Romney Will Take Conservatives For Granted (and They Will Let Him)
Peter Beinart makes the case for why conservatives should be satisfied with Romney:
It’s true that Romney could, if he really cared, derail this process, and choose someone with a passion for say, mine safety. But if he did, the decision would produce ripples of discontent: An angry phone call from a Republican member of Congress or large campaign donor. Negative chatter on the conservative blogs. And who would rise in Romney’s defense as he alienated the conservatives who run today’s GOP? The moderate Republican caucus in Congress? Washington’s influential moderate Republican think tanks? The moderate Republican talking heads you keep seeing on Fox? If anyone rose to his defense, it would be the Sierra Club or the New York Times editorial page, which in conservative eyes would compound the offense. A few high-profile decisions like that and the Wall Street Journal would start muttering about the ghost of George H.W. Bush, who lost reelection after a conservative challenged him in the Republican primary.
Assuming Romney can win the general election, this underestimates the incentives Romney will have to ignore conservative discontent once he is in office, and it overestimates conservative willingness to oppose a Republican President. George W. Bush was probably the least conservative President in the substance of his policies since Nixon, but a combination of partisan tribal loyalty, post-9/11 solidarity, and traditional deference to presidential leadership kept most conservatives’ complaints to a minimum or prevented them from being voiced at all. Bush drove through significant expansion of the federal role in education, he pushed through the largest expansion of the welfare state since the 1960s, and he actively defied the party base on immigration during both terms. There were some criticisms and objections to this, but apart from some honorable exceptions there was remarkably little resistance and even less alienation prior to the 2006 midterms. After 2006, conservatives began abandoning the sinking ship, but the immigration debate in 2007 was the only time that Bush faced a large-scale revolt.
Bush assumed that he could take conservatives for granted, and he could, which is what he proceeded to do. Bush presented himself as a conservative while arguably governing farther to the left than anyone, including his father, in the previous thirty years. Most conservatives accepted the act, and largely ignored the substance. If there’s one thing we know about Romney, it is that he is quite capable of pretending to be conservative without being one. He may govern that way for as long as he believes it is advantageous, but there is nothing to stop him from keeping up the pretense of conservatism while enacting policies that are nothing of the kind.
8 Responses to “Romney Will Take Conservatives For Granted (and They Will Let Him)”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Beinart tends to have a very superficial and detached understanding of how practical politics works. You’re right, of course, about how a Romney administration would actually function. It never ceases to disappoint me how conservatives define their beliefs by whatever the GOP party line happens to be, and condemn any and all dissenters. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.
Disappoint conservatives in what way, Daniel? Pull all our troops out of Afghanistan? Appoint pro-abortion judges to the Supreme Court? Not grant waivers to the states for Obamacare and not press Congress to repeal Obamacare? Not cut federal spending? Cut spending on defense? Not propose revamping of the federal income tax system? Not wage war against Russia on behalf of Georgia? Not call for a total ban on contraceptives, which will undoubtedly upset Ross Douthat (now working on the third religion of his relatively short life)? Call for an expansion of Social Security and Medicare?
Romney is bound to dissatisfy some conservatives of one stripe or another depending on the issue, but my point here is that Romney will not feel beholden to conservatives, and he will govern in whatever seems most advantageous to him. He won’t believe that he owes conservatives much of anything, and most conservatives are so keen to keep the GOP in control of the White House that they will put up with just about anything. I don’t know what the particular policies will be. It’s probably the case that Romney hasn’t decided on them yet.
I would venture that if you accept, broadly speaking, that the WSJ represents conservatism in its purposes on the domestic side, and the Weekly Standard in its purposes on the Foreign Policy side, mutually reinforcing each other as they go, then Romney and conservatives will go together like a horse and carriage. This (money and ‘elite conservative media’) is why the nomination is all but sewn up already, sound and fury notwithstanding.
The interesting politics that is yet to develop is how well will Ron Paul fare as the season goes on; and whether circumstances will develop that convince him that it would be salutary for the country to run as a third party candidate.
For a genuine conservative, a choice between Obama and Romney is yawn making.
“For a genuine conservative, a choice between Obama and Romney is yawn making.”
That’s because we know that “genuine conservatives” either don’t value competence or are simply unable to evaluate competence, as evidenced by the nominations of Sharon Angle and Christine O’Donnell in 2010 and even the selection of Sarah Palin in 2008. I am not sure what a “genuine conservative” means. Does it mean you are in favor of cutting federal spending and balancing the budget while not touching Social Security or Medicare or the defense budget, as many “Tea Partiers” believe? Does it mean withdrawing completely from Afghanistan or having bases there “for eternity” (per “conservative” Sen. Lindsey Graham)? It’s hard to tell what a “genuine conservative” actually beieves, which is why Daniel is on safe ground when he predicts that President Romney will disappoint many “conservatives” once in office.
It is not so hard to tell what a genuine conservative believes. Genuine conservatives understand that the government has about run out of future to pay for the present value of Social Security and Medicare and Foreign missions to bring the world up to Washington standards. Genuine conservatives also believe that there are other than economic reasons for resisting Washington’s imperial ambitions; the reasons are too many to go into here, but they can be summarized: genuine conservatives would prefer to live their lives responsibly as free men.
Calling Sharon Angle and Christine O’Donnell real conservatives is an insult to the term. Both were pathetic media creations who ran the absolutely stupidest campaigns I’ve ever seen.
“Calling Sharon Angle and Christine O’Donnell real conservatives is an insult to the term. Both were pathetic media creations who ran the absolutely stupidest campaigns I’ve ever seen.”
I didn’t call them conservatives. I impied that they were incompetent. It is undeniable that the “Tea Party,” not the media, was largely responsible for the nominations of Angle and O’Donnell and a few other incompetent losers. The last I checked, the Tea Party is still a major constituency of the Republican Party. And, to be completely fair, the Tea Party deserves a lot of credit for the large landslide Republicans won in the last congressional elections as well as at the state level. You have to keep in mind that both national parties, Republican and Democratic, are assemblages of many diverse, often conflcting, interests. It makes as little sense to regard the Republican Party as comprising individuals with uniform thoughts as it would to think of all Catholics as thinking alike.