So, conservatives: who’s our guy going to be? Heading into the New Hampshire primary, Mitt Romney has a commanding lead — and the other candidates spent most of Saturday’s debate snarling at one another, while hardly even taking a swing at Mitt.
There are two questions.
First: who out of this lot would, by our lights, be the best president?
Second, and far more important for the future of the nation: who has the best chance of ousting Barack Obama?
To answer the most important question first: I think the answer is Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich is simply much too off-putting to too many people. The reasons? There are several: his personal peccadilloes, his ostentatious vanity and haughty condescension (though of course you’re stuck with those that either way in a Gingrich/Obama contest), his petulance, his sequential fascination with a kaleidoscopic assortment of Big New Ideas, and more. (Even his portly middle, suggestive of hedonistic indiscipline, would no doubt be a liability in contrast to the imperially slim Mr. Obama.) I simply don’t think he would win, and if there’s one thing that all conservatives agree on, from the evangelicals to the Tea Party to the most socially liberal, godless “metrocons”, it’s that for Mr. Obama to get another four years in office would be a catastrophe for America. Mitt Romney, though brilliant by nobody’s assessment, looks radiantly presidential, holds his own well enough in debates, and clearly understands what all conservatives agree our next president must understand: the importance of a smaller, leaner, and less intrusive government to the preservation of America’s liberty and prosperity. It would be delightful to see Newt Gingrich shred Mr. Obama on the debating floor, but you can’t have everything, and it’s hard for me to imagine that Mitt won’t have a far broader appeal at the polls. I’ll invoke the Buckley Rule: you pull for the most conservative candidate who can actually get elected — and that’s Mitt Romney, I think.
As for the first question, about who would make the better President: for all of Newt’s brainy command of history, and his vast governmental experience, I’m still not sure that he’d be a better president. He has a tendency, rather like Toad of Toad Hall, to hop from one glittering attraction to another, and he has many enemies in Washington. I’m sure Mitt would be less of an activist than Newt — but Washington doing less looks pretty good right now, and I imagine most of his activism would be directed toward slimming the Federal behemoth, rather than dreaming up new and visionary initiatives. There’s no doubt that Mitt is far less imaginative than Newt, but that’s just as well, under the circumstances.
So: Mitt Romney it is, I guess. It’s hard to get excited about the guy, but if he can unseat Mr. Obama, that’s good enough for me.
Not everyone on the Right agrees, of course. In his latest essay, for example, Thomas Sowell makes the case for Newt Gingrich. I agree with much of what he says, as usual, but I think he overestimates Newt’s chance of victory in November, which completely undermines his argument. You can read it for yourself, here.
19 Comments
First: who out of this lot would, by our lights, be the best president?
Difficult to say. Each has his own individual strengths and weaknesses. But Gingrich has more weaknesses than most.
who has the best chance of ousting Barack Obama?
I’m inclined to agree with your answer. But that’s a question whose answer is only obvious in hindsight. Even Reagan looked like a longshot until the Iranian hostage crisis came along. Once a candidate wins (or loses), people have a tendency to act as if that particular outcome was historically inevitable.
Mitt Romney is a man who lacks convictions, is dishonest, and is several vertebrae shy of a backbone. He is also a weird person, and I’m not sure that he will pass the most important criterion of Presidential caliber: would you want to have a beer with him? Or, in his case, a tall glass of milk.
In all fairness, however, he did pass a pretty good health care program as governor of Massachusetts.
Whatever. Each team gets to pick its own guy. Considering that the last nominee who was endorsed on this site was President Giuliani, I can only hope that waka waka waka’s influence has not grown to the point where it can sway national elections.
Well, I don’t think the GOP was exactly counting on your vote, anyway.
Rudy was a good mayor, I think, and outstanding in a crisis.
He was a good mayor. I voted for him.
This humble website may not sway national elections yet, but at least I’ll take some satisfaction in nullifying your own vote for the incumbent, come November.
I’m not sure that he will pass the most important criterion of Presidential caliber: would you want to have a beer with him?
You voted for Obama because you thought he was the sort of guy you’d want to have a beer with? I find myself skeptical.
dishonest
A dishonest politician? That’s just unthinkable.
