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The Dreadful Inevitability of Romney (II)

Ross concedes the dreadful inevitability of Romney: What’s more, Republicans have only themselves to blame for his inevitability. Romney owes his current position to two failures: the Bush era’s serial disasters, which left the Republican establishment without a strong bench of viable national politicians, and the Tea Party’s mix of zeal and naïveté, which has […]

Ross concedes the dreadful inevitability of Romney:

What’s more, Republicans have only themselves to blame for his inevitability. Romney owes his current position to two failures: the Bush era’s serial disasters, which left the Republican establishment without a strong bench of viable national politicians, and the Tea Party’s mix of zeal and naïveté, which has elevated cranks and frauds and future television personalities to the party’s presidential stage.

It’s true that Romney’s apparent inevitability is a legacy of the Bush era, but not quite in the way Ross suggests here. During all of the disasters of the Bush era, Romney was faithfully aligning himself with the late Bush-era party consensus, and he identified himself with the conservative movement when it was at its most complicit in the failures of the Republican Party. At a time when movement conservatism was defined largely by its embarrassing servility to the party in power, Romney was promoted as the acceptable movement candidate.

While some might hold out hope that the unprincipled Romney is to be preferred to an ideologue, Romney is perfectly capable of playing the ideologue, and he has shown that he will do so whenever he must. In Romney’s case, the ideology he has embraced is Bushism rather than a stricter or more conservative alternative, but that doesn’t make him any less ideological. Bushism endured in 2008, and it seems very likely to prevail in next year’s primaries. Of course, Republicans are responsible for this, because they put Bush in power, supported him or at least acquiesced in almost everything he did, and continued defending him even as his disastrous war in Iraq led them to major electoral defeats. Oddly enough, Romney has flourished in the post-Bush era because he has stayed more or less loyal to the Bush-era consensus that produced the “serial disasters” to which Ross refers.

The party consensus held (and apparently still holds) that the Iraq war was neither a disaster nor a mistake, but something that had simply been handled poorly for a little while. According to the consensus, the debacle in Iraq had no implications for foreign policy in the Near East or anywhere else. This is why Romney can safely surround himself with foreign policy advisers from the previous administration, and it is why he can propose to revive Bush-era foreign policy in some of its more aggressive forms without putting the nomination at risk. On the most controversial domestic issue of 2008, Romney aligned himself with the Bush administration and party leadership in backing the TARP. While he has naturally taken opportunistic shots at how the TARP has been administered since the start of 2009, he has gone so far as to defend the program in presidential debates.

Romney’s likely nomination does not represent the failure of the Republican establishment to produce an alternative to Romney, but rather represents the party establishment’s success in rewarding one of its own and heading off yet another insurgency from the rank-and-file. His apparent inevitability is proof that Republicans have still not begun to learn the real lessons of the 2006 and 2008 elections, which is why they seem to be ready to re-fight the 2008 election with the candidate that many of them wished they had nominated instead of McCain. They have not yet fully accepted that a majority of the country rejected Bush, how he governed, and what he represented, and they are hoping that American memories are extremely short.

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