Fred Thompson has withdrawn from the presidential race.  I have had my criticisms of his views and his campaign, and I never understood the movement to draft him into the race in the first place, but he always inspired more feelings of pity than indignation, which is more than I could say for any of the other one-time leading candidates.

His [Brooks’] position doesn’t stray much from the neo-conservative position, in which foreign policy rules supreme, and limited government is of little concern. ~Mark Levin

As opposed to all the great constitutionalist champions who fill the movement to overflowing these days, for whom limited government is a top priority and foreign policy is an afterthought?  This criticism would be much more telling against Brooks if it weren’t also applicable to a huge number of conservative columnists.  If mainstream conservatives want to complain about the rise of McCain, they probably ought to consider how they have empowered or acquiesced to “the neo-conservative position, in which foreign policy rules supreme, and limited government is of little concern” over the past ten years and more.  If you allow your movement and your party to be made over in the image of Bush, don’t be terribly surprised when his natural ideological heirs receive a lot of votes from those who call themselves conservative.        

Now no onecanpossibly confusemewitha David Brooks fan or with someone friendly to the policy agenda of neoconservatives or their preferred candidates, and obviously I don’t endorse Brooks’ meliorism or “reform” agenda, but there is something distinctly odd about the degree of hostility shown to these two candidates relative to that shown to Giuliani or Romney.  Besides their capacity to send talk radio hosts into seizures, Huckabee and McCain have something else in common: they come from those parts of the country where the core constituencies of the party actually live and work, while Romney and Giuliani come from places where conservative Republicans are something of a rare, exotic species and Republicans of any kind are a dying breed.  I can’t help but think that this has something to do with the antipathy towards the former and the leniency shown to the latter.   

If anyone represents the tradition of the “Nixon-Ford domestic agenda — i.e., a muck of compromises and government expansion that surrenders the ideological playing field to the Left or, if you will, an incremental socialism which Brooks sets forth as a new way,” it would probably have to be the man who gave you MassCare, just promised a boatload of subsidies to the auto industry and has been pro-life for less time than I have been in graduate school.  Romney grew up in a Rockefeller Republican family and belonged to that tradition until it became convenient for him to discover the virtues of Reaganism.  By the standards that these people condemn McCain, they would have to throw Romney overboard as well, but they simply don’t spend the time or energy doing this.  Their general indifference to the obvious frauds Romney perpetrates against the public in his campaign shows the hollowness of their complaints against the other two.  McCain is, of course, well to the left of me, he is deeply, amazingly wrong on immigration and foreign policy, and I will oppose his candidacy as much as I possibly can, but he has actually been to the right of Giuliani and Romney (which isn’t saying that much, but there it is) for decades.  The mind that can accept the turnaround artist who has turned himself 180 degrees on virtually everything as acceptable, but regards flawed but consistent candidates as beyond the pale, is a very confused one.  There was simply nothing like the intense attacks against McCain when Giuliani was the putative frontrunner, and by comparison Romney has been given a very easy time of it from conservative media, all of which points to the cynicism of at least some of those who protest against McCain and Huckabee’s deviations. 

P.S.  Just on an empirical point, Brooks’ claim that conservative voters have not followed conservative leaders is basically accurate.  In total votes, Huckabee/McCain have received 849,956 votes (per TownHall’s count, which apparently doesn’t include Wyoming) and Romney/Thompson have received 633,715 votes.  If you add in Ron Paul’s numbers to the total of voters not following conservative leaders, the margin obviously grows.  Even when you acknowledge that McCain has led among conservative voters only once this year (South Carolina) and independents have been an important source of support for McCain, Huckabee and Paul, it remains the case that most conservatives chose candidates other than Romney and Thompson in every contested race.  Given the choice between the vilified deviants and the approved candidates, most people voting in the Republican primaries and caucuses opted for the former.  That is significant, and these results are also generally in line with national surveys that ask Republicans which candidate “shares their values.”

Along lines similar to this, Brooks observes:

Yet a funny thing has happened this primary season. Conservative voters have not followed their conservative leaders. Conservative voters are much more diverse than the image you’d get from conservative officialdom.

The intense reaction against Huckabee in particular seems to show an inability among movement leaders to accommodate the diversity of the political coalition with which they have allied themselves.  Dissident conservatives from the right have long complained of the tendency to over-identify the conservative movement and the GOP, and in this election cycle we have seen a continuation of this, albeit somewhat in reverse.  The identification between the party and the movement institutions has become so complete that the institutional movement leaders react against candidates in the GOP primaries as if the eventual Republican nominee were the de facto leader of the movement as well.  A fairly strict, meaningful definition of conservatism would not be a problem if it were not considered an absolute requirement that every major elected Republican describe himself as a conservative.  Currently the GOP voting coalition is arguably much less conservative, by the standards of what that term meant in 1980, than it was just ten years ago, and yet far more Republicans describe themselves with this term than was the case just a decade ago.  This does not represent the triumph of conservative principles so much as it represents the dilution of the term’s meaning.  The name has become a marker and proof of your right to belong, but it has consequently become much less significant.  We are currently experiencing the confusion that inevitably follows the overuse of a term that empties it of all meaning.     

