Posted on 12/21/2006 5:55:17 PM PST by jbonham76
Good news for me! A day after I wrote that campaign ’06 can’t begin soon enough, I notice that National Review has run a cover of Mitt Romney and John McCain duking it out for the Republican nomination. Call it a double dose of good news. Not only has the campaign begun, but my preferred candidate, Mitt Romney, has been elevated to the semi-finals by the NR folks.
I know there are a lot of people who are wondering why this semi-obscure one-term governor of our nation’s bluest state has so knocked the conservative media on its collective tush. Indeed, it is a phenomenon. A long-standing Senator of impeccable conservative credentials like Sam Brownback throws his hat in the ring, and the conservative media yawns. And yet Mitt Romney has K-Lo and others panting in anticipation of a Romney administration.
How could it be? Even if you’re inclined to take a cynical approach, there’s no easy explanation for how this happens. Instead, I urge you to take the Occam’s Razor approach. Mitt Romney has dazzled conservative opinion-makers because he is indeed special.
I was well ahead of the curve in having this realization. I knew Romney was special a decade before my brethren in the conservative punditocracy came to the same conclusion. But it is worth noting that I came about the conclusion the same way they have – from first-hand exposure to the guy.
As every reader of this site knows, I don’t find our political class to be particularly impressive. I find them intellectually incurious, pathologically ambitious and morally unmoored. The Democrats are worse than the Republicans, but it’s not a runaway.
But Romney is different. First of all, he’s brilliant. When you spend even a little time with him, you see how his mind attacks a problem from every conceivable angle. This requires an intellectual curiosity and an intellectual industriousness that is foreign to nearly all of our politicians.
Second, he’s a profoundly decent man. All that stuff about what a perfect family he has and how committed he is to it isn’t a crock. And he’s really nice – his affability is no Clintonian act.
When I was his occasional driver in his 1994 Senate campaign, we would often access Boston’s Expressway via the Mass. Ave exit. As the locals know, the traffic light leading to the ramp is a notorious hangout for Boston’s beggars who will approach the cars as they wait to get on the Expressway. Romney would not only give everyone who approached the car a few bucks (by handing it to me – the recipients had no idea that the money was coming from a Senate candidate), he would make me swerve across traffic to make sure every panhandler on the road got a few bucks. It drove me nuts, but it should tell you something about the guy.
I’VE RECEIVED A FEW LETTERS asking me to square Romney’s 1994 statements with his present-day stands. First, let me outline a few Romney characteristics. He is, personally, a deeply conservative man. He is a traditionalist to his core. Second, as I said above, he is a profoundly decent man.
On the issue of gays, I think there’s little inconsistency if any between his 1994 positions and his current ones. Romney has never been a hater – it’s simply not his style. One of his most prominent local critics, my one-time friend who later turned into a notorious crank, Brian Camenker, has complained on the dignified airs of The Daily Show that Romney was not only pro-gay in 1994, as governor his administration hired numerous homosexuals. The horror!
The controversy over this is that some can’t figure how Romney could treat gays as equals and still be against gay marriage. I don’t find that to be a particularly difficult brain-teaser unless you subscribe to the Andrew Sullivan theory that anyone who’s not eager to overturn millennia of marital traditions is by definition a latter day Bull Connor. Romney is against gay marriage but also for treating gays with dignity and respect; the two are not mutually exclusive.
The only reason this “scandal” is receiving the extended treatment that it is from mainstream media outlets like the Boston Globe and the New York Times is because they think that Republicans want their candidates to be hostile to homosexuals. This is flat-out wrong, and completely misses the genuineness in the frequent formulation, “Hate the sin but love the sinner.”
There is a little more meat on the bone regarding Romney’s “evolving” views on abortion. Personally, I would have been shocked if Romney in 1994 didn’t consider abortion the taking of an innocent life. When I drove him, we once had a debate regarding pre-marital sex. I was for it, he was against it. Although it never came up, I lived the values I espoused (as a single 27 year-old, virtually every chance I could get), and I bet he did, too. It would surprise me if someone who was so deeply personally conservative took a casual approach to the moral stakes involved in abortion.
And yet he was pro-choice. It’s fair to ask, why? To get a good answer, you have to look at the times.
Romney in 1994 was running against Ted Kennedy. In 1994, Ted Kennedy was vulnerable. The Palm Beach non-rape scandal was still fresh in voters’ minds, and Kennedy’s brand of big government politics had fallen into disrepute. 1994 was a dreadful year for Democrats, so dreadful that even Ted Kennedy was in trouble. As late as September of that campaign year, Romney held a slight lead over Kennedy in the polls.
