The other day I penned a piece detailing the reasons that I think Mitt Romney will be probably be the GOP presidential nominee in 2012.  While I think Romney probably will be the nominee, and while I will have no problems supporting Mitt once he is the nominee, there is a part of me that wonders whether he will be able to best President Obama in a general election.  Gov. Romney is probably my fifth choice for the Republican nominee in 2012, with my top four being, in no particular order, Rudy Giuliani, Gary Johnson, Paul Ryan, and Mitch Daniels.  Unfortunately, three of these four candidates have about as much chance of being the nominee as I do.  Rudy still has to prove that he can actually win a state that should be tailor made for him in New Hampshire.  A second Florida Strategy will mean a second Rudy bust.  Ryan is about 5-10 years away from his prime.  And Johnson is pro-choice, dovish, and exudes a sort of weirdness that would turn voters off.  Out of my top four, only Daniels is a credible nominee, but I don't see GOP voters selecting him over Romney when Romney has many of the same qualities that Daniels has, along with the status as the guy who came in second last time.

So I guess what I'm saying is that of most candidates who have a reasonable shot at the nod (Romney, Huck, Palin, Pawlenty, etc.), it's Romney who has the best chance at unseating the president, but just because he has a better chance than most doesn't mean that Mitt won't be in for an uphill battle.  Romney has two big problems.  One is RomneyCare, and the other is that Romney has a very moderate temperament that prevents him from presenting voters with a clear contrast between the Republicans and the president.  Mitt will be forced to defend RomneyCare, and Obama will almost certainly take the opportunity to point out how he and Gov. Romney pretty much agree on the fundamentals of the health care issue.  Whether or not Obama actually gets a bill signed into law before the 2012 presidential race will be irrelevant at this point; all that will matter is that Romney and Obama will basically agree that the solution to our nation's health care woes is a big-government solution of subsidize/mandate/regulate, and not through an expansion of freedom and choice via tax credits/high-risk pools/interstate competition between insurers.  If all Obama and Romney are left arguing over is whether to implement the health regime at the federal level or the state level, or whether to fund it via a tax on the rich or by removing the tax deduction on health benefits, Americans may just decide that there's not a dime's worth of difference between the candidates and choose the horse that they already know.

Romney's second problem is what I call his detente problem.  Back during the days of Race42012, one of our former contributors suggested that he couldn't support Romney because Romney had the soul of a moderate, and that had Mitt been around back during the Reagan days, he wouldn't have been a Reaganite because he just seems a lot like a detente kind of guy.  Romney is essentially a modest and sober politician who pulls off the fire-breather schtick horribly, as we saw in 2008.  Mitt needs to stick to the dispassionate businessman model to seem genuine.  But dispassionate businesspersons don't make good revolutionary leaders, and the country is in a revolutionary mood.  And that just means even less of a contrast between Mitt and Barack.  A debate between the two would be an even-tempered contest between two uber-wonks counting beans.  And at the end of the day, Americans may wonder why there's any reason to change horses.  All of this will create the added temptation for Team Romney to start focusing on social issues to create a sense of contrast between the two camps.  Such a move will almost certainly backfire, making Republicans seem out of touch with a country concerned about the economy, government spending, and the debt.

The best case scenario specifically for Mitt Romney would probably go something like this.  Obama signs into law a watered-down health care bill passed with 51 votes via reconciliation.  The debt continues to spiral out of control, and the Democrats allow many of the Bush tax cuts to expire before they lose their working majority in November.  The Dems are left with a bare majority in both houses of Congress and unemployment remains high going into 2012.  At that point, since the health care regime will already be in place, the debate over RomneyCare and ObamaCare will essentially be behind us and Romney can argue that he will be better able to reform the program given the successes and failures of the Massachusetts model.  He can also sell a tax-cut/balanced-budget/entitlement-reform package to the public using his business savvy, and convince Americans that his way will end economic stagnation in America.  Against that backdrop, Romney would probably do pretty well against the president.  But a lot of things have to fall into place for that to happen.  If health care doesn't pass, Americans may want someone offering them a real alternative to ObamaCare.  If the Democrats are smart enough to extend the tax cuts, a major issue is taken off the table for Republicans.  If the economy rebounds, all bets are off.  As such, Romney may be the probable nominee, but determining the identity of the probable next president is a long way off.