Movement leaders have some significant, legitimate objections to the records of Huckabee and McCain, many of which I happen to share, but they have opted to treat them as they have treated rightist dissident conservatives in the past: they do not simply reject this or that policy position for certain reasons, but take the departure from an official line as proof that a person is not just possibly mistaken on policy but must also be excluded from the realm of conservatism all together for raising the question in the first place.  At the very least, this response makes a mockery of the pretensions that Republicans and establishment conservatives entertain and value intellectual diversity.  Very little creative or valuable thinking can be done if conservatives are constantly made to feel as if any unconventional proposal threatens to dynamite the entire movement and endangers the proposal’s author with exclusion.  If the conservative movement is not going to be an appendage of the GOP in the future, its leaders will need to recognise that the outcome of the Republican nomination contest does not have to define the future of the movement, and that the movement’s support for a given Republican administration is not foreordained or guaranteed.  That, in turn, may yield some better results on policu, since it makes it harder for the party to take movement support or acquiescence for granted. 

If conservatives allow their priorities to be dictated by transient political needs of the GOP, they will find themselves increasingly dissatisfied with the direction of their movement and will also find themselves incapable of having an independent voice that will have credibility when it speaks out against Republican follies and failures.  Without that independence, they will find themselves, as they do today, complicit in the errors of the party and unable to do much about them.  This independence from the party cannot simply be rhetorical or a scapegoating tactic when things go wrong, but must be a consistent strategy of keeping a healthy distance from a party organisation that may have common goals in certain cases but which has its own interests that do not always align with those of conservatives.  If conservatives took that path, there would be much less anxiety every four years about the dangers of “redefining conservatism” for political ends.  An important step in the direction of independence would be the decentralisation of conservative movement institutions away from Washington and the East Coast.  As with every kind of decentralist approach, this would make conservative institutions better aware of different conditions around the country, it would reintroduce them to local and regional perspectives and would remove them to some degree from the proximity to and influence from party leadership.  Perhaps most importantly, instead of developing think tanks and institutes focused on national policy there would be a greater focus on local and regional concerns, which would of necessity eschew the sort of homogenised, uniform responses on matters of policy, and it would allow the kind of flexibility and ability to challenge assumptions.  This decentralisation of the movement would then also give the movement greater incentives to pursue and defend actual political and economic decentralisation, so that they would have a practical reason to advocate devolution of power back to states and localities.  When movement institutions have no concrete interest in devolution and localism, they will tend towards acquiescing in centralist policies that are ostensibly pursued for “conservative ends,” but which everything we know about consolidated power tells us will not achieve those ends and will actively subvert the natural affinities and remaining local institutions that are actually much more fundamental to realising those “conservative ends.”

I guess I’m sorry that I missed this debate.  As a matter of informing voters, it seems to have been the same waste of time that debates always are, but as political theater it will be remembered for a long time to come.  Clinton stated (correctly, as it happens) that Obama’s claim of continuous, unbroken opposition to the war was false.  Obama insisted, as some of us argued earlier, that his remarks about Reagan were not meant as an endorsement of Reagan’s policies, which should have been obvious to everyone.  Then there was loose talk of corporate lawyering and slumlords.  Then Edwards hit Obama on his numerous “present” votes.  Despite the much more conventional one-on-one nomination fight that is developing on their side, the Democrats seem poised to commit self-immolation than the GOP if they keep doing what they’ve been doing the last few weeks.

Okay, he isn’t saying that exactly, but he does seem to be one of the few columnists or radio hosts who recognises that there is something awry with the persistent demonisation of Huckabee and McCain when compared to the much more friendly treatment meted out to Romney and Giuliani, who are, by any fair standard judging by their records, far less conservative than the two receving the third degree from pundits, activists and talk radio hosts.  If the phrase “pro-war liberal” applies to anyone in the race, it is Giuliani, yet he typically gets a pass from the people who would try to persuade you that Huckabee wants something like “socialism in one nation under God.”  There is no doubt, as I have noted before, that the majority view of Huckabee in particular is that of someone who is seriously conservative, and Republicans likewise identify with Huckabee and McCain as people who “share their values” far more than Romney or Giuliani.  That Huckabee has not been noticeably more conservative than the President over the years and yet receives the highest rating as a conservative by Republicans should tell you something about cognitive dissonance among GOP voters, who claim in poll after poll around the country that they want someone like Reagan and not like Bush and are, according to national and Feb. 5 state polling, nonetheless happily embracing the two candidates who seem like natural heirs to a Bush-dominated GOP. 

