(CNN) – As this election season unfolds, we are watching an age-old dream in politics go horribly smash. It isn’t good for politics, and it sure isn’t good for the country.

President Franklin Roosevelt helped to fire up the dream during his second term in office. Coming off a massive landslide in 1936, he believed that it would be far better for governing if the Democrats became the liberal party and Republicans the conservative one. In the 1938 congressional elections, he barnstormed across the South trying to purge the Democratic Party of several incumbent conservatives. His efforts backfired — the incumbents won and were sore at FDR — but the dream became a staple of politics.

In 1950, for example, in one of the landmark studies in political science – one still read today by undergraduate majors — some of the best minds of the day argued strongly that the nation would benefit from more ideologically “coherent” parties: that things would be better if Democrats stood firmly for a liberal ideology and Republicans for a conservative one.

That way, people would have clear choices, they would know what they were voting for, and they could count on their party delivering if it were in power. “Shoo out those racially suspect Sunbelt conservatives from Democratic ranks and those lily-livered Northeastern liberals from the GOP. And maybe some of those moderates, too.” So the thinking went.

Well, in recent years, we have seen the dream come true. And guess what? It is producing a mess. As each of the parties has moved toward ideological purity, our politics have become ever more polarized, our governing ever more paralyzed. Extremists increasingly run the show.

This campaign season is pointing toward a rough road ahead after the November elections. Yes, it is true that in selecting a presidential candidate, both parties have chosen men who on the surface seem moderate centrists. But each of the candidates has decided that in order to win, he must first stir up his ideological base.

Would Mitt Romney have endorsed the Paul Ryan budget, a hard line against immigration and a condemnation of Planned Parenthood if he were not trying to prove that he’s a “severe conservative”? Meanwhile, Barack Obama has moved left, pushing taxes on the rich, piling up trillion-dollar deficits and bashing the same Republicans he would have to work with in a second term.

One can see these trends in harsher relief amid campaigns for the Senate and House. Olympia Snowe, a moderate and much-beloved GOP senator from Maine facing her first primary challenge, is retiring because of a lack of bipartisanship and mechanisms to find “common ground.”

Sens. Richard Lugar and Orrin Hatch — both stalwarts of the GOP who have committed apostasy by trying to work across party lines — face primaries this season that imperil their survival: A poll Thursday morning found Lugar down 5 points to a tea party-backed challenger in Indiana, and Hatch failed to secure a 60% supermajority at his party’s convention in Utah, sending his race to a primary. Only two years ago in Utah, another stalwart Republican who had worked with Democrats, Bob Bennett, was deposed by an ideologically purer primary challenger.

In the House, meanwhile, the once-robust cadre of “Blue Dog Democrats” — moderate to conservative members of the liberal party — has been winnowed out, with two more members (Reps. Jason Altmire and Tim Holden of Pennsylvania) defeated in primaries this past Tuesday by opponents from their left flanks.

As of 2010, there were as many as 54 Blue Dogs, but the midterms knocked their caucus down to 26. With retirements and primaries, that number will probably be well below 20 by next January — an effect that further turns Democrats into the party of the left.

Some activists — conservative Grover Norquist among them — argue that over time, this purification will be good for the U.S. But so far, the task of governing has gotten much tougher, and what little trust is left among the parties is evaporating. As the parties become more ideological, it’s easier to demonize the other side and harder to rationalize working with it — both to your colleagues and your constituents. Woe to be you in your next primary if you have consorted with the enemy.

Under heavy pressures for party conformity, legislation by nature becomes a more partisan undertaking. Hard to believe it now, but big programs like Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, or tax and Social Security reform in the 1980s, passed with broad bipartisan support.

Our latest legislative achievements, on the other hand (think health care, the stimulus or Wall Street reform), have been almost entirely driven by one party. More often than not, gridlock and obstruction soon follow. As scholar Bill Galston has wisely noted, it becomes “a zero-sum mentality: if they win, we lose.”

