Not Mitt

Politically, it has been a rich and confusing cycle. A year ago, speculation was rampant about which of the strong Republican contenders would enter the race for President, and there were many--Mitch Daniels, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, Haley Barbour. In the end, we were left with a rather weak field, led by Mitt Romney, who looks good on paper but in the flesh leaves the average Republican voter interested, but for all the wrong reasons. I share with many Republicans two objections to Romney, one which he might have been able to overcome and one which I think will end the prove seriously damaging not only to him personally but also to the Republican Party.

The first is the obvious problem of solving the riddle. As Governor of Massachusetts, Romney governed like a liberal--not perhaps compared with most recent politicians from the state but compared to virtually all Republicans anywhere else. He compromised a great deal and did not fight for conservative principles. Many have explained that governing from the right is not a serious option in Massachusetts, and they may be correct; however, governing from the center or center left doesn't leave one with any serious credentials as a Republican man of experience. The fact is that Romney's political experience would suit a Democrat perfectly--leftish but still reasonable enough to make him palatable to voters in the general election. The lack of a serious conservative record means that what we most want to know about him--whether he will fight the liberals in the Senate for, say, conservative nominees to the Supreme Court--is a serious question. In as polarized a polity as is ours at the present time, we can no longer afford David Souters on the Court. Romney claims that he is conservative, but that claim is belied by his record as Governor. Will he govern as a conservative from the White House? His record makes it impossible to say.

The second problem is the manner in which he runs his campaign. Since his politics are murky, he finds it difficult to run a positive campaign: I still cannot say what exactly Romney stands for, other than general competence (precisely what Michael "this election is not about ideology but about competence" Dukakis ran on in 1988). Neither, apparently, can many other voters, which is why, when the field was larger, week after week, the attitude of anyone but Romney launched Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich, Cain, and Santorum to the front of the pack. In contrast with Romney, each of these candidates had a positive message which allowed voters to distinguish between them. And as soon as each of these candidates began to look like a serious contender, Romney began savagely to attack, wounding each of them so badly that they began to falter. To be sure, some of these candidates, like Perry and Cain, also damaged themselves, but Romney ensured that they would not survive the heavy artillery of his negative ads. That is one way to ensure that no one stands in Romney's way, but it will also ensure bad feeling and further lack of trust. Part of the wisdom of Reagan's famous eleventh commandment is that it promotes good feeling within the Party; Romney's destructive, negative campaign does just the opposite. What he did to Gingrich, and Gingrich's immature but natural and thus understandable response, is a perfect example of what such negative campaigning can do.

In the end, Romney is likely to win the nomination. He may even defeat President Obama. If he does so, however, it will be not because anyone likes Romney and is willing to support him because of what he stands for. Rather, it will be because he trashed the other guys. That is not a mandate. As Newt Gingrich showed in the 1990s and Barack Obama more recently, much can be accomplished by a positive campaign. And neither of these men ran simply one-dimensional positive campaigns: both were willing to make clear distinctions between themselves and what they thought was bad policy for the country. But relentlessly negative campaigns don't do that. In Romney's case, trashing the other guy still tells us nothing about Romney--other than that he very, very badly wants to be President. I am not at all convinced that they who want it the most ought to have it.

Debate Tonight

On the whole, all the candidates--with the possible exception of Gov. Perry getting tangled in the syntax of attacking the two Gov. Romneys or talking about "mating Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain"--even Rep. Paul, did very well. Newt Gingrich did particularly well; Rep. Bachmann also did very well, for the small amount of time she was able to speak. I herewith announce the formation of the Bachmann Equal Time Association. Anyone who cares to join BETA may consider his initiation the sending of an email to Fox News requesting that Michelle Bachmann receive the same amount of time as, say, Gary Johnson. For crying out loud, let her speak! She has been a very strong Republican voice over the past three-year disaster of the current administration, and we ought at least to let her say what she has travelled from Minnesota to Florida to say.

The Silent Treatment?

According to Chris Wallace on today's Special Report, both he and Brett Baier have received a flood of emails over the past couple of days from supporters of Texas Congressman Ron Paul demanding more coverage of their man, who finished a very close second to Michelle Bachmann in the straw poll at Ames, Iowa, on Saturday. At first blush, they have a point: Rep. Bachmann has received a great deal of press for her showing; Texas Governor Rick Perry, who didn't even compete at Ames, has received as much; surely the man who almost won the poll ought also to receive his fair share of attention?

As is often the case with Ron Paul, however, the closer look tells the tale. The Congressman is very well known for standing against wasteful government spending, primarily because such spending exceeds Rep. Paul's strictly conservative interpretation of Constitutional limits on the role of government. But closer scrutiny shows that Ron Paul, like many others in Congress, has voted for Federal spending (on such projects as funding research on the reproductive lives of shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico) that happens to benefit his constituents but which also seems exactly the kind of spending that he criticizes others for receiving. While TMH agrees with much of what Rep. Paul preaches, we also find some of that preaching a bit unconvincing since his actions in part belie his ideas.

And a closer look at the coverage of Paul's campaign reveals a deeper story than a media conspiracy to ignore him to death. The serious media, interested in careful analysis about what is likely to happen over the long term in the campaign, does not wish to devote a great deal of time to a candidate who simply cannot win the nomination. And his inability to win the nomination is emphatically not due to a lack of coverage by the media. The fact of the matter is that Paul's views are idiosyncratic: because so many of his supporters believe that 9-11 was "an inside job" (a view that Paul has been somewhat reluctant to repudiate), because he believes in an essentially isolationist foreign policy, because he believes we should end the Federal Reserve and return to the gold standard, his views are out of the main stream of Republican opinion. That in turn means that his support in the Ames straw poll is extremely solid but that it could not grow significantly larger. To be sure, Bachmann defeated him by only a narrow margin, but, if the field had been smaller, she could well have beaten him by more.

Since Bachmann--and Pawlenty and Romney and Gingrich and Cain--are in the mainstream of Republican thought, any of them might have won. If fewer other candidates had participated in the poll, Bachmann would have received more votes because some who supported, say, Pawlenty might, if he had not been running, supported Bachmann. But because Paul is so different from the other candidates, it is unlikely that in a smaller field he would have attracted more support than he did. Now that Pawlenty has dropped out of the race, his support will drift to most of the other candidates; but because Paul is so unique, very little of Pawlenty's support will swing his way. Those who can be attracted to Paul support him already; since because of his views he is unlikely to gain support as the field inevitably narrows in the coming months, his slice of the pie cannot get any bigger: in fact, relative to the other candidates, his slice will only grow smaller. For this reason, he cannot ultimately win, and no amount of media attention will change that fact because it will not essentially change Paul's platform. On the other hand, Bachmann might win; so might Perry or Romney; so conceivably might Gingrich or Santorum--and for that reason, the media will pay more attention to them than to Paul.

As Paul's supporters point out, media bias certainly exists, but that is true of the mainstream media (think of the Newsweek cover of Michelle Bachmann), not of Fox News, for whom Baier and Wallace work. They do indeed cover other candidates more than they cover Congressman Paul, but not because they wish to silence him. Rather, they realize that the very passion of his supporters and uniqueness of his positions ensure that he is always at the peak of his fortunes, and that peak is simply not enough to make him a serious long-term contender. Congressman Paul is admirable in many ways, not least because his candidacy invites people to think seriously about important issues that we ignore at our peril. Ideas alone, however, do not ensure political viability, and since Paul is in the current political climate not viable as a first-tier candidate, he will not receive first-tier political coverage.