Mitt Needs More!

Mitt Romney Needs More Than Moneyâ¿¿A Lot More : The New Yorker

...If November’s electorate were confined to millionaires and billionaires, Romney would be a shoo-in. Unfortunately for him, even the G.O.P.’s best efforts to suppress voter turnout through the introduction of voter I.D. laws and the like won’t prevent many less-wealthy Americans from ambling along to their local polling station and pulling the lever. Which means that the Mittster is also going to have to ingratiate himself with the regular folk, something he’s never been particularly adept at.

Rove and Stuart Stevens, the sometime novelist and bon vivant who is Romney’s campaign manager, may be hoping that they can spend their way to victory, burying President Obama under an avalanche of negative ads, but in their heart of hearts they know they can’t. In today’s politics, money is a necessary condition for success, but it’s by no means sufficient. From Steve Forbes in 1996 to Meg Whitman in 2010 and Rick Perry last year, the political landscape is littered with the detritus of well-funded campaigns that self-destructed because the candidate wasn’t up to it, the opposition was too strong, or the objective conditions were unfavorable...