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Bennett and Brown

As I said earlier this year, the conservative enthusiasm for Scott Brown and the conservative hostility to Bob Bennett derived from the same source: total opposition to federal health care legislation. As arbitrary as it seems for conservatives to enthuse over a liberal Republican who defends Massachusetts’ universal health care system while condemning a largely […]

As I said earlier this year, the conservative enthusiasm for Scott Brown and the conservative hostility to Bob Bennett derived from the same source: total opposition to federal health care legislation. As arbitrary as it seems for conservatives to enthuse over a liberal Republican who defends Massachusetts’ universal health care system while condemning a largely conservative Republican for proposing something more or less identical to that system at the federal level, there is a certain simple consistency to it. It should be clear by now that it is laudable and praiseworthy to support Romneycare, so long as it stays in Massachusetts, but it is abominable to support anything like federal Romneycare under any circumstances. Scott Brown is a folk hero for being the 41st Republican against a health care bill that passed anyway, and Bob Bennett has to be sent packing for being the co-sponsor of a bill that has never been voted on. Makes sense, right? After all, why settle for someone with an ACU rating of 84? That’s the general thrust of National Review’s editorial today.

Speaking of Romney, it is worth noting that Bennett is one of the few candidates in a contested primary so far this cycle that Romney has actively supported. Bennett is probably going to be denied a chance to stand in the general election, and this will happen specifically because of his co-sponsorship of legislation not so very different from the Massachusetts plan Romney believes is working fine but which should on no account ever be imitated by anyone. It cannot help Romney’s already bad reputation for excruciating ideological contortionism that he has aligned himself with a candidate who is being voted down by his state party’s delegates on account of support for a version of federal health care legislation, and it certainly doesn’t help that he is doing this at the same time that he has been trying to re-cast himself as the tribune of pro-repeal voters.

I should add that Bennett also supported the TARP, so I don’t really have any sympathy for his political plight. My point is not that Bennett isn’t wrong from a consistent, small-government conservative perspective, but that he is so perfectly typical of the overwhelming majority of his Senate colleagues that it is hard to understand what it was that he did that was so uniquely awful. It is more than a little odd that many other leading Republicans who also supported the TARP can turn their coats, denounce the TARP after the fact and be taken seriously as potential presidential nominees and party leaders. Meanwhile, Bennett gets the axe for being no different from Romney, Thune, McConnell, Boehner and Cantor and thirty other Republican Senators who cravenly backed the measure and have since found it useful to pretend that they had nothing to do with it.

Except for McCain, none of the seven other pro-TARP Republican Senators up for re-election this year faces any primary challenge worth mentioning. If Bennett is unacceptably at odds with his party, why isn’t there similar outrage being directed at Burr, Isakson, Grassley, Coburn, Thune and Murkowski? If Wyden-Bennett was an intolerable error, shouldn’t 2007 co-sponsor Chuck Grassley and 2007/09 co-sponsor Mike Crapo face the same revolt?

Obviously, Utah’s Republican Party delegates are free to support the candidates they prefer, and Bob Bennett has no guaranteed right of re-nomination. Utah is such a heavily Republican state that it will almost certainly make no difference in the outcome in the fall, and Bennett will presumably abide by his party convention’s decision. Still, it will be interesting to see how the state electorate reacts to the eventual Republican nominee after Bennett’s humiliating defeat.

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