Mitt Romney is in trouble, Scarborough says. The problem with Mitt

Voters who like moderates can’t trust him. Conservatives who are desperate for victory don’t believe him. And the election Republicans should be winning seems to be slipping further from their grasp.

On Saturday night, I sent out a few tweets predicting Mitt Romney’s defeat if he continued his directionless campaign through November. The Huffington Post turned those tweets into an article complete with a screaming headline about my “dark warning” to Republicans.


On Sunday the Wall Street Journal raised similar concerns after Gov. Romney went on “Meet the Press” to embrace parts of Obamacare.

By Monday, Romney reversed his Sunday position while conservative host Laura Ingraham slammed his campaign for its fecklessness. Ingraham argued that if Republicans couldn’t win this year, they should shut the party down.

She’s right.

Barack Obama has sunk America $5 trillion deeper into debt, has enacted the largest stimulus plan ever, pushed through the biggest health care boondoggle in U.S. history and posted trillion-dollar deficits every year of his presidency.

And yet unemployment is still over 8 percent.

Two-thirds of Americans still think their country is headed in the wrong direction.

And Mitt Romney is still losing.

Really???

How can it be that this man who turned around countless businesses, saved the 2002 Olympics and ran Democratic Massachusetts like a pro be the head of such a disastrous campaign?

Who was responsible for burying his moving convention video behind the bumbling bluster of Clint Eastwood?

Who told Mr. Romney to issue a political broadside against the commander in chief the day after a U.S. ambassador was murdered?

And who decided that Romney would use his general election campaign to stand for absolutely nothing? The Wall Street Journal described this ideological listlessness as a “pre-existing decision.” The question conservatives should be asking is whether that strategy was hatched by a misguided consultant or the candidate himself.

Whoever is responsible needs to know that replacing real conservative ideas with a flood of negative 30-second ads is a pathway to defeat.

Mitt Romney is in trouble. Not because of a boring convention or a bloodless speech or a grossly inappropriate press conference, but rather because the man refuses to stick his neck out and take a stand on the critical issues of our time.

Here are just a few:

THE NATIONAL DEBT: The United States of America is racing towards an eventual default. And yet Mitt Romney refuses to lay out a plan to balance the budget before 2040. He doesn’t specify cuts, he doesn’t propose eliminating agencies and he doesn’t explain how his tax cuts will be offset. When it comes to balancing the budget, Mr. Romney has no plan.

MEDICARE: It’s going bankrupt. But all we get from the Romney campaign is an embarrassing 30-second ad that borrows more from Bill Clinton’s shameful “Mediscare” strategy than from Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America campaign. Medicare benefits have to be cut over the next generation. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

DEFENSE SPENDING: The U.S. military-industrial complex is bloated beyond belief, and yet all Mitt Romney can do is promise bigger budgets and longer wars. Today the United States spends more on its military than all other countries combined. This does not make America safer. This puts us deeper in debt and poses a far greater threat to America’s long-term health than Russia and China combined.

Romney’s penchant for one-upmanship on seemingly every foreign policy issue that arises would stretch our military thin and limit our ability to neutralize real threats coming from countries like Iran.

For hand-ringing Republicans who believe it is the duty of every registered member of their party to blindly follow this directionless campaign off the cliff, I would remind you of the warnings I began giving my fellow Republicans during the Bush era. My predictions beginning in 2003 that Big Government Republicanism would eventually cripple the economy and crush the conservative movement enraged party hacks and set off Washington sycophants. Some dimwits on right-wing talk radio actually challenged my conservative bona fides because I dared to challenge George W. Bush’s big spending ways.

I remain convinced that if more conservatives had spoken up earlier during the Age of Bush, the routs Republicans endured in 2006 and 2008 could have been avoided. Nancy Pelosi would have never been speaker and Barack Obama would be working on his fourth autobiography instead of his second term. But Republicans chose instead to shut their mouths, circle the wagons and compromise their values.

The consequences were disastrous. And the lesson is clear: If we want to win the battle of ideas in the long term, we should be willing to face the fact that Mitt Romney is likely to lose — and should, given that he’s neither a true conservative nor a courageous moderate. He’s just an ambitious man. Nothing wrong with that, except when you want to be president. Great leaders combine ambition and ideas and conviction.

Margaret Thatcher was tough and unapologetic about what she believed. Ronald Reagan was tough and unapologetic about what he believed. They won their campaigns, changed their party and transformed their countries because they were conservatives who dared to tell voters they planned to radically transform their governments. They got elected and did just that.

Craven calculation, on the other hand, does not pay off for conservatives. Romney needed to decide long ago who he was: the last of the Rockefeller Republicans (and thus somebody who probably wouldn’t have gotten through Iowa) or a genuine movement conservative with detailed ideas about how to right the country.

Instead, we have a nominee who represents the worst of both worlds. Any swing voter attracted by moderate Republicanism can’t vote for a man who ran away from his core convictions. And conservative voters don’t believe Romney has any core convictions. This has all the makings of a Greek tragedy, all playing out on C-SPAN.

Part of the tragedy for Republicans is that the opportunity is still great.

Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Charlotte exposed him as an intellectually exhausted politician. The man who brought Hope and Change to the Democratic National Convention four years ago exposed himself in Charlotte as a guy who has no new ideas and no clue where he wants to take the country over the next four years. Obama is now reduced to mindlessly repeating the same tired lines he trotted out on the campaign trail in 2008. He had somehow morphed from the political equivalent of a young Elvis rocking Mile High Stadium four years ago to becoming the fat, sweaty singer who haunted Vegas showrooms in the months before his most inglorious expiration in the summer of 1977.

But that aging rock star will win this campaign going away if Romney keeps playing it safe. That is a terrible waste for Republicans, an ominous sign for a country in desperate need of new leadership, and more than enough reason for me to stop bothering to tweet on Saturday nights.

A guest columnist for POLITICO, Joe Scarborough hosts “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and represented Florida’s 1st Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001.