If Romney had run as pro-life, his campaign would have been a non-starter. He never would have had a chance. So, in my opinion, as a concession to reality, he ran with a “commitment to preserving a woman’s right to choose.” That’s the euphemism pro-life politicians used when they ran as pro-choice. While he defended the need for access to abortion services to assuage the jitters of Commonwealth voters, he never took up the morality of abortion during that election season.
The putative abortion betrayal isn’t all that Romney did in ’94 that might rankle present-day conservatives. I haven’t seen it anywhere else in print yet this campaign season, but he also declined to sign what has since become the much-revered Contract With America. The reason for this was simple – embracing the national Republican Party would have been political suicide in a race against Kennedy.
How can a defender of Romney justify such things? Speaking just for myself, I theorize that Romney as both a politician and a man does not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. As mature and thoughtful people, we pursue victories that may actually be achieved. We necessarily work in the realm of the possible as opposed to the ideal.
It would have been impossible for a politician who was adamantly pro-life and embracing Newt Gingrich to have defeated Ted Kennedy in 1994. But Mitt Romney, with the campaign he ran, had a real chance and almost pulled it off. Were he not outmaneuvered and caught flatfooted by the far more experienced Kennedy campaign in the election’s last weeks, Romney would have beaten Ted Kennedy. And that would have been very good indeed.
So has Mitt Romney had an evolution on abortion since 1994? Regarding his personal feelings towards abortion, I highly doubt it. I don’t for a second think that he found abortion morally acceptable a dozen years ago. I’ll also point out that he never said at the time that he did.
I do, however, think that he has had an evolution as to what’s politically possible regarding abortion since he ran against Kennedy. As Massachusetts’ governor, he understood that for many pro-choice voters, Harvard’s plan to create and destroy embryos in the name of science would be beyond the pale. And he also understood that the Harvard plan could put the entire abortion debate into a different light. Harvard’s program had the potential to reframe the conversation in a way that made voters see abortion in a different light. And Romney seized the opportunity to do just that.
SO, WHAT SHOULD A REPULICAN VOTER take away from all of this? Well, first of all, if you want a candidate to tilt at windmills, Mitt Romney’s not your guy. He is an idealist, and he has lived his life as one, but Pyrrhic victories and noble failures aren’t his cup of tea. He plays to win, or he doesn’t play at all.
Next, if you want a candidate who’s reliably hostile to homosexuals, Mitt Romney is again not your guy. The good news is if that’s your hot-button issue, Sam Brownback is in the race. Brownback recently put a hold on a judicial nomination for her attendance at a same-sex union ceremony and demanded that she recuse herself from all cases regarding gender-neutral marriage issues. If you consider that to be true leadership, you can join 2% of your fellow Republicans and hop aboard the Brownback juggernaut.
Romney is someone who at his core and in his politics shares the aims of socially conservative Republicans. (As I intimated regarding our debate over pre-marital sex, he’s to my right on many of these matters.) He’ll pursue the socially conservative agenda whenever there’s a chance to do so. And unlike some of our more Elmer Gantry-like Republican figures, when he makes a stand he’ll do it not just for show but to get results.
Did it take a long time to come up with that tag line?
He may be the best choice out of a handfull of Republican candidates. My point was that the conservatives are the so called 'base' of the party. Lots of people in the south ad midwest may be a little weary about voting for a guy from a state that allows gay marriage (thanks to the courts of course) and has very strict gun laws.. just my thoughts... we just have to stay tooned and see how the cookie crumbles, so to speak.
Why call Mr. Hewitt a whore? What did he do to earn that ?
I am having a hard time understanding why you seem so angry at me. I am not denigrating you or your choice, nor even your opinion even if I do think that the way it presents you is not that complimentary to you.
And not all Americans are Protestants.
His position on RKBA would knock him out of my consideration.
We will not surivive that.
Romney really is a good guy, but there is a lot of BS in that article.
This writer is not going to help Romney by making stuff up, and distorting facts.
What is Hugh making up?
Sure. But what's the point? The bigots only know what was taught to them in their Church classes, which is hardly a neutral source.
Hugh has spoken highly of FR in the past.
Slick Mitt? Nope, not for me!
I was never taught that. And one of the most honored writers here is Orson Scott Card - a practicing Mormon.
Mr Hewitt is one smart cookie, even if he likes the Cleveland Browns. He knows that when you lose an election, you are basically powerless,
He's brilliant. I hate the fact that he and the equally brilliant Larry Elder are on at the same time.
Same here... No thanks.
That was sarcasm....
I agree. 2008 is light years away in political time :-)
A lot will happen and I'm just going to keep my mind open and listen and watch. I'd like to see more people come in actually.
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