Now by the standards of what I would recognise as conservatism, all of the four are badly wanting, none can really be trusted and all are deeply in the wrong on foreign policy to different degrees, but I am keenly aware that the standards I use are definitely not the prevailing ones in the GOP today and haven’t been for some time.  It was simply impossible for the GOP and the movement to tie themselves so closely to Bush, to rally core constituencies to his side time after time and to identify many of his worst policies (e.g., “the freedom agenda”) as their guiding principles and then suddenly reverse the effects of the last seven years on the attitudes of the voters who had been stampeded into the Bush corral.  The Republicans who say they want a Reagan-like leader and don’t think Bush is cut from the same cloth nonetheless approve of the President’s performance in approximately the same percentages as embrace Huckabee and McCain.  There may not be complete identification between Bush supporters and Huckabee/McCain supporters (McCain seems to have the backing of a remarkable number of anti-Bush voters), but if two-thirds of the GOP still back Bush how is it so remarkable that two-thirds would also back Huckabee and/or McCain?   

It seems more certain than ever that Ross was right when he wrote:

If you consider how the nation’s most ambitious Republicans are positioning themselves for 2008, Bushism looks like it could have surprising staying power.

Now that the idea of an anti-Romney McCain-Huckabee alliance is fast becoming conventional wisdom, it is worth noting that many of the institutional movement conservatives and party leaders shot themselves in the foot with their intense hostility to Huckabee and everything he represented.  When the GOP establishment needed to rally evangelicals and social conservatives to stop McCain, they could not throw their weight behind Huckabee, whom they had already denounced in the harshest terms, and they could not expect the favourite candidate of many movement conservatives to peel off supporters from Huckabee after he had tried to discredit Huckabee.  Incredibly, the same movement that just six months ago was powerfully opposed to McCain because of the immigration bill has, as I said earlier, spent much of its time for the past month vilifying the one candidate who could have checked McCain’s ambitions.  Now that they need to rebuild an alliance between the Republican center and right to replicate the success of Bush in 2000 to thwart McCain, they find that they have instead surprisingly driven many voters on the right into a tactical alliance with McCain and his “moderates.”  The (mostly baseless) antipathy to Huckabee on trade and economics–the opposition to his insubstantial “populism”–and the exaggerated complaints about his fiscal liberalism when compared to the largely kid-glove treatment of Romney’s equally undesirable interventionist record helped to drive a wedge between large parts of the social and economic conservative factions that made it unlikely that Romney voters would vote tactically for Huckabee.  Furthermore, because the GOP has wedded itself so fully and blindly to the war in Iraq and McCain is on the side of a majority of Republicans on this question, a McCain candidacy protected by a tacit alliance with Huckabee becomes very hard to stop.

Prof. Bainbridge preaches ashes and sackcloth:

Coupled with losing Congress in 2006, losing the presidency in 2008 will provide a pair of defeats that surely will prompt “attentiveness” on the part of the GOP leadership and the intellectual base of think tanks and academics who helped lay the foundation for the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions.

But attentiveness to what?  There is something frustratingly vague about Bainbridge’s complaint, just as there was always something frustratingly vague about Thompson’s campaign message.  Going back to first principles is a fine idea (assuming that you have sound first principles), but Thompson never made clear how he would differ from the current administration in those areas where it was most ruinous for the reputation of the party and the name of conservatism.  There is reason to think, given what he has said and who is advising him, that Thompson would have been worse and more prone to the same mistakes of this administration on foreign policy than would Romney or Huckabee.  In other words, in the one area where a return to first principles seems most necessary, Thompson plainly failed to deliver.    

2006 should have been a deafening wake-up call to the GOP that most of the country was not with them on Iraq, but that wasn’t the lesson they learned at all.  They decided to hang it all on corruption and overspending, as if Indiana ousted three Republican incumbents and New Hampshire turned into a Democratic state because of Abramoff and earmarks.  Depending on the nominee, the aftermath of an ’08 defeat will result in slightly different conclusions, but whatever explanation “the intellectual base” gives to account for the defeat they will remain oblivious to the party’s blind spots on the war and foreign policy, and so will be unable to fix what is wrong.  Remarkably, many of the same people who have winked and nodded at executive usurpation and infringement on civil liberties, the ones who mock Paul’s constitutionalism as hopelessly antiquated, are all the more rigidly, inflexibly adhering to the memory of “the Reagan coalition,” as if conservatism existed for the sake of the coalition rather than the other way around.

