{"id":12777,"date":"2012-01-24T14:52:12","date_gmt":"2012-01-24T19:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=12777"},"modified":"2012-01-24T15:40:21","modified_gmt":"2012-01-24T20:40:21","slug":"the-nub-of-romneys-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/12777\/the-nub-of-romneys-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"The Nub of Romney&#8217;s Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Writing today <a href=\"http:\/\/dyn.politico.com\/printstory.cfm?uuid=3C95ADF5-5022-4C5B-AF17-195308109C7C\" target=\"_blank\">in Politico<\/a>, Reagan biographer (and now Newt Gingrich chronicler) Craig Shirley gets to the very heart of the difficulty Mitt Romney faces in trying to persuade a Republican electorate desperate for an epochal shift in a party that they (rightly) perceive to have been insufficiently inattentive to limited government:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The former Bain Capital chief is the elitist heir to Rockefeller and the malapropistic heir to Ford and George H. W. Bush. Watching Ford speak extemporaneously was like watching a drunk cross an icy parking lot \u2014 and the same can be said for the exuberantly monosyllabic man from Massachusetts&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>No one goes around calling themselves a Nixon Republican or a Ford Republican or a Bush Republican. But plenty now proudly call themselves Goldwater Republicans and Reagan Republicans.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>One need not share Shirley&#8217;s enthusiasm for Gingrich to recognize the sagacity of his diagnosis of Romney. It&#8217;s not that conservatives don&#8217;t want a manager. It&#8217;s just that they want so much more. At this moment in our history &#8212; when all sense of principled restrictions on the power of the federal government seem to be eroding &#8212; they want someone to draw a line in the sand. Convincing conservative voters that he&#8217;s the man for that job is probably beyond Mitt Romney&#8217;s ability. To remain a serious candidate, however, he&#8217;ll at least have to convince them that he&#8217;s not a closet sympathist for their ideological adversaries within the party.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Writing today in Politico, Reagan biographer (and now Newt Gingrich chronicler) Craig Shirley gets to the very heart of the difficulty Mitt Romney faces in trying to persuade a Republican electorate desperate for an epochal shift in a party that they (rightly) perceive to have been insufficiently inattentive to limited government: The former Bain Capital [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[914,2740,1679,3299,160,3300,869,3301,1576,456],"class_list":["post-12777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-2012-presidential-election","tag-barry-goldwater","tag-conservatism","tag-gerald-ford","tag-mitt-romney","tag-nelson-rockefeller","tag-newt-gingrich","tag-republican-politics","tag-richard-nixon","tag-ronald-reagan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12777"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12783,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12777\/revisions\/12783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}