Book review: ‘Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America’ by Dan Balz
By Howell Raines, WashPost, Published: August 2
Howell Raines, a former executive editor of the New York Times, is working on a novel set during the Civil War.
Dan Balz’s history of the 2012 campaign ends with an astonishing scene from a post-election interview with Mitt Romney. When the reporter brings up his infamous “47 percent” remark, Romney blurts, “Actually I didn’t say that.” He then retrieves his iPad and leads Balz, line by line, through an excruciatingly delusional exegesis of the speech that crippled his campaign.
Balz, a fair-minded reporter in the tradition of his Washington Post mentor, the late David Broder, resists the temptation to belabor the obvious. The Republican nominee just didn’t understand, then or now, what happened last fall, particularly voters’ mystifying insistence on verbal precision. Like his father, George, whose Republican presidential candidacy in 1968 flamed out when he said he had been “ ‘brainwashed’ by the generals and others about the Vietnam War,” Mitt Romney is a master of the self-immolating quote. The Republican Party, if it’s lucky, will not see his like again.
Balz argues that the 2012 “collision” between President Obama and Romney set the pattern for future contests in several ways, starting with a nation hatefully and equally divided along socioeconomic and party lines. Moreover, the technological mastery of the Obama team, which caught its opponents flat-footed, has created a radically elevated standard for campaign management that neither party can ignore. Balz also shows how wrong the Republicans are to believe that the problem is not their message. He argues that their veneration of austerity has severed the GOP’s connection with swing voters in the middle class. This suggests that if the party sticks to its balance sheets, the Democrats may achieve a hegemony similar to the Republican ascendancy ushered in by Ronald Reagan’s 1980 landslide. All these points are arranged around the unifying theme that the new American demographics mean disaster for an insistently white party with its base in the Deep South and the Rocky Mountains.
This book is old-fashioned in a good sense. The author likes the close-focus reportage of the “Boys on the Bus” era. But he adds a sure, up-to-date grasp of how new technologies and social media have disrupted the old order. Specific without being tedious, “Collision 2012” is short on windy analysis and long on attributed quotes and statistics.
(More here.)
Howell Raines, a former executive editor of the New York Times, is working on a novel set during the Civil War.
Dan Balz’s history of the 2012 campaign ends with an astonishing scene from a post-election interview with Mitt Romney. When the reporter brings up his infamous “47 percent” remark, Romney blurts, “Actually I didn’t say that.” He then retrieves his iPad and leads Balz, line by line, through an excruciatingly delusional exegesis of the speech that crippled his campaign.
Balz, a fair-minded reporter in the tradition of his Washington Post mentor, the late David Broder, resists the temptation to belabor the obvious. The Republican nominee just didn’t understand, then or now, what happened last fall, particularly voters’ mystifying insistence on verbal precision. Like his father, George, whose Republican presidential candidacy in 1968 flamed out when he said he had been “ ‘brainwashed’ by the generals and others about the Vietnam War,” Mitt Romney is a master of the self-immolating quote. The Republican Party, if it’s lucky, will not see his like again.
Balz argues that the 2012 “collision” between President Obama and Romney set the pattern for future contests in several ways, starting with a nation hatefully and equally divided along socioeconomic and party lines. Moreover, the technological mastery of the Obama team, which caught its opponents flat-footed, has created a radically elevated standard for campaign management that neither party can ignore. Balz also shows how wrong the Republicans are to believe that the problem is not their message. He argues that their veneration of austerity has severed the GOP’s connection with swing voters in the middle class. This suggests that if the party sticks to its balance sheets, the Democrats may achieve a hegemony similar to the Republican ascendancy ushered in by Ronald Reagan’s 1980 landslide. All these points are arranged around the unifying theme that the new American demographics mean disaster for an insistently white party with its base in the Deep South and the Rocky Mountains.
This book is old-fashioned in a good sense. The author likes the close-focus reportage of the “Boys on the Bus” era. But he adds a sure, up-to-date grasp of how new technologies and social media have disrupted the old order. Specific without being tedious, “Collision 2012” is short on windy analysis and long on attributed quotes and statistics.
(More here.)
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