Romney is perfecting the art of the attack but has been light on specifics. Romney not into 'vision thing'

Mitt Romney has made it clear what he’s against.

What he’d be for as president is another question.


The presumptive GOP nominee has some Republicans worried he lacks the “vision thing” that has hurt previous presidential candidates and haunted George H.W. Bush in his quest to succeed Ronald Reagan.

Some GOP officials fear that their nominee for president has so far failed to articulate a clear and compelling plan for the country if he defeats President Barack Obama in November. Instead of framing his ideas in a positive and specific way — like some of his GOP primary challengers — they say Romney must stop solely running a defensive campaign that leaves voters without a clear idea of where he stands.

( See also: 5 times Romney refused to apologize)

“I don’t know what he’ll do on anything,” Club for Growth President Chris Chocola told POLITICO. “And that’s, that’s the concern that people have always had is, you don’t truly understand what Mitt Romney is going to do.”

Chocola clarified: “Whatever he does, it’ll be better than what President Obama would do. And that’s why conservatives will coalesce around his candidacy.”

“At the end of the day, you can’t just be all, you know, anti-Obama,” said former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, whose state is key to Romney’s chances. “It has to be, I think, two parts that and one part here’s the antidote, here’s the vision, here’s the path that I would like to lead America down.”

And GOP strategist Mark McKinnon — who advised former two-term Republican president George W. Bush — said it’s time for Romney to outline his agenda.

“It’s important to establish the problem when you are a challenger because you are asking voters to fire the incumbent. So, Romney has to file his grievances,” McKinnon said. “But at some point he has to show that he has a vision of a better way. He can’t just say ‘The future is bleak, follow me.’ Because no one will.”

From the beginning, Romney’s stump speech has been a mix of syrupy Americana — the much-neglected second verse of “God Bless America” was a staple in early primary states — and promises to repeal Obama’s health care and regulatory policies.

He’s pledged to do “the opposite” of the president on the economy, without explaining in much detail what that means. He has proposed an across the board 20 percent cut in marginal income tax rates.

In the past two weeks, Romney released two TV ads titled “Day One” that give voters a sense of steps President Romney would take on his first day in office such as approving the Keystone XL pipeline, “begin replacing Obamacare with common-sense health care reform” and “ending the era of big government.”

“That’s what a Romney presidency will be like,” says the most recent ad.

Some GOP officials argue that a basic outline of his plans is more than sufficient for Romney at this point in the campaign.

Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, a former National Republican Congressional Committee chairman, said Romney may not need to offer specifics about his plans.

“He’s essentially adopted the Ryan budget,” Cole said, referring to Paul Ryan’s plan to reform Medicare. “Has that been put together in a compelling and direct way? Not yet. But I think it’s awfully early for that.”

Cole said revealing little is part of a strategy, which he endorsed, of outlining few specifics about what Romney would do as president until later in the campaign.

“It will all come in due course. They’ve certainly shown throughout the primary the ability to deliver a message and stay on the message,” he said. “The big thing to me now, from now to the convention, is to avoid any mistakes. If you’re a Republican and you keep it close to the end, you’ve got a good chance to win.”

And Ken Khachigian, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan — vaunted for his rhetorical prowess — said it makes more sense for Romney to keep his ideas vague for as long as possible.

“At the end of the day, this is a political campaign and you conduct it in such a way as to win the election and get in office so you can govern,” Khachigian said. “There are a lot of things you can do in a political campaign that don’t help you at all, that are countervailing to your desire to get elected. Why would you do them?”

“The vision thing” entered the political vernacular when the first Bush ran for election after serving as Reagan’s vice president and was criticized for harping too much on short-term objectives rather than unifying themes.

In Bush 41’s case, he was running for an open White House rather than against an incumbent, so he could have painted with broad strokes on an empty canvass. But he instead ran as a more practical politician.

Romney is perfecting the art of the attack, using the speeches his campaign bills as headliners to slam the Obama administration.

But the GOP standard-bearer has been extraordinarily light on specifics, even on the economy, which he bills as his trademark issue. He touts the fact that he was a successful businessman and knows how to create jobs, but has to be pressed to outline specific ways he will transfer that know-how to the U.S. economy.

