Daniel Larison

Accommodation, Detente, and “Winning the Cold War”

Movement Conservatives Foisted Romney on Themselves

By Daniel Larison • November 28, 2012, 4:30 PM

Scott Galupo gets most things right in his dissection of Stuart Stevens’ apologia for Romney, but I don’t think this is correct:

In short, Romney lacked roots in both Washington and at the grassroots level; he essentially foisted himself onto the party.

As much as I would like to characterize Romney as an unwelcome interloper who forced himself on his supporters, this lets the latter off a little too easily. If there was a time when Romney foisted himself on Republicans, it was in 2006 and 2007 when he was organizing his first campaign. Back then it would have been fair to say that he was trying to impose himself on a majority of the party with which he had almost nothing in common until he started running for the nomination. However, by the end of his first campaign, Romney had been embraced as the candidate of large parts of the conservative movement as their preferred alternative to McCain. Most Republican primary voters weren’t buying his act at the time, but many activists certainly did, and they propelled him into the position of being the effective runner-up and likely favorite for the nomination in the next election. Romney probably could not have become the nominee this year without the support he received from movement conservatives in 2007-08.

During his second run, Romney seemed to realize the limits of being the movement candidate. Romney had the advantages of being the front-runner and having run once before. It’s true that there was no great enthusiasm for him from party leaders or activists in the 2012 campaign, but in the end he was viewed favorably by an overwhelming majority of Republicans and strong resistance to him was limited and divided against itself. One of the weaknesses of anti-Romney forces in the primaries was that more than a few of his critics, including some of his fellow candidates, had been his supporters in 2008. Another was that the opposition to Romney never settled on any one alternative and kept jumping from one candidate to the next. Even when they were openly against Romney, movement conservatives’ inconsistency and indecision worked in his favor. Movement conservatives made Romney a viable candidate inside the GOP last time, and then completely failed in their half-hearted efforts to block him this time.

Posted in politics. Tagged Mitt Romney, Scott Galupo, Stuart Stevens.

6 Responses to Movement Conservatives Foisted Romney on Themselves

libfreak48 says:

November 28, 2012 at 7:54 pm

It’s ironic that in this campaign where every GOP candidate was trying to out-conservative the rest of the field – after the 2008 campaign in which the same thing happened, but even more so this year – I hear nothing but conservatives lamenting about how their self-described “severely conservative” candidate wasn’t conservative enough, and how they would have won if they’d only nominated a “real” conservative. Yet all of their severely conservative candidates for the Senate got their conservative butts severely kicked. Perhaps it’s time for conservatives to take a severe look in the mirror and ask themselves how severely their views are out of touch with the American people.
Merlin says:

November 28, 2012 at 10:45 pm

This is quibbling, sort of a chicken-egg issue, to some extent, but here goes. To your excellent point: “the opposition to Romney never settled on any one alternative and kept jumping from one candidate to the next,” I think it really needs to be asked, what choice did we have?

In 2012, we never backed Romney. We kept hoping that someone else would jump in and put us out of our misery – but, it never happened imho *because* Romney’s organization had been working for years to essentially BUY support across the US and amass enough money to butcher opponents in air wars.

Steve Baldwin’s piece sums the first part of that up here:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/11/27/yes_romney_was_the_problem_116245.html
“But the Romney forces were clever. Beginning in 2004, they created a half dozen PACs to give money to conservative and GOP entities all over the country. I’ve reviewed these disclosures and hundreds of GOP and conservative entities benefitted from Romney’s largess.”

That is why I think Galupo’s use of the word “foist” is spot on. What serious contender was strong enough to go up against Romney’s resources? So my contention is that voters’ indecision and inconsistency was the direct result of the Romney operation’s approach – and the process (the state and national party rules? lack thereof?) that enabled it.

My naive hope going forward is that in about 2.5 years, a couple of likeable conservative will emerge, partake in 3-5 debates and make it a competitive (rather than bloody) state-to-state contest, giving voters a real choice. My fear is that we are already doomed to repeat this unbearable “inevitability” pattern (hello, Jeb Bush). That’s pretty scary.
beejeez says:

November 29, 2012 at 2:09 am

Maybe it’s a Republican thing; we wouldn’t understand. Because to many of us outsiders, the notion that Romney was “embraced as the candidate of large parts of the conservative movement” in 2008 sounds comically delusional. Certainly a tight circle of Wall Street moneybags were sold on him, but my recollection is that partywide Romney was seen as an effete establishment salesman incapable of charging up the base the way a war-vet snapping turtle like McCain could. The only reason polls showed a Republican groundswell for Romney in 2012 was that their voters haaaaaaate the Democratic alternative so much.

And what if conservative-conservatives had coalesced around a single alternative to Romney instead of splintering among half a dozen lightweights? It wouldn’t have mattered. Everyone not a deluded ideologue knows any other GOP candidate would have decapitated the party instead of giving it the limb amputation that was Romney-Ryan 2012. Romney was the only hope for Republicans from the git-go, and there’s a signficant chance he will have been their last hope for a long, long time.
Clint says:

November 29, 2012 at 7:23 am

Movement Conservatism was libertarians, traditionalists, and anticommunists fighting the liberals’ New Deal. Neoconservatives and Religious Right latched on to the movement later.

Romney was the Neocons’ fallback guy, as was McCain before him.

It’s time to bench The Faux Conservative NeoCons.
MBunge says:

November 29, 2012 at 10:26 am

“partywide Romney was seen as an effete establishment salesman incapable of charging up the base the way a war-vet snapping turtle like McCain could.”

That is about as far away from the truth as possible. Not that anyone really loved Romney in 2008, but McCain was widely loathed by huge portions of the conservative movement.

Let’s review. The party establishment and the conservative movement largely went in the tank for George W. Bush in 2000. Then McCain won the New Hampshire primary and was subjected to, perhaps, the most vicious and sustain intra-party attacks ever seen in the GOP during my lifetime. Maybe there were worse things said about Goldwater back in the day, but that was before my time.

Then, in 2008, while the establishment was more or less okay with McCain, the movement hacks and pundits that had so utterly demonized him in 2000 couldn’t support him without admitting, to themselves more than anyone else, that they were full of crap. That led them to rally around Romney as the last and only alternative to McCain, which is what gave Romney credibility 4 years later as Larison points out.

Mike
LosGatosCA says:

November 29, 2012 at 12:11 pm

Used to be that the conservative Republican TeaBagger mission statement was pretty clear and supported by 50 +% of the electorate. Cut taxes, increase defense spending, and screw people who were not on their team, specifically non-Christians, racial minorities, ‘slutty’ women, gays, etc.

Fiscal realities have invalidated cutting taxes as credible. Afghanistan and Iraq have invalidated defense spending and Republican management of it as a credible option. Demographics have made the folks ‘not on their team’ larger than their own team.

It’s hard for them to realize that time has passed them and their mission by. There is simply no strategy that takes the party from here to national competitiveness on a consistent basis. They have lost the popular vote in 5 of the last 6 presidential elections and its just going to deteriorate with their current ‘values’ which are the direct lineal descendant of the Nixon southern strategy played out to its natural conclusion.