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Beyond his positions on the issues, American voters will also be judging Romney on his character, on what kind of individual they think they are entrusting with an office that is unique in its necessity for a psychological bond with the American people.
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| If Mitt Romney becomes the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, the former Massachusetts governor will certainly have earned it. For while the media have spent the past several months presenting Romney as the ‘inevitable’ nominee in the GOP field, the reality is much more complicated. In fact, Romney couldn’t be a worse fit for the Republican Party of 2012.
Romney’s core problem is that he seems to be a man imbued with remarkable ideological elasticity. Depending on the audience, he’s either pro-choice or pro-life, either loves the idea of a flat tax or thinks it’s a boon for “fat cats” and either wants more gun control or touts his membership in the NRA. Good businessman that he is, Romney is whatever he believes the market needs him to be.
This habit has left the public unclear whether the real Mitt Romney is the moderate-to-liberal Republican who ran two statewide campaigns in deep blue Massachusetts or the conservative true believer who materialized when his political future became contingent on winning over Republican primary voters. The operative question has thus become the one that Jonathan Cohn asked in the title of a recent story in New York Magazine: “Which Side is Romney Conning?”
This isn’t exactly a new problem for the former Bay State governor; it was a big part of the reason that he failed to secure the GOP nomination in 2008, even as the party flailed desperately for an alternative to the outmoded and ideologically suspect John McCain. But the consequences this time around are much greater because of the remarkable renaissance of the Republican Party during the Obama years.
Rather than following the prescribed media narrative of accepting its obsolescence in the face of a charismatic liberal president, the conservative response to the Obama Administration was to dig deep and return to its roots. The result was the Tea Party movement and a host of fellow-travelers who rejected both liberalism and big-government conservatism in favor of a renewed emphasis on limited government, reverence for the constitution and free-market economics. At the heart of their activism was a bipartisan warning: Politicians who were willing to trade away principle for easy political points were about to find themselves in the crosshairs.
That admonition birthed the dilemma that now faces those same activists as they prepare to cast their votes for the Republican presidential nomination. Most conservatives would be willing to vote for virtually anyone in order to see Barack Obama evicted from the White House (the internet meme is “I’d vote for a syphilitic camel” over the current president). Yet Romney – the candidate who is relentlessly portrayed as the most electable in the GOP field – represents precisely the kind of equivocation, opportunism and seeming lack of principle that the Tea Party was organized to defy. For committed Tea Party types, giving the nomination to Romney seems tantamount to a refutation of the entire movement.
The quandary may not be as vexing as it seems, however. The argument for Romney’s electability hinges largely on the fact that his policy bearings – elusive though they might be – are widely considered centrist enough to be persuasive in a general election. But that calculation mistakes the one-dimensional analysis of computer models for the reasoned judgments of flesh-and-blood voters, who are liable to vote on factors beyond a candidate’s feelings about the propriety of any given marginal tax rate. This is bad news for the robotic Romney; flesh and blood isn’t his specialty.
Beyond his positions on the issues, American voters will also be judging Romney on his character, on what kind of individual they think they are entrusting with an office that is unique in its necessity for a psychological bond with the American people. And on that dimension, the Romney who will say anything to get elected is an exceedingly tough sell. In an age of ubiquitous disappointment with Washington, the last thing voters are longing for is a politician seasoned enough in the game to attempt to be everything to everyone, without the deftness to hide that calculation. If that’s the tact that Romney takes in a general election matchup, he’s likely to befall the same fate as his Massachusetts counterpart John Kerry, who learned in 2004 that the American people have a remarkable nose for ciphers.
For all of his other shortcomings, say this for Barack Obama: He is a true believer in the cause of modern liberalism. After four years of the destruction that ideology has wrought, aren’t the American people owed the opposing case, buttressed by a sense of conviction?
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