A day after I wrote about Mitt Romney’s campaign is singularly focused on the economy, a campaign strategy that is best positioned to succeed if the recovery continues on its sluggish path, Steve Kornacki and Ryan Lizza write that… Mitt Romney’s campaign is singularly focused on the economy, a campaign strategy that is best positioned to succeed if the recovery continues on its sluggish path. Ah well. What are you gonna do, you go to media war with the megaphone you have.

But just to go over them, Kornacki rightly notes that, if the economy continues to underperform, Romney and his message will be seen in a more favorable light, particularly by the GOP establishment, who would then sell him to the base. He needs the kind of pragmatism that legitimate hopes of victory would provoke. In other words, he has to root for economic failure. Similarly, Lizza confirms that this is Romney’s entire bet:

One of Romney’s former aides recently told me that, whatever Romney’s difficulties explaining his support of the individual mandate in the health-care plan he passed in Massachusetts in 2006, nobody should discount him, because once he gets “locked in” it is “scary” to see how focussed he can become on a goal. Right now, Romney is locked in on the weakness of this economy—and that is a message that should scare Democrats this time.

It absolutely should scare Democrats. It should scare them into action. The President didn’t want to mess up his message of touting the auto recovery – which is worth touting – today at a Chrysler plant in Toledo, but he still managed to mention that “we still face some tough times.” Unfortunately, that’s about all he’s willing to offer, that and some bromides about how when you’re in a deep hole it takes longer to climb out. Hope is still the plan in the White House, and that’s a politically perilous strategy. The White House would probably tell you that the configuration of Congress means they have no recourse. I’d argue that represents a poverty of imagination, but at the least they should be aware that this defeatism plays into the hands of the only opponent running the type of race that can beat them in 2012. Mitt Romney offers no real solutions as an alternative outside of conservative boilerplate, but he’s talking about the right issue and would be likely to garner a lot of moderate support just based on that.

However, I have to say that I think the President is likely to catch a break on this one. Because despite his front-running status, Romney is deeply disliked in the Republican Party, including among the establishment. National Review endorsed Romney in 2008, calling him a “full-spectrum conservative.” This year, they greeted his rollout with this brutal piece by Ramesh Ponnuru, saying that Romney essentially cannot surmount the enormous problem created by the passage of a health care law mostly similar to the bill he signed in Massachusetts. In the piece, Ponnuru says that “Romney has a reputation for being willing to say anything to advance his political career,” that the health care passage “exacerbates the flip-flop issue” and robs him of the only real policy accomplishment he had after four years in office. Here’s his conclusion:

The issue, finally, is a dagger aimed at the heart of the coalition that Romney wants to build to win the primaries. It appears that this time around Romney is not trying to run as the movement-conservative candidate but instead as an establishment man. To do that he has to unite pragmatic business-oriented conservatives and more ideological economic conservatives. Both groups listen to such voices as the editors of the Wall Street Journal — who are attacking Romneycare with a ferocity they usually reserve for left-wing Democrats.

It will, in short, be extremely hard for Romney to win his party’s nomination without solving his health-care problem. So how does he solve it?

He doesn’t.

Ponnuru’s essay is compelling because of the publication it comes from, and the part of the establishment GOP base it represents. Republicans appear poised to look their only hope at recapturing the White House, their gift horse, in the mouth, and then turn to some nutburger who checks all the boxes on the ideological purity scale.