While watching Mitt Romney in action last night, I had a
fugitive thought: he would be the perfect candidate for Vice
President. I do not say that in a disparaging way. In the modern
era, the Vice Presidency has become a job of substance and
delegated authority. On more than a few occasions, it has been an
important executive post; cf., Gore, Albert and Cheney, Richard.
Can you think of anybody more likely than Romney to succeed in
reorganizing an unwieldy Cabinet department, or in cutting back a
bloated budget request? With Romney, there would not be a problem
with the implementation of plan. He’s a world-class manager. The
problem would be with the plan itself.
Which frames the residual question about Romney as
Presidential candidate this way: left to his own
predilections, would Mitt Romney be a conservative President? The
answer is almost surely no, he would not. As the acerbic Tory
Benjamin Disraeli observed of the swells in the House of Commons:
“sensible men are all of the same religion,” by which he meant that
establishmentarian elites tend to cluster around the received
wisdom. The late Herman Kahn saw the same tendency from a different
perspective. In his tangy way, Kahn claimed that the fundamental
division between public men was between “those who care what the
New York Times thinks about them and those who don’t.”
Clearly, Romney cares. His entire career has been expended in the
seeking and winning of approval from establishmentarian elites.
Which prompts the sequential question: could Mitt Romney, supported
closely by an engaged and vocal conservative movement, be a
conservative president? In the current economic circumstance —
where the politics of reality is reasserting itself with a
vengeance — my hedged and hopeful answer would be, yes. Here’s the
hedge. If, after the election, conservatives choose to return to
the plow and the hearth, my answer would be no, almost surely
not.
Eye on Newt
What to
make of Newt Gingrich? It may have been the estimable Jeffrey Lord
who first
remarked the similarities between Newt Gingrich and Winston
Churchill. Suspend your disbelief. What Lord had in mind and what I
find arresting were the surface similarities between the two portly
statesmen — the forensic gifts, the historical perspective, the
long exposure to government benches back to front, the maturing
life-experience with both savored victory and embittering defeat,
the towering intellect. I was riding along smoothly with Lord until
that last stop, where I felt compelled to get off the rhetorical
train. Gingrich is verbally facile, to be sure, even pyrotechnical,
but intellectually towering?
At a small dinner in Washington some years ago, several of
us sat enthralled as Gingrich held forth well into the evening. He
expressed admiration with unmodulated fervor for the writings of
James Madison, the principal author of The Federalist
Papers, Alvin Toffler, the intermittently intelligible
futurist, and Arianna Huffington, the Greek-American ditz who would
say almost anything in her climb to social prominence and economic
opulence. Gingrich’s undifferentiated enthusiasm represented for me
the root problem of the autodidact: to the self-directed, all ideas
appear to be created equal. (This is no knock on autodidacts,
understand. Thomas Jefferson, alone in his library at Monticello,
attained a superb education long after he had departed William
& Mary. It’s the rest of us that need guidance.) Is it unfair
to entertain the possibility that a Gingrich Presidency might
resemble in essential respects a Gingrich Speakership: lots of
ideas in search of a premise, lots of projects in need of adult
supervision, management by whim and driven by impulse — followed
by a swirl of charges, a cloud of confusion and, off at the end, an
awkward exit?
And then again, when taking the measure of any Gingrich
enterprise, one is obliged to count the number of personal items
he’ll be bringing on board. One can be pretty sure that they won’t
fit in the overhead storage bin. The two pieces of “baggage” that
stick most conspicuously in memory, the one distant, the other just
this month, were these. The first was when Speaker Gingrich lied
about his adulterous affair just as he was impeaching Bill Clinton
for lying about his adulterous affair. Not quite
Churchillian, I think we can agree. The other oversized carry-on
was Gingrich’s explanation this month of a $300,000 fee he received
from Freddie Mac. He was employed as an “historian,” said the
former Speaker, thus electrifying faculty lounges across the
fruited plain. When subsequent news reports showed that the fee was
at least $1.6 million, Gingrich retooled his explanation. He was
not actually writing history and certainly not lobbying. He was
providing “strategic advice.” That formulation was not so much
Churchillian as Clintonian. Whatever Gingrich thought he was
selling, it’s clear what Freddie Mac thought it was buying —
influence with conservatives who were thinking of closing the open
bar at the mortgage-scam party. (One can only imagine the
sweep of that seven-figure advice: “Gentlemen, I commend
to you a genuinely new paradigm. According to projections
calculated here at the Gingrich Polymathic Institute, we can bring
the American Dream to every man, woman and child in this country by
laying off the risk on the U.S. taxpayer, who can then lay it off
on the Chinese government. Everybody with me so far?”)
In at least one respect, Gingrich must be considered fully
Churchillian. As the great biographer William Manchester wrote of
Sir Winston at mid-career: “By now he had become adept at creating
his own dramas.”
Bottom line: If Gingrich is the nominee, would we, could
we, support him? In a heartbeat. He’s not a Retributionist (see
below).
The End of the Beginning
The Presidential election has now been defined and, bringing
particular satisfaction to those of us of the TAS
persuasion, it has been defined by the broad mass of the citizenry
and not by the increasingly derelict national media. The choice
next year will be between the Disciplinarians on the one side and
the Retributionists on the other. All of us— right, left, and
middle— recognize that something serious and possibly epochal has
gone wrong with our fragile Republic. Seen in its most favorable
light, this problem is cyclical and soluble. In the gloom of
twilight, it can seem fundamental and irreversible. (Watching the
bond markets swoon, we expect the declinists to exhume any day now
Sir Edward Grey’s chestnut from 1914: “The lamps are going out all
over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our
lifetime.”)
The Disciplinarians, identified in the public mind with
the Tea Party but spreading far beyond its ranks into both of the
major parties, regard the problem as soluble and they have stepped
forward to accost the decline and enlist in the restoration effort.
They understand the core issue to be the breakdown of discipline in
public finance. They seek to “take back” their government — not in
a lunge for operational power, but in the limited sense of calling
the government to its original commitments.
The Retributionists, identified in the public mind with
Occupy Wall Street but representing a broader swath of political
alienation, are resigned to the prospect of national decline and
have fixed their attention on the division of residual wealth. They
believe that an unfair economic system has inevitably produced
unfair results and they seek to redress these systemic wrongs
through the brute power of government. They employ not just the
language of class warfare. They advocate openly for the prosecution
of class warfare.
Barack Obama, of course, is the champion of the
Retributionists. He springs from the same activist roots as the
Occupiers, was nurtured boy and man by the dependency establishment
and speaks fluently the faux-street-language of the Affluent Left.
He will make the Retributionist case as well as it can be
made.
The good news is that the Disciplinarians will have a
champion next year, too. He will have been tested in debate, vetted
by the media, scrutinized in retail primaries and conservatized by
a nominating process that has purged Retributionist tendencies
comprehensively from the Grand Old Party.
