Cold, bleak February has turned into a happy time for us. It’s
given us a short break from the constant barrage of debates,
speeches and “crucial” primaries in the Republican presidential
nomination contest. February has given us, and the candidates, a
bit of time to think. Let’s make the most of it.
The nomination is still up for grabs. Mitt Romney has the
clearest path to it but Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul
are all promising to take it all the way to the convention. To
those who natter about how cool a “brokered” convention would be, I
say don’t wish for something because you might get it. (Among other
frightful questions, who can be the brokers? It’ll be a food fight
that benefits only the media.) The Republican Party is too weak and
fractured to come out of such an event united and strong enough to
win in November.
So let’s assume that Romney is the nominee. The arithmetic
is pretty simple. Mitt Romney plus an energized Republican base can
beat Obama in November. Romney without an energized base will lose.
But the Republican base is conservative, and Romney hasn’t closed
the deal with conservatives. Can he?
Let’s face it: Romney isn’t one of us. At CPAC last Friday
he said he governed Massachusetts as a “severely conservative”
Republican in the tone of voice my late maternal grandmother used
to say she was severely constipated. We know his record as state
candidate and governor, and national candidate since 2007. We need
not rehearse it here. Suffice it to say that it defines him as a
transactional conservative. He will apply conservative principles
as a business owner might apply production scenarios and estimated
profit margins to negotiating a deal. They aren’t part of his core,
but will be useful tools for him in campaigning and, if he wins,
governing.
Romney has run as a technocrat, the kind of expert the
Eurozone imposes on desperately failing economies. But technocrats
don’t win American elections. Skilled, passionate politicians
do.
Romney’s failure to convince conservatives isn’t entirely
his fault. There is a mood among conservatives this year created by
Bob Dole, George W. Bush, and John McCain. We’re sick and tired of
compromise candidates foisted upon us because they were supposed to
be electable. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” turned out to be
the oxymoronic “big government conservatism” that paved the way for
Obama. McCain was never a conservative, just an arrogant Washington
insider. It was only fitting that Dole ended up flakking for Viagra
after his campaign. This time, all of the candidates we thought
best to take on Obama chose not to run.
The debates haven’t helped Romney. He’s neither evidenced
the kind of passion for conservatism the base has been looking for
nor has he explained his economic or foreign policy ideas in terms
that were clear or compelling . In his most memorable moments in
these debates — the challenge to Rick Perry for a $10,000 bet, and
the rejoinder to Santorum that Obamacare wasn’t worth getting angry
about — Romney was aloof in one and dismissive of the passions
that animate conservatives in the other.
In his CPAC speech, Romney tried to connect and failed. I
did a double take when he said that his test for continuing a
government program was whether it was worth borrowing from China to
pay for it. Huh? I thought conservatives judged the parts of our
oversized government by the terms of the Constitution, especially
the Tenth Amendment. If the government shouldn’t be in the business
of doing something, it should be legislated out of it. Romney
doesn’t get that.
Conservatives believe that we have too much at stake this
year to trust anyone who isn’t an ideological conservative. Judging
by what’s gone on since 2009, a lot of us conclude that if Obama
wins a second term, our nation may not survive it.
Rick Santorum had it right in his CPAC speech. Why would
independents and Democrats vote for a Republican when his own party
isn’t enthusiastic about him? Romney’s enthusiasm gap is his
biggest vulnerability. If he can’t energize the Republican base and
achieve the level of enthusiasm needed to ensure voter turnout, he
can’t win in November.
Romney can’t close the deal with conservatives. So are we
left with Mark Levin’s idea that it will be up to us to drag him
across the finish line?
If the 2012 race is determined by the relative strengths
of the conservative media and the mainstream liberal media, Levin’s
scenario is possible. Talk radio and publications such as The
American Spectator will have a huge impact on voters. And in
what is sure to be the most expensive and negative campaign ever,
more and more people will be listening to us and reading us because
the politically active liberal media has lost a lot of its
credibility.
The lack of enthusiasm for Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum
is already evidencing itself in the lower primary turnouts since
South Carolina. Compared to 2008, turnout was down
58% in Missouri, 26% in Nevada, 23% in Minnesota, 14% in
Florida and 6% in Colorado. This was despite constant attention to
those races among the conservative talk radio and print media.
(When I guest-hosted the Michael Savage show on February 1, the
callers wanted to talk about the primary contest to the exclusion
of almost everything else.)
For all the enthusiasm we can generate, it probably won’t
be enough. We can help, but our help won’t be decisive. Barack
Obama is a skillful campaigner whose principal skill is motivating
his supporters. To defeat him, Romney will have to do the same. But
Romney — if he wants to win the nomination and gain momentum to
November — will have to be passionate, credible, and constantly
conservative.
There are things such as Obamacare, the loss of personal
freedoms, and Obama’s tsunami of spending that are worth getting
angry about. Romney needs to convince people he shares their anger
and will act to remove the reasons for it if he wins the
presidency.
Romney has not shown himself to be a man of passion. He
will have to change that perception if he is to win the nomination
and the election. The time to do that is in the next three weeks
before Super Tuesday.
Anger and passion are legitimate emotions. To connect with
voters and prove that you share theirs does not require overheated
rhetoric or tears. But it does require commitment absent from his
CPAC speech. If we don’t embrace Romney, he can start gaining
ground with conservatives by embracing us and the people we
trust.
Presidential candidates always try to have people running
on the ticket appear at stump speeches in the general election
campaign. Romney needs to start doing that now, not later. Even if
the candidates don’t want to endorse him yet, why not endorse them
in every stop? Romney could do that in the three primary states
before Super Tuesday (Arizona, Michigan, and Washington) and the
ten which will be held on that day, March 6. By doing that he can
embrace real conservatives even if they don’t yet embrace him.
Conservatism by association isn’t really conservatism, but it may
be the best Romney can do before the biggest day in the primary
season.
That, too, won’t be enough to energize conservatives in
Romney’s favor. But it is a way to begin demonstrating passion for
more than his own ambition, and to start uniting the party he hopes
to lead out of the Tampa convention.