As Galston and others have theorized, all this sniping saps the public’s trust in the government, but it does something equally insidious, too: It saps trust between the parties, completing the vicious cycle and making compromise even tougher.

So it’s crucial to bolster the men and women of courage in politics: the ones who can act as ambassadors between these increasingly dug-in parties and who can kindle that small flame of trust that has almost gone out. Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) and Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and a handful of others, for example, have launched laudable work on this count in the Senate, pulling together small, quiet dinners with legislators from both sides of the aisle who are strong in principles but equally strong in their commitment to moving the ball forward for the country.

Getting by on the little victories can help restore health to the process, too. The Congress coming together on patent reform at the end of 2011, the JOBS Act in early April and (potentially) on extending low interest rates on student loans in coming days may seem like small potatoes, but these compromises can be confidence builders. Like water over a stone, they can slowly but steadily wear away some of the mistrust and acrimony.

Franklin Roosevelt was right on many big things, but on this one, he was dead wrong.

Cambridge, Massachusetts (CNN) – An aggressive public relations offensive by the White House, celebrating the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death, is kicking up a hot political fuss. But are we arguing over the wrong question?

With their eyes clearly locked on the November elections, President Barack Obama and his team are going all out to dramatize his decision-making and success in taking out America’s most wanted.

What they’re doing: Opening up the White House situation room for a presidential interview with NBC, running a television ad by former President Bill Clinton, feeding stories to authors and journalists, encouraging surrogate attacks on Mitt Romney’s courage, even a catchy campaign slogan from Joe Biden — “Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.”

In mock innocence, the White House says they are only responding to news media requests. Yeah, sure.

Is this White House exploitation for political purposes indecorous and unbecoming, as Republicans claim? Of course it is.

President George H.W. Bush set the standard for exemplary conduct when he refused to dance on the Soviet grave after its empire collapsed and directed credit toward the U.S. military when they chased Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

But more often than not, a president looking toward re-election has gone too far the other way, milking foreign adventures for votes and Republicans have been as guilty as Democrats.

One of my vivid memories from early White House days was the way we choreographed Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, and especially his triumphant return, so that his helicopter from Andrews Air Force Base landed on the Capitol lawn and he then strode into the House chamber to report to a joint session of Congress. It was boffo television, and he won re-election in a landslide not long after.

Or think of that “Top Gun” performance by President George W. Bush in 2003 as he landed on an aircraft carrier, stepped out in a flight jacket, and spoke to a prime time audience about Iraq — with that “Mission Accomplished” banner just behind him. Even in my wildest dreams in the White House, I never dreamed of using an aircraft carrier as a prop. Not long after, Bush, too, won re-election. (It was not lost on the son that dad’s approach hadn’t won over voters for re-election.)

So even though Obama’s critics have a valid point about his current PR offensive, they shouldn’t beat him up. The public is a good judge of when a president and his team overplay their hands.

Indeed, it would be far better for Republicans to acknowledge that the president, his advisers and especially the CIA and the Navy SEALs handled bin Laden superbly. Because they did. This was a moment that richly deserves public praise.

If they would acknowledge that achievement, his critics would then have the credibility to raise the more important and serious question: whether the killing of bin Laden and the gradual crushing of al Qaeda as a serious threat to the U.S. has been as transformative as the White House would lead us to believe.

No one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is hanging up “Mission Accomplished” banners, but with elections a half year away, the White House wants us to know that we have a warrior commander in chief at the helm nailing our enemies.

Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.

Serious observers are arguing that in the aftermath of bin Laden’s death, the world may actually have become more dangerous. In Sunday’s Washington Post, columnist David Ignatius persuasively makes the case that we got our man but, as bin Laden hoped, other militant Islamists are now gaining political strength in key countries such as Egypt and Syria.

In an excellent essay in Time on bin Laden’s elimination, Kennedy School scholar Graham Allison argues that as we now focus on Iran producing its first bomb in the coming 12 months, an increasingly unreliable Pakistan could produce 12 in the same time span.

