As soon as I saw the numbers, I was suspicious. This post on Power Line confirmed them. Polls in 2008 in Ohio showed Barack Obama being up at this point in the race by 15 points, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans by a 35 - 27 margin. Obama took the state by 2.5 points.
But with that aside, I am still not overly-optimistic about Mitt Romney's numbers, even though, as I showed above, they are not as bad as advertised. With everything that has gone in the past three years from high unemployment to the ramming through of a still largely unpopular healthcare law, it just seems like Romney should be up in the polls. Romney has no doubt done better lately (see this speech he gave in Israel), but he is still trying to fight the caricature Obama's team created about Romney, that he only cares about the rich, likes to fire people, and outsources jobs overseas (all charges by the way are false but they are probably still persuasive to the average voter).
This thought led to me to browse through a speech Calvin Coolidge gave in 1925 to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Coolidge, in his time but certainly in much more recent times, has been given the same treatment Romney has only it has been done by historians. To be sure, Coolidge talked about business in many speeches, but he was always careful to talk about in the context of natural rights, or the principles that undergird the American Republic. Here is the key excerpt:
There does not seem to be cause for alarm in the dual relationship of the press to the public, whereby it is on one side a purveyor of information and opinion and on the other side a purely business enterprise. Rather, it is probably that a press which maintains an intimate touch with the business currents of the nation, is likely to be more reliable than it would be if it were a stranger to these influences. After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life. The opposite view was oracularly and poetically set forth in those lines of Goldsmith which everybody repeats, but few really believe: "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay." Excellent poetry, but not a good working philosophy. Goldsmith would have been right, if, in fact, the accumulation of wealth meant the decay of men. It is rare indeed that the men who are accumulating wealth decay. It is only when they cease production, when accumulation stops, that an irreparable decay begins. Wealth is the product of industry, ambition, character and untiring effort. In all experience, the accumulation of wealth means the multiplication of schools, the increase of knowledge, the dissemination of intelligence, the encouragement of science, the broadening of outlook, the expansion of liberties, the widening of culture. Of course, the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence. But we are compelled to recognize it as a means to well-nigh every desirable achievement. So long as wealth is made the means and not the end, we need not greatly fear it. An there never was time when wealth was so generally regarded as a means, or so little regarded as an end, as today (emphasis added).
Romney needs to do a better job in this, making the case constantly that the money made by business is not an end to itself; that no one is arguing for the ultra-individualist position Obama is implicitly arguing against; that the Republican position doesn't entail a simple love of big coporations; that a just government does not take the bread from the mouth of one man to feed another. I don't want to leave the impression that Romney has not done these things, but he could certainly do much better.
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