If you were trying to get a Thompson supporter to switch to Romney, what would you explain to them about Romney’s past support for various components of the leftist agenda, and the fact that he changed this support for the purpose of running as a conservative?
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If you were trying to get a Thompson supporter to switch to Romney, what would you explain to them about Romney’s past support for various components of the leftist agenda, and the fact that he changed this support for the purpose of running as a conservative?
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I think what does the job is rational thought. Once it is clear who has the funding to compete in the general or not, then despair sets in and disappointment and then some time passes.
Here’s the truth of the matter. No GOP president is going to get ANY agenda at all enacted. His job will be to stop the Democrat majority in Congress from making any significant progress on its own agenda.
That means when the USSC nominations are required, and they will be, a GOP president will not be able to submit a profoundly conservative nomination. He has to be very clever and manipulative and “reasonable” and submit a nomination of a low key, compromising, *MODERATE* jurist.
The right wing base will hate this. The left wing base will hate ANY nomination from a GOP president, but a moderate who is vaguely at best conservative can get confirmed.
This is not going to be a presidency for leadership. The Democrats will not be led. They have to be cleverly manipulated into failure at their own agenda. Bush has been successful so far in stopping them ONLY because he has an adequate constituency in the Senate. It Won’t Be There Next Year. The RNC doesn’t have money to help win seats.
So that is how I persuade, and it will not be persuasion that will appeal to the passionate today, before many delegates are awarded and the long term power of fund raising asserts itself. But I think conservatives think with their heads and not their glands when they have time, and once that time arrives, they will see what must be done.
I'll give you the process that I went through in coming to accept Mr. Romney as a candidate for my vote.
First, I see Mitt Romney as someone who has talent as an executive and has been developing and exercising that talent for all of his adult life. My best bosses at work have tended to be men who were less ideological about political or any other issues and more practical about getting things accomplished. Most good executives tend to be that way. They may have opinions, but their focus is on finding the right people, motivating those people to do their jobs well, and ensuring that the company's structure is such that good performance in each individual job fits into good performance as a team. People who can do these things have a particular talent, and that talent has value.
After doing very well in business, Mitt Romney wanted to apply his talent to public service. He ran first for the senate and then for governor as a Republican. He didn't run with any strong ideological agenda, but he wanted to make our government work better. His positions were a mix of Republican platform positions, compromises that any Republican would have to make to run in Massachusetts, and positions that he had from his upbringing in a financially rich and politically moderate family. I don't like the compromises that anyone would have to make to win in Massachusetts. I probably couldn't make those compromises for myself, but I don't see those who try to run in a liberal state as being evil because they accept some horrible positions in order to try to make other things better.
As governor of Massachusetts, he seems to have tried to get the best bargain that he could on all of these issues. He couldn't repeal gun control in Massachusetts. Maybe he wouldn't have wanted to repeal all gun control if he could, but he did a few small things to make the situation better for gun owners. He couldn't have stopped Massachusetts from having pro-abortion policies. He says that his study of life issues during a stem-cell controversy led him to a pro-life position. He came from a family that believed strongly in legalized abortion because they had known someone who died from an illegal abortion. In most of his adult life, he would have had no reason to look at the issue all that closely. When he did look at the issue, he changed. I looked at the issue differently until my late 20's. Each of us confronts the issue at a different time in life. I don't like the idea of making anything mandatory, but the current practice of making emergency rooms take uninsured patients means that we already have a kind socialized medicine everywhere. Forcing people to buy insurance means that they don't get that care for free if they could have paid for it. Massachusetts is going to be a state that does many wrong things. No one was going to change that. I think Mitt Romney did the best that anyone could have done in that situation.
Running for national office, he's been in a position to look at issues from a national perspective. Because the nation is more conservative than Massachusetts is, he's going to be in a position to embrace more conservative positions. I believe those positions will more closely reflect his own values and not the compromises that anyone in his position would have to make in order to be elected in Massachusetts. I'm sure that he doesn't hold conservative positions as passionately as I do, but I'm not looking for someone who feels as passionately as I do. I'm looking for someone who will be effective.
Likewise, I don't see Fred Thompson as some great conservative champion. If someone wants to support Fred Thompson, I can respect that choice. I'm not saying that Fred Thompson is bad or that supporting him is stupid. Fred Thompson has made his own compromises, and while those compromises don't make him a bad person or bad candidate, they do reveal him to be something other than the conservative purist that some people like to claim. Fred Thompson was always part of the John McCain/Chuck Hagel/Lindsey Graham wing of the Republican Senate. He may have been the best of that group, but he was part of that group. He has voted for gun control in a few instances as well. Most of these were not tight votes, but if he really wanted to show solidarity with America's gun owners, he could have voted in our favor. He's lobbied for pro-abortion clients. Again, doing so doesn't make him a bad person or bad candidate, but he's not the lifelong, pro-life champion that some want to claim. I'm skeptical of his whole argument for his not-guilty vote on one count of the impeachment. He can say now that campaign finance reform hasn't worked as he'd wished, but that statement is either a flip-flop itself or shows a lack of foresight. If we call the statement a flip-flop, then he's just another candidate changing his position to be elected. Lack of foresight may be a worse quality in a president. Regardless of his personal reasons, the people of Tennessee didn't force him into any of these votes. He could have voted 100% with Gun Owners of American and NRA and not suffered any negative repercussions with the voters of Tennessee. He could have voted against campaign finance reform and had no problems with the voters of Tennessee. The same is true on impeachment. Whatever compromises he's made, he wasn't forced into them.
Finally, Fred Thompson has no executive experience. The presidency is an executive office, and nothing in his background shows that he has a talent for that kind of work. Let's assume that you agree with Mitt Romney only 70% of the time and Fred Thompson 80% of the time. If Mitt Romney's effectiveness is 50% and Fred Thompson's is 25%, then you'll get 35% of what you want with Mitt Romney and 20% of what you want with Fred Thompson.
If none of these things changes your mind, that's okay. I'm not interested in insulting you because you've chosen another candidate. I don't respect you any less for looking at the evidence and coming to a different conclusion. I don't hate you or hate Fred Thompson. On the other hand, if you can't discuss these things without throwing insults, then you've lost my respect and you've driven me further from supporting your candidate.
Bill