There's a lot of speculation out there about why Mitt Romney's performance in this race is sluggish at best in an election that according to David Brooks should be a "cakewalk" for the GOP. The punditocracy is all a-twitter over nothing fitting the narrative they trot out every four years. No one seems to know why Romney is losing because everyone knows he's broken all his promises and is a big disappointment to voters.
Well, I know why the Romney campaign has been so unsuccessful in its courtship of voters, and it's not because conservatism is being failed by the American people. It's message confusion, plain and simple.
The GOP in general and the Romney/Ryan campaign in particular suffer from what I call "message confusion". This is not just an issue of being a little disorganized or having a tendency to veer off point. It's a fundamental, ground-up flaw in messaging that results in too many peripheral issues taking centre stage.
This is why the Obama campaign has been so successful in painting Romney as an unattractive candidate while remaining vague itself on some of the specifics of the President's agenda. It's why Ann Romney has been so successful in painting her husband as a cold, greedy sonofabitch who is also possibly mentally unstable. At a core level, the GOP lacks clarity of message. It suffers from "message confusion".
If the Republicans and the Romney campaign would simply stop confusing their message with racism, homophobia, misogyny, perpetual war, paranoid know-nothing nativism, religious intolerance and purulent anti-intellectualism and instead focus on their ideological strengths of privatizing and eliminating the social safety net, neutering labor unions, and promoting South American style neo-feudalism while prying into your uterus, Romney and Ryan would surely be cleaning Obama's clock.
Think about it.