For many conservatives, Mitt Romney wasn’t their first choice.
Come November, he will be their only choice. The Republican Party
is set to nominate Romney for president. Few will find Barack Obama
an acceptable alternative, and even fewer will vote third
party.
So what is a conservative to do? Right-thinking Americans would
do well to consider the parable of the two Bushes. George Bush the
elder was nominated to be Ronald Reagan’s successor, but
conservatives never trusted him. They remembered his barbs about
“vodoo economics” and his Eastern establishment roots. So when the
first President Bush raised taxes, they rebeled. When he signed a
quota bill, they rebuked him. They read his lips and then read him
the riot act.
That presidency didn’t work out terribly well for George Bush.
He served only one term. His share of the popular vote collapsed by
16 points in four short years. Desert Storm and expansions of
government remain his most enduring achievements. But the
resistance to Bush’s backsliding helped put conservatives in charge
of the Republican congressional leadership. In 1994, the leadership
won control of Congress and thwarted Bill Clinton’s most liberal
initiatives. Conservatives gained in the long term by keeping the
Republican president at a distance.
George Bush the younger knew how to talk like a conservative. He
left behind his Yale roots and spoke with a Texas accent. He
connected with evangelicals because he was one. And he had the good
fortune to have a primary opponent named John McCain, who
implausibly thought he could win the Republican nomination by
running to Bush’s left.
Once in office, Bush cemented his bond with conservatives with
his resolute response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. So when he
grew non-defense discretionary spending at twice the rate of
Clinton, many conservatives looked the other way. The same held
true when he doubled the size of the Department of Education —
which even Bob Dole campaigned on abolishing — through No Child
Left Behind. Bush’s Medicare Part D increased the program’s
unfunded liabilities by trillions of dollars and was the largest
new entitlement program since LBJ’s Great Society.
Republican failures endangered Republican successes.
Out-of-control spending threatened to wipe out the Reagan tax cuts,
with increases in the top marginal income tax rate coming in 1990
and 1993. Trillion-dollar deficits similarly endanger the Bush tax
cuts, which will expire absent direct congressional action. But far
fewer conservatives were complicit in the first set of failures
than the second.
So which Bush will be the model for how conservatives treat
Romney? My former American Spectator colleague Philip
Klein hopes conservatives will stick to their principles, but he
acknowledges it’s no sure bet. “It’s easy for Republicans to talk
tough about fighting for smaller government when they’re in the
opposition and a Democrat is in the White House,” Klein writes in
his new book
Conservative Survival in the Romney Era. “But the
pressure placed on elected Republicans to sacrifice conservative
principles becomes much more intense when one of their own is in
power.”
Even rank-and-file conservatives will feel pressure to fall in
line. Klein, now a senior writer for the Washington
Examiner, notes:
In the coming months, those of us who criticize Romney from the
right will be told we should save it until after November, or else
we’re just helping Obama. When we do so after the election – should
he win – we’ll be told he deserves a honeymoon period and needs to
rack up a few accomplishments first before moving to items on the
conservative agenda. Eventually, it will be that we can’t weaken
him before the midterm elections, and then later, that we have to
loudly support him, or else he’ll lose reelection to an even
worse liberal boogeyman (or boogeywoman) in 2016.
But if candidate Romney needs only to woo swing voters, he will
ignore conservatives. If President Romney faces pressure only from
his left, he will surely disappoint the right. When Republicans
take the base for granted, government gets bigger and conservative
policy objectives go unrealized.
Despite his good intentions on Social Security reform, George W.
Bush’s presidency was an enormous missed opportunity for
conservatives on entitlements. Not many more opportunities will
present themselves. Romney needs to have the same political
incentives to govern in a conservative fashion that Tea Party
challengers have created for complacent Republican incumbents
across the country.
Klein was an early conservative critic of Romneycare,
presciently realizing its individual mandate would be hard to
confine to the state level — and that even many of the
Massachusetts health care law’s conservative backers saw it as a
model for the nation. He correctly observed that it would at the
very least complicate the political case against Obamacare.
Yet in Conservative Survival in the Romney Era, Klein
isn’t trying to dampen conservatives spirits ahead of November or
get people to stay home rather than support the Republican nominee.
He is writing an important blueprint for how conservatives can make
a Romney presidency worthwhile.
“Even if conservatives would have preferred a different
Republican nominee,” Klein writes, “there are still plenty of ways
for them to advance their ideals by pressuring Romney into behaving
more like the conservative for whom they had longed.” If they learn
from Klein’s book — and the tale of the two Bushes.