“So as we applaud extraordinary performance in this operation,” concludes Allison, “we are left contemplating a discovery that means we are likely to soon face even more daunting challenges in the days and months ahead.”

In a political campaign filled with too many diversions, these are the challenges we should be arguing about on the bin Laden anniversary.

Read more at: http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/30/opinion/gergen-bin-laden-death/index.html?hpt=op_t1

Posted on Friday April 20, 2012

(CNN) — Space Shuttle Discovery started out as a way to discover what lies beyond us. Its last flight, taken earlier this week, helped to discover what now lies within us.

Piggybacked atop a specially outfitted 747, Discovery made its flyover Tuesday above Washington — soaring over the White House and the Capitol, the Washington Monument and Arlington National Cemetery — en route to Dulles Airport and its new (and final) home, the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center.

All around Washington, people climbed up on rooftops, pulled off to the side of the road or gathered anywhere with a clear view to watch the shuttle’s parting journey. The Washington Post reported tens of thousands on the Mall alone.

The tone of the onlookers — reported on CNN.com and elsewhere — varied, but two important emotions jumped out.

The first was nostalgia, even sadness. There was a sense that the retirement of the shuttle symbolized the trajectory of the country that sent her into space these past 30 years. CNN iReporter Danny Mills called the flyover “really bittersweet,” while an online commenter wrote that, while watching: “Tears streamed down my face because this final flight represents the death of the space program. For me, it proves that America took a ‘giant leap’ to becoming a third-rate has-been.”

That dejection is understandable. America, for the first time in three decades, does not have in place a program to send its astronauts into space. We pay the Russians for the service, with plans for a public-private partnership several years away to create new American spacecraft.

Space is not the only — or most important — frontier on which we’re currently competing, but things are not going terrifically well on some of the others, either.
Our economy’s stumbles and fitful starts in the past few years need no spelling out, and most projections have China’s economy overtaking ours as the world’s largest by 2030. The Economist recently projected that China’s military spending could surpass ours by 2035.

Meanwhile, we are so failing to educate our children that a recent commission, co-chaired by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former New York City education chancellor Joel Klein, concluded that the poor state of K-12 imperils not just our economy but our national security.

But there was a second, more hopeful emotion in the reactions to the Discovery’s final flight — and that was pride. Pride at what the country had accomplished in the miracle of space flight; pride in what America can still do.

One woman told The Washington Post that the experience might propel her 9-year-old son to become an astronaut. Another wrote on CNN.com, “Now let’s move on to bigger and better things so that our grandchildren can say the same about us in 50 years!” A third offered: “I hope we don’t become a nation of nondreamers.”

The spirit of the day called to mind a scene in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” when Jimmy Stewart first arrives in town and can’t keep his eyes off the city’s monuments and institutions. Like the onlookers pouring out of their offices or pulling off the road, he slips his handlers, pulled in by the draw of a sight-seeing bus headed for the Lincoln Memorial.

Perhaps part of Discovery’s draw — besides the sheer awe of a machine that had brought men and women to outer space and back — was its timely reminder that there are still things we can do together as Americans.

The philosopher Michael Sandel has an important new essay in The Atlantic in which he argues that “we live in a time when almost anything can be bought and sold,” in which we run the majority of our society like a marketplace. A corollary to this idea is that, as we privatize various projects, there are very few big things we do together as a nation anymore.

Sure, we still have to show up for jury duty and pay taxes, but increasingly our larger national efforts — building infrastructure, transforming our schools, developing complex new technologies or conquering climate change — drift along or are farmed out to private interests. Our wars are fought by an elite but all-volunteer military (“the forgotten one percent”), supplemented by defense contractors and other private companies.

If Discovery’s last ride rekindled our pride in what we can accomplish together as citizens in a vibrant country, it should also rekindle our call for leaders who can reunite us in tackling those big challenges.

At our Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, we conduct a yearly poll, “The National Leadership Index,” to take the pulse on America’s judgment of its leaders.

