has lost his defining image before the campaign for president has even begun. Voters scarcely know what he stands for. Making things worse, his Republican primary opponents are delivering ammunition to the Democrats left and right.

Romney is finally free of his rival, Rick Santorum, but Santorum’s socially conservative ideas will still follow him around for a long time. Santorum drove the former Massachusetts governor far to the right during their bitter primary campaign. So far to the right, in fact, that Romney will find it difficult to get out of the corner in which he is now trapped. And one thing is certain: Obama won’t make it any easier for him.

The president is already drumming up support against the super-wealthy former investment banker. The White House has already found its main theme: social fairness vs. social Darwinism. This theme and this juxtaposition will appear and re-appear over the seven long months between now and election day. In the blue corner is Barack Obama, fighting for social equality; in the red corner, the hardhearted capitalist Mitt Romney.

President Obama’s campaign team can draw richly from the Republican primary election well. All the other Republican contenders drew a bead on Romney, some calling him a closet liberal, others saying he was a mere opportunist, while others reviled him as a hardhearted Wall Street banker. And there is little in a political campaign that’s more effective than attacks borrowed directly from the enemy’s own playbook.

Romney’s main problem is that the criticism he gets can be well-documented. As governor of Massachusetts between 2003 and 2007, he enacted health care reforms that were nearly identical to those proposed by Barack Obama in his national reform plan. Romney’s plan also made health insurance mandatory for all — if necessary under threat of a monetary fine for non-participation. Obama’s plan does exactly the same, but on a national scale. That makes Romney’s promise to repeal Obama’s plan if he’s elected very hard to believe.

Romney’s numerous flip-flops are also legendary, whether it’s his stance on immigration, tax reduction, abortion or climate change. It’s a given that politicians will modify their positions over the course of their political careers, but Romney seems to have made flip-flopping a way of life. That reveals a desire to please everyone: the party, the voters and himself.

And that’s the source of Romney’s image problem. It’s impossible to say what he truly believes.

Driven into a corner

When it comes to the question of character — always of paramount importance in U.S. elections — Romney starts the race with a significant disadvantage: his past history as an investment banker. As head of Bain Capital, Romney restructured hundreds of American corporations and, in the process, caused thousands of people to lose their jobs and many companies to go totally belly-up. There are many examples in which Romney chose profits for investors over the well-being of the company to be rehabilitated.

In the primary campaign Romney was therefore branded a “vulture capitalist” by his opponents Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry. When it comes to the subject of social justice, Romney is always on the defensive. Not only must he defend his actions as a businessman who was instrumental in the globalization and deregulation of capital markets, he must also attempt the difficult task of going on the offensive in the debate over tax policy. While Obama pushes for higher taxes on the upper income brackets, Romney is forced to support further cuts. Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether Romney really believes they are justified. But as the candidate of a party that has shifted so far to the right, he hardly has a good escape route. Flip-flopping on the tax issue would be fatal to Romney’s prospects.

If Romney loses the grudging support of the tea party movement, among whose members he’s not overly popular, his candidacy would be finished. It is this dilemma that makes Romney a prisoner like no candidate before him. He knows, as a successful businessman, what he should do — but as the candidate of a party so internally divided, he also has to do what is required of him. Compared to Republicans, the traditionally fractious Democrats currently look like a smoothly homogeneous community. How Romney intends to bring the competing interests of the Republican Party together is something he has yet to explain.

In many respects, Obama failed to fulfill the high expectations people had for his administration. These included his big plans for environmental protection and immigration and the closure of the Guantanamo prison camp. But these issues remain on the agenda for a second Obama term. In the final analysis, people know what to expect from Obama, and that will perhaps make the crucial difference.

Obama represents predictability; Romney is a pig in a poke.