You can check out poll respondents’ verbatim responses to our poll yourself.
Here’s what I take away: People don’t yet connect with him as a person. They identify him correctly as a businessman. I don’t see, however, where people in general have a sense of him as a person.
A fatal flaw politically? Some pundits think so. They like Obama more. Game over.
My thought: people don’t yet like or dislike Romney. They just don’t have a sense of him.
This is not essential. Voters gave landslides to, for instance, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. But, of course, both men had nothing to fall back on when they ran into trouble.
Romney still has time to reach people. But can he? Some politicians have it, some don’t. Take, for instance, Sarah Palin and Bill Clinton. Like them or not, people feel they know those two. That’s a huge asset to a politician.
And there’s something intangible about it, of course. There’s no formula, no equation. And it’s not clear Mitt Romney has that.
Of course, he could win with ideas, as Krauthammer says. Our poll suggest that may be needed, of only because Mitt Romney just isn’t going to connect with voters as a person.
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