This past year’s brought us a near record-low. Only 21% of those surveyed believe that our country’s leaders are effective and do a good job, while 77% believe we have a leadership crisis in the country today and that, unless we get better leaders, we will decline as a nation. As Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn puts it: “At this critical inflection point for the country … people are parched for leaders who can lay out a credible mission.”

A half-century ago this year, a young president visited Rice University in Texas to deliver a major address on his plan to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. President John F. Kennedy said this:
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

As the reactions from folks watching the shuttle’s last voyage on Tuesday attest, that spirit of discovery still lies within us here in America. But the search goes on for leaders who will ensure it doesn’t perish from the Earth.

Read more at: http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/20/opinion/zuckerman-gergen-discovery/index.html?hpt=op_t1

Where: Elon University School of Law

Other: onference registration is open to judges, law firm partners, higher education administrators, law professors and corporate counsel who have a commitment to developing the next generation of lawyer-leaders.

Learn more about it at: http://www.elon.edu/e-web/law/leadership/conference/participantsgergen.xhtml

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/07/opinion/gergen-romney-grind/index.html

(CNN) – Some footnotes to Super Tuesday after a night that never ended:

For years, Buckeye teams methodically ground out victories with an offense affectionately called “three yards and a cloud of dust.” Few long passes or acrobatics — just keep slogging and adding a few more points on the board.

In politics, it is now Romney who has embraced the Woody Hayes offense. Time and again, he wins when he has to — New Hampshire, Florida, Michigan, Ohio — but he never does it with decisive flair. Each victory is achieved methodically and tactically, relying on a superior organization and lots of money. As he said after Michigan, he doesn’t win by a lot but he wins by enough.

And so, he comes out of Super Tuesday continuing his long march toward the nomination. It isn’t pretty, but he has won more states and more delegates than the rest of the field combined. While one can still imagine him losing, it is difficult to see any one of his rivals winning.

It has been clear all along that he has trouble connecting with most folks. Some politicians are naturals (think Bill Clinton). Romney is among the “un-naturals” — people who have scored successes in fields like business but can’t easily transfer those skills into politics (think Lee Iacocca).

But there are a host of other factors bedeviling him, too. One of the most powerful is that the GOP is no longer his father’s party. Moderate conservatives seeking the party’s nomination now face purity tests that force them to move far right or stay off the field. It is not clear whether a Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Jerry Ford or George H.W. Bush could be nominated by today’s Republicans. Even Ronald Reagan would be heavily attacked over his California record on taxes and abortion.

Throw in the fact that Romney is Mormon and one can see why the hills are steep for him.

Then, too, the rules have changed for the race. As Elaine Kamarck of the Kennedy School points out in the Wall Street Journal today, GOP leaders intentionally made this a long, long race: By this time four years ago, 80% of the GOP delegates had been selected versus 13% this year. (Will that decision go down as one of the worst?)

Ironically, the way the Supreme Court opened the door to Super PACs has first bitten the Republicans, not the Democrats. Would Newt Gingrich still be in the race without Sheldon Adelson? Rick Santorum without Foster Friess? One wonders if billionaires will soon treat politicians like race horses — choose a promising one, train him up and finance his run for the roses.

On Super Tuesday, Romney also had some bad luck. For reasons that are not entirely clear, major metropolitan areas in Ohio where Romney was strong — Cincinnati and Cleveland are key examples — tallied their votes very late in the evening while rural areas where Santorum was strong sent their results in early.

As a result, millions of Americans went to bed thinking that Santorum had probably won Ohio. Just as importantly, with Santorum ahead, the media narrative during prime time focused to a considerable degree on Romney’s weaknesses as a candidate. Only after midnight when Romney pulled ahead in Ohio did the story line change. (Point of pride for CNNers — CNN got there first with Romney’s victory because it had reporters on the ground like Dana Bash.) Think how different interpretations would have been last night had Ohio’s big cities reported early.

In a parallel way, the order of voting nationwide has helped Santorum and Gingrich. Think how much more powerful Romney would seem if New York and California had voted early on in the primary process.

