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    • April 23, 2012

    The GOP: A Party in Flux

    by Mark W. Hendrickson

    With Rick Santorum having dropped out of the race, Mitt Romney is apparently the Republican nominee for POTUS, barring a “black swan” event swooping down out of nowhere.

    Why has the Republican Party taken so long to decide upon its presidential nominee? The two most common explanations given have been the structure of the primaries and the absence of an “ideal” candidate. Those are valid reasons, but there is one more that generally has been overlooked: The Republican Party itself is in a state of flux, and its new identity has not yet gelled.

    The Tea Party message of smaller government has been dominant in the GOP primaries. However, even though the old guard, moderate, country club, establishment—choose whichever cliché you prefer—wing of the party was eclipsed in the nominating process, it remains a formidable force in Washington. This was evident in the recent Senate vote on repealing all subsidies to all private energy companies (conventional and renewable): 19 Republicans voted with every single Democrat against abolishing the subsidies. Also, the very fact that the most conservative budget proposal put forth in Congress by Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)—a plan that, while obviously superior to the Obama alternative, will increase federal spending and debt—shows the present limits of the Tea Party’s influence.

    The Republican Party may indeed be evolving into a truly conservative party, but the transformation is far from complete. Many rank-and-file Republicans have been becoming more conservative at different rates, so it is not surprising that the candidates struggled to find the “sweet spot” where one could establish himself as the ideal 2012 Republican.

    Although many Republicans were dismayed and disheartened as the primary race dragged on, there is an excellent chance that this sense of malaise will quickly dissipate now that the race is essentially over.

    The bickering between the candidates was unpleasant and cast a pall over the nominating process, but that was a passing phenomenon that will soon be forgotten. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich took turns pointing out each other’s past flirtations with interventionist government, while trying to outdo each other in professing to repent of those earlier missteps and emerging as the one genuine, born-again, true-blue conservative.

    Ron Paul, meanwhile, who remained un-nominate-able due to his noninterventionist foreign policy (and perhaps even his uncompromising free-market principles), must feel vindicated that his three opponents (in some cases) staked out positions much closer to his consistent, constitutionalist, limited-government philosophy than would have been conceivable four years ago.

    The Republican program in 2012 became clear even before Romney emerged as the standard-bearer. The last four men in the primary race—Romney, Paul, Gingrich and Santorum—all agreed: The federal government is too big, the country is in deep trouble, and the presidency of Barack Obama has been disastrous. All four advocated less federal involvement in education, effective control of national borders, lower taxes, fewer bureaucracies, repealing Obamacare, greater freedom to develop domestic energy resources, less social engineering by Washington, etc.

    Choosing between Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum was, for many, like choosing between vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream. Their personalities, pasts, and priorities had different flavors, but their philosophies were of the same general type. The presidential election campaign will generate far more enthusiasm among Republicans than the primary race did, because voters will now have a clear-cut choice between Republican ice cream or another helping of Barack Obama’s spinach.

    Barack Obama has already laid the groundwork for a very challenging economic environment in 2013. Whoever is president will have to cope with a bruising debt-ceiling battle, the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts, a weak job market, unresolved systemic problems with Social Security and Medicare, a badly deteriorated power grid, and degraded military capabilities—not to mention possible complications resulting from Obama’s feckless foreign policy.

    Frankly, I don’t think there is a person on earth who is completely prepared for all the challenges that will confront us during the next four years. I am convinced, though, that if Romney is elected, he will devote himself unreservedly to trying to solve those problems, while Obama would just make them worse. Tea Partiers, moderate Republicans, independents, and anyone else hoping for a change of direction in our country, can either unite behind Mitt Romney or concede defeat to Barack Obama. That is the choice before us.

    Copyright 2012 The Center for Vision and Values

    Tagged as: election 2012, gop

    The views expressed by the authors and editorial staff are not necessarily the views of
    Sophia Institute, Holy Spirit College, or the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts.

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    Mark W. Hendrickson

    By Mark W. Hendrickson

    Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.

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    • Paul Turner

      I’m voting third party.  At least we KNOW Obama is a lefty.  I can’t trust Romney to be conservative.  And that is the crux of the GOP flux: are conservatives still welcome?  Or will conservatives have to pull the rug out from under them a la the Whigs in the mid-19th century?  I think so.

      • MarkRutledge

        Paul, don’t yield to the platitudes put forth by the media.  The GOP has been becoming more conservative, whether one measures that by its grassroots supporters or the congressional caucus.  If we wait for ideological purity to exist at the top of a party before voting for said party we’ll never win.   Next January 21, there will be one of two men occupying the White House.  We would all do well to figure out who is better suited for the job and vote accordingly.

        • Paul Turner

          The good is often the enemy of the best.  I vote on principle, not practicality, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

          • ChrisPineo

             I respect this. Also in an objective sense you have a good point. The system set forth by the founding fathers had more than two parties, so would likely work better if the American people still had those options.

      • Cord_Hamrick

         Paul:

        I think you’re missing where the momentum lies. The conservative wave is still building.

        The Republicans, as a party, used to be more statist than they are now. We misunderstand that because of the untimeliness (in a certain way) of Ronald Reagan: He showed up much earlier than one would naturally expect. The fecklessness of Jimmy Carter and the “next-in-line” culture of the Republican party made it possible to nominate a (by the standards of that day) small-government conservative much earlier than the state of the conservative movement would normally have permitted, because he’d given a humdinger of a speech some years before and had been California’s governor: He was next in line.

        But Reagan was an outlier. The actual desires of the Republican electorate in “red states” might be reflected in him, but the Republican electorate nationwide had a center-of-gravity more moderate than Reagan, and some Republicans were very uncomfortable with him.

