Several of my conservative friends were shocked last year by my
assertion that Mitt Romney was the best choice for the Republican
presidential nomination. My argument, however, had the virtue of
simplicity: Romney is a tall, handsome, multimillionaire with a
glorious mane of dark hair.
Considering that his leading rivals for the nomination at that
time -- John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson -- were all
in various stages of advanced baldness, the former Massachusetts
governor's thick hair constituted his chief qualification. Also,
his chiseled jaw and his Hollywood-perfect smile. Fred might
be a movie star, but Mitt looked like a movie
star.
"But … Mitt's a flip-flopper!" howled my friends.
"Yes, a very telegenic flip-flopper," I replied. "Give
me a good-looking flip-flopper over a bald old maverick any day
of the week."
This is not an endorsement of unprincipled flip-flopping, just an
argument for assessing candidates the way independent "swing"
voters assess candidates.
Let's face it: Nominating a superficially attractive,
rhetorically vague and ideological nebulous candidate didn't hurt
the Democrats this year, did it?
Swing voters are notoriously superficial. They believe they can
judge a man's fitness for office by watching him talk on TV. This
fact frustrates politicians who don't look good talking on TV,
but it's true.
The president is a television character, and the voters are
casting agents. The American people went to the polls on Nov. 4
and cast Will Smith/Lawrence Fishburne in the role. Who can blame
them, since the Republican Party sent Don Rickles/Tim Conway to
the audition?
Trivia time: What was John McCain's best demographic? White
voters 65 and older, who went 58 percent for their fellow
AARP member. Whatever else he did wrong, he didn't lose the
geezer vote. Losing
Florida by 200,000 votes was bad, but just imagine how much
worse it would have been had it not been for McCain's advantage
among the elderly.
Exit-poll data is insufficiently detailed to allow a completely
superficial analysis of the electorate, but the fact that old
candidates do best with old voters and black candidates do best
with black voters (95 percent went for Obama) suggests that the
GOP scored well this year among the short, the bald and the
grumpy.
EXCUSE MY JOCULARITY about all this, but I'm in a silly mood,
having just read David Brooks's
declaration in the New York Times that John McCain's
defeat has inaugurated a "fight over the future of conservatism"
between Traditionalists and Reformers.
Our own R. Emmett Tyrrell was quoted as an emblematic
Traditionalist, while several fashionable young authors were
classified as Reformers by Brooks, who insists this Republican
defeat can be blamed on conservatives who "continue to insult the
sensibilities of the educated class and the entire East and West
Coasts."
So if I'm in a mood for mockery, don't blame me, blame Their
Mister Brooks. And don't blame him, really, since he's merely
trying to justify his salary.
The self-interest of intellectuals demands that they portray
every election as fraught with existential significance, an
honest-to-goodness Hegelian shift in the zeitgeist.
Divining the zeitgeist and integrating the latest
paradigm shift into our weltanschauung is the
stock-in-trade of intellectuals, and if all that elevated
cogitation could produce an extra 207,000 Republican votes in
Ohio, maybe I would give a damn. But it can't and I don't.
The economy sucks, the war in Iraq is costing us about $5 billion
a week, the deficit's out of control, and every time you turn on
the TV, another giant corporation is either declaring bankruptcy
or getting a bailout from the taxpayers. You don't need an
intellectual to tell you why this was a tough year to be a
Republican, but that's not going to stop the pointy-heads from
explaining What It Really Means.
NOT TO PUT too fine a point on that pointy-head, but four years
ago, Brooks looked at the election results and
declared that "the values divide is a complex layering of
conflicting views about faith, leadership, individualism,
American exceptionalism, suburbia, Wal-Mart, decorum, economic
opportunity, natural law, manliness, bourgeois virtues and a
zillion other issues."
Nothing about the Fed pumping currency as fast as the Treasury
could print it, nothing about the ballooning deficit, nothing
about the evaporation of normal standards of creditworthiness in
mortgage lending, nothing about 2,500 U.S. combat deaths in Iraq
that would occur in the next four years. No, in November 2004,
Brooks explored the "complex layering" of various irrelevancies
that had little to do with why 51 percent of Americans didn't
want that pompous blowhard John Kerry to be president.
Kerry had great hair, though -- you've got to give him that much.
Massachusetts has provided America an almost unbroken succession
of thickly planted political scalps. The Kennedy brothers all had
first-class presidential hair and even the doomstruck Mike
Dukakis couldn't be accused of any tonsorial shortcoming.
Maybe Mitt Romney's Massachusetts hair would not have been enough
to win the White House in this year of Republican "brand damage"
and virulent Obamaphilia in the press corps. Yet my theory that
the GOP suffered for nominating a 72-year-old bald guy is at
least as valid as Brooks's suggestion that Republicans lost
because Tyrrell and his Traditionalist colleagues were "crushing
dissent, purging deviationists and enforcing doctrinal purity."
Given Brooks's unimpressive track record in forecasting the
political future, his invitation to overthink the recent
political past shouldn't get an RSVP from conservatives. Just try
to find a Republican presidential nominee for 2012 with nice
hair. Lipstick is optional.