The first term Republican threw himself into the Ohio fight and deserves enormous credit for the 20-point win Romney racked up in Hamilton County, home to Cincinnati.

Portman is not well-known yet around the country but he commands widespread respect within Republican circles as a highly capable and promising leader. A former Congressman from Cincinnati, he was tapped by President George W. Bush to serve as both his trade representative and budget director.

If nominated, Romney may well need Portman on the ticket to win Ohio, a crucial state. But then again, he may need Sen. Marco Rubio on the ticket to wrap up Florida and enhance his appeal to Hispanics and others. Maybe he will want two running mates.

Three times in recent weeks, Obama has intervened — giving a rousing talk to the UAW on the day of the Michigan primary, calling Sandra Fluke during the Rush Limbaugh controversy, and holding a rare press conference on Super Tuesday.

While partisans differ on how effective Obama was (I thought on balance, Obama helped himself), it is clear that the president will be a nimble opponent for any Republican. For Mitt Romney, coming out of Ohio, it is also clear that he may need more than three yards and a cloud of dust to beat Obama. If he grinds his way to the nomination, Romney will be moving up from college ball to the NFL.

Video: Michael Zuckerman at Morning Prayers

Michael Zuckerman

Remarks at Morning Prayers

Memorial Church, Harvard University

Saturday, February 18, 2012

“Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10)

Good morning, and thank you for being here on, of all mornings, a Saturday morning. When I was still an undergraduate at the College, my attendance record at Saturday Morning Prayers was not exactly something to write home about. (Unless you were writing home to say, “Dear Mrs. Zuckerman, your son needs to start waking up earlier than noon on Saturdays, he’s become a real degenerate.”) So, as we pray this morning, I am thrilled to see each of you, and to be reminded that, through the mercy of God, we occasionally are let off the hook from what Luke 6:38 promises, and find that the measure we give is actually exceeded by the measure we get back.

I am also blessed, this morning, to have a few old friends visiting here in the pews and so, even though they were kind enough to wake up early this morning and come join in this 375-year-old tradition of worship, I am going to take this opportunity to go ahead and embarrass them and pray a little bit about friendship.

My text this morning comes from the Old Testament, from the Book of Ecclesiastes:

“Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10)

I chose this text because it calls to mind a story that’s extremely important to me.

The story is my own story, and it begins with a 13-year-old kid who’s pretty angry at the world, who’s lost his father just a year before and who has started spending his time outside of school in less than productive ways. Actually, you’d have to call them criminal ways.

And eventually, without getting into any of the details here in a place of worship, it leads to this 13-year-old kid having to do community service after school. And this kid is still pretty angry at the world, he’s not so optimistic about the future, he feels knocked down and he feels knocked out.

But this kid has a friend – actually he has a few friends. Thanks to one of the friends – and the friend’s mom – he gets set up with this terrific community service partnership between two local organizations, a program that’s going to have him doing art projects and mentoring every week with homeless children who live in the strip motels on Route 1 outside Trenton, NJ.

And another friend – who didn’t get in trouble and didn’t have to do the community service in the first place – tells him, completely unprompted, that he’s going to start volunteering alongside him, that he’s going to accompany him every week, to spend hours with these younger kids on these art projects, just so he doesn’t have to go it alone.

And that’s what the friend does, and every week they meet up and walk into town together, where they’re doing the art projects with the homeless children, and before long it’s the highlight of the week and something they find themselves looking forward to.

And actually those friends are in the pews this morning – Eddie, whose mom helped found the community service program, and Dimitri who volunteered alongside every week – and that experience ends up being such a transformational one for everyone involved – including the 13-year-old kid, who I can now start referring to as myself, because this is the point in the story where I start to fully recognize him again – that it lifted all of us up. It lifted me up, lifted my friend up, hopefully lifted the kids living in the motels up, and lifted us all up, I think, to be helping lift each other up.

And what this story has to do with faith is simply this:

That one of the great mysteries of faith – one of the great joys of faith for many of us here who love the life of the mind – is the effort to try to conceive of the inconceivable, to try to comprehend the incomprehensible, to try to summon up the unsummonable, which is the majesty of God Almighty.

