Nothing could induce full-blown conservative nostalgia better than the little shop of horrors that was this year’s CPAC, but there are good reasons to temper any sense that the movement was actually in such great shape, say, twenty years ago.  The use of Reaganite nostalgia as a club with which to beat Mr. Bush and the nightmarish GOP majority has only limited uses, and it serves as an argument that is for certain Bush apologists to knock down by throwing Reagan’s bad policies back in the face of his hagiographers.  This nostalgia has limited value in no small part because most of the divergences from high conservative principle for which traditional and paleoconservatives hammer the administration are many of the same divergences that were promoted and enacted in the Reagan years–which they complained about at the time when Reagan was doing them.  Because Reagan has taken on a kind of unquestionable authority and sanctity among modern conservatives, akin to Lincoln among Radical Republicans and FDR among the Democrats of the last sixty years, it is now much more useful to skate over his bad decisions and excessive optimism and reinterpret the man as someone who would have been shocked and horrified by the entirety of the Bush Era.  This is because real conservatives are shocked and horrified by the Bush Era, but need to find a prominent, recent figure who endorses their view of things, which leads them to place too much weight on the good old days of the ’80s (because they would otherwise have to acknowledge that the GOP has, to one degree or another, always been at war with conservative goals, which is a rather depressing thought for many people).  Judging from his rhetoric and record, I think Reagan would have been shocked and horrified by some of this era, but would have been far less shocked and horrified by other parts of it.  

Of course, the relevant question any conservative should ask about any given measure or proposal is not, “Would Reagan approve?”  The question is, “Does this contribute to a humane, well-ordered, decent society that enjoys the benefits of ordered liberty?”  More specifically, a conservative might ask, “Does this threaten my hearth and home, my family and the more or less intact, existing communities to which I belong or does it help secure and defend them?”  Whether a charismatic politician from California, who was certainly admirable in many ways, would have approved or not ultimately ought to be far down the list of questions to ask.  We do conservatism no favours by investing such importance in any one figure, when it is part of the wisdom and virtue of conservatism to remember that the species is wise and the individual foolish.  We would be very foolish if any of us insisted on basing most of our arguments on what any given individual’s political priorities were, and there is a certain mirroring of Bush Republican loyalism in invoking a different past Republican President as some sort of anti-Bush archetype.  It is assuredly the dependence on the GOP and the debilitating effects of this attachment on the Red Republicans that have created so many problems for realising conservative goals; it has reached such a point that many conservatives can convince themselves that their own co-optation to the priorities of the GOP is proof of their great success.  The contrast between Reagan and Bush is useful to show just how completely divorced from conservatism Bush has always been, but if anti-Bush conservative dissenters try to reify the ’80s as some sort of era of high principle from which we have fallen we will be setting ourselves up for a fall later. 

Now, before admirers of Reagan get too upset, Reagan was obviously infinitely so much more of a movement conservative than Bush ever was.  He took up the torch from Goldwater and challenged Ford when the “accommodationist” Rockefeller style was all the rage and when that approach seemed to GOP elites to be the future.  (In fact, as I laid out the other day, Rockefellerism was unfortunately the future of the GOP, but this did not come about without at least some struggle.)  Despite his political background, Reagan had far, far more of a pedigree as a real Goldwaterite than Bush ever did, in part because Goldwater’s legacy was obviously never fully or firmly embraced by the GOP itself and Bush was first and foremost a creature of the party establishment.  One reason for this disdain for Goldwater’s legacy was, as Ross never fails to point out, that there was actually not much of a large constituency for dismantling the New Deal or the Great Society and today there is essentially none at all.  (More’s the pity, I say, but it is very hard to deny this observation.)  Another reason is simply the self-interested desire of Northeastern party men to keep control of the apparatus of power, which any implementation of Goldwater’s agenda would have seriously threatened. 

The GOP were happy to enter Goldwater into the stories of conservative martyrology and pay his campaign some lip service as a “defining moment” in history, but they had little or no use for his ideas except to drag them out every few years as campaign slogans.  By the time these people were done with intelligent limited government arguments, they might have been summed up by something as crude as the supply-siders’ “Less government, more filling!” 

