One of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s selling points during this year’s presidential campaign has been his business acumen. Republican political consultant Mike Murphy writes in the latest TIME that Romney must change his focus for the general election:
The Obama attack ads will pound Romney for doing what every successful business leader from Steve Jobs to Warren Buffett has done: shut down factories that aren’t making it to invest capital in more-productive options with a better chance to grow and prosper and employ more people. By the President’s campaign-ad logic, of course, the only good businessman is one who never closed anything or fired anyone. In the real world of actual economic accomplishment, such a creature does not exist.
But we are not talking about the real world; we’re talking about political ads. Their reality is based solely on the perception they create. The Obama spots are certain to feature workers talking about losing their jobs, and they will undercut–perhaps even erase–Romney’s biography as a job creator. Mitt will have the charts and graphs and facts and figures. The Obama ads will have the sad stories, and they will be effective.
If Romney bets only on biography as his economic message, this is going to be a short race. Presidential elections always tilt forward, not backward. More than a bio, Romney needs a set of bumper-sticker-clear ideas about how he will create jobs. Those proposals must both catch the imagination of the public and win dinner-table arguments across the U.S. by being smart, fresh and worth a try.