And although we know that we, in this City of Man, are still restricted to seeing only through a glass darkly, for my money, when we think of what God is, of what it is we can do to be most like God, it’s not to try to seize the commanding heights of societal power and influence, or to try to decipher the formulas of the cosmos, or to try to engineer the scientific mechanisms of life and death.

In all those things, we are pretty poor imitators of the God who made this universe with its crashing waves and roaring winds and animals that graze the fields and man himself, whom God is so mindful of (Psalm 8:4) for reasons that pass understanding.

For my money, it is these simple acts of friendship, this walking alongside one another that we hear of in Ecclesiastes, in which we most approach the true majesty of God, in which we come closest to being vessels of His grace, just as we know, from Exodus, that “The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11).

And we hear the same, from our dearly beloved brother the Rev. Peter Gomes, who responded to all those who asked, “Where is God?” by saying that “God is where God is always – by the side of those who need him. He is not in front to lead, not behind to push, not above to protect, but beside us to get us through: ‘Beside us to guide us / Our God with us joining.’”

So as we go forth from here on this Saturday morning, let us go forth full of thanks for those who have walked beside us; let us go forth full of hope for a world that God blesses with His and each other’s companionship; and let us go forth full of joy to be able walk alongside those we meet who, just before we come upon them, still walk alone.

And so let us pray:

Dear Lord our God, our rock and our redeemer,

Our friend in troubled and still waters alike,

Continue to stand beside us and guide us,

That we may lift up our brothers and sisters,

As you lift each of us up, in our own times of falling.

Amen.

* * *

Michael Zuckerman serves as David Gergen’s research assistant. 

Where: Great Hall of the State House, Boston, MA

Other: This event is free and open to all LCC members. Chartered buses will be available from sites around the state. The State House is fully accessible.

Learn more about it at: http://www.massculturalcouncil.org/news/lcc_2012_event.asp

For more than half a year, super PACs and other third-party advertisers have aired misleading attacks against Republican Massachusetts incumbent Sen. Scott Brown and his probable Democratic opponent, professor Elizabeth Warren. (You can see a sample of these ads at FlackCheck.org.).

Read more at: http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/29/opinion/jamieson-tame-super-pacs/index.html

Charleston, South Carolina (CNN) — The cloak of inevitability that Mitt Romney has been wearing — on again, off again — is suddenly and dramatically off again. Just as he seemed poised to wrap up the GOP nomination in South Carolina, Romney has been hit with a triple dose of bad news:

• Newt Gingrich has been surging among South Carolina voters. His strong debate performance Monday night, coupled with Romney’s clumsy responses on his taxes, allowed Gingrich to move up swiftly. This week’s CNN/Time/ORC International poll showed Gingrich cutting the Romney lead, and three polls Thursday morning have Gingrich modestly ahead in the state.

• Rick Perry, in bowing out Thursday, gave a full-throated endorsement of Gingrich. Perry commanded little support in South Carolina, but his departure 48 hours before voting starts will inject fresh energy into the Gingrich campaign.

• Iowa has now released its final count from its caucuses showing that lo and behold, Rick Santorum has the most votes — only a 34-vote difference but enough to give Santorum fresh bragging rights. (Many will always wonder how the trajectory might have changed had Santorum been declared the victor on caucus night.)

Who could have imagined this a week ago? We now have a race on our hands in South Carolina, and CNN’s debate Thursday night in Charleston — the last forum before voting starts — has become a crucial moment.

South Carolina, of course, is only one primary in a long season, so — even if their candidate were to lose here — the Romney forces remain confident about Florida 10 days later and other races to come. By any measure, they are much better prepared for the long haul than every other campaign, which usually spells ultimate victory. And it remains to be seen what Marianne Gingrich, the speaker’s second wife, will revealthat could damage her ex-husband’s candidacy in her interview Thursday on ABC’s “Nightline.”

