The American Conservative

Rick Santorum had a good weekend, having won the Kansas caucus comfortably with over fifty per cent of the vote, and coming a strong second in Wyoming. With a disappointing Super Tuesday for Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich coming under increased pressure from the Santorum campaign to drop out, it looks like the GOP nomination race will develop into a two-man race. Unfortunately for Republicans, this race is between a moderate who enacted an early version of Obamacare and whose opinion on almost anything is a moveable feast, and a strict social conservative who does not seem to understand the American political tradition.

Santorum cannot win over moderates, and Romney cannot win over the socially conservative base. While it does look like Romney will be able to claim close victories tomorrow in Mississippi and Alabama they will hardly be convincing or of much reassurance. Republicans cannot win without the south, and the polling data shows both Mississippi and Alabama to be evenly divided between Romney and Santorum supporters. These sorts of divisions in a primary contest should worry Republican strategists. While it is very unlikely that Obama could win Alabama or Mississippi in November, the uncertainty of conservatives in these states is telling. In 2008, Mississippi overwhelmingly voted for John McCain in the primary, and while most votes in the 2008 Alabama primary did go to Mike Huckabee, the level of confidence in John McCain was much higher than current support for Romney or Santorum.

Whatever the outcomes of tomorrow’s contests it looks unlikely that a nominee will be decided soon.

Image: Shutterstock/Frontpage

It is my understanding, from a very reliable source, that the Ron Paul campaign laid off most of its staff nationwide yesterday.  I do not know if that means he will suspend his campaign, though I hope he will continue on to the convention to make sure his voice is heard, even if ignored.  I have to say that it was my impression that the campaign was poorly run at every level, top heavy with useless six-figure consultants, and frequently unfocused.  I spoke at a number of RP events in Northern Virginia but they were generally poorly attended because little effort was made to publicize them.  Even a February rally of Veterans for Paul held on the Mall, which I and many other local veterans would have attended, was in no way advertised to reach a wider audience beyond the organizers.  I think Dr. Paul could have carried the Old Dominion with a little more effort and I would bet that has also been true in other places.  It is such a tragedy because the Paul message of genuine change in how we do business was coming at the right time and creating a great deal of enthusiasm, particularly among younger voters and independents.  The blockhead establishment Republicans are only preaching war and big government and it now looks like we will be having more of the same from them or from four more years of Obama.  More likely Obama.

Dave Weigel wonders whether the Pennsylvania ex-Senator will be the GOP’s frontrunner in four years’ time, considering that “the runner-up of the last Republican primary always starts off with an advantage. McCain 2008. Dole 1996. Bush 1988. Reagan 1976.” What’s more, assuming presumptive nominee Romney loses to Obama this year, wouldn’t back-to-back failures by moderate Republicans open the door to getting a right-winger the nomination next time?

Probably not. The same list that testifies to the GOP’s propensity for nominating runners-up also shows what kind of Republican typically gets the nomination, namely the kind that includes Bush, Dole, McCain, and Romney. (Bush II doesn’t make the list as a runner-up, but he fits the ideological pattern — and anyway, quite a few voters initially thought he was his father.) The Republican base is not primarily conservative, it’s primarily Republican, and while it’s happy to throw rhetorical bones and even symbolic scraps of legislation in the direction of economic conservatives and the social right, what party loyalists are most concerned about is winning elections. Which hasn’t proved to be Santorum’s strong suit.

Instead, I expect that for the first time since 1968 the GOP won’t have an heir apparent. That by itself might be a terrifying enough prospect to induce some unusual behavior in the party-loyalist base, but I don’t think it will send them running to Rick Santorum.

America has reached the point where its politics are conformist and polarized at the same time. That’s maybe not such a paradox: when there’s little substantive disagreement between the party of Obamacare and the party of Romneycare, the party of foreign intervention and the other party of foreign intervention, what’s left to draw voters to the polls other than appeals to myth and resentment? Thus Obama, a civil-liberties wrecking corporatist of exactly the same mold as George W. Bush, has to be believed to be an Alinskyite radical, a Third World communist; while anyone who doesn’t want to pay for other people’s contraceptives must be a blazing misogynist and would-be theocrat. It’s not that the cultural differences between the gangs aren’t real — though they arguably aren’t cultural — but that the acrimony masks a fundamental consensus over the shape of the economy, the power of the state, the servility of the citizen, and hegemony over the globe.

