Will Romney Win?

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"There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan," President Kennedy observed after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but Mitt Romney's campaign—living in between victory and defeat—has brought with it a thousand kibitzers, offering the kind of free advice that is worth every penny: He must show his human side, he must connect with real people, he must define himself more clearly, he must offer us a compelling vision of why he wants to be president. (Assuming he does not answer, as New York mayoral candidate Abe Beame did in 1965 to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, "Right--What do I say then?")

Lurking beneath the surface of these concerns is a more fundamental one that no amount of repositioning or "messaging" can fix. Put simply, it is that Mitt Romney is ill-equipped to embrace the Republican Party's favorite argument: that its candidate best embodies the values and attributes of the American electorate—or, at least, the part of the country that Sarah Palin called "the Real America."

This strategy goes back decades, and has taken many forms. It was Richard Nixon's argument in his 1946 congressional campaign, when he claimed to stand for "the forgotten American," it was a central theme of his 1968 campaign, when he hailed "the nonshouters, the nondemonstrators," and it was at the heart of his appeal a year later to "the great silent majority."

It was a foundation of George H.W. Bush's 1988 campaign, which managed to define Michael Dukakis as a Harvard-trained elitist, indifferent to the pull of patriotism. "Should public school teachers be required to lead our children in the pledge of allegiance?" Bush asked in his acceptance speech. "My opponent says no—and I say yes," he said, before embarking on a tour of flag factories.

It was at the core of the effort in 2000 to paint Al Gore as a smug, condescending elitist with no faith in the common sense of ordinary Americans. "He trusts the government," George Bush argued. "I trust the people." It was how Republicans wanted the voter to see John Kerry in 2004, as a French-speaking Ivy Leaguer who put Swiss cheese on his Philly cheese steak and wind-surfed.