Still, one senses yet another shift in the political landscape. It’s not just that in the past eight elections (all the way back to Ronald Reagan in 1980), the winner of the South Carolina primary has gone on to become the nominee of the Republican Party. A loss here would carry heavy symbolism for Romney.

But the bigger point is that Romney’s strongest calling card with GOP voters — his electability — has become somewhat diminished of late. A little-noticed Pew poll this week found that over the course of the recent campaign (November to now), Romney’s favorability rating among all registered voters has slipped from 38% to 33% and his overall favorable/unfavorable rating is 33%-47%. In the same survey, President Barack Obama has moved to a 5-point lead over Romney in a head-to-head match, 50%-45%.

The Romney team can point out that in the 2008 campaign, all three top competitors — Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain — saw some slippage in their favorability ratings over the course of the primaries. Goes with the territory, they will say. Then, too, other polls this year show Romney in a dead heat with Obama and running ahead in several key swing states.

Still, heading into this campaign cycle, political pros know that the Obama team has yet to unleash the full fury of its attacks against Romney — attacks they know how to do better than anyone else these days. And it is apparent that in the way the national conversation is changing, the Obama folks — with help from liberal friends in the media — are steering the debate away from jobs toward income inequality.

As nominee, Romney will command much higher ground if the election turns on how to create the most jobs than if it becomes a slugfest over fairness. Watching Romney squirm these past days over his tax returns, Democrats are increasingly confident about trend lines. That’s why it is so important for Romney to find better ways to address his taxes and wealth, starting Thursday night.

The bottom line is that Romney still has the lead position in the race for the Republican nomination. The polls also suggest that he will win South Carolina — that just as McCain won South Carolina in 2008 when avid conservatives in 2008 split their vote between Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson, so now Romney can successfully play divide and conquer against Gingrich and Santorum.

But the momentum here seems to be shifting, and if Romney is bloodied in South Carolina — where he once had a 20-point lead — we are in for a longer, more unpredictable race. Tune in Thursday night!

Read more at: http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/19/opinion/gergen-romney/index.html

(CNN) – Visiting New Hampshire, it appears that Mitt Romney is well poised to sweep through the Granite State, and probably South Carolina and Florida, on toward the nomination. But the campaign here suggests that, as he looks toward November, darkish clouds loom on the horizon.

New Hampshire voters love to surprise, and perhaps they will again this time. Some 37% remain undecided (according to a WMUR/UNHpoll released Friday), and one can never be certain how many independents will vote nor whom they will support — especially with Romney making several unforced errors in the past 48 hours.

Still, he has been a steady front-runner for months: His Massachusetts background makes him nearly a favorite son for many New Hampshire Republicans, and far more than in Iowa, his message of job creation resonates in this hard-hit state. He is almost cruising to victory.

So, the first question the press is asking is not whether he will win but by how much. If his vote total is in the mid-30s or better and he wins by double digits, the media will call it a major victory; if above 40, he will “crush.” Only if he goes below 30, and that seems unlikely, will be he be seriously hurt.

The related question is how others will stack up behind him. If there has been real news so far in New Hampshire, it is the lackluster performance of Rick Santorum. Typically, a candidate who came out of nowhere in Iowa to nearly win (what a difference those eight votes have made) would have built on that momentum in the first primary state. But Santorum appears to have plateaued and may even be fading.

That means the conservatives still don’t have a darling to rally behind in South Carolina, leaving Romney once again to divide and conquer. Meanwhile, the Jon Huntsman team hopes that he can break through to second in New Hampshire or at least be in a tight cluster with Ron Paul. That would give him a chance to compete elsewhere, especially in Florida (where he first planned to have his headquarters).

But the fact that no one is yet challenging Romney for the brass ring this Tuesday means he is closing in rapidly on the nomination. Only one Republican (President Ford in 1976) has ever won back-to-back in Iowa and New Hampshire, and never before has a nonincumbent Republican done it. With a victory in South Carolina, Romney would be 3-0. With most of his rivals already forced to scrimp and save, who could raise enough money to take him on after that?