Being “a guy I’d like to have a beer with” is very, very far down on my list of presidential qualifications at this point, and I couldn’t care less if we’d get along socially. I don’t expect politicians to be normal people I’d like to hang out with; they’re “weird” almost by definition.
Top of the list? Being “not Barack Obama”.
I’m sure if I had starting reading this blog from the very beginning I would be able to answer this question but considering the amount of vitriol directed towards President Obama’s way I was wondering if you could indulge me and list a couple topics where you believe Obama has made policy mistakes (and additionally you think any of the Republican candidates would have done differently) and include examples.
I hardly think that Obama is a perfect president but I have a had time understanding how I can agree on some many items with you yet on who would make the better president we disagree so drastically. I think some examples of your dislike for Obama would help me understand.
Forgive me, DS — and I do hate to shirk a homework assignment — but to write an essay listing Mr. Obama’s shortcomings as President, with examples, and thereafter comparing and contrasting Mr. Obama’s policy choices regarding each of those examples with what each of the Republican candidates might reasonably have been assumed to do differently — which in turn would lead to an avalanche of tendentious and indignant responses (if not from you, then from other commenters, as sure as the night follows the day) demanding further explication, links, references, and expository demonstration, is simply beyond the scope of this thread. Suffice it to say that Mr. Obama’s vision of what America is and ought to be is incongruent with my own, in nearly every respect. If you re-read this post, you’ll see that I think it is essential to our nation’s future that our next president be someone who understands “the importance of a smaller, leaner, and less intrusive government to the preservation of America’s liberty and prosperity.” Mr. Obama, to put it mildly, is not such a person. That is far from the only reason I wish to see him gone, but it is sufficient.
I will say that, to his credit, Mr. Obama has done a good job of keeping up the pressure on al-Qaeda, and was wise enough to keep Gitmo open.
You mentioned some regret at not having read this blog from the beginning. Fortunately, you still can: all of our 2,484 posts (as of this writing) are neatly archived, over on the sidebar. You might also try the “View a Random Post” link, at top right.
You’ll find that there is less of this sort of political material the farther back you go. There may be less again in future, though maybe not.
P.S. What “vitriol”? I thought I was being perfectly civil.
The weakness in your argument is its assumption that an alternative to Obama would, in fact, reduce the scope of government. As Reagan and Bush learned, as long as you rail against the evils of big government, you can expand it as much as you like once you are in power.
While the elasticated Mitt Romney gives speeches to assuage the hostility to government which inheres in the GOP base, he has no actual plans with actual numbers to do so. This is because few people actually want to slash Medicare, give up government paid prescription drugs, or shut down the FBI. Hence you have a quadriennial game of popcorn surprise, where Republican candidates insist on a smaller government, but are vague as to how they would actually effect one.
Pete, I agree with you: The problem is not just the pols, but also the voters. As Franklin said, “When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” That moment is at hand.
Nevertheless, there’s a difference between having someone in office who actually understands that the survival of the republic depends on reducing the crushing weight of government, versus giving four more years of executive power to a deeply divisive crypto-socialist with a viperous antipathy toward capitalism and individual enterprise. And despite what you say, there are plenty of ideas floating around on the Right for slimming the behemoth, ranging from detailed wonkiness to ruthless cleaver-wielding. Some of the candidates would eliminate entire departments.
I agree also that Mitt Romney is a shape-shifting glad-hander who is perhaps the least conservative of all the candidates. But I have a feeling he’ll just be glad to have the job, and at the very least won’t make things worse. And he’ll have a strong mandate for reducing the size and scope of government, and plenty of people in Congress to work with.
There is no “Mr. Right” for conservatives in this race, so we have to settle for “Mr. Right Now”.
Under Obama’s tenure, the stock market has doubled, corporate profits and GDP have risen to all time highs, the banks and auto companies were rescued, and there have been no Justice Department prosecutions, despite widespread calls to have bankers’ heads on pikes. This doesn’t sound like someone who has “a viperous antipathy toward capitalism and individual enterprise” to me. However, I’ll let this egregious mischaracterization pass.
The only Republican candidate in the race who isn’t a phony is Ron Paul. Why is it that he does not receive your blog’s coveted endorsement?
