It happened again.
Mitt and Ann Romney planned a grand entrance to what was supposed to be a large post-debate rally at the Florence, SC, civic center on Tuesday. The campaign had rented a ballroom for the rally with capacity for at least 1,000, but quickly roped the room off across the middle when few people showed up.
Mitt and his wife Ann were going to drive the campaign bus into the building at 8:30 am and disembark in grand fashion. But the crowd was so thin that they waited until 9 am and then aborted the plan. Here’s the AP’s description:
For half an hour, they delayed, but the crowd didn’t get bigger.
Just over 100 people turned up for an 8:30 a.m. rally here for Mitt Romney, a decision that may have influenced the campaign’s decision to abort a grand entrance for the candidate and his wife, Ann, that involved driving the campaign bus into the building.
Taking the stage, Romney eyed the smaller than usual crowd, which had already been documented by the dozens of reporters on the scene with photos posted to their Twitter feeds, and seemed to offer an explanation for the news media.
“What time is it here? 9:00 a.m. in the morning?” Romney said, eying his watch. “Gosh, this is a work day right?”
How embarrassing. With a solid lead in the national polls and a solid debate performance the night before, he should have been able to turn out more people. Here’s another description from NPR:
Aides had curtained off half the Civic Center ballroom, but the reduced space still seemed too large for the crowd that showed up. Unfazed, Romney stuck to his usual script, looking past the primary to the November race against President Obama. He paints that race in the starkest of terms, calling it a battle for the soul of America.
As I’ve noted before, Michelle Bachmann’s rallies in South Carolina, and her book signing in December, when she was in single digits in the polls, typically attracted 200 to 300 people.
Yes, the GOP will get behind Romney if he is the nominee and odds are he probably will be. But he is going to need more enthusiasm among the rank and file on the ground to beat Obama’s ground game. As I’ve said before, just counting on people’s disdain for Obama isn’t enough to win the presidency. People have to actually like you.
You’ve got to have followers who love you enough to take a day off work to drive the little old ladies to the polls. They have to love you enough to go door-to-door and spend their evenings stuffing your fliers. They have to push you on facebook. OR YOU LOSE.
Obama may be down in public approval, but he has that kind of love from followers on the ground. It’s what you call ground game and it is what Obama excels at. If people in Romney’s own party won’t do more than vote for him, if they don’t like him enough to show up to see the guy who could be the next leader of the free world, he’s in big trouble, no matter what the polls say. How on earth do you sell this man to independents?
And the snippy handling of reporters doesn’t help either. Yes, I know they are seriously biased and completely annoying. But you can’t talk to these people as if they are corporate underlings, because eventually they are going to put you on camera doing it.
Testiness like this on Romney’s part is a recipe for disaster:
As staffers again tried to usher him on his bus, Romney paused to offer a testy response to an NBC reporter’s question about how he came up with a figure he often touts about the number of jobs created by companies he invested in while head of Bain Capital. At Monday night’s debate, he said 120,000 jobs generated by companies Bain backed.
Asked about the figure by NBC’s Peter Alexander as he walked to his bus, Romney stopped dead in his tracks.
“Let’s get the math, alright?” he declared. “Four companies created 120,000 jobs. It’s very simple. Four companies created 120,000: Staples, Bright Horizons, Steel Dynamics, and, uhhh, which one am I missing? Sports Authority … If you look up their 10ks today, you’ll find that they have 120,000 jobs.
When a reporter interrupted to say that total did not include jobs lost during that period—a figure the Romney campaign has downplayed—the candidate got a bit snippy, responding, “Gotta listen to the very end, alright?”
“Those four created about 120,000 jobs. And then all of those businesses that had been well-documented by various people over the years, when I ran in ’94, when I ran last time, when I ran for governor, those that have lost jobs, they end up being a little less than 10,000, those that were losers,” he explained. “So if you took the ones that were losers, and compare with the ones that were — those four, at least — why you end up with something over 100,000.”
It looked as though Romney wanted to continue talking, but his body man interrupted.
“Governor, we’ve gotta go,” he told the candidate.
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