tagg romney. i don t see the romney brand working well at this point in time. that may be right. i suppose we ll get an early test of whether the project is working. i think that the other thing to keep in mind about scott brown is he doesn t want to, after having run in the special election, run in a regular re-election, run in another special election and another regular election. if he gets the governorship he s got it for four years and at this point he s got to be sick of running, running. claire mccaskill ran a ridiculous amount of senate races. if he loses again in a senate race, he s done. this is self-preservation. i would just say whenever we re this sure of something, this far out, that we re often wrong and things happen, candidates better candidates than we think, worse candidates than we think.
a good place with this coming into the general election. i think it s going to be very tough to make an ideological case against him. on that score, could you see the beginnings of a campaign being framed up in his comments last night, where they are edging a bit away from ideology towards the competence argument, where the president of the united states is a nice guy, but he hasn t done the job for you, i can. i think when he stepped over the joke line and delivered it harshly, he is not a natural politician in the way that you saw the president, you know, as he was slow jamming the news. he s not going to be able to do that. he was a businessman making a business case yesterday. may as well have had a power point up there with him, you know, with economic slides. if he can make the business case, the one thread that runs through mitt romney s career, you know, whether it s at the olympics, whether it s at bain, whether it was when he was governor, is achievement and excellence an
candidate and that never really works. so the romney people really need to get back onto a message that is appealing to their, to the republican voters. i m not sure they can do it, because the romney brand is not the brand that conservatives believe in. and that is where santorum has really catapulted and, stayed as active in the race as he has been. jon: well, so much of the anti-romney vote, mary katherine, has been based on timing. people peaked at certain times and, you know, people would peak at good times and newt gingrich seemed to peak right around the time of the iowa caucuses. maybe he could argue that staying in the race, he might get yet see another surge in his popularity and rick santorum tore rum s might fall? he can argue that, the place you would have likely seen that would have been mississippi, alabama, tennessee. tennessee where he came in
what is so striking is his father was a mod ratd who embraced it. mitt romney has been running away from it because of where the republican party is today. is the romney brand in michigan considered a republican brand or moderate brand? it s a little bit of both. in the romney party he s still revered as a name because george was so instrumental in bringing the republican party out of the wilderne wilderness. i was a rockefeller republican at the time. and today and even then, people in the party who were conservative or mistrustful of george romney as the conservative wing of the party has been mistrustful of mitt romney today. let me ask you about the primary campaign going on right
why? well, there was only one judge. he floundered against phil. who was the democratic icon in michigan, as you know. it would have been very hard to beat him. if she won she would probably still be senator today. scott romney was elected statewide, mitt s brother to the university of florida trustees. so the romney name has not done as badly as i think you portrayed a few minutes ago. as you point out, he beat john mccain in the try mare in 2008. is the romney brand a republican brand, a moderate brand, a conservative brand?