We’ve discussed the problems with Democrat Andrew Romanoff’s campaign for U.S. Senate on several occasions in this space. We’ve long said that Romanoff’s biggest problem is a lack of fundraising that will enable him to go up on TV and counteract the millions that Sen. Michael Bennet has socked away for ads of his own.
But even if Romanoff was able to raise a significant amount of money, we’re starting to wonder if would even matter because of his campaign’s apparent inability to find a message that works and a refusal to accept when a strategy has failed. Today The Colorado Statesman takes another look at a story that they first reported a few weeks ago:
U.S. Senate primary candidate Andrew Romanoff’s campaign doubled down this week on charges that incumbent Michael Bennet failed to protect college students from predatory lenders.
In a stinging rebuttal signed by Romanoff communications director Roy Teicher and published in last week’s Colorado Statesman, the Democratic challenger accused The Statesman of falling for “a mosaic of near-facts, smoothly and cynically crafted by the Bennet campaign” to divert attention from an attack Romanoff unleashed last month in Colorado Springs at the second debate between the two candidates.
“Michael, you know, proprietary colleges are gouging students with predatory loans,” Romanoff said to Bennet during the final minutes of the debate April 23. “One of those colleges, Westwood, is even facing, now, two class-action lawsuits for fraud. Your committee, the Senate banking committee, had a chance to protect students from that kind of financial abuse, and you did nothing. You did take $2,400 from Westwood College three days before that bill came to a committee. My question is, is that just the way Washington works?”
Other diarists have written before about this angle of attack when it first popped up, but we hadn’t paid much attention to it until now. What seemed like a failed attack on Bennet — no harm done, every campaign takes shots that don’t hit home — has become a weird vendetta against The Statesman. And it’s a vendetta about something that is way too complicated and minute to really hurt Bennet anyway. Romanoff’s camp tried to make a big controversy out of this, but it didn’t work (for a number of reasons, including the fact that it doesn’t appear that the charge is accurate). But rather than moving on, Romanoff’s spokesman fired off an angry Op-Ed at The Statesman and the campaign keeps clinging to this like the last life raft on a sinking ship.
Here’s just a few of the problems with what the Romanoff camp is doing right now, and how it all comes back to their core problems from day one:
1. It’s not at all clear, as Ernest Luning has reported in the Statesman on two separate occasions now, that the charges coming from Romanoff are even accurate. As the headline from Luning’s April 30 story summarized, “Romanoff fires ‘Westwood bullet’ at Bennet, but record suggests it’s a dud.” Luning was apparently compelled to revisit the story, and here’s what he wrote in today’s edition:
A fresh examination of the controversy reveals a different story than the one promoted by Teicher.
Contrary to Teicher’s assertion, the kind of loan offered by Westwood College – and thousands of other private, for-profit colleges across the country – recently came under the authority of Regulation Z of the federal Truth in Lending Act, adding numerous disclosure requirements and other protections for student borrowers.
In addition, the Senate financial regulation bill supported by Bennet would regulate “gap loans” made by Westwood and other for-profit colleges, not leave them alone, as Teicher contended.
Moreover, an amendment sponsored by Bennet and adopted by the Senate banking committee adds particular protection for students borrowing from private schools by establishing a Private Education Loan Ombudsman – a layer of oversight beyond what was proposed in a House amendment the Romanoff campaign cites as its model for what Bennet should have done in the Senate
Maybe the Romanoff campaign is right, and The Statesman just doesn’t understand this problem after two long stories in three weeks. Or maybe the Romanoff campaign, in their zeal to find some sort of useful attack on Bennet, just didn’t quite connect all the dots. Either way, the point is the same: IT DIDN’T WORK! The Romanoff campaign wasn’t going to suddenly turn this attack back around, so they should have dropped it and looked for something else.
2. This whole line of attack is way too complicated to damage Bennet. You really can’t explain this charge in less than a couple of minutes, which means there’s no way an average Primary voter is ever going to a) understand, or b) even care if they do understand. Hell, we couldn’t even tell you in less than a few paragraphs what this is all about. This attack was never going to stick on Bennet, even if it was accurate, because there are too many nuances at play. The fact that the Romanoff camp doesn’t understand this is a big part of their problem in general. This is a perfect example of how “Policy-wonk Andrew” keeps killing “Politician Andrew.”
3. $2,400 is not a smoking gun. At the heart of this attack is the contention that Bennet took $2,400 from Westwood College and then voted on a bill that was of interest to the school (although a spokesman for Westwood has openly admitted that Bennet voted the opposite of how they would have liked). Even if Bennet’s campaign had taken this money, and then Bennet had done what Westwood wanted, you still have to try to tell people that a guy who has already raised $5 million would have sold his vote for $2,400. It just doesn’t seem like a realistic charge when we’ve heard stories about people like former Rep. William Jefferson keeping $90,000 in his freezer.
Sure, $2,400 may be a lot in “Romanoff money” (since he only has $500k in the bank), but it’s not even a drop in the bucket for Bennet’s campaign. If Westwood had donated, say, $100,000 through bundling individual donations or something, then this might have been a little more interesting. But $2,400? Eh.
4. The PAC attack isn’t working. That’s really what this all comes down to, because there’s no evidence that Bennet has been “bought” by anybody. You can’t just throw out a list of contributors and say, “See, this proves he’s corrupt!” Not only does that not prove anything, but most voters already know that incumbent politicians get money from a variety of different industries. This isn’t a shock to anyone, and that’s why Romanoff desperately needs some sort of connection like they hoped they had with the Westwood college thing.
The bigger issue in all of this is what it says about Romanoff’s campaign, which went months without a message at all before finally settling on the “Bennet takes PAC money, but I don’t” theme. That Romanoff’s camp won’t seem to let go of this essentially disproved, and virtually unintelligible, attack on Bennet shows either a campaign dysfunction or an unspoken admission that they this is all they’ve got, even if they know it isn’t working.
“The PAC attack” message in general hasn’t been the silver bullet that Romanoff thought it would be, so they need a new message, and quick. But unless he starts raising a lot more money, it won’t matter anyway; the message is just an internal memo if you don’t have a way to tell anyone.
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