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All Those Strong Candidates

David Frum makes something like an interesting point when he says that the GOP presidential field ought to be considered one of the strongest ever, but the problem is that the candidates are making a mess of things by ignoring all those things that are supposed to be their natural advantages.  According to this reading, all of the major […]

David Frum makes something like an interesting point when he says that the GOP presidential field ought to be considered one of the strongest ever, but the problem is that the candidates are making a mess of things by ignoring all those things that are supposed to be their natural advantages.  According to this reading, all of the major candidates are failing to play to their strengths, and the rest of the field is…well, he doesn’t explain why they’re not exciting anyone, but it isn’t hard to see why they aren’t. 

Brownback’s strength is that he is a dedicated social conservative leader, but he often chooses to exploit his reputation on this by talking about Darfur and prison reform and the like.  Instead of making him seem like a fresh, interesting, reform-minded social con, it makes him seem flaky and weird.  Set aside for the moment whether these are important things, as prison reform might well be in principle.  They are transparently bad politically (Republicans don’t care about Darfur–they really don’t care), yet he just won’t stop talking about them, undoubtedly because he thinks they’re important.  Mike Huckabee has been as solid an activist governor on marriage policy as you can imagine, and he even makes sense when he tries to portray himself as a conservationist, but he caricatures himself by talking about art programs as part of the pro-life agenda.  The attempt to seem different and fresh again comes off sounding weak and desperate.  Tom Tancredo has led on immigration just about as well as anyone could have hoped for under the circumstances, but does he think that anybody outside a very hard-core restrictionist constituency cares about his pet cause of freeing Compean and Ramos?  (It is my impression that restrictionist championing of two apparently genuinely bad border agents on the grounds that “they’re border agents and we’ve got to support them” would be as damaging to restrictionist positions as the Schiavo case was for pro-lifers if anybody in the general public knew very much about it.) 

Even the candidate whom I like and admire and support, Ron Paul, has a tendency to talk about the gold standard more often than might be advisable for an insurgent campaign that already has everything going against it.  The less said about Tommy Thompson, the better for him.  Duncan Hunter is right about trade with China and right about trade generally, but he has to understand that a Republican base brainwashed for the past thirty years that Free Trade Is Good will not hear him on this.  More to the point, donors will actively shun him, if they haven’t already.  If he is a message candidate, rather than someone trying to win a lot of votes, this makes sense, but that tends to reinforce the impression that you get that a lot of these people are out there to fly their respective flags and not actually take the lead of their party.  The end result is that people who believe nothing (Romney) or believe the wrong things (Giuliani) stand much better chances of becoming the eventual nominee, in which case these flag-fliers will find themselves stuck with another Republican campaign that has no time for their concerns.  It may be a moot point, since the GOP ticket is almost bound to get crushed next year anyway, but it tells us something about why the GOP is so moribund this time around. 

There is nothing fundamentally different from previous cycles here: in each one, the party anoints an expedient standard-bearer whose past record hardly inspires confidence among core constituencies, but who seems to demonstrate the bare modicum of political skill to justify his elevation, whereupon all of the core constituencies duly pretend that their latest standard-bearer is an embodiment of all they have ever wanted.  This is not a flaw with the candidates, but with the entire structure of the Republican Party and with the two major political parties in this country.  The conservative activists have gotten tired of playing the role of cheerleaders for people who actually couldn’t care less about their respective agendas.  They are in a funk because they realise that the system to which they have contributed so much energy to build is something of a farce that almost guarantees that the eventual nominee will be horribly disappointing.  This is particularly acute today in a way that it wasn’t in 1999-2000 or 1995-96 because there is now no Congressional majority to fall back on and there is a keen awareness that the movement has sold itself into indentured servitude to a party that will not lift a finger to advance most of what the movement wants advanced.  

Nonetheless, it is questionable whether it is actually to McCain or Romney’s advantage in the primaries to stress their past moments of moderation and bipartisanship.  Barack Obama does not, for instance, mention his endorsement of Joe Lieberman’s re-election at all, since he knows that this is poison for any Democratic presidential candidate, even though it would supposedly represent Obama’s ability to transcend conventional political divisions over the war.  When one of the major objections activists have against McCain is his role in the “Gang of Fourteen,” talking about his record of working with Democrats hardly seems desirable.  Romney obviously isn’t a conservative, but the only reason he’s even competitive at this point is that he has conned enough people into believing that he has become one.  

Described in the abstract, the candidates do sound impressive, provided that you describe each one in the most flattering terms imaginable, but then you actually see the people attached to the impressive-sounding descriptions and you begin to realise why virtually no one is enthusiastic. 

Where I think Frum is mistaken is when he writes:

Have Republicans absorbed how much trouble their party is in? To the (limited) extent that we do, we tend to to attribute everything to Iraq — as if Katrina, the Schiavo affair, corruption in Congress, and the intensifying irrelevance of our domestic-policy agenda did not exist. And so we demand from our candidates ever more fervent declarations of fealty to an ideology that interests an ever dwindling proportion of the public.

Those other things are real problems, no doubt, but those other things would be manageable and it might be possible to address them effectively if there were no Iraq war.  The total failure of candidates, party leadership and most Republican voters to face up to that reality and the necessary change that has to be made (i.e., Republicans must lead the charge for withdrawal) is the thing that is killing GOP chances at the White House more than all those other things combined.    Yet to listen to the candidates and constituents tell it, you would think that continued ueber-hawkishness on Iraq and the Near East generally was a political winner.  Republicans may acknowledge that Iraq is weighing down their party, but they often acknowledge it in a way that lends itself to bitterness and resentment against the public, which has never exactly been a good way to win public confidence.  To the extent that they admit that the Iraq war is bad for them politically (they cannot fully admit it–see how many of them desperately cling to the false hope that withdrawal will be a political disaster for the Democrats), they think that this is simply proof of how right they are on the policy: we’re so confident that we’re right, we refuse to bow to public pressure!  It’s impressive, in a way, except that political parties don’t get extra points for flying in the face of public opinion on serious matters of policy.  Indeed, the more serious the policy question, the worse it is for the party that bucks public opinion. 

In 1968, the country decisively repudiated the incumbent party that had, among other things, led us into a pointless and frustrating war.  Forty years later, the Republican nominee may suffer the fate of Humphrey unless there is a sudden change either in Iraq or in the mainstream Republican position on Iraq.  However, as I have noted before, 2008 is unique and does not make for an easy, neat comparison with any other election.

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