Posted on 04/16/2007 9:23:04 AM PDT by areafiftyone
That is the sad story of Mitt Romney, the movie-star handsome former governor of Massachusetts. Romney registers a dismal fourth in Republican opinion polls. Yesterday's LAT/Bloomberg poll put him at 8% approval among Republicans.
A year ago, Romney looked like an emerging Republic star. He had rescued Massachusetts from a large budget deficit without raising taxes. And he had engineered a state-wide health insurance plan that delivered universal health insurance coverage to all of Massachusetts' residents--again without raising taxes. A hugely successful businessman, he had rescued the 2002 Olympic games from a corruption scandal.
In small-group sessions in 2005 and 2006, Romney dazzled elite audiences with his command of fact and easy, humorous speaking style.
He would begin by talking about the importance of data--of checking your assumptions--and of keeping the discussion open to dissenters. He was talking about state governance of course. But everybody heard the implied criticism of President Bush's management style. And after he left, his audiences would nod their heads over their coffee cups and say, "If only somebody like that had been running this war ? "
But sometime in the summer or fall of 2006, Romney reached a strategic decision. He would not run as a pragmatic problem solver. He would run as the conservative in the race: the tax-cutting, pro-life, pro-gun, pro-traditional-marriage heir to George W. Bush.
He even dropped hints that if nominated, he would choose Florida governor Jeb Bush as his running mate.
And this past week, he chose the George H. W. Bush presidential library as the site of his first major foreign policy address.
At the same time, he has given short shrift to his breakthrough health-care achievement. In fact, he rarely refers to it in his speeches, apparently fearing that one ingredient of his plan--a requirement that every non-poor state resident buy a health insurance policy or face a tax penalty--will offend the antigovernment sensibilities of Republican primary voters. None of this is working.
In part, Romney's difficulty in gaining early traction can be traced to his own vulnerabilities: He has become more conservative since his first political race, and (as I noted in last week's column) YouTube is now crowded with clips of him saying one thing in 1994 and very different things in 2004, 2005 and 2006.
But it seems to me that something bigger is going on.
Had you asked a shrewd Republican observer in, say, 2004 to guess who the party's next nominee would be, he or she would probably have named George Allen, the senator from Virginia--a popular former governor, son of a legendary football coach, famous for his cowboy boots and chewing tobacco. Allen was a solid, down-the-line conservative on everything from taxes to guns to abortion. He was hiring all the top consultants, raising money, making friends and seemingly cruising to an easy re-election win in 2006.
Instead, he lost. Lost in Virginia, where Bush had beat Kerry by nine points! If Allen could lose in Virginia, then no conservative was safe anywhere.
In some shrewd instinctive way, the Republican party is sensing that the United States has changed. And just as the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and Grant eventually ran out of Civil War generals to nominate to the presidency, so perhaps time has run out for the old Nixon-Reagan coalition that came together to vote against the social upheavals of the 1960s and the 1970s. The 1960s and 1970s were, after all, a very, very long time ago.
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In some shrewd instinctive way, the Republican party is sensing that the United States has changed. |
Romney seized on Allen's defeat as an opportunity to position himself as the authentic Reagan conservative in the race--in a year when the Republican party may for the first time in a generation be looking for something other than a Reagan conservative.
Rudy Giuliani, the Republican frontrunner, is not exactly a moderate, of course. But he's not a traditional conservative either. He appeals to Republicans, not by running against government but precisely because of his record in making government work. Above all, his success in fighting crime recommends him. Under Mayor Giuliani, the number of murders in New York declined from over 2,000 per year to under 700. With government again providing safety to the people, the city recovered its economic strength.
Mitt Romney had an equally compelling story of executive leadership to tell. He chose not to. He chose to run as Bush's heir in a year when even Republicans are looking for Bush's opposite. That choice is looking more and more misguided. It may soon look fatal.
David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.
I think much of the opposition to Romney is exactly that, people are worried about his faith, but won't come out and say it. Instead they have to make up reasons in their mind to oppose him in different ways.
FReeper rbookward posted this on another thread, and I repeat it here because its' quite enlightening.
Richard Mouw, President of Fuller Theological Seminary:
I know that I have learned much in this continuing dialogue, and I am now convinced that we evangelicals have often seriously misrepresented the beliefs and practices of the Mormon community. Indeed, let me state it bluntly to the LDS folks here this evening: we have sinned against you. The God of the Scriptures makes it clear that it is a terrible thing to bear false witness against our neighbors, and we have been guilty of that sort of transgression in things we have said about you. We have told you what you believe without making a sincere effort first of all to ask you what you believe.
About time someone addressed what I view as some very stupid assumptions.
I'm not at all religious. I belong to no group or organized faith. But I do believe in God.
As such, I find that religions exhibit all of the human failings they proffer to understand and eliminate. To me, this is the the primary reason why I do not participate.
It is good that at least one has accepted and acknowledged what I have been trying to tell them for many years, every time I am asked why I do not participate.
It's a start.....
It seems to me that Frum has been pessimistic about the future of conservatism for a while. He seems to buy into the Judis/Teixeira hypothesis that demographic trends make an emergent Democratic majority inevitable and that conservatives can’t do anything to change it and just have to live with it.
I hope this analysis is too gloomy. After the elections of 2002 and 2004 many liberals had come to the opposite conclusion. On the other hand, 2006 and the current unpopularity of Republicans may be the first wave of a long term trend.
Part of the problem has been that conservatives are victims of their own success. The Reagan Revolution of lower taxes and less regulation launched an era of prosperity that continues to our own day. Unfortunately, this has caused people (especially young people) to take this prosperity for granted. And, as Thomas Sowell has written, no matter how many times it fails, statism/socialism always *seems* like a good idea.
So let’s give everyone health care. Let’s cap carbon emissions to “save the Earth.” Let’s regulate “urban sprawl” out of existence. Let’s “help families” by madating vacation time. Let’s lower the price of gas by imposing price controls.
To the average American all these seem like good ideas. And as the regulatory failures of the 1970s fade from our collective memories, it will become harder and harder to resist these kind of measures.
The other thing I have to say about Frum’s piece is that he seems to assume the George W. Bush is a straight-up Reaganite, although I know from Frum’s other writings that he doesn’t necessarily think this. Wasn’t Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” a repudiation of much of Reaganism? The kind of making peace with a changing nation that Frum seems to be arguing is needed by the GOP now?
Oh, this is a hard one! Could it be because it's early in the race and he's not well-known nationally yet by the rank and file?
This will change as the campaign moves forward. He's already leading in some polls in early primary states where he's been actively campaigning.
National polls at this point are little more than indicators of national name recognition.
Neither was Reagan in 1980. People seem to forget he was a former democrat.
Wow. Talk about self-delusion!
Reagan always said he didn’t leave the Democrat party, it left him. In other words their principles changed and his didn’t.
No. I said your sentence was an example of self-delusion. Your sentence said nothing about supporting our troops, which I do.
Rather, I am calling self-delusional your claim that Iraq is a victory. Maybe Iraq will one day be a victory, but to claim that it is a victory is to claim we have already won, which is just plain absurd. Iraq may be winnable, and we may eventually win, but to claim that we've already won, given our current difficulties, has got to be the most preposterous things I have ever heard.
Nailed!
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