A Santorum or Gingrich campaign in the fall likely means a landslide win for Obama. But can Romney recover and win the primary?
And to think two months ago, a conservative victory in November actually seemed doable.
Alas, no more. Let me be the first to wish President Obama a joyous second term, compliments of the democratic process brought to us by the Republican Party.
Even as Rick Santorum rises like a Phoenix and demonstrates that he is a serious man after all — it was very hard to tell this based on his early debates – Mitt Romney has mismanaged and misspoken himself into a most difficult situation. Like father like son — it was his father, you will recall, who ended his own chances for the presidency by proclaiming that the military had brainwashed him about the Vietnam War, thus his early support for what he later deemed a mistake.
It was a poor choice of words, of course, because any leader who can be brainwashed isn't a guy to lead the free world. A president, the electorate concluded, should be made of tougher stuff. Governor Romney the elder was essentially proclaiming his own feeble mindedness, critics concluded, a self accusation that wasn't true but which, nevertheless, left doubts Mr. Romney could not erase.
The son is equally inept with words at times, strangely, in fact, because he can be quite articulate and compelling when he is talking about things he knows. Governor Mitt Romney is afflicted by two traits that won't be easily managed. First, he is relatively new to philosophical conservatism, as many have already observed. He is wandering through new ideological and political fields and seems to lose his way when required to leave the beaten path. (I encourage him to find some Bill Buckley books quickly, before it is too late, and develop a bit of wit and humor to lighten the day.)
He also has the need to ingratiate, to prove his mettle by overstating. He is running on the defensive and so he pushes his arguments beyond his comfort zone, ending up twisted into idiomatic knots that leave folks scratching their heads. A business man by nature, he lacks the capacity of so many good politicians to say little while sounding profound. He tries to say too much and winds up sounding disconnected.
Fundamentally, this is because he is unsure of how to navigate the right wing of a Republican party bent on a self destruction. He is trying to appeal to everyone rather than letting his own core abilities and convictions bring people to him.
But pandering that is obvious appeals to no one and he might have already dug himself into a hole he can't escape. That is too bad because it my view he is the right guy for our nation right now. We desperately need a business oriented president who understands budgets, who gets international business, who knows how to impose discipline on complex organizations. Our government is broken and slight improvements in the economy don't change the fact that President Obama and his followers have spent this nation into massive and catastrophic debt.
Were I Romney, I would focus on that one issue for a while — he would be convincing on the topic and most Americans understand that this debt, more than any enemy foreign or domestic, is the greatest long-term threat we face as a nation — it will cripple us and make problematic all of our noble ventures, private and public.
Rick Santorum has the opposite problem — he is so sure of his convictions, apparently, that he is never in doubt of where he stands. Ronald Reagan was not much of a social conservative, in reality, and was deeply tolerant of those with whom he disagreed. He led with a moral center, but rarely tried to legislate morality — knowing instinctively that this is not the role of government. The role of government is to make it easier for people to make moral choices — and to build consensus around issues where we can, and leave alone issues where we as a nation are naturally divided or where government need not intrude. We don't need Billy Graham as our president, we need a leader who can navigate politically and geopolitically while making tough choices about economic and foreign policy.
Senator Santorum, alas, is on record for saying all sorts of silly things that appeal to a narrow wing of the conservative movement. He is a hawk who talks as if our capacity to engage in foreign entanglements is unlimited. He will be easily tarnished, as Goldwater was, with the brush of extremism just as Romney is becoming the Republican Al Gore.
That leaves us with — well, President Obama — a man who is increasingly confident compliments of a self destructive Republican primary, a few nuggets of good economic news and a media that — once again — will do all of his dirty work for him, or at least that part of it the Republicans don't do themselves.
This leaves us with an ocean of debt, an incoherent foreign policy and a business environment not likely to improve anytime soon.
One can only hope Romney finds his center again and starts leading and campaigning like the man many of us believe he is — a modern, thoughtful fiscal conservative who realizes that you can be pro-business and pro-environment, that you can be moral without being judgmental, that you can discipline government without demonizing it, that you can assert your own vision without tearing down others.
A Santorum or Gingrich campaign in the fall likely means a landslide win for Obama. We need the Governor from Massachusetts — and Republican voters — to figure it out before it is too late.
As a liberal Democrat, I have been massively surprised by the ineptitude of all of the Republican candidates. A year ago, even six months ago, I thought I was on safe ground in predicting a Republican victory in 2012. Instead, the candidates took turns in exposing their weaknesses and, in many instances, an utter lack of the most basic preparation to engage in political debate.
Now for Mitt: I live in Massachusetts and remember Romney's time as governor quite well. Both in his campaigns for that office and in his public utterances while in office, he never even came close to hinting that he was anything but a "moderate" Republican. His pro-choice, pro-gay, and pro- government-managed health insurance positions convinced me that I was looking at what I'm old enough to think of as a "Rockefeller Republican."
If Romney really was, then, a true conservative, as he says he is now, then my conclusion is that he is even more duplicitous than politicians usually are. He lied like a rug to get elected governor–how can your side get worked up to support him? Who knows what sweet nothings he is saying to the Right?
And,Mr. Lareau, you're correct–Mitt is the best, really the only, choice your side has for a candidate who might have beaten Obama. The Right could have avoided this impasse if only it was much more disciplined. Each week of the traveling carnival of not-ready-for-prime-time hopefuls brought new laughs to liberals. Watching one right-winger after another crash and burn was fun, but eventually grownups in the Republican Party are going to have figure out how to run the winning clown against Obama.
The serious Right sought, and still seeks, a Reaganesque figure who can heal wounds and inspire voters. You don't have him yet, and I don't see where you're going to get him.
I'm not entirely happy about the prospect of Obama for another term. Maybe–although I'm not at all confident of this–he'll learn how to play well with others. Maybe he'll learn to stop proposing new programs for which there is no money. Maybe he'll start paying some attention to those in his own party who are trying to show him that he's got to develop a meaningful plan for dealing with our country's debt. Maybe. Or not.
Mitt Romney is the choice of the media and the old guard “Rockefeller Republicans” who are more interested in maintaining big government for purposes of their personal power than in what is good for the nation. They are no more interested in limiting spending than the big government Democrats who dominate their party. What both sides fail to observe is that government, at all levels, must reduce spending in order for the national economy to revive. At the same time regulation and interference must be reduced in order to allow for incentives to produce, which is the long term source of prosperity.
For the last half century or so government policy has been consumption based, and slowdowns were met with Keynesian style stimulation. This became self defeating in the long run. Until this lesson hits home it doesn’t matter who runs the government.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are dealing with an “anyone but Romney” phenomenon that may put Santorum into the nomination, or may result in a brokered convention. But the majority of voters are developing more of an anyone but Obama approach that should put any other candidate into the White House, simply because the public has realized that they made a drastic mistake four years ago and went for a con man’s con man.