The few figures who defy this manic conformism are to be cherished, even when the alternatives they offer aren’t always things you want to support, and even when their “cultural” complexion is far from what you’d like. I’m therefore sorry to see Dennis Kucinich lose his primary fight to stay in Congress. Mostly because of what he stood for, above all his strong antiwar convictions, but also because Congress will be a flatter, duller place without him, one more easily managed by the fungus-like leadership in both parties. As a story in the Washington Post notes:

“The one thing that’s being tamped down here is, we’re losing characters. When I got here, you had Jim Traficant, you had Barney, and then Dennis came,” said Rep. Steven C. LaTourette (R-Ohio), a nine-term veteran, referring to Frank and former congressman James Traficant, who ended up in prison on corruption charges.

“The place needs character, and characters.”

The more bizarre representatives aren’t always the ones most likely to defy the leadership. But the decline in eccentricty and the greater ideological discipline the parties have displayed over the past decade spring from a common source, the streamlining of political management.

Although not many people in high places may notice what I’m doing, I’d like to ask the following questions to three of the surviving GOP presidential contenders. First, why did Mitt Romney, as late as 2002, respond to a questionnaire from Planned Parenthood indicating that he fully supported Roe v. Wade and favored state funding for abortion?

According to his stated positions at the time, which were reported in the Boston Globe, Romney also favored allowing minors to obtain abortions without parental consent. Whatever one may think about these issues, Romney has been flip-flopping on social questions more often than he wants us to believe. Supposedly he had moved from wiggling somewhere to the left of Teddy Kennedy on abortion, while running unsuccessfully against him for the Senate in 1994, to being a “family-issues conservative” a few years later. By 2002, according to this frequently recounted narrative, he had undergone l sea change. As the Santorum campaign tried to point out during the recent Michigan primary, this change is not at all evident from Romney’s record; or else this change came later, when Romney’s presidential ambitions became stronger and he had to contend for votes from the Religious Right.

Second, if Santorum is as gloomy about the moral state of his country as he appears to be from his campaign speeches, how do we explain that he switches gears abruptly when he discusses America’s role in the world? Then we become a shining city on a hill and a chosen people required to bring the human rights we exemplify to the rest of humanity. This schizophrenia is characteristic not only of Santorum but of those Religious Right spokesmen and politicians I’ve been listening to. I wish they could make up their minds. Either we’re going to hell in a hand basket; or we’re so glowingly virtuous that we have a mission to make everyone exactly like us. Which is it? Read More…

Enda Kenny, the prime minister of Ireland, has announced that Ireland will hold a referendum on Europe’s new fiscal treaty. Ireland was one of twenty-five countries to agree to a treaty that calls for more fiscal discipline. Mr. Kenny himself believes that the treaty is worth ratifying, but the Irish Attorney General has said that a referendum in necessary.

Ireland has a far from perfect relationship to pan-European referenda. In 2008, Ireland’s public voted to reject the Lisbon Treaty, a result that the European establishment refused to accept. Legislatures of countries like Germany and the Netherlands have approved the new fiscal treaty while rejecting the possibility of a referendum, with less than impressive majorities. The UK has withdrawn from the process altogether.

The fact that referenda are being rejected across Europe is another indication of the undemocratic nature of European institutions. Despite what effect a referendum will have, it will be interesting to see how the Irish vote on the proposed treaty, and how damaging an indecisive vote will be to the multinational response to the Euro crisis. Whatever the outcome, Ireland will need to make sure that renegotiation with the EU happens soon, in order to avoid the mistakes of the past. Read More…

My prognostications for the Republican primary season have not been very good this cycle, though the arc of the race tracks expectations: Romney has the whiff of inevitability, however reluctant voters may be to make it easy for him. A religious right candidate has threatened to upset the coronation, but never quite succeeds. It’s a familiar enough script. What I didn’t consider was that Romney would have a harder time than John McCain — in part due to the extended primary season, and in part because Mitt’s sense of entitlement seems to offend Republican voters more than McCain’s “maverick” pose did. (One commenter on Twitter noted that Romney has a habit of bouncing back after he’s been counted out, which could spell trouble for Obama in November. The flipside is also true, of course: after every New Hampshire or Florida, Romney loses momentum again as voters decide to teach him a lesson in humility, which somehow never takes.)

