Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney would do well to adopt the winning campaign strategies of former GOP Presidents Richard Nixon in 1968 and William McKinley in 1896, says former Rep. Martin Frost, D-Texas.
“There is no guarantee that following either model will elect Romney, but it is a place to start,” he writes in
Politico. Frost describes McKinley’s front porch strategy, designed to keep him on his porch and away from the media.
“You couldn’t keep a modern-day presidential candidate confined to home, but you could severely limit media access and only have the candidate do carefully well-scripted staged events,” Frost writes. “The media would complain like hell, but it may be the only way to keep Romney from stepping in it.”
As for Nixon, “the team around him decided to sell him like a bar of soap with some well-crafted political advertising that was short on issues but long on image,” Frost writes. “His handlers also limited media access to Nixon.”
While Romney has blasted out millions of dollars of ads, they have been largely negative. “A significant positive ad campaign for Romney (counterintuitive in today’s political culture) might actually wipe away the lingering effect of his many gaffes,” Frost writes.
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