Ross:

Wyden-Bennett was not my preferred health care reform either, but was it really no better than Obamacare from a conservative perspective? It scored as deficit neutral with many fewer spending cuts and tax increases than the legislation we actually got. It did away with Medicaid and S-CHIP entirely. And it severed the link between employment and insurance with one swift stroke. Yes, its mix of mandates and regulations mirrored some of the major features of Obamacare, but one could level a similar critique about the provisions of the alternative health care legislation that Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn co-sponsored, and I trust that NR would not welcome a primary challenge against either of those legislators.

No, they wouldn’t, which is part of what puzzles me about the Bennett episode. The more that one tries to discern what Bennett did that made him especially deserving of defeat, the more one realizes that his mistake was to have been a conventional Republican of the Bush Era. Unlike Ross, I don’t really have any sympathy for conventional Republicans of the Bush Era, and I have none at all for supporters of the TARP, but I can acknowledge that Bennett has not tried to make himself into a latter-day anti-bailout zealot as most of the embarrassing Congressional Republican leadership has done. He has not tried to morph into being something other than what he was.

Ross mentions NR’s Romney endorsement in 2008 in his post, so it is worth adding here that the Romney of 2007-08 during and after the primaries was basically indistinguishable from Bob Bennett on policy. As recently as last summer Mitt Romney went on Meet the Press and said this:

We [Republicans] have a healthcare plan. You, you look at Wyden-Bennett, that’s a healthcare plan that a number of Republicans think is a very good healthcare plan, one that we support. Take a look at that one.

Romney has said things like this, he endorsed Bennett for the Senate, and yet he remains a favorite candidate of National Review and continues to be the de facto front-runner for the next presidential contest. It’s as if there is always one standard for other office-holders, and a very different standard for Romney. At least Bennett has stood by his controversial votes and his record, unpopular as they were, and hasn’t spent the last five or six years running from his own words and deeds as Romney has. Bennett has not lamely tried to distinguish between the “good” TARP under Paulson and the “bad” TARP under Geithner, as Romney has tried to do, and as far as I know he has never insulted the intelligence of his audience by claiming that an individual mandate is an embodiment of the principle of personal responsibility.

Romney deserves at least as much scorn as Bennett does, and actually he deserves more, but he will not receive it from movement and party leaders and activists. Unless someone emerges with the political network, funding and charisma to stop him, it is hard to see how Romney does not prevail in the GOP’s winner-take-all primary system. In Utah, where a majority of the state electorate claimed to be against Bennett’s re-election, Romney is the most popular political figure despite being identified with a worse universal health care bill in Massachusetts and despite being an outspoken defender of the TARP in late 2008. Bennett is out for being no worse and actually a little better than Romney.

Bennett proposed a flawed bill that has never been (and never will be) voted on, but Romney signed a worse bill into law in Massachusetts, and his state is now paying the price for it. Bennett erred when he voted for the TARP along with most of his Senate colleagues, but he did not turn on a dime to claim that the abuses of the TARP had nothing to do with him. Bennett has stared political oblivion in the face and said that he would have done the same things if he had known what the price would be, while Romney seems to “evolve” new positions every few months depending on the circumstances. In my view, Bennett was wrong on certain issues, but he has demonstrated more basic integrity in this process than his supporter Mitt Romney has shown in his political career. If Bennett’s critics were consistent and honest, they would repudiate Romney even more forcefully.

P.S. I should add that both Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn, whose health care legislation Ross mentions here, also voted for the TARP.