I didn’t expect either Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich to run — or, at least, to run for long — and obviously I was only half-right. I also expected Mike Huckabee to run, and I’m baffled as to why he didn’t. Huck was poised to overtake Romney when Romney dropped out of the ’08 race. The ex-Arkansas governor had some fresh baggage for 2012, most notably a scandal in which a criminal whose sentence he had commuted shot and killed four police officers in 2009, but he still had what looked to me like a formidable profile. It’s easy to envision him winning every vote Santorum has so far won and a lot more besides — unlike Santorum, Huckabee wasn’t booted out of the last office he held in a landslide defeat, and unlike the tone-deaf Pennsylvanian, Huck had a folksiness that contrasted well with Romney’s iCandidate programming.

Did Huck think he couldn’t raise the money? Was he happier being a well-paid Fox News “personality” than a likely loser to Romney or Obama? That’s plausible enough. The campaign hasn’t been missing much for his absence — Bachmann and Santorum have covered his base — but from a fantasy political-football perspective, it’s surprising he stayed on the sidelines. (The other “what if” of this cycle isn’t Mitch Daniels, who probably would have fared as badly as Huntsman and Pawlenty, but Rand Paul. Would he have been able to do as well as his father and add to his total more of the Tea Party and mainstream Republican vote? I think Rand was smart not to do it: it’s too soon, Romney had too many fundamentals on his side, and the field was too volatile to guess how it would play out. But I’ve heard from more than one analyst who thinks Rand would have been, if not a shoo-in, a factor that would have severely complicated the picture for Romney.)

Whenever I become depressed over the current state of this country’s election campaigns I know I can always count on Russia to remind me how worse it could be.

Today the Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin, gave a speech to a stadium in Moscow as he bid for re-election as President, a post he held from 2000 to 2008. Standing below a banner proclaiming “Defend the Country” in front of a crowd of tens of thousands, Putin pledged to win the “battle for Russia,” while emphasizing Russia’s independence and appealing to the crowd’s patriotism.

The speech comes not long after large scale protests against corruption and fraud in December’s elections took place in Moscow’s Red Square. With public signs of dissent growing, it makes sense for Putin to put on a publicity stunt like today’s rally.

Putin is of the old guard, a politician molded by the Soviet political machine and the KGB. He understand the importance of Russian patriotism and a “strong man” image in Russian politics. Yet even among crowds of “supporters” there is evidence of fakery and deception, with some of the participants at today’s rally saying that they had been forced to attend by their employer, paid to attend, or that they thought it was going to be a folk festival, not a political rally. With people like this in the second-biggest rally for Putin thus far, it is easy to see why the opposition are so angry. How is it possible for Putin to have the support he claims when he cannot bring legitimate supporters to a rally in Moscow? Read More…

 

At the end of last week I was lucky enough to attend CPAC 2012, the largest conservative conference in the country. Coming from the UK and having attended a few political conferences in my time I anticipated few surprises. I thought I knew what to expect. Yet CPAC was beautifully interesting, bizarre, theatrical, contradictory, and unpredictable in equal measure.

At first glance CPAC is nothing too out of the ordinary. Having checked in and collected my media pass I made my way down to the exhibition hall to help set up our booth, where we were giving out free copies of the most recent edition and offering subscriptions. Our booth was in the corner flanked by a group calling for the return of Glenn Beck to Fox and the National Taxpayers Union. It was only when I began my first walk around the exhibition hall that I realized how interesting the next three days were going to be. Read More…

Not by a long shot, but the Pennsylvania ex-senator’s victories in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado yesterday attest to the enduring strength of Buchanan’s formula: combine social conservatives with a blue-collar economic program, and you have a force that can threaten the establishment. Unfortunately for voters, Santorum isn’t really a break with the country-club set; as a politician, he’s stamped from exactly the same mold as George W. Bush. And while the coalition built around “Middle American” values can give guys like Mitt Romney or Bob Dole dyspepsia, it’s never been enough to deny them the Republican nomination.

Still, Santorum’s success shows the tectonic plates of the GOP are still in motion: social conservatives and the establishment aren’t completely fused, the establishment looks weaker than it has in 20 years (thanks to the lingering contamination of the Dubya debacle), and although all of this augurs ill for the party’s November prospects, it suggests there could be a reckoning before 2016 that will reshape the GOP’s identity. I’m not optimistic: Middle American militarism may once again prove the GOP’s lowest common denominator, but there are alternatives.

To see how this battle was fought, and lost, once before, be sure to check out “Buchanan’s Revolution” in the current TAC, as well as the book from which it comes, Timothy Stanley’s The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan .