WSJ: Romney Suffered from Too Little Spending, Not Too Much

The wealth of Super PAC money spent on behalf of Mitt Romney wasn’t a waste, contrary to the claims of many pundits in their election post-mortems, according to a Wall Street Journal editorial.

Romney’s problem was actually too little money rather than too much money.

“The cash that really counted was the more than $100 million that the Obama campaign used from May through July in the battleground states to portray Mitt Romney as Gordon Gekko without the social conscience,” Journal editors write.

Exit polls show that was a damaging blow for the Republican nominee. “He ran largely a biographical campaign, and the Obama campaign destroyed his business biography.”

The Romney camp said in early August that it wanted to rebut the attacks but didn’t have the money to do both that and offer a positive message from Romney. The problem was that the Romney campaign had run out of money after the primaries.

“The GOP Super PACs tried to fill the gap by attacking Mr. Obama, but they were hard pressed to speak for a candidate whom by law they are prohibited from coordinating with,” the editorial states.

“Perhaps their ads could have been more effective, and perhaps some of that money would have been better spent on matching Democratic voter turnout operations. . . . But it's hard to believe that Mr. Romney would have done any better if the Super PACs hadn't existed.”

Bottom line: “the real problem this year wasn't too much campaign spending but too little,” The Journal editors argue.