Even so, one cannot escape the sense in New Hampshire that if he is the nominee, Romney and his team still have serious work to do if they want to defeat President Obama. That was instantly apparent Sunday afternoon when Romney appeared with Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey at a rally in Exeter, New Hampshire, drawing one of the biggest crowds of his campaign.

While supportive of their guy, the crowd seemed relatively quiet, almost subdued, a sharp contrast to the electric rallies that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama held four years ago. Granted, the Democrats were locked in a much closer race. But several veterans of New Hampshire politics say that the energy isn’t flowing as it has in years past.

That is consistent with a Pew poll announced Monday that found only 51% of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters nationwide rating this year’s candidates as excellent or good, compared to 68% four years ago (and compared to 78% on the Democratic side in 2008).

Another striking (and related) impression on Sunday came with the speaking lineup. Normally, as a special guest, Christie would have taken the microphone first, warmed up the crowd, and then introduced the candidate, who would turn up the juice and send people marching into the night.

Instead, Romney spoke first, delivering a fairly boilerplate homily before handing off to Christie, who delivered a barn-burner (listening, one got the sense the GOP convention keynote may be in his future).

Wisely, the Romney campaign prevented the narrative from becoming “Romney opens for Christie” by asking Ann Romney to close out the evening, which she did so with warmth and grace. Still, the odd sequencing begged the question that has been nagging the former Massachusetts governor for what feels like centuries now: Can he connect with voters strongly enough to win a general election?

The other issue that arises for Romney is whether he can unite his party behind him. We have seen for some time that this is a fractured, motley field of candidates, but, listening to different campaigns (and their voters), it seems clear that, just as importantly, they may well represent a philosophically fracturing party.

More than one united front, the Grand Old Party right now looks more like a group in the midst of a heated battle between at least three camps: the old-line, more moderate “Establishment” Republicans (a group that clearly favors Romney), the growing libertarian movement (exemplified by chief hero Ron Paul), and the more communitarian, religious phalanx of social conservatives (who propelled Santorum to near-victory in Iowa).

What casts the fissures in the party in such sharp relief is how little fondness these groups seem to have for one another: Not only is it easy to imagine a typical Romney voter looking down his nose at a Ron Paul candidacy, but evangelical voters are exactly the type Romney has so singularly struggled with (as Ron Brownstein notes, he even lost ground with them from 2008 to 2012, judging from exit polls), while Paul and Santorum themselves have appearedsubstantially more at odds with one another in the debates than either has been with Romney.

By contrast, the 2008 election on the Democratic side, while hard-fought between Clinton and Obama, was still a rivalry between two groups of voters who, in terms of policy, ultimately agreed on a great deal. Despite the fact that common wisdom deems Democrats the more diverse coalition, there was little doubt that the party’s voters would stand firmly behind whichever nominee was crowned.

As with the 2008 race for the Democrats, Romney’s biggest advantage this cycle is that the various voters punching ballots in the GOP primaries do have one thing in common: They desperately want a new president in the White House. For many evangelicals and libertarians, opposition to Obama will ultimately outweigh distaste for Romney, if he wins the nomination — so he is likely to be competitive as the nominee no matter what. But winning the presidency (especially against a campaigner as able as Obama, who has been shoring up his own base of late) requires generating enthusiasm from voters, and governing well requires generating even more.

Which underscores a serious concern that Romney and the president should share: that either of them, winning in a squeaker, would be hard-pressed to accomplish much with the country, and their parties, as divided as they are. Both parties talk about a country in need of a level of policy change that would traditionally require overwhelming support from voters, but nothing approaching a mandate is in sight.

So even if Romney is on the glide path to the nomination, he still has a lot more work to do. If he wants to challenge Obama and become a successful president, he would need to find a way to unite his ideologically fraying party, and he’s definitely going to need to summon enough fire so that Chris Christie can start opening for him.

Read more at: http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/10/opinion/gergen-romney-road-ahead/index.html