In an interview this week with Time’s Mark Halperin, for instance, Romney treated inquires into specifics about about spending cuts as president as a gotcha question.

“Remember, that was what was asked of Chris Christie,” Romney said. “It’s like come on Chris, why won’t you tell us all the things you’re going to change? He’s said, you know what, I’m going to cut back on spending. We’re going to work together with the legislature to find ways that Republicans and Democrats can come together and find ways to reduce spending. And the media kept saying to Chris, come on, give us the details, give us the details, we want to hang you with them. And he said look, my plan is to reduce spending and to get us to a balanced budget.”

Even on issues where Romney is most emphatic — repealing Obama’s health-care reform and striking down the Dodd-Frank financial industry regulation — his rhetoric on the campaign trail has at times been fuzzy.

Take health care. Since May 2011, Romney has said his first act as president will be to grant an executive order issuing waivers to the 50 states from Obama’s health-care overhaul. He’s repeatedly called for the law’s repeal and blamed it for the bulk of the nation’s economic woes.

But like House GOP leaders who, POLITICO reported last week, have begun discussions to preserve some of the more popular aspects of the legislation widely known as “Obamacare,” Romney is also on record favoring parts of the law.

While he doesn’t advertise it from the stump, Romney, in one of his most extensive interviews on the subject during the campaign, told Jay Leno in March that he would, after repealing health-care reform, seek to resurrect aspects of it that protect people with pre-existing conditions.

“Well, people who have been continuously insured, let’s say someone’s had a job for a while but insured, then they get real sick and they happen to lose a job, or change jobs, they find, gosh, I’ve got a pre-existing condition, I can’t get insured,” Romney told the NBC late-night host. “I’d say, ‘No, no, no.’ As long as you’ve been continuously insured, you ought to be able to get insurance going forward. See, you have to take that problem away. You have to make sure the legislation doesn’t allow insurance companies to reject people.”

Romney has likewise called for the repeal of the Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley financial reform laws, but has been vague about what, if anything, he would favor to replace them.

After the $2 billion loss incurred by JPMorgan Chase, Romney further called for “commonsense” regulations, but didn’t detail exactly what mechanisms should be created.

“When I get rid of Obamacare, and I get rid of Dodd-Frank and I get rid of Sarbanes-Oxley, it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to have any law or any regulation,” Romney said March 3 in Ohio. “It means I want to make sure it’s modern, it’s updated, it goes after the bad guys but it also encourages the good guys.”

Romney has proposed broad concepts for what kind of regulatory laws he’d favor without delving into specifics. In his campaign pamphlet, “Believe in America,” he wrote that “some of the concepts in Dodd-Frank have a place.” He said in February that he favors regulating bank derivatives and has repeatedly called for regulations to be modernized, without saying what that means.

As for reviving the economy, Romney’s major campaign plank, Romney is vague on the policies he would implement besides displacing Obama as president.

His campaign points to his 59-point plan for redoing the economy. But the lengthy white paper, to which he wrote only the forward, spends more time outlining problems with Obama policies than bolstering his own.

Romney has also pointed to his private-sector biography — the focus of this week’s attacks and counter-attacks on Bain Capital — as an asset to the campaign, arguing that he is better suited to lead the economy because Obama hasn’t worked in the private-sector.

But some Republicans argue Romney needs to talk about how his business experience ties into his plans for the country before Obama’s forces effectively paint him as a corporate raider, GOP strategist Ed Rollins said.

“He needs to talk in term of a narrative and his own,” Rollins said. “People are going to ask the question, ‘What does the first 180 days of the Romney presidency look like?’”

If Romney continues to focus on Obama without his own vision, he won’t be able to sustain the attacks from Democrats, Rollins added.

“If he just sits there and becomes the punching bag for the Obama team, it will be very difficult for him to win,” Rollins said.

In the end any excitement for Romney’s candidacy or his specific policy proposals may be immaterial, Chocola said.

“I don’t think it matters,” he said. “I don’t think it ever matters. When you’re, if the other guy inspires you, I don’t think Mitt Romney could ever inspire our members as much as Barack Obama has inspired our members. And I’m not sure there is a candidate out there that would have inspired our members, certainly none that ran.”