Mitt Romney’s plastic and philosophically vapid campaign secured
an easy victory in Florida on Tuesday night. Sunshine state GOP
voters swallowed his “electability” argument whole, according to
the exit polls.
It appears that country club Republicans have succeeded
again in duping the GOP electorate into crowning a “centrist”
Republican. Never mind that “centrist” Republicans rarely win
the center. They usually lose the center while sapping the spirit
of the party’s conservative base.
Out of Bob Dole’s and John McCain’s tattered Big Tent
steps another “reformed” RINO, Mitt Romney, who will receive,
should he win the nomination, a similar thumping from the
Democrats.
But let’s say that he is “electable,” for the sake of
argument. Who cares? The purpose of politics in a republic is not
simply to win but to win on sound principles. A party that pursues
victory by scrapping or sidelining its platform will have no
truth left with which to govern once it does.
If “electability” is the goal, why don’t the politically
correct plutocrats of the GOP just call for a one-party state? That
way they could win every time.
The “electability” argument is bankrupt on both
philosophical and practical grounds. It destroys the party’s soul
and guarantees defeat.
Even though Romney paid for this Florida win on his debit
card — outspending Newt by millions — he still couldn’t nail down
the rank-and-file vote. Seven out of ten self-described
conservatives didn’t vote for him. This foreshadows the boredom and
disgust that will keep conservatives home in the fall.
Visions of a former Paul Tsongas voter and Planned
Parenthood supporter won’t exactly blast them out of bed in the
morning. The confederacy of weasels that is the GOP establishment
couldn’t even find a moderate with an engaging personality to run.
They settled on a robotic bore.
His high-priced strategists — the ones who bragged to the
New York Times about engineering his post-South Carolina
comeback — wind him up and then find photographers to capture him
“doing his own laundry,” buying a Big Mac, or woodenly tossing bags
of potato chips to media jackals on his campaign plane.
This pitifully plastic campaign is what passes for winning
politics in the GOP. Newt, Romney supporters crow, is a loser and
“embarrassment.” But what about their own candidate? Romney’s
teleprompter-dependent drivel is far more risible than Newt’s
grandiose opining. Romney comes off as the blinkered technocrat
whose idea of wit is to compare his opponent to “Lucille Ball at
the chocolate factory.” All one can say for Romney is that he looks
presidential. If Newt looked like Romney and Mitt looked like an
overfed blowhard, Gingrich would be winning.
That Romney is a corny businessman of narrow learning and
culture wouldn’t be so deadly if he harbored conservative
convictions. But he doesn’t. He has been taught how to play a
semi-conservative Republican on TV, but his deepest instincts
remain liberal. Hence, his dogged pride in Romneycare, legislation
that Barack Obama himself would have fathered had he governed the
Bay State.
What’s notable about the rise of Romney is not the extent
to which he has pandered to conservatives — the usual media
narrative — but the ease with which he has left his liberalism
open for all to see and still won. In the debates, he has defended
statist mandates, extolled gay rights (short of marriage), and
waxed nostalgic about FDR’s New Deal. Remember his rebuke of Rick
Perry for even contemplating a system other than Social Security?
Good Republicans, Mitt let Perry know, don’t entertain such impure
thoughts.
Almost two years after energy from the Tea Party swept
Republicans back into congressional power, a politician who
embodies the antithesis of that spirit stands on the verge of
victory. This is regress, not progress, and the GOP will pay a
severe price for the Faustian bargain of “electability” that it
entails. A party that chooses power over principle will lose
both.
