Carly Rae Jepson’s “Call Me Maybe” is the pop phenomenon of the summer, reaching the top spot on the Billboard charts and inspiring countless imitations. Last month, an ABCNews.com article explained exactly why the song is so catchy. Three of the main factors were:
1. An incredibly memorable chorus
2. Simple, repetitive lyrics
3. Musical arrangement
Not surprisingly, Mitt Romney's foreign policy vision hasn't garnered the same irresistible attraction. But the story of a successful pop tune is instructive in understanding why Romney’s foreign policy message is not resonating.
Let’s start with the first reason: “Call Me Maybe” is “methodically easy on the ear, simple enough to stay in your head all day.” Romney's overarching foreign policy vision, though, is not. His July 24th speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) touched on several different foreign policy issues, but as NBC’s First Read described, “it was long on criticism and short on vision…a Romney Doctrine is not at all clear at the moment.” Even John McCain’s former campaign manager said it was little more than a “paint-by-numbers Republican critique.”
Two, the song has simple lyrics. “The verses have weak rhymes that pretty much anyone can repeat after listening once.” Now, try to apply that to Romney’s position on Afghanistan and it's a no go. Romney seemed to endorse the President’s timeline of withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan by 2014 in his VFW remarks, despite previously criticizing it. The speech also came on the heels of one of his senior advisors suggesting that real Americans don’t want to talk about Afghanistan (despite the fact that some 90,000 real Americans are still serving there). Therefore, it’s not surprising that, according to a recent report, even several leading Republican Senators don't know what Romney's Afghanistan policy is. As Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) put it: “You would have to tell me what exactly you mean by ‘his policy.' That's a long discussion that I don't want to get into.”
Finally, there’s the musical arrangement, which is “filled with pizzicato strings and boppy rhythms in the drums, that’s infectious.” The overall tenor of Romney’s foreign policy, though, doesn't have "an amazing innate sense of pop." Through his rhetoric, Romney has either presented himself as uber-hawkish (talking tough on Iran without explaining what he would do beyond current policy to isolate or weaken it) or uber-mawkish (sentimentally painting a picture of what American power looked like in a bygone era as his view of the future). It’s no wonder then that the latest USA Today/Gallup poll shows that Americans support the President’s handling of foreign affairs by a 12-point margin over Romney's, 52 to 40 percent.
The Governor's international trip could have served as a chance to clarify his positions on national security and international affairs. Developing an understandable narrative would not only have helped his supporters better articulate these issues, but would have also benefitted the national dialogue and the American people. Instead, he made a series of gaffes that sounded more like a chorus of “Don’t Call Me, Maybe?” And that doesn’t make for a hit in any season, especially campaign season.
Jessie Daniels is a Truman Security Fellow