One of the things about the Bush years that I think really shocked a lot of conservatives was just how brazenly and openly the administration and its supporters embraced the tradition of these “accommodationists” and the neoconservatives in domestic policy.  These people had always been there and had always been making arguments for basically leaving the old usurpations in place, but I think there remained a sense in the movement that this was simply tactical positioning to prepare the killing blows.  So all of these people with their fundamentally center-left views about the role of government were tolerated because they could be good policy wonks (we welcomed converts, for all the good it did us back then–it contributed to winning elections and losing so much of what mattered in the process), but along the way these people, because they demonstrated some ability at wonkery and were very good at intra-movement politicking, gradually took control of more and more of the institutions and organs of opinion until they began calling the shots.  Before you knew it, there was no question of shrinking government, much less returning it to its specifically constitutionally designated activities, and suddenly a great concern with making government work more effectively.  Why, in the name of all this is holy, would anyone want more effective government?  The one thing that gives us peace of mind about horribly powerful centralised government is that the bureaucracy manages to retard the implementation of new legislation, and this tends to limit the damage done by any new law–just consider how unsettling it is to have government running more efficiently! 

A significant part of the old ideal was that we wanted government to be relatively ineffective, powerless and held in check.  To make Leviathan more effective would seem to an earlier generation of conservative to be like giving your murderer helpful hints on how to more quickly strangle you.  But, of course, all of this is dressed up as empowerment, which, following the logic of all such euphemisms, inevitably means further disempowering the people in question and granting more power to the state.  You can reliably understand pro-government propaganda by taking whatever it says its intended benefit for the people will be and apply that benefit to the state instead.  I understand that this is often a formula that wins elections.  That there is something horribly wrong with all of it is also just as obvious.

No one will ever accuse me of being a marketing genius, but I do have a piece of advice for Joel Surnow, chief of the torture-cons: when writing an appeal to conservatives to watch your fake news comedy show, do not begin with the line, “Hello, I’m Joel Surnow, co-creator and executive producer of the TV show 24.”  The 24 reference will garner some interest, but starting an article with “Hello, I’m…” makes you sound like a telemarketer.  No one likes telemarketers.  I don’t even pick up the phone when I see a toll-free number come up on the caller ID, except for the two seconds it takes me to lift the receiver and slam it back down again.  That is much the same impulse I had when reading your self-promotional article, but I pressed on in the interest of my readers, who may be curious why a producer of good, successful television shows would decide to stop producing those sorts of shows and do something so radically different.

Oh, and one more thing–when you start telling jokes in the article about your fake news comedy show, make sure that the jokes are funny.  That will encourage people to think that your show will also be funny, which is pretty much what most observers have concluded that your show isn’t.  For example, under no circumstances should you tell jokes in your article in a Q&A format.  You may as well tell knock-knock jokes if this is the best way you can find to present your material.  Furthermore, you should not then use that Q&A format to tell jokes this worn-out:

What is the show like?

It’s a “Weekend Update”/Daily Show/The McLaughlin Group hybrid, which makes The Half Hour News Hour the first hybrid ever endorsed by the FOX News Channel, its management, or its parent company, Halliburton.

Oh, you slay me, Joel.  Not quite as effectively as Jack Bauer would with a Glock 9mm, of course, but I certainly do feel a kind of shooting pain after having read that one.  A pun on hybrid!  And that Halliburton bit at the end, well…it was pretty forced actually.  The last line at the expense of Limbaugh and Coulter is, however, slightly funny, but there has so far seemed to be no indication of any of that sense of irony making its way into the show.

The dogged Romneyites at Evangelicals for Mitt have latched on to this positive spin of Romney’s CPAC victory:

Some people will tell you that Mitt Romney didn’t deserve to win (because he bussed in College Republicans to vote for him). That’s like saying George W. Bush didn’t deserve to win because he raised more money than his opponent. Romney’s ability to organize, inspire, and transport college students to the conference is precisely why he did deserve to win! A campaign that has the organizational ability to bus in college students has the organizational ability to do a lot of other things, too. The rules allow for it, so what’s wrong with Romney doing what he has to do (within the rules) to win?