Jolly decent of you. And you’re absolutely right: the Justice Department hasn’t gone after Mr. Obama’s generous Wall Street campaign contributors, for some reason I just can’t fathom. (I guess the DOJ has just been too busy focusing on things like imposing racial guidelines on its prosecutors, suing states for daring to enforce immigration laws that discourage undocumented proto-Democrats from settling here with impunity, providing assault weapons to Mexican drug-lords, and otherwise looking out for Mr. Holder’s “people”.)
So I thank you, Peter, for your sociable forbearance regarding my “egregious mischaracterizations” of the incumbent. In a spirit of amiable reciprocity, I’ll pass over in silence not only your own egregious post hoc ergo propter hoc assumptions regarding our glacial recovery, but also the logarithmic increase in burdensome government regulations, the skyrocketing deficit, the green-jobs cronyism, etc., that have stained Mr. Obama’s escutcheon. I’m glad we can have these little chats without getting hung up on such distractions.
As for Ron Paul: there’s a great deal to like about him. I agree wholeheartedly with his views on the reduction of government generally, on abandoning America’s self-imposed obligation to provide military security for the entire civilized world, on the idiotic drug war, and on simplifying the tax code. Mr. Paul, to his infinite credit, is one hombre who clearly understands that as the State gets bigger, the citizen gets smaller.
On the other hand, I think he’s dead wrong on border security, and some related issues.
If he gets the nomination, though, I’ll be glad to vote for him. He’s a good man, his heart’s in the right place, and we could do a hell of a lot worse. The main reason I don’t want him to have the nomination is simple: I don’t think he can defeat Mr. Obama in November.
I see your point. A lot of people would look at Eric Holder’s impeccable conservative credentials – Reagan appointee, corporate lawyer, Acting Attorney General under George W. Bush, and prosecutor of Democrats John Jenrette and Dan Rostenowski – and conclude that he is so far in the tank to right wing interests that he wouldn’t prosecute a banker.
However, I think that there have been no prosecutions because I don’t think that there are any indictable offenses. If there were, I think that a grand jury would have been convened. Plenty of people did lots of stupid things, but I’m not sure if anyone did anything which was actually illegal.
I make this remark not merely to be irritating, but also to point out that this is a perfect example of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If Obama played to the bleachers and unleashed a slew of indictments, he would be accused of appeasing the OWS crowd. By not indicting anyone, his base thinks that he sold out to Wall Street, or puts the interests of his “generous Wall Street campaign contributors” above the impartial administration of the law..
Unlike his opponents, Obama actually has to make decisions, and each decision makes some group of people mightily upset. In this case, I think he made the right decision.
Strange, then, that you’d cite the lack of such prosecutions as an example of Mr. Obama’s ardor for capitalism…
As for me, I have no idea whether there were indictable offenses or not, only that the Obama machine was copiously lubricated by the principals and proxies of the Wall Street financial houses. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course; it’s the way of the world.)
A lot of people would look at Eric Holder’s impeccable conservative credentials — Reagan appointee, corporate lawyer, Acting Attorney General under George W. Bush, and prosecutor of Democrats John Jenrette and Dan Rostenowski — and conclude that he is so far in the tank to right wing interests that he wouldn’t prosecute a banker.
I don’t believe for one second that Holder would prosecute a banker!
At least, not one who had donated generously to the Democratic Party.
As for his “right wing credentials’, it can be difficult at times to tell if you are an idiot, sarcastic, or dishonest.
It is not a crime to be greedy, stupid, or reckless. Most of the executives who ran financial institutions which went bust lost big or got wiped out because they personally made big bets on strategies which failed. Absent malevolence – or mens rea, in legal terms – there is no crime. So I think the fact that there were no indictments simply reflects the fact that nobody broke the law, not because of political calculations.
As for Obama, my point was simply that if he fit the right wing caricature of him as just a better looking Hugo Chavez, then he would have gone after bankers with the ferocity of Vlad the Impaler. But he didn’t. Instead, he did the right thing, by looking at the facts and the law and going where they led.
Not if he didn’t have a case, he wouldn’t. He’s shrewder than that. And anyway, those guys gave him some serious baksheesh.