        This has been changing at the voter level. However, as Republican voters became more conservative, they didn’t have enough “outliers” among their elected officials to match their conservatism. Only by taking over the nominating process for House and Senate candidates (and for State offices) can conservatives begin to develop a “deep bench”; that is, a crop of Republican politicians whose conservatism matches that of the GOP electorate.

        In short, to make a conservative president, you first have to have a conservative electorate that elects a conservative citizen to be a conservative state legislator. That guy becomes popular and eventually becomes a governor or a U.S. Representative. This happens in 50 other states to 300 other candidates. Some of them mature into presidential material; most do not. About thirty years later, one of them is presidential enough to be the first president from that early conservative crop. Any conservative presidents you may have before then (like Ronald Reagan) are flukes: Instances of a rare conservative emerging from back in the days when the electorate was less conservative.

        So Reagan was a lucky break (or, more accurately, God’s providence). The 1996 or 2000 elections were when we could reasonably have expected our first conservative presidential candidate to be ready to run.

        Moreover, the GOP nominating process puts a lot of less-conservative states
        earlier in the primary and naturally tends to produce candidates of the
        George H.W.Bush variety even when the electorate would prefer a Reagan
        or even something between a Reagan and a Ron Paul. Until Maine is as “red” as Georgia, this will tend to skew presidential candidates towards the moderate center. That, in combination with the problems of the other candidates who ran, is what has given us Mitt Romney, and John McCain before him, and Bob Dole before him. (George W. Bush is more complicated; while not in actuality much more conservative than his father, his Texas twang and evangelical conversion story pressed all the right buttons and made the snooty coastal elites hate him as much as if he were a “movement” conservative. The GOP electorate likes to love whomever the coastal lefty elites hate, so they responded by embracing someone more moderate than they. But they were sick of his domestic policy centrism by 2006, and the Tea Party movement arose to combat the big-government apostasies of elected Republicans including G.W.B.)

        But the Tea Party is doing what it promised it would do: Taking over nominations at the state level to replace less-conservative Republicans with more-conservative ones. Orrin Hatch faces a primary fight for this reason. Of course there will be some hits, and some misses. Christine O’Donnell and Sarah Palin were two of the misses; neither was “ready for prime time” and got propelled into the spotlight prior to developing the sophisticated weapons needed to defend against the leftist news media. O’Donnell probably never would have or will develop that kind of finesse. Palin would have developed it if she’d had a complete term as governor and maybe a term as U.S. Representative or Senator under her belt before getting the V.P. nod. As it is, she developed it only after being thrust unready and defenseless into the barrage, and is temporarily sidelined from elective office. She has learned the game quickly, however, and is now biding her time as a sort of Conservative Oprah.

        Anyway, the Tea Party is making sure that the new crop of Republican politicians are all much more conservative, on average, than their predecessors were in prior generations. In the future, the geographically-skewed nominating process won’t be able to make as much difference because there’ll be fewer RINOs to choose from, and the blue states will just have to select from amongst several conservative candidates.

        But for now: Sure, Romney’s leftward of the GOP base. But look how much difficulty he’s had getting the nomination, despite being (a.) far better funded than all the others and (b.) being “the next in line,” having failed to get the nod last time. Normally in the GOP these two things guarantee a quick and easy win. This time they didn’t. Why? Because the GOP has moved underneath Romney, and he’s almost un-nominatable by them.

        Even with his money and his “next in line” status, Romney would have lost the nomination had any of the other GOP candidates had fewer flaws. Had Herman Cain had a more encyclopoedic grasp of the issues and a Romney-like personal life, Cain would have won the nomination. Had Santorum had a small-government legislative record and the ability to come across as a happy warrior instead of a complaining also-ran, Santorum would have won. Had the dictionary entry for “hubris,” not said, “see: Newt Gingrich,” Gingrich would have won. Had Rick Perry not done the debate equivalent of vomiting on his shirt on national television, Perry would have won.

        Had Ron Paul not had vaguely anti-semitic past associations and the habit of articulating his small-government principles in dumb, over-the-top ways that make them sound ideologically kooky and untethered from real-world experience, he’d be the nominee right now.

        Now, if you’re like me, in a solidly red state or a solidly blue state, then
        you have the freedom to vote third party without fear of swinging the
        outcome to Obama by accident.

        But if you’re in a battleground state, where your vote might conceivably make a difference, please don’t make the error of “voting for Obama” by voting third party. I know, I know, it stinks to have to think strategically by voting for the lesser of two evils. It really does. But that’s life in a fallen world.

        (For more reflections on that, see my earlier essay: http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/romneys-good-enough )

    • Scott

      The time is ripe for Orthodox Catholics to go underground, return to their ancient ways, expel themselves from the Culture of Death, which is the culture of all democratic republics, and return to the One True Faith, in which Christ is the King.   (NOT the president, the KING).  Turn off the Fox News, put down the National Review, ignore this satanic election, and run straight to the nearest Church and begin tending to the pastoral needs of our communities.   This country is on a course for self-destruction. We urgently need to teach our children how to surivive the anarchy that is coming in their lifetimes when we suffer a financial and demographic crisis that makes the present one in Greece look like a walk in the park. That means a politics of the local community, rather than some Protestant notion that the world is solved at the ballot box rather than at the alter.  If I read one more Boomer, Novus Ordo, “free market” Catholic wax poetic about Saint Ronald Reagan, it will be too soon.

      THIS… http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/2012-0318-medaille-GOP-hopefuls.htm

      …is the kind of political reporting Catholics need more of.