Romney Will Prove To Be a Feeble Presidential Nominee

GRAND BEND—It is the dead of winter in Canada, but a white-sided cottage on a sandy ridge overlooking Lake Huron will always be a summer place for U.S. presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. It is where he spent his summers at the beach, enjoyed fireworks on Independence Day and watched his handsome, silver-haired father George, then governor of Michigan, swim in the lake.


It all happened in a Canadian cocoon, a tiny, gated community called Beach o’ Pines which hugs the shore near Grand Bend.


The elder Mitt Romney, who died in 1995, jokingly called himself a “Summer Canadian.”


Youngest son Mitt still clings to those memories — and the Canadian property.


Six decades after his father paid $31,900 in 1950 for a 52-metre lakefront lot, Mitt and his siblings still own it, still use it and still keep their telephone number in the local directory under “G. Romney.”


It’s one of several vacation properties Mitt Romney owns. But this one has special significance.


“You can understand why they hold on to it,” says Bob Sharen, a long-time local realtor. “For many families, a cottage is where their happiest memories live.


But let me pose this question. What if the economy is in pretty decent shape by the fall? The creation of 200,000 private-sector jobs in December is nothing to scoff at. In fact, Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution, emailed me Monday morning in response to my question about the unemployment rate in this election year to say: “Based on the growth in the adult population, employment levels in Dec. 2011, and a couple of alternative assumptions about how fast the labor force will grow over the next 10 months, it appears to me than employment growth will have to average 155,000 to 170,000 over the next 10 months to hit” a jobless rate by Election Day of 8 percent. He cautions that the labor force participation rate (LFPR, explained here) could affect that a bit, requiring a somewhat higher number. Fair enough. But Burtless also told me in an earlier conversation that the LFPR rose over the last quarter of 2011, meaning more people participated in the work force and looked for jobs—which in turn means that “yeah, but people are taking themselves out of the labor market” is slowly becoming a smaller and smaller asterisk.


So—170,000 jobs a month? Consider this: We averaged 133,000 jobs per month in 2011, and the year gone by was certainly pretty crappy, especially the first seven or eight months of it. Is it insane to think we’ll average considerably better than that in 2012?


Romney is already a uniquely bad messenger for this particular year for the reasons laid out above. But if by Election Day we’ve been adding that many jobs a month every month for basically a year, Romney’s message will be irrelevant. Oh, he’ll get 47, 48 percent of the vote, because we’re a divided country, and he’ll take back a couple of states Obama picked off because of the singular historical circumstances of 2008. But a majority will not want to change horses, especially when the other horse is carrying Romney’s kind of personal baggage and is promising policies that are warmed over versions of the policies that created the economic crisis in the first place. I have no great confidence in the brilliance of Obama’s political team, but this should not be too hard, even for them, and Mitt can find himself a nice quiet room in La Jolla to go ponder the what-if’s.