I know most people would like to forget about the election, but
as someone who supported Mitt Romney throughout the primary
campaign — taking a lot of flak from Spectator readers in
the process — I would like to defend his effort and make a few
comments about the future of the Republican Party.
First of all, Romney ran a damned good race. He was up in the
polls by as much as 7 points (Gallup) going into the last week.
Where he got sandbagged was Hurricane Sandy. The storm captured the
nation’s attention and pushed the election off the front page. It
gave President Obama a chance to act presidential (with vague
memories of President George Bush Jr.’s initial inaction on
Hurricane Katrina reverberating in the background) and to shake
hands with Chris Christie. Now I don’t fault Christie either and
don’t see any nefarious plot to maneuver for 2016. A governor has
to act on behalf of his state. Parts of New Jersey were devastated,
and if Christie had snubbed Obama, it would have put thousands of
his constituents in immediate danger — and been interpreted as his
fault as well.
So let’s just call it an Act of God. Maybe the fates were
shining down on President Obama. Polls showed that people who made
up their minds the day they voted broke 7 percent for Obama — a
sharp reversal of the usual pattern. I think the storm probably
made the difference.
There was one point at which Romney made himself vulnerable to
all this, however, and that was his all-out embrace of coal. Two
weeks before the election I wrote a piece for the
Spectator saying Romney should embrace a carbon tax as a
gesture to the educated middle class that he shared their concerns
about global warming. Our dearly beloved editorial director Wlad,
for whom I hold the utmost esteem, turned it down — the first time
in 25 years he has rejected one of my stories. He said it would
amount to Romney “committing political suicide,” and in this he was
undoubtedly right. Turning away from coal at that point would have
branded him as a flip-flopper who changed with the political winds,
and any appeal to the middle class would have been quickly erased
by the press anyway.
The mistake occurred much earlier in the campaign. Romney’s bet
was that enough votes could be mustered to put Virginia and Ohio in
the Republican column. But coal miners and their families are a
distinct minority in both states; the much more pivotal
constituency is the professional middle class, which is far more
concerned about global warming. (To express your conviction that
global warming is a nefarious liberal plot, click
here.)
Now, I will never understand why conservative commentators are
so unanimous in their rejection of the possibility that human
activity might be having an impact on climate. The logic seems to
be that if liberals are the first to raise an issue and call for
action, then it must be wrong. I agree that there have been
ridiculous alarms and exaggerations in the press, but overall it’s
perfectly plausible that putting huge amounts of carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere might affect the climate. Nor would
forestalling it mean the end of industrial civilization (although
factions of the environmental movement would obviously welcome
that). New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s public endorsement of
Obama as a result of Hurricane Sandy probably represented the
inclinations of millions of middle-class Americans. That’s what
cost Romney all his momentum. Had he embraced a carbon tax
alongside his general support of coal, he might have blunted the
impact.
ON THE WHOLE, HOWEVER, Romney ran a very tight and effective
campaign. He did so well in the debates that after the one on
foreign policy, people were saying Romney looked like the incumbent
and Obama like the obstreperous challenger. His only unforced error
was the “47 percent” comment made way back at a private fundraising
event during the primaries. But most conservative commentators were
saying the same thing all along: that we were on the tipping point
at which the “takers” would outnumber the “makers.”
Here again I think Republicans are being a little too
pessimistic. The premise that people getting money from the
government will automatically vote Democratic is very much open to
question. Recipients of Social Security and Medicare constitute
more than half these people, and they’re not in Democratic pockets.
In fact they have much reason to fear that the Democrats’
“can’t-touch-it” attitude endangers everyone. There is a growing
tide of “takers” who drop out of the workforce and go on Social
Security Disability, but they are nowhere near to forming a
majority, and it’s nothing that a good dose of Reaganesque economic
revival wouldn’t cure.
So that brings us around to the liberal media’s other astute
analysis: that the real problem with the Republican Party is that
it’s too white. “GOP: You’re old, you’re white, you’re history,”
says the charming cover of Newsweek. (Isn’t that magazine
supposed to be dead by now?) Somehow this passes as enlightened
discourse, whereas if Paul Ryan says urban turnout helped put Obama
over the top, that’s just a code word for racism.
Let’s face it: Black America was going to vote 95 percent for
Obama — in some precincts 100 percent,
according to the returns from Philadelphia — no matter what
happened. This contrasts with the usual 90 percent vote for
Democrats. I don’t think this is going to change much, and I don’t
think there’s any point in worrying about it. In case you haven’t
noticed, there’s a lot of pressure toward conformity in black
communities. If you think it’s tough being a conservative, try
being a black conservative. You’re a
“traitor” and an “Uncle Tom.” When Herman Cain emerged as a
Republican front-runner in the early part of the campaign, did you
read any stories praising Republicans for becoming more open-minded
about race? Cain was simply described as a sell-out and a sycophant
who was only being embraced by Republicans as a “symbol.” There is
what you might call a lack of tolerance for political diversity
among African-Americans, and rather than being queried, this will
be celebrated by the press as long as it remains Democratic.
Nor is there much hope that Republicans will be able to appeal
to Hispanics. President Obama’s “gift” to them — a very
appropriate term — was that those who were born here illegally can
stay and that immigration laws will be loosened so they can bring
in more relatives and friends as well. This is a win-win situation
for the Democrats. The more Hispanics they let in, the more the
Democratic votes pile up. It may risk turning the country into
another Venezuela, but if it wins elections, who cares? So how can
Republicans outbid this, suggest we annex Mexico and give it 100
electoral votes? Then the Democrats would never have to worry about
losing an election again.
The Democratic strategy now is to make voting tribal. Blacks
will vote Democratic, Hispanics will vote Democratic, single women,
who form another tribe, will vote Democratic. Presto! They have a
majority. Make race and sex the major issues and Democrats can
govern forever. Republicans are told they are missing the boat and
the only way to recover is to trail after the Democrats
promising…what? Lifetime supplies of birth control? Even easier
immigration? Disability benefits for everyone who doesn’t graduate
from high school?
Although it’s hard to remember now, the whole purpose of the
Civil Rights movement was to ensure that racial differences
wouldn’t matter, and that people would be
judged by the content of their character rather than the color of
their skin. Tell that to Newsweek.
THE ONLY SENSIBLE STRATEGY for Republicans right now is to keep
calm and recognize that they can win another Presidency by running
on the economy and talking about the kind of country we are going
to live in. America remains an island of free enterprise in a world
where economies are run by the government. Do we want to maintain
the system that has made us prosperous or do we want to become a
stagnant European welfare state? It could easily happen. The
current issue of the Economist features a poll on support
for free enterprise. In France, only 15 percent of respondents said
they do. In the U.S., it’s a healthy 55 percent. The highest in the
world? China, at 65 percent.
Since the 19th century, the key question in American
presidential elections has been whether the middle class would
identify with the people above or below them on the economic scale.
The Republican Party will always be the “party of the rich,”
because it attracts people who have succeeded in the free
enterprise system and want to maintain it. The Democratic Party
will always be the “party of the poor,” because it appeals to
people who have not succeeded and want to see the system torn down.
The key question is with whom the middle class will cast its
lot.
The Democrats ran a 2012 campaign that demonized Mitt Romney for
his success and told the middle class it should join forces with
the poor. They were successful, but just barely, and with a whole
raft of extenuating circumstances. That should be no reason to heed
the liberal sirens and try to recast the party as a second-rate
version of the Democrats. The best option at this point is to be
proud that Mitt Romney came breathlessly close to unseating an
incumbent President and to stay the course.
Photo: James
Currie (Creative Commons 2.0).
