Three Minor Slips and One Big Difference on the Road to 2008

First, a word in defense of Republican Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, who officially entered the 2008 presidential race this week.

One third of the U.S. electorate admits to pollsters that they will not now vote for a Mormon for president. According to analysts, many voters still associate contemporary Mormons (of whom Romney is one) with the practice of polygamy, which the church banned in 1890. Still, surveys place Romney in the first four of GOP presidential hopefuls.

What makes this interesting is that among them, the three other Republican front-runners — former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Arizona Sen. John McCain — have been married eight times, while Romney is the only one of the quartet still married to his first and only wife.

Nevertheless, Romney's announcement speech was long on abstract nouns (by one count, he used a form of the word "transformation" a dozen times) and short on action verbs. Not good. Innovation and transformation are not words ever used by Ronald Reagan, and they have never made the hair on the back of our neck stand up.

Front-running Democrats had their own verbal missteps. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton has told audiences, "I'm in it to win, and that's what I intend to do." She has added about opposition Republicans: "I'm the one person they're most afraid of. Bill and I know how to beat them and have done (sic) consistently." Campaigns, most especially presidential campaigns, are not about the candidate or campaign tactics. Presidential campaigns, at least the good ones, are about the voters, the country and the future — not about the candidate and tactics.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, in his own post-announcement swing, told an enthusiastic crowd: "We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged. And to (sic) which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted."

He almost immediately and publicly apologized for his slip of the tongue for having unintentionally "diminished the enormous courage and sacrifice (those fallen Americans had) shown."

Obama's announcement speech, given outdoors at the statehouse in Springfield, Ill., in sub-freezing cold to a crowd in excess of 15,000, impressed the French wife of a friend of mine from Uruguay who has lived and worked in the United States since graduating from college some 25 years ago.

His wife, no fan of American politics, was fascinated by the scene of the frostbitten, overwhelmingly white crowd cheering a non-white presidential candidate. She said simply: "This — these white people supporting this young, black man — is what makes the United States different from — and better than — France."

So what does Barack Obama now do to top his announcement tour? Here is one suggestion borrowed from a conversation Robert Kennedy had on the fateful day of the 1968 California presidential primary, in which he would defeat Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy. Kennedy knew that Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had skipped the primaries, was, as Kennedy put it, "running around the country picking up delegates. ... My only chance is to chase Hubert's ass all over the country. Maybe he'll fold."

Kennedy was then following one of the iron rules of political campaigns: Do what your opponent is unable to do. If Humphrey had a speech to give or an appearance scheduled in Denver or Detroit or Des Moines, Kennedy intended to go to the same city on the same day and draw bigger, more enthusiastic crowds than the vice president, and thereby convince Democratic delegates that he would be the stronger nominee.

Today, probably alone of all the declared presidential candidates, Barack Obama could travel the globe, meeting with world leaders and drawing enormous crowds cheering an American political leader. That is something the incumbent president is incapable of doing and something that none of Obama's opponents could match.

More importantly, the receptions he would receive would tell this country that the rest of the world is not anti-American, just furious with the policies and attitude of this administration. It would provide hard evidence that Obama could actually become a uniter and not a divider. Just an idea.

To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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COPYRIGHT 2007 MARK SHIELDS