“There is no agenda,” said Soren Dayton, a young consultant and blogger, complaining that GOP candidates are only offering up predictable platitudes.  “You say you’re pro-life, you say you’ll ban gay marriage and you say you’ll cut taxes.” ~The Politico

Of course, my fellow blogger has a point.  There is certainly not much new out on the hustings, even if there are some smart conservatives wonkishly contemplating problems of social policy.  Contrary to the claims of “Smiling Eyes” Kristol, there are no “fresh ideas” on offer from the candidates, and I think this is because none of them thinks any new ideas are necessary.  All of them, except for Ron Paul, Hunter and Tancredo, seem to think that most of the policies of the current administration were on the right track and just got fouled up in the execution.  The motto of the rest of the field besides these three (who obviously take strong exception to major parts of the Bush consensus), would seem to be: “Like Bush, but competent this time!”  This reflects a far deeper problem than gloom and malaise in the ranks, and this is the apparently widely held view that the principles of the policies the GOP enacted while in the majority were sound and just got muddled in implementation.  There does seem to be broad agreement that spending got out of hand, but there seems to be much less agreement about how and why that happened. 

That being said, being anti-tax, pro-life and opposed to gay marriage are all part of “the agenda,” broadly speaking, and have been for some time.  The problem with today’s GOP is that it has already cut taxes as much as their free-spending habits will allow for the near future, it never does anything about reducing or restricting abortion and it merely gestures at gay marriage and makes shrieking noises.  It ignored or dithered on one of the great policy problems of the day (immigration), punted on anything related to entitlements, servilely submitted to corporate interests on trade policy and offered a foreign policy vision so simplistic and childish that it would embarrass nine-year old players of Risk.  Many Republicans don’t even see anything wrong with these things and regard Risk-worthy leadership skills as proof of foreign policy mettle.  “Giuliani promised to invade Kamchatka next turn–we should vote for him!”  So many of the areas where Republican candidates could break with their party’s immediate past and chart interesting, popular and smart courses are out there waiting for someone who can conjure up something more than the old bromides, but they would either run into entrenched opposition or would probably fail to inspire a lot of voters.  Many good policy reformers make lousy national political figures and vice versa, because the focus and expertise of the former make them appear monomaniacal to a national audience while the latter can only make vague gestures in the direction of policy details without losing that awful superficiality that being on the national stage seems to require.  In other words, there’s no agenda in the presidential race right now because…it’s the presidential race and policy unfortunately tends to take a backseat to a tiresome focus on biography, personality, clothing choices, whether the candidate loves his wife (and how much he loves her), etc.  Indeed, what does anyone expect in a mass democratic election but a lot of sloganeering and boilerplate rhetoric?  They don’t really expect a battle of ideas, do they?  Oh, they do. 

On the other hand, there is no more specific “agenda” at this stage for the simple reason that you don’t roll out concrete policy proposals 10 months before New Hampshire.  You give broad, thematic speeches and “introduce” yourself and your record to the voters.  Political junkies want to know in detail how you plan to fund the mind-boggling liabilities of welfare programs and see a chart with your projections of benefit levels through 2035 (actually, I don’t want to see any of this, but someone must) and they want it now, which is, of course, completely absurd in March 2007.  If you rolled out your Social Security privatisation plan already, the same people would be complaining about how the candidate was campaigning on the same Social Security plan for a year and a half.  “There are no new ideas since last spring,” the junkies would start complaining.  With the explosion of blogs and news channels, the need to avoid saying very much for a very long time has only grown.  We chatter so much that we have compelled candidates to say nothing that we might find controversial, which therefore shuts down most interesting avenues of discussion. 

Perhaps what Mr. Dayton means is that all of the candidates are simply going through the motions, because they think they can win support simply by mouthing tired platitudes.  If Romney’s early endorsements are any indication, mouthing tired platitudes will convince some people, but apparently not enough.  Certainly, with Romney and McCain, you get the distinct sense that they say the things they say on any number of issues because they believe they have to use the right code words to convince people that they are what they and everyone else know they are not, namely reliable conservatives.  (McCain is actually conservative on a few things, but not nearly enough and not enough of the most important things.) 

But there is a certain disconnect here between conservatives who complain about the lack of credible conservative candidates and the same people complaining that the candidates are mouthing all the right phrases designed to appease a conservative audience.  (Not that they would call it appeasement, of course, because people at CPAC would tell you that appeasement is Very Bad and would probably throw things at someone who made kindly remarks about diplomacy.)  There is the feeling that any pol saying all or most of the right things is being insincere or unsatisfactory in his sales pitch, but the failure to say all or most of the rights is also disqualifying.  In other words, this is an almost unreasonably tough crowd. 

If a candidate says something new and potentially interesting for the field, such as, “Let’s withdraw from Iraq right now,” most CPACniks would metaphorically (and perhaps actually)tear him limb from limb.  If he does not hit every issue and state his commitment to the right view in just the right way, he suffers politically by appearing to be unreliable or uncommitted.  Look at poor Sam Brownback and his position on the “surge”!  He is generally more pro-war than just about anybody you could find and loves the idea of intervening in other countries, but because he came to a different prudential judgement about an ill-chosen tactical deployment he has been cast into the outer darkness of villains where people like me reside. 

If the candidate actually holds a different view, instead of being praised for his interesting, different take that might reflect the mind of a serious, thinking human being, he is shunned as an agent of corruption and perversion of the true message.  When you have a politics where successsful candidates have to subscribe to a laundry list of widely accepted, not necessarily connected positions to “prove” their fidelity to “the cause,” you are going to have candidates rattle off predictable statements of devotion to…the cause.  Some politicians do this easily and without breaking a sweat (e.g., Tancredo, Hunter, Brownback with some important exceptions), because they either know the spiel backwards and forwards or they really believe in all of these things, while others make it seem as if they have been rehearsing this stuff over the last few months because they know it is what they have to say but don’t really know how to unite it in any sort of coherent, comprehensive vision.  Romney’s NRI Summit speech was just such a listing of positions without any imagination or thought given to them–he declared that he was against the welfare state!  Talk about being behind the curve.   

You can almost see the Mitt going over his announcement speech: “What’s wrong with government is that it’s too big…I have to remember that one, that’s a good line…too big.  And the people are….oh, I keep forgetting this part…we are…oh, that’s right, we’re overtaxed.  Right, tax hikes are bad.  I really have to carry that around on a card or something, or else I will forget that I am now against tax hikes.” 

It is important to scrutinise candidates certainly, because there are frauds who will try to present themselves as people who hold fast to the platitudes they are reciting.  The difference is not so much in what the different candidates say, because they are all going to repeat more or less the same basic points, but in whether they have any credibility when they say it.  Based on their records, Giuliani, McCain and Romney do not, while the others, to varying degrees, do.  But there should be no expectations that anyone will be offering clever or interesting new ideas in the coming weeks and months.  What is worth watching is whether any of them find a new and interesting way to convey the same old positions, because the candidate who can do that (and it certainly isn’t any one of the Terrible Trio) is the candidate who stands a decent chance in the general election.  And, no, Sam Brownback, this does not mean recycling “compassionate conservatism.”