Stevens has drawn criticism for his the-campaign-did-nothing-wrong posture. Stuart Stevens stirs anger on right

Stuart Stevens re-emergence this week after Mitt Romney’s trouncing on Nov. 6 has served to rekindle the longstanding gripes about the Republican strategist from many in the GOP who feared from the get-go that he was the wrong person for the job of electing a new president.

Stevens has drawn criticism for his the-campaign-did-nothing-wrong posture in TV interviews and a Washington Post op-ed piece at a time when the Republican Party is seeking to learn real lessons from the electoral disaster to prevent a rerun in 2016.


In his Washington Post piece, Stevens admitted no major mistakes and instead took aim at a “D.C. green-room class” he insists disliked Romney and he even argued that the former Massachusetts governor’s win among voters making more than $50,000 a year showed the GOP campaign was “doing something right.”

“I certainly don’t think it was the ideas,” Stevens said on CBS “This Morning” when asked why Romney went down to defeat. “I think the ideas carried the day for us. And the success that we had, though it obviously wasn’t enough to win the race, was based on the candidate Mitt Romney, and on his ideas.”

Stevens suggested that while Romney won the ideas battle, it wasn’t enough to overtake the smaller-bore campaign Obama ran.

“They ran very state-specific issues, less of a national campaign,” he said. “That was not why Gov. Romney was running. He wanted to talk about big national issues: debt, entitlement, the future of the country. He wanted to put big issues before the country, and he did that. I think the comparisons of those two was striking. It was striking in the debates.”

He added, “When you look at the numbers in this, there was a sharp divide between those that felt that the President had been successful and those who felt that they weren’t. That’s not uncommon. We saw the same thing in 2004 with the Bush campaign where there was a sharp divide between those that thought that he had done a lousy job and those that thought he had done a very good job. The battle in that campaign was for each campaign to turn out those who thought that each side had done a good job. They were able to turn out those that thought that the President had done a successful job. I think that their messaging spoke to them.”

On Thursday, unlike in his op-ed, Stevens made his first admission of what many critics says was obvious - that the campaign, in fact, could have done better reaching out to key voting groups.

“I think we should have done a better job reaching out to women voters,” Stevens said on “This Morning.” “The governor has a great record on women’s issues. We should have done a better job articulating that record. We should have done a better job reaching out to Hispanic voters. We should have done it earlier, and in a more effective way. And looking forward those are questions for the party. I think we have a very good message there, we just have to do a better job with it.”

But among conservatives in the blogosphere - many of whom never liked the off-beat consultant’s non-ideological style - Stevens’ post-mortems have been greeted by a combination of outrage and disbelief.

GOP strategist Rick Wilson said: “Oh for effs sake. I just read the Stu Stevens piece and my BRAIN IS BURNING WITH FIRE.”

As for Stevens’ admitted mistakes, former Jeb Bush adviser Ana Navaro suggested the Romney campaign should have known they were making them.

“Agree w/Stuart Stevens: Romney campaign was a ‘national movement’. Latinos & women across the nation moved as far as they could from him,” she tweeted.

Even Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post blogger frequently criticized for her fealty to the Romney campaign, turned on Stevens.

“Stevens fails in precisely the way in which the campaign failed: a refusal to acknowledge real and material incompetence by himself and others on the campaign,” Rubin wrote in a scathing blog post on Wednesday, adding: “The closest Stevens comes to admitting any responsibility for a campaign with grossly defective polling, weirdly ineffective ad buying and a get-out-the-vote operation that will forever give Orca whales a bad name is this: ‘In my world, the definition of the better campaign is the one that wins.’”

“Well,” Rubin continued, “that tautology pretty much sums up the attitude during the campaign, in which ‘in his world’ the press was at fault, Obama was at fault, conservatives were at fault, the other pollsters were at fault and foreign policy hawks were at fault but never the Boston team.”

Also hurting his cause: Stevens’ op-ed was brimming with questionable assertions, critics said.

National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru identified an “obvious untruth four sentences in.” In the second paragraph, Stevens argues few of “D.C.’s green-room crowd” thought Romney would win the nomination. Romney was acknowledged as the frontrunner throughout the campaign, even as different conservative candidates took turns leading him in the polls.

HotAir’s pseudonymous AllahPundit took issue with Stevens’ claim that the campaign won the middle class because it won voters making more than $50,000 a year, pointing to exit polls showing 53 percent of voters thought Romney’s policies would help the rich the most, compared to only 34 percent who thought he would help the middle class.

“Even if I’m totally wrong about all this and Stevens is right, what’s his point?” AllahPundit wrote. “Should the GOP take comfort in having won the middle class if it continues to lose in perpetuity because poorer voters are turning out in higher numbers?”

While Stevens emerged from a squabbling gaggle of advisers in 2008 as the person Romney trusted, conservatives never shared that feeling.

Educated at four distinctly un-conservative colleges — Middlebury, Colorado College, UCLA film school and Oxford — Stevens has written books about his travels in Africa and his quest to eat at every restaurant in Europe with at least three Michelin stars, Stevens stood out among GOP consultants, and not always in a way that endeared him to the right. He once told the Baltimore Sun it was “considered a breach of conduct to be sexy” in Washington, according to a New Republic profile of him published during the campaign.

In July, POLITICO reported conservatives were worried about the “minimalist” nature of Stevens’ message, “a conservative, light-on-specifics, first-do-no-harm philosophy that seems to work best at navigating center-right candidates through tough primaries and seldom pushes the candidate out of his or her comfort zone.”

And conservatives never moved past those early worries. “It was Stevens, more than any other Romney advisor, who was blamed for being too slow to trumpet Mitt’s warmth and generosity early in the campaign, when Obama was busy defining him as a Gekko-esque ogre to ruinous effect,” HotAir’s AllahPundit wrote in response to Stevens’ op-ed.

Conservatives were also distrustful of Stevens’ past work for Charlie Crist, the moderate Republican-turned-independent who lost to Sen. Marco Rubio in 2010. Crist is now a pariah within the party.

Stevens faced friendly fire from within the campaign in September, before the first presidential debate, when POLITICO reported he was becoming the “leading staff scapegoat” on the faltering Romney effort. That status hasn’t changed.

“If Stu Stevens’ private advice for Romney was as delusional as this op-ed, no wonder he lost,” Washington Examiner editorial writer Philip Klein wrote on Twitter.