OK, more on this Mitt Romney thing
I just read Chris Cillizza's look at Mitt Romney's ridiculous decision to start running TV ads, and there are a couple points that show clearly that this is a colossal mistake . For the record, Edwards was considered appallingly early when he became the first candidate to start broadcasting ads in June of the last cycle. Even beyond strategic measures, this is getting ridiculous. I don't want to live in a permanent presidential campaign.
Problem one:
But, in going up with a 60-second commercial in select markets in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan and Florida, (over the next week) Romney is vastly expanding the universe of people he hopes to reach and forcing his opponents to re-evaluate when they might begin their own paid advertising campaigns in early states. (emphasis added)
I don't see what's so hard to understand here: the presidential primary system is now too frontloaded for states beyond Iowa and maybe New Hampshire to matter. Since states individually decide when to hold their presidential primaries, they all have an incentive to go earlier: the first states have a disproportionate impact on the process. But they can't go before Iowa and New Hampshire, and they're all so crowded together that none of the also-rans will have time to regain momentum. Winning Iowa is about as big a momentum builder as you can have, and it would take weeks, at least, for another candidate to try to make his/her name in a subsequent state. But you don't have weeks or months, you have one week at most, and you don't have to win in one subsequent state, you have to win a whole bunch at once. It's basically impossible. (This is why I support a primary system that starts later and has wider spaced contests.)
So airing TV ads before the primaries start on states besides Iowa and New Hampshire is almost certainly wasted money. TV ads a year before the primary is absolutely wasted money. TV ads a year before the primary in the fourth-biggest state in the union is borderline insane. Don't forget: the people making these decisions are the ones who get high-level appointments in the White House.
My second problem is this:
Romney still trails Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani badly in both state and national polling. Romney must, therefore, start to make his case for the nomination sooner rather than later.
There is absolutely no causal relationship between those two sentences. Romney must make his case for the nomination before Iowa, not "sooner rather than later" which means nothing anyway. You could make the argument that you need to build steady momentum over the course of this year, but that's not how it works: much more often than not, some candidate comes screaming out of nowhere in the last month to (usually) come close and sometimes take the nomination outright. In other words, you don't need to make your move "sooner rather than later" until we actually reach 2008.
This brings up a larger point that really baffles me. Cillizza has been doing this for years. He knows this already. Is he forgetful, or is he just making stuff up to try to make the race as exciting as possible for as long as possible? So either he's not putting in the effort to learn lessons from each successive campaign, or he's not interested in reporting the honest nature of presidential campaigns. Fantastic!