Tip for candidates: Be human.
Running for office? Avoid the dry and wonky. Remember you are dealing with your friends and neighbors.
And if you don’t? You end up like Mitt Romney, trailing a failed president no one likes, but are convinced cares about them.
“Mitt Romney’s electoral trouble with women — more precisely with college-educated women — is real enough. Recent polling has Romney trailing President Obama by 18 points among this group in Ohio, with similar gaps in other battleground states,” The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson writes today.
Is the culprit the Democrats’ insistence the GOP are waging a “War On Women?”
No.
“The media — ever drawn to simple explanations that reinforce their own cultural expectations — have diagnosed Romney’s gender-based electoral weakness as the result of his opposition to the contraceptive mandate. This is both initially plausible and demonstrably false. More than 60 percent of American voters don’t even know Romney’s position on the mandate — a topic they rank near the bottom of their political concerns. And when pressed, a majority of women affirm that religious institutions should be exempted from the mandate…
“…Mainly, women and independents want some reassurance that Republicans give a damn about someone other than Republican primary voters. It is not a high bar. But Romney needs to start somewhere — to pick an issue of justice and equity that he cares about deeply. It could be lowering an unemployment rate that is now more than 40 percent among African American teenagers. Or the improvement of high school dropout factories attended by 38 percent of black students and 33 percent of Latino students in America. There are plenty of sound conservative and free-market reforms that can be applied to improving the lives of the vulnerable.
“A successful presidential candidate must have a compelling economic message. But he must also be able to stand before the nation and say: ‘I will serve all American citizens, whether they support me or not. My conscience, my faith, my view of America requires it. It hurts us all when any are hopeless.’
“One of the best ways to appeal to women — and to humans, for that matter — is to show some humanity.”