Ethically speaking, I suppose there isn’t much “wrong” with it.  No one’s really saying that he cheated exactly, but we are saying that the result isn’t very representative of conservative opinion when a large number of participants in the straw poll had their way at CPAC paid on the condition that they vote for Romney.  As Dan McCarthy, who was at the conference talking about conservative ideas and fusionism, tells us, the rumour is that Romney shelled out $350,000 to get that rather meager result.  It may not seem like it to the man who raises $6 million in a day, but that is a lot of money to blow on a straw poll of no great importance (or rather, it is of no great importance to anyone who isn’t desperate to prove that he is a real conservative).  Is that the sort of expenditure that a consultant from Bain Capital would think was well-spent? 

There was apparently a grand total of 1,705 votes cast.  Evidently, Romney got 350 votes.  Of those, he brought in 200 people on his dime.  That works out to $1750 per paid supporter in a straw poll that everyone pretty much acknowledges has only very limited importance.  Howard Dean in ’03 was a big one for flinging money around like he had an endless supply of the stuff, only to find that the supply wasn’t endless and that streams of cash do not automatically translate into votes in the primaries.  Romney’s ad buys and now this CPAC buy all suggest the same habit of frittering away resources on bad decisions or on what are relatively minor campaign events.  At this rate of spending on symbolic victories, he will be shelling out tens of millions of dollars for the Ames straw poll in Iowa this summer, where tens of thousands of votes have been cast in the past.  Of course, as the Spartanburg vote has already shown, when it comes to real voters whose support cannot simply be bought Romney doesn’t do all that well.  Maybe that’s because people don’t trust him and are not inclined to trust someone who feels compelled to buy support at an event that he, as the great conservative he supposedly is, ought to dominate as a matter of course.    

If election laws allowed blatant vote-buying, Romney’s methods at CPAC would have immediate real-world value and his victory there would show that he can buy support better than anybody.  The trick is that he fares poorly in straw polls where he can’t game the system, because his actual candidacy doesn’t inspire as much enthusiasm as getting your conference registration and hotel bill comped by a desperate politician. 

The point is that the CPAC straw poll isn’t really a measure of what conservative activists believe about their preferred candidates if the poll can be so easily distorted by a glut of Romney-paid Romney supporters.  You can applaud Romney’s win if you want, since it never hurts to win these polls, but what you can’t do is use that win as some sort of vindication that conservatives have endorsed him as their guy when he manipulated the rules of the poll to maximise his result.  It means that the participants who backed him there may well have no intention of backing him in the real world.  The result shows that a lot of people he effectively paid to vote for him voted for him.  In fact, it fairly shouts to the entire world that Romney knows he isn’t a real conservative and he knows everyone else knows it, so he feels compelled to inflate his level of support through these sorts of artificial tricks because he knows his boilerplate proposals aren’t winning anyone to his side and he knows that virtually no one is buying his “conversion” story.

But even 9/11 has its limits. Later, I do a little push-polling of my own. I ask Max Kaster, a local pastor and party chair for Calhoun County, a half-hour south of Columbia, what people down here would think of America’s Mayor if they knew he had moved in with a gay couple after separating from his second wife. “Really?” Kaster says. He fiddles with a lapel pin that combines an American flag and a cross. “I think that would roll a lot of people’s socks down.” ~New York Magazine

Via The Plank

Put this anecdote in the ever-growingfile of “Damaging Information That Conservative Voters Don’t Know About Giuliani.” 

One might think that it would be his flagrant adultery and the horrible public separation and divorce that must have inflicted such embarrassment and suffering on his children that would set off conservative voters far more than the fact that Giuliani temporarily moved in with a gay couple (and, as almost every media report insists on including, their shih tzu, as if the lapdog were the really scandalous part of the story).  But then I guess I don’t understand many conservative voters as well I supposed I did.    

Besides, saying things like “character counts” is so very ’90s.  I guess it became something of a liability for the GOP, when so many of their top people didn’t have particularly admirable characters, so at some point GOP voters just learned to stop worrying and love their leaders’ vices.  Conservatives who used to despise politicians for blatant public adultery with a subordinate (something about the dignity of the office or some such crazy talk about moral integrity) have apparently discovered something more interesting in Rudy’s cult of personality.  We should understand that a cult of personality is what is being built up in front of us, and it should bother everyone quite a lot. 

