If you’re not sold on the three top-tier candidates for the
Republican presidential nomination, the folks at an outfit called
Political
Media have come up with a campaign button for you: just say no
to “Rudy McRomney.”
The big red slash crossing out a non-fusionist fusion of Rudolph
Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney was spotted on quite a few
lapels during last weekend’s CPAC confab. (Apparently, a Rudy
McRomney website is set to follow.) It’s this lingering
conservative discontent with the 2008 GOP field that has led
onetime campaign guru Dick Morris to predict that one of the
“pygmies” in the race has a real shot at the nomination.
Pygmies they certainly are, according to the early polls. Only
former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a so far undeclared candidate
benefiting from 1994 nostalgia, has broken into the double digits
in any reputable national survey. Even Romney, the man at the
bottom of the Big Three — and the one who, at least in his current
form, comes closest to fulfilling the conservative checklist —
lags well behind the less orthodox Giuliani and McCain. So what
hope is there for the conservative aspirants who lack his copious
campaign funds and polished organization?
To paraphrase Tom Petty, even the pygmies get lucky sometimes.
Millions of evangelicals presently lack a logical candidate.
Grassroots Republicans are confronted with candidates who have
supported legal abortion, opposed the Bush tax cuts, or been on
both sides of these issues at one time or another. If ever a purist
was going to break out from the pack simply by agreeing with the
base on core principles, now would be the time.
At least that’s part of the rationale for Sen. Sam Brownback’s
candidacy. An evangelical turned Catholic, Brownback is a pro-life
stalwart and favorite of religious conservatives. After Rick
Santorum’s defeat last November, it is hard to identify another
senator who has spent as much political capital on social issues.
The Kansan even appeared at this year’s March for Life in person
rather than phoning it in, thus doing both Ronald Reagan and George
W. Bush one better.
But Brownback is no single-issue socon. The Club for Growth
gives him generally high marks for his fiscal policy
record. He has consistently favored tax cuts and, despite the large
number of farmers in Kansas, voted for the Freedom to Farm Act’s
reductions in agriculture subsidies. Unfortunately, Brownback was
less independent when it came to Medicare Part D and ethanol
subsidies.
Worse, there are other reasons Brownback has had trouble
spreading his appeal from the religious right to conservatives who
care about limited government. There is something about his
crusading rhetoric that makes him sound like a member of the big
government right. Many CPAC attendees seemed nonplussed by his
oft-stated goal to cure cancer in ten years, which seems vaguely
reminiscent of liberal calls to end poverty — or John Edwards’s
2004 promise that the lame would walk again if Democrats won the
White House and rescinded the Bush administration’s restrictions on
embryonic stem-cell research.
Factor in Brownback’s advocacy of last year’s Senate immigration
bill plus his stronger support for intervention in Darfur than the
surge in Iraq, and his “yellow brick road to the White House” may
actually be fraught with lions, and tigers, and bears.
If you are looking for redder meat than Brownback is able to
serve, Congressman Tom Tancredo — the Colorado Republican who is
most famous for being an immigration restrictionist and a cigar
aficionado — might be your man. In addition to the border-hawk
credibility he built up through his years chairing the
Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, Tancredo has led a
free-market think tank and compiled a pro-life voting record. He
warned the CPAC crowd that “conversions happen on the road to
Damascus, not the road to Des Moines.”
On many of the issues where the Bush administration has angered
conservatives, Tancredo has bucked the president. In addition to
his crusade against the Bush immigration plan, the congressman
voted against both the Medicare prescription drug benefit and No
Child Left Behind. That places him among a small minority of
diehard fiscal conservatives in Congress.
The only Republican candidate who has broken with Bush more
often is Texas Congressman Ron Paul. The libertarian maverick voted
against the war in Iraq, opposed the Patriot Act, and balked at
additional federal dollars for faith-based charities. Paul doesn’t
just want to repeal No Child Left Behind and the prescription drug
benefit; he would eliminate the Department of Education and abolish
Medicare entirely. A devotee of the Austrian school of economics,
Paul is even in favor of ending the Federal Reserve.
Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore is less interested in showing
independence from Bush than distancing himself from our friend Rudy
McRomney. He has released a video challenging the frontrunners’ conservative
credentials.
“The three leading challengers for our party’s nomination may be
good men,” Gilmore tells his virtual audience. “But they simply do
not share our conservative values. John McCain has fought
conservatives time after time, even invoking the rhetoric of class
warfare to oppose the Bush tax cuts. Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney
both repeatedly opposed core conservative values to win elections
in New York and Massachusetts.”
Yet there isn’t a single upstart candidate in the race who
currently has the resources or the staff talent to launch a
successful revolt against the party establishment. Brownback has a
dedicated group of followers; Tancredo and Paul appeal to a smaller
but equally enthusiastic set of true believers. None of them,
however, have anything like the grassroots backing of Barry
Goldwater in 1964 or Ronald Reagan in 1976.
And the pygmies are having their own problems bringing
conservatives together. The New York Times reported (in a
story now buried behind Times Select) that several lesser known
candidates made presentations to the Council for National Policy.
The story claimed that Brownback was unacceptable to activists
concerned about illegal immigration, former Arkansas Gov. Mike
Huckabee was found wanting on taxes, and there were concerns that
Congressman Duncan Hunter wouldn’t be able to raise money because
of his views on trade.
Disenchanted conservatives can’t beat somebody with nobody, or
at least nobody of the frontrunners’ stature. Unless that problem
is resolved, the Rudy McRomney buttons will be nice collector items
— like Harold Stassen ‘84 placards.
