Redstate...
A
Call for Sanity in the Anti-Romney
Rhetoric
Posted by Leon H. Wolf (Diary)
Wednesday, January 4th
Let
me just say up front that Mitt
Romney is far from my first choice among the current field. I think
both Rick
Perry and Jon Huntsman would be far better general election candidates
and
Presidents than Mitt Romney and I don’t really “get” the joke the state
of Iowa
has clearly foisted on the entire country by essentially voting for
Santorum,
but macabre humor has never been my thing. However, all objective
evidence
seems to indicate that the GOP primary electorate does not agree with
me and
that Romney has the clear inside track to the nomination, with only
Newt posing
a serious threat to his chances. While I certainly get that Romney as a
candidate has many, many flaws, I honestly do not get the gnashing of
teeth I
am hearing today at the prospect of a Romney nomination. In my view, if
he were
to win the nomination, he would be our most conservative nominee since
at least
1988.
I
think that some people have either
lost a sense of historical perspective here or are expecting an
unrealistically
quick sea change if their contention is that Romney is unacceptably
moderate to
get their vote in a general election. Turning back the wayback machine
to 1992,
recall that our nominee (among other things) was most recently known
for 1)
raising taxes and 2) nominating a pro-choice justice to the Supreme
Court. In
1996 we ran “tax collector for the welfare state” Bob Dole, whose
cronies groused
openly about removing the pro-life plank from the Republican party
platform. In
2000, George W. Bush ran on an open platform of instituting the largest
entitlement expansion in decades (Medicare Part D), amnesty for illegal
aliens,
and loads of other big government ideas. I mean, GWB wasn’t defending
having
done those things in the past, he explicitly told us that if elected,
he would
implement them as President. To say nothing of the fact that his wife
was
openly pro-choice and he flirted openly with the idea of selecting Tom
Ridge as
VP. In 2008, we ran a guy whose entire national name ID was due to the
fact
that he was, without a doubt, the handiest and most available useful
idiot for
the media to grab when they needed a Republican to criticize the
Republican
party.
Now,
Mitt Romney has often been
criticized (fairly and completely accurately, in my opinion) as a
flip-flopper.
I agree that this is less than a desirable trait and if I had my
druthers I
would prefer someone like Rick Perry who has been more or less
consistently
conservative for a relatively long time (an easier feat in Texas than
Massachusetts, no doubt, but that is beside the point). However, the
most
salient point I can divine about this criticism, given the fact that
Romney’s
latest flops are all to the right, is that Romney is being criticized
for
accurately perceiving that he needs conservatives. Yes, I would agree
that
Romney would bear careful watching as President and constant egging on
from
Congress, but I would certainly prefer someone who panders to me for
political
reasons than someone who openly gives me the finger in order to pander
to
centrists and/or leftists, which is exactly what we have gotten in
terms of
Presidential nominees for the last 20 years.
I
guess what I am saying here is that
if Mitt Romney is the standard-fare establishment candidate who we
would all
only grudgingly settle for after all other options are exhausted, then
we
should recognize that we as conservatives have successfully moved the
party
significantly to the right over the last two decades, and it would be
absolute
infantile madness to disregard this fact and refuse to support Romney
(if he is
the nominee) in the general election against Obama because more
conservative
candidates were unable to convince GOP primary voters to vote for them.
Read
this and other columns at
Redstate
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