Respecting actual marriage, rather than mouthing phrases about protecting the institution of marriage (not that Giuliani does this), must be part of that 9/10 mentality (except that Rudy couldn’t even manage it back then).  For my part, we could stand to have a little more of a 9/10 mentality when it comes to dishonourable old lechers.  Oh, I forgot, we can’t talk that way about “America’s Mayor.”

He’s a successful two-term governor who was re-elected with 69 percent of the vote in New Mexico, a red state. ~David Brooks

It’s nice to see David Brooks catching up to where Matt Yglesias and I have been for weeks and months.  I don’t just think Richardson is the one most likely to rise, but that he is the natural benefactor from the bloodletting among the top three relatively weaker candidates and will likely be the last one standing when it is all done.  He is now the centrist governor candidate in a party whose only successful nominees in the last thirty years have been more or less centrist governors, but he is also reliable on having been opposed to the war all along so that he does not have that “centrist” hawk baggage that Clinton and Edwards carry.  When the next six months fully reveal the major candidates as deeply flawed, which they certainly are, Richardson will be waiting in the wings when the party decides to take a second and third look. 

However, it’s unfortunate to see that Brooks is repeating this idea that New Mexico is a “red state” that makes his overwhelming re-election somehow significant as proof of his “crossover” appeal.  Richardson has a centrist record, and he has been good at winning independent voters, but as I wrote almost six months ago he doesn’t have any history of winning Republican votes.  He has never had to campaign in that way, because his elections have always been in extremely favourable environments against weak opponents.  His last three electoral victories (including his last term in Congress) were against John Dendahl, John Sanchez and Bill Redmond, all of whom were either widely disliked or were political novices or nonentities.  In this sense, he is Obama with a longer resume.  Since he talks up his ability to “deliver real estate,” it is important to understand that he will not be able to deliver any parts of the West that are not already heading rapidly towards the Democrats.

New Mexico is not now, nor has it ever been, what anyone could reasonably call a “red state.”  The state’s political leanings are as purple-blue as the Sandias in the evening.  It is true that Bush won New Mexico in 2004 and he only narrowly lost the state in 2000 (thanks to some probably creative vote-counting in northern southern New Mexico), but what people need to understand about New Mexico is that our state follows national trends just about as closely as any swing state ever has.  Matt Yglesias understands that New Mexico is a swing state and calls it that.  Only twice since statehood has New Mexico gone for the losing candidate in a presidential race: NM went for Ford in ’76 and Gore in ’00.  New Mexico has an eerie habit of almost always backing the national popular winner, and usually by roughly the same margin of the vote.  Given the demographics and party registration of New Mexicans, this really should not be happening, but the state’s population is so strangely diverse and unrepresentative of the nation as a whole that it somehow ends up producing outcomes for the presidential race that reliably track the country as a whole.  The relatively great numbers of Catholics, the infusion of investment from tech corporations and a strong military presence (which has been maintained in the face of base closures elsewhere through the influence of the aging Domenici) all combine to create a political culture that is far more right-leaning than should be the case for the state whose capital is the City Different and whose population is a minority-majority one. 

Given the national mood today, New Mexico has to be considered a Democratic-leaning state in the presidential race, just as it was certainly a purplish blue state in 2006.  Richardson would probably be the best standard-bearer the Dems could nominate out of the current field (which really tells you something about how pathetic the current field is), but he will not be bringing any states into the Democratic column that were not already going to be there.

After everything Romney did to boost his numbers at CPAC, he managed to beat Giuliani (who apparently expended no resources on this vote) by a whopping four points and outscored Brownback, a rival he absolutely overwhelms in terms of resources and media coverage, by all of six.  This has to be seen as another example of an underperforming campaign that is not seeing sufficient return on investment.  If Romney’s campaign were a corporate enterprise, they would be calling in the turnaround artists any day now, except that the chief turnaround artist is already running the show and is the reason for the enterprise’s weakness.  

