Turn off the cable yappers for a moment, will you? Consider the
political road ahead and where you hope it will lead. Then run
these traps:
1. With the
re-enlistments of triangulators William Daley, Gene Sperling, and
Jack Lew, Barack Obama has tacked to the middle and, in so doing,
established himself as the favorite for re-election. Absent
Administration scandal or further economic decline, Obama is likely
to enter the 2012 race as the prohibitive favorite.
2. The GOP has
(by my count) 17 prospective candidates, all of them appealing to
one or more slivers of the base, none of them likely to be embraced
as a unifying candidate across party factions. The best known and
best funded of the candidates are, in intra-party terms, sectarian
rather than coalitional figures. The few candidates with crossover
appeal to both social and economic conservatives trail badly. The
present danger is that conservative support will be spread across
multiple candidates and, as a consequence, conservative influence
will be dissipated.
3. Given the
current circumstance, and the historical stakes, conservatives
should be thinking boldly not only about the 2012 election but
about the 2016 election, as well. We cannot approach 2012 as a Bob
Dole-style “whatever” election. We need to rally around a credible
Presidential candidate even as we maximize both down-ballot
opportunities next year and regime-change opportunities four years
later.
4. Most of the
current energy in the conservative movement is generated on the Tea
Party Right. That energy can disappear as quickly as it arrived.
Unlike political lifers, the Tea Partiers have put on hold the real
communities, and real lives, to which they will be delighted to
return after the siren of patriotic concern dies away.
5. The GOP
must avoid the mistake it made a century ago. In 1912, the GOP
nominated the dour and middle-roading William Howard Taft, ignoring
the reality that all of the energy in the party was generated by
the progressives — who promptly stomped off to join a third-party
campaign with Teddy Roosevelt. The result was the election of
Woodrow Wilson, the hardest-Left candidate elected to the
Presidency before Obama himself. In the current cycle, the GOP must
redirect Tea Party energy toward common goals. At all costs, it
must prevent that energy from being turned against meritorious GOP
candidates.
6. The Tea
Party has numerous political heroes. Not all of them were created
equal. As is the case in all political movements, some of them are
summer soldiers, inconstant in the cause. Others are unprepared
intellectually for the coming ordeal by Establishment fire. Still
others are living unvetted lives that, in high-stakes
confrontation, might not survive scrutiny. Conservatives of all
stripes —Republican, Tea Party, independent, even Democrat —
should insist on a standard-bearer who can give full voice to our
case while bringing honor to our cause.
7. With all of
these factors summed, we need a candidate whose fidelity to
principle has already been tested and affirmed. We need a
candidate who has already developed an integrated
political philosophy and is thus composed in dealing with the
rapid-fire issues of a national campaign. (We are working with a
short runway here. The first GOP debate, on Fox, is less than four
months away. CNN hosts the second debate in June.) We need a
candidate who has already attracted major media attention
and demonstrated that he or she can withstand it.
8. Finally,
our candidate must have sufficient stature in both communities —
the GOP and the Tea Party — to command bilateral respect, a
measure of deference and, in the face of what will doubtless be
dispiriting polls, a willing suspension of disbelief.
9. Q.E.D.: conservatives
should support for the GOP nomination in 2012 — Jim DeMint of
South Carolina.
Are you marching with me, brother?
