See Me Squeegee

So we’ve heard Mitt Romney’s comments from Friday:

“No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate.  They know right where I was born and raised”.  Or something to that extent (I could be off a word, but that’s essentially it).  And, naturally, we’ve heard the fallout – MSNBC, HuffPo, BIll Maher, etc. all branding Romney a racist birther.  But here’s where this weekend’s uproar doesn’t even come close to last weekend’s Todd Akin nonsense:

1) It’s hard to be racist when you’re essentially quoting rapper Big Sean (“I give her that D, cause that’s where I was born and raised in…”).

2) In taking that quote out of context, the Democratic media are doing the same exact thing that Fox News did to Obama with “you didn’t build that”.  Romney’s entire statement, in context, makes his joke much more benign.  “I was born at…”, “Ann was born at…”.  He was talking about the fact that Michigan is where he’s born.  And trying to be affable at the same time.  And here’s why THAT should be so easy to understand:

Michigan is a huge opportunity for Romney.  For a few reasons.  It has 16 electoral votes – it’s a big state electorally and it has gone Democratic every election since  Clinton.  It’s arguably his home state, and if you look back at Gore’s greatest mistake (if you acknowledge that he did, in fact, lose) it’s that he couldn’t carry Tennessee.  And Michigan is in play, whereas in 2008 it was as blue as the Great Lakes that surround it.

Here’s why Romney’s comments weren’t dumb or racist, but in fact SMART:

Michigan is a hometown-pride state

I’m from Michigan, and one thing I know as a Michigander is that we love our own.  We listen to more Bob Seger, Eminem, Aretha Franklin, and Kid Rock per capita than any other area of the world.  Ohio, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania can claim to have stadiums almost as big as Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor…but none of those states also sells out an 80,000+ seat stadium an hour away on those same Saturdays.  Michigan people love being from Michigan.  Just look at our car commercials, which run nationally but essentially focus on the theme of Michigan pride.

We’re also not huge fans of outsiders unless they earn our trust.  We still laugh at Matt Millen and Marty Mornhinweg, who in addition to being purely awful at managing a football team rode into town on Harleys talking about how they’d shake things up.  We hated them immediately…especially when Millen continued to live in Pennsylvania and commute.  We ran Rich Rodriguez out of town in large part because “he wasn’t a Michigan Man” – and we’d have done the same to Ohioan Bo Schembechler had he not won us over by beating the Buckeyes and embracing Michigan tradition immediately.  We’re still bitter over the Daimler merger and the arrogance of those Germans.

Mitt Romney has a chance to capitalize on his Michigan roots, but he also has to balance that against being an outsider.  He hasn’t lived in Michigan for 40+ years, but he has a chance to win independents if they identify with him as one of our own.  So what does he go to?  He was born there and went to school there (albeit at Cranbrook, a rich private school most famous for being mocked in a battle rap in 8 Mile).  But then he left, identified more with Massachusetts and Utah and Wall Street, and even publicly stated that the government should let the Detroit automakers fail.

Romney’s only commonality with Michiganders is that he was born there, so if he’s trying to rally some homeboyish spirit, you can’t blame him for going to his and his wife’s roots like that.  He doesn’t understand Michigan – one of his primary campaign ads about “I’m from Michigan” actually showed a family photo of he and his relatives at the New York World’s Fair.  So he has to play up the – ANOTHER – birther angle. His own.

And I’ll tell you this – I won’t vote for Romney and I disagree with a lot of his policies, but even though I know it’s phony and calculated for electoral votes, this Obama-donating registered Democrat likes Romney more for his appeal to his home state.  I’m a sucker for that…I’m about to watch the left-leaning The Newsroom on HBO and I promise that I’ll think about the fact that Jeff Daniels is from Michigan a minimum five times.

So Romney used a Michigan-based event to talk about his Michigan-based birth.  That doesn’t make him racist, especially because…

Romney’s biggest achilles heel in the swing states among independent voters just might be that he can’t connect with normal people.  He tries to connect with the NASCAR-fanatical GOP base by saying that “I don’t follow NASCAR as closely as the most ardent (Harvard word!) fans, but I do have some close friends who own NASCAR teams”.  He uses Ivy League vocabulary and 1%er identification when he’s talking to the people already in his camp.  Polls put him well behind Obama in likability, and for many in the middle that’s what the election comes down to if neither candidate separates well on his vision for the future.

So again back to his comment – Romney is having trouble connecting with people.  And what do people who struggle to connect do?  They identify a friendly face, and make a joke.  “Birth certificates” are funny politically.  Obama himself has joked about it (hilariously so in his White House Correspondents standup routine).  So he took that as an opportunity to connect with friendly faces from his home state.

It reminds me of my buddy Brent from college (loyal readers – you’ll learn more about him).  One night on our way to a party we ran into a group of girls who were visiting campus and had lost their host friends.  So we got to be their hosts, and Brent was thrilled.  Within an hour, I came across him, hammered, talking to one of the girls and trying to find common ground.  He was leaning with most of his body weight against her, spilling a drink, and noting that she was from Farmington Hills and he was from Bloomfield Hills.  So he started talking about streets they must have in common, saying – and this is fully true – “do you know 11 Mile Road? Yeah, me too.  What about 12 Mile Road…”.  He was hopelessly trying to find common ground with another Michigander…and that’s just what Mitt Romney did.

Listen, there are plenty of things not to like about Romney, and with my newfound pulpit-to-the-world I’ll probably discuss many of theme here.  But this comment isn’t one of them.

The fact that the left is up in arms about this comment bothers me.  Anyone with a brain and a pulse can agree that Fox News is awful, and that if it had a bastion of actual journalism going on there it would be the greatest insult to journalistic integrity since before the printing press.  But don’t stoop to their level.  I like Barack Obama because I see him as a uniter, even if that stance has gotten him in trouble politically.  I like him because I love his integrity and his passion for doing what’s right.  This episode?  It’s straight out of the Karl Rove playbook.

If you want to blast Romney’s comments, blast him for the fact that even on friendly turf he came of clumsy trying to connect.  Blast him for the fact that in a state that loves its own, he’s still considered an outsider along the lines of Madonna.  But his comments weren’t racist or off-base.  I disagree with the man as a political candidate, but as a guy trying to make friends in his home state of Michigan, I ain’t got nothing against Mitt’s visit to the mitten.