Romney has managed to demonstrate that he can effectively dupe one in five activists with his song and dance, and he has spent a hefty chunk of change to do it.  When it comes to getting voters in primary states to the polls, he will have to do a lot better than this.  McCain even managed to get 12% and he didn’t even bother to show up.  He has bothered to show up in Iowa and New Hampshire.  Romney has to be worried, and Brownback has to be energised.

Update: Liz Mair seems to have a similar take:

Assessment: it’s worrying when paying 200 people to vote for you only enables you to beat an unapologetically pro-choice, pro-gay candidate with no organization present on the ground at the country’s biggest conservative conference, dominated by social conservatives who should like your pro-life, pro-FMA line.

Ed Morrisey has a lengthier analysis that comes to much the same conclusion:

However, the straw poll probably reflects Romney’s organizing abilities far more than his popular support among conservatives. The Romney campaign turned CPAC from a get-acquainted event to a mini-convention by recruiting scores of young activists to attend CPAC and haranguing attendees to vote for Mitt. The Brownback campaign did the same with a smaller coterie of foot soldiers. None of the other candidates bothered to do anything of the kind.

Understanding that, these numbers should be somewhat disappointing to the Romney campaign. Take a look at Giuliani’s numbers. Here’s a candidate who supposedly didn’t impress in his speech on Friday, whose consistent positions have him in conflict with more than a few of the groups comprising CPAC, and who didn’t have any organization at the conference or spend any time with the attendees outside of the speech. Despite all of these handicaps, 17% of the conservatives at CPAC selected Rudy over any of the other candidates — only four points lower than Romney. He beat Sam Brownback and Newt Gingrich, who is widely presumed to be preparing his own bid for the presidency.

John McCain also scored rather highly despite his snub of CPAC. He came in fifth, but still managed to win 12% of the straw poll without any organization or appearance at the conference. That’s only nine points behind Romney.

Romney had a good CPAC with or without a straw poll win. He scored well on his speech, with the consensus at the conference being that he delivered big when he needed it the most, and his personal appearance later generated some glowing comments. However, this result shows that he has only made himself credible as a candidate. He hasn’t really beaten anyone.

Weirdly, Giuliani and Romney tied among “limited government conservatives,” which evidently means that these people either don’t know much about their preferred candidates or they don’t know what “limited government” means.  The man who praises the PATRIOT Act and the man who gave you MassCare are not limited government conservatives and should not really be the preferred candidates of people who claim to be that.  Of course, neither of the candidates is conservative to start with, so what else is there to say?

If Ann Coulter really were, to use the words of Sullivan, a “drag queen posing as a fascist,” would that also mean that Giuliani is a fascist posing as a drag queen?  Discuss.

Last year’s CPAC straw poll results make for a little amusing reading.  Note that last year’s poll, unlike this year’s, asked participants to select the person they thought would most likely be the nominee:

Allen received 22% of the vote, topping his Republican colleague, Sen. John McCain, who had 20%. Others finished in the single digits.

Somewhere Jim Webb is laughing heartily, and we laugh with him.

Among Republicans, Romney had the most backing among party insiders, with 20% support, followed by Giuliani with 14%, McCain with 10% and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia — who has said he might enter the race in the fall — with 8%.

In a potentially worrisome sign for McCain, just over 1 in 10 RNC members said they would not support him if he won the party’s nomination in his second attempt.

“It shows just how much resistance there is within the Republican establishment to McCain and how open the party is to candidates who either aren’t very conservative, like Giuliani, or only recently minted conservatives, like Romney,” Cook said. “McCain has worked pretty hard since 2000 to be a team player, but these numbers would suggest that there is still a problem for him.” ~The Los Angeles Times

Via Evangelicals For Mitt

So the party doesn’t like McCain, and the sun rises in the east.  But that is a nice phrase from Charlie Cook: “recently-minted conservative.”  Of course, it gives him too much credit as a conservative to say that, but I think Romney would have had a much more interesting reaction if his audience yesterday fully appreciated just how recently this recently-minted conservative was minted.   

