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Party Leaders Are No More Enthusiastic About Romney Than Voters Are

Noah Millman is right that it is pointless to look to “party leaders” to help Romney win over rank-and-file voters: News flash: the Republican party hates its leadership. The biggest millstone around Romney’s neck in this race has been that he’s tried to win by making himself into the establishment candidate. He’s the only one […]

Noah Millman is right that it is pointless to look to “party leaders” to help Romney win over rank-and-file voters:

News flash: the Republican party hates its leadership. The biggest millstone around Romney’s neck in this race has been that he’s tried to win by making himself into the establishment candidate. He’s the only one to have racked up any significant number of endorsements. Once Rick Perry revealed himself to be . . . Rick Perry, he was the only remaining candidate that the party leadership considered remotely plausible as a nominee. If establishment support could do anything to help him, it would have done it already.

I agree with a lot of this, but this overlooks that there are a lot of nationally-known Republican politicians that have remained neutral in the race. Rubin was appealing to several prominent Republicans, including quite a few fantasy presidential candidates, to abandon their neutrality. (She seems to have missed that Jindal was a Perry supporter, and he isn’t likely to back Romney now that his preferred candidate has dropped out and endorsed Romney’s main rival, Kyl is retiring and increasingly irrelevant, and DeMint already had his opportunity to influence in the race in South Carolina and refused to do so.) She hopes that this would create an anti-Gingrich bandwagon effect. Noah is right that their endorsements wouldn’t suddenly make conservatives enthusiastic about Romney, but the fact that all of the people Rubin mentions have declined to endorse him (or, in Jindal’s case, endorsed the hopeless Perry) reflects and reinforces the lack of enthusiasm for Romney. It may not help Romney that much with ideological conservatives if he gets an endorsement from Rubio or Ryan, for example, and any politician endorsing Romney runs the risk of being harmed by the association, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that the party’s leading figures have mostly not been giving Romney their stamp of approval. The significant endorsements Romney has received have typically been from former nominees (Dole, McCain) or office-seekers and defeated rivals (Bolton, Pawlenty). Romney has the liability of being perceived as the establishment candidate (which he is) without many of the advantages that this might normally confer.

P.S. I would also like to welcome Noah to TAC. I haven’t contributed much of anything to The American Scene in several years, but we were colleagues of a sort there for some time, and I’m pleased to have him as a colleague here at the magazine.

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