GOP hopefuls struggle with their baggage

Republican Mitt Romney, tieless, fired up a PowerPoint presentation in a University of Michigan classroom Thursday and set about the delicate task of trying to defuse a ticking threat to his presidential candidacy: the health-care plan he enacted as Massachusetts governor, his biggest accomplishment in office.

The gist of Romney's message was that his law featuring a mandate that individuals buy medical insurance was a righteous state-based experiment, while President Obama's health-care overhaul with the same individual mandate was a "federal power grab."

He pledged to repeal Obama's plan and offered nuanced critiques of how the national law raises taxes, fails to control costs, and burdens business. But in the short term, at least, Romney drew ridicule from the conservative punditocracy.

"I think we can all start referring to Romney as a 'former' presidential candidate," wrote Erick Erickson, the influential blogger behind RedState.com.

Last week was one of the busiest in the developing 2012 Republican presidential race, as three of the serious, "first-tier" potential candidates whom pundits have been crying for made moves.In addition to Romney's attempt to reframe his health-care quandary, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich announced his candidacy and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels inched closer to running.

Together, they carry what one analyst termed enough baggage to fill the cargo hold of a 747, so the first order of business for each was to try to paper over electoral flaws.

Gingrich, for instance, is a serial adulterer now on his third marriage, but strategists say his biggest challenge as a candidate will be to curb his logorrhea. And Daniels has to deal with his marriage's unusual history.

"Truth is, all candidates have some past troubles, scandals, misstatements, or the like," said political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, a scholar of campaigns and the trajectory of scandal. "It's inevitable unless you had an immaculate conception shortly before announcing."

What's important is how adroitly a candidate handles the problem, Sabato said, and also the political environment: Do opponents have even worse liabilities? Are your ideological positioning and background right for the times?

Romney was attempting the classic grit-your-teeth-and-bluff-your-way-through-it maneuver.

Hillary Rodham Clinton took that approach in the run-up to the 2008 Democratic primaries, when she refused to apologize for her Senate vote authorizing the Iraq war despite the overwhelming opinion of the party's base that the war was a mistake from the start.

Her advisers knew that position was heavy baggage, but so were the perceived need for the first potential female commander-in-chief to look hawkish on foreign policy and the desire not to remind voters of the flexibility of former President Bill Clinton's positions.

So Hillary Clinton stood by her decision. She lost in the end, but the race stayed close for a long time.

Romney's strongest moment in Thursday's speech was when he asserted that the individual insurance mandate was the right thing to do, and a conservative idea besides, because of the problem of "free riders."

And though he got hammered initially, in the long run, sticking to his position may help, mitigating his reputation for flip-flopping. In 2008, he abandoned his former support for abortion rights and gay rights, adopting conservative positions favored by the GOP's religious right.

Authenticity is perhaps a bigger burden for Romney than the health-care plan that conservatives love to hate because it was a model for Obama's. As one adviser to Romney, who asked not to be named, said: "The far right doesn't like Mitt Romney, and he's not going to get most of them no matter what he says."

Heartfelt renunciation is also a time-honored way for candidates to inoculate themselves against an inconvenient past.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, for instance, apologized in the first GOP debate May 5 for having enacted a policy of caps on greenhouse-gas emissions in his state.

"It was a mistake, and I'm sorry," Pawlenty said. "You're going to have a few clunkers in your record, and we all do, and that's one of mine. I just admit it. I don't try to duck it, bob it, weave it, try to explain it away. I'm just telling you, I made a mistake."

Opposition to so-called cap-and-trade policies has become a tenet of faith in the modern Republican Party, on the grounds that they harm business and cost jobs.

Pawlenty is betting that he helped himself with his frankness and by getting the issue out of the way early.

"There is sometimes great joy in the church over a convert - or so Pawlenty hopes," Sabato said.

In the 2008 Democratic primaries, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said he had made a mistake in voting to authorize the Iraq war, and he apologized. He was criticized at the time for excessive calculation, but Edwards lost for a host of other reasons.

Gingrich had already moved to address the infidelity issue, saying in interviews that he had strayed because he was working so hard on the country's problems. That explanation drew laughter, but not the rest of the answer, first given on the Christian Broadcast Network - that he has repented and been forgiven by God, and has been faithfully married to Callista, his third wife, for 11 years.

Strategists say his bigger challenge will be his reputation as a loose cannon. Though Gingrich brings energy and intellectual firepower to the GOP campaign, he spits out dozens of ideas at a time, some of them clunkers, and tends to make controversial off-the-cuff remarks instead of sticking to a script.

"I think he will get relatively impatient giving the same speech a hundred times," Republican strategist Terry Holt told the Washington Post. "You've got to quit making up new stuff and take your best thing. That will be Newt's true test."

Daniels is waiting for his family's OK to join the race, and for once that's not the usual excuse politicians give. In 1993, his wife, Cheri, filed for divorce, moved to California (leaving behind their four daughters), married another man, then divorced again and returned to Indiana to remarry Daniels in 1997.

She hates politics, and already opponents are circulating questions about the gap in the couple's marriage. Neither has ever spoken of it publicly, except Mitch Daniels' quip to the Indianapolis Star in 2004: "If you like happy endings, you'll love our story."

The public may well see it as a story of the triumph of love, as Daniels' advisers hope.

It's possible to overcome even heavier baggage. Consider Bill Clinton, who during the 1992 presidential campaign faced evidence of draft evasion, marijuana use, and adultery.

"Americans wanted a change and rejected the other candidates for various reasons," Sabato said, "and the rest is history."