It’s understandable that the Romneyites would be excited about this news, since they haven’t had much else to get excited about recently.  But what does this tell us?  It tells us that the supposed outsider, the man who is running against the broken Washington establishment, is the favoured candidate of many in the broken Washington establishment.  When it comes time to organise and turn out supporters in actual primary states, how does his campaign do?  Naturally, he fares poorly.  Today will be the test among conservative activists in a straw poll that Romney has been desperately seeking to win.  Obviously, Romney knows how relatively important these straw polls can be for building momentum for a struggling campaign, such as his certainly is.  Otherwise, he wouldn’t have wasted a lot of money bringing in his loyalists and/or what are effectively paid supporters from Michigan and Massachusetts.  All the insiders in the world mean nothing if they cannot actually bring people to the polls come the time to vote, just as all of the enthusiasm and fundraising Dean was able to bring together didn’t mean a thing if he didn’t have an organisation on the ground.  Romney’s organisation is apparently much more extensive and well-connected than Dean’s ever was, yet for some reason people still don’t want to vote for him.  That spells trouble.

He’s just another slick politician – he [Romney] doesn’t stand for anything. These people aren’t running for president, they’re running for American Idol. ~Chris Simcox, co-founder of the Minutemen (via Dave Weigel)

That would unfortunately seem to track with my creeping suspicion that the election right now is not much more than a celebrity contest.  Feedback from friends attending the conference echoes Simcox’s low, low estimation of Romney.  Having one of the top figures of the Minutemen essentially declare you either a liar or a drama queen or both is not exactly a vote of confidence for someone who wants to use his alleged anti-immigration views to distinguish himself from the top candidates.

Meanwhile, the Romneyites are boasting about Ann Coulter’s “seal of approval” on their man.  That‘s a good idea.   If my guy just finished fifth in a South Carolina straw poll he had been preparing for over the last several months, I would also be quoting enthusiasts who think McCain, who won the poll, is a “non-starter.”  When Romney loses the CPAC straw poll, in spite of the absurd amount of money he spent bringing in supporters to rig the vote in his favour, will it be time to declare him an also-ran?

David French writes at EFM:

I am growing increasingly puzzled by the continued intensity and viciousness of the attacks against the Governor by a few vocal critics on the right.

Of course, there aren’t just “a few” of us, but let me see if I can solve this puzzle: we think Romney is an opportunist who seeks adulation and power and will say what he has to in order to get it, and we don’t much cotton to his kind of politician.  We don’t trust him, and we actually don’t like his public persona (though some people seem to think he’s just dreamy), and we don’t mind saying so.  Conservatives have been told to settle for watered-down or unreliable candidates in the past, but many have been hoodwinked one time too many and aren’t going to put up with it again.  There are several more credible (in the sense that you can believe what they say), more conservative candidates running right now that pro-lifers in particular should be looking at before  settling for the counterfeit version.  Two of them (Hunter and Brownback) just beat Romney in the straw poll, and there are others (Gilmore, Paul, Tancredo) to choose from as well.  In the real world, which Mr. French is so concerned that we Romney critics acknowledge, formerGov. Romney’s religion will actually play a very big role and will cripple his candidacy.  His campaign will be finished by the end of the South Carolina primary, if not before.  Perhaps that troubles the folks at EFM and other pro-Romney sites, but that is part of the political reality of our time.  In wishing it away or declaring it to be untrue, it is the Romneyites who appear to have divorced themselves with the real world of primary politics. 

I am a Ron Paul man myself, in case that wasn’t abundantly clear from my multiple posts stating this to be so, because there is no greater defender of the Constitution and no more honest man of integrity in federal office today.  Note those traits: honesty and integrity.  Consider which candidate is lacking in them, and then there should be no puzzle about why we hammer Romney as often as we do.  Ron Paul has amassed a record of principled small-government constitutionalism second to none, and he does not waver from those principles because it might bring him advantage or fame or plaudits.  Rep. Paul possesses a fidelity to old American republicanism that would be as foreign to Romney’s understanding as the French whom he apparently loathes so much.

Mr. French asks:

Am I crazy to think that we might find that the “big three” will be the “big two” (Rudy and Romney) soon?

Does he really want us to answer that?