I am endorsing Ron Paul for the Republican nomination for President because of his commitment to less government, greater liberty, and lasting prosperity for America. We are at a point in this country where we need to reduce our dependency on government and regain control of our future. To this end, Ron Paul will bring back troops, end the War in Iraq, and will strengthen the U.S. dollar and the economy. For these reasons and more, Ron Paul has my support, respect, and vote. ~Fmr. New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson

Mr. McCain was the target of Mr. Norris’s apparent frustration over Mr. Huckabee’s loss and he went for a McCain sore spot, his age. Mr. McCain is 71, the oldest candidate in the field.

“I really don’t believe he’ll have the stamina to run the country for four years,” Mr. Norris said at a news conference. Mr. Norris is 67. ~The Caucus

Well, this may be the beginning of the end of this anti-Romney pact idea.  Perhaps Huckabee still has the odd idea that he can win the whole thing.  That would certainly liven things up a bit.

Last week I wrote about McCain as the candidate who had replaced Giuliani, and this seems to be holding true.  This will have an effect on Florida voting, since there is little incentive to take a chance on a broke, untested Giuliani campaign when you can back McCain, and you can get pretty much the same combination of crazy foreign policy and immigration liberalism but with none of the weird and creepy baggage that goes with supporting Giuliani.  What occurred to me tonight as I thought about the South Carolina result is how much McCain’s campaign has matched up in practice with Giuliani’s alleged “strategy” of exploiting a divided field on the right to propel himself to the frontrunner position.  The assumption of the Giuliani “plan” was that multiple winners in the early contest prevented consolidation around any one candidate, which then allowed Giuliani to sneak in through the back door.  The only problem with this was that he was supposed to retain a prohibitive advantage in February 5 big states where his New York Republicanism would not offend nearly so many.  In the event, his support in almost all the big states has started to collapse, even in New York and New Jersey, because he failed to consider that his candidacy was redundant and irrelevant the moment McCain’s campaign revived. 

Giuliani hoped, and probably still hopes, that the divided field would work to his advantage, but with his failed under-the-radar direct mail Iowa campaigning following his pre-Ames retreat, his on-again, off-again New Hampshire effort (which was, as Michael correctly said at the time, mostly an anti-Romney effort based on the reasonable assumption that Romney was his principal rival), his belated abandonment of Michigan and his simply miserable organisation in Nevada he ensured that the natural home for his voters would be with McCain.  McCain has shown that you can either exploit a divided field from the beginning or you cede the ground to someone else who can.  You do not get to wait for the  others to tear each other apart and expect to sweep in like a conquering hero.  McCain’s implosion last summer will now be seen as a blessing in disguise, since it made him hone his message, trim his operating costs and husband his resources carefully, while Giuliani took his reasonably successful fundraising and started throwing money around with little concern for long-term funding, when his supposed “strategy” relied on precisely the kind of close control over funds that McCain’s campaign had to practice out of necessity.

The flaw with Giuliani’s campaign was also the central flaw with Fred Thompson’s campaign, which the Fred Hysteria exacerbated severely: anointing a candidate as the “obvious” or “necessary” candidate to fill a void or assume a leadership role removes all incentive for the candidate to exert himself and do the necessary persuading that he is the best candidate, when has already received that title by acclamation before he got started.  When you treat a politician as if he is the answer to some woe, he becomes very pleased with himself, a little too pleased, in fact, and then he becomes resentful when you do not immediately provide him with the laurel crown.  Having no business in the race, but propelled there because of the official narrative that 9/11 qualified him for a completely different job with utterly different responsibilities from those he had in New York, Giuliani went with the official narrative and played it for all it was worth.  When that didn’t work, he had little else to offer.  Likewise, having no business in the race, but propelled there by the idea that he was the “consistent conservative” alternative to a field of squishes and heretics, Fred Thompson stuck to that “consistent conservative” message, as if to say, “Okay, Reaganites, I have arrived–now flock to me!”  When voters did not respond to this fairly weak appeal, Fred became rather surly and kept reiterating how very serious he was, and he wasn’t in the campaign to act like some game show contestant who had to buzz in with an answer in the form of a queston.  He had policy papers!  He even called them “white papers”!  Haven’t you read them all?  As with Fred, Giuliani’s was a celebrity candidacy, but one also premised on having the charisma and command to unify a disillusioned, confused party.  In the end, the candidates reputed to have charisma and command possessed neither, and their absence from the early contests (with the exception of Fred’s very belated Iowa push) reminded voters that the two candidates who were supposed to drive all before them had fled several of those states out of a very reasonable fear of defeat.  

P.S.  Earlier, I argued that, while satisfying to antiwar conservatives, the demise of Giuliani was a victory for hegemonists, whose goals will not be burdened any longer by Giuliani’s personal history and social liberalism.  No longer will social conservatives have to hold their noses to keep the perpetual war going.  In a strange way, Giuliani’s failure is a very good thing for the War Party.