[Update 25AUG2011: I wrote this on 14May, after the first debate. I’ve corrected some spelling and phrasing, but nothing substantial. Rick Perry has just passed Mitt Romney in at least one, perhaps two significant polls. This post has stood up rather well.]
Mitt Romney had a golden opportunity to seize the nomination and skewer the president. In my opinion, all he needed to do was cast off his illegitimate offspring, RomneyCare. He should have said that he used the laboratory of democracy called Massachusetts, with its rich history of political innovation, to see once and for all if a large role for government can improve critical services in health care. He would have been in a unique position to assail the president on ObamaCare. “I have already implemented your program, and ten years down the road, I can tell you now–it simply does not work.”
How hard would that have been? Huge benefit, low drawback, but the drawbacks were too much for him. You don’t get to extol the virtues of the laboratories of democracy and then insist that what has not worked for one of the states should also be implemented in Washington. Part of the whole “50 labs of democracy” is that the bad ideas, and most notably their champions, do not advance to the next round.
As is widely reported, he did not disavow “RomneyCare”, but chose to stand on the ideologically sound ground that the 50 states are the laboratories of democracy, and that the states can and should do a great many things that the federal government should not. The problem with this is that while true, it is not a winning platform. It’s just a plank and it’s a good one, but not enough to make a platform. Obviously, Tea Party people are greatly attracted to constitutionally sound arguments, but are not so one-dimensional about it.
[pullquote]Mitt Romney aimed for the Tea Party, and wound up working Ron Paul’s seedy streetcorner[/pullquote]
Mitt Romney aimed for the Tea Party, but wound up working Ron Paul’s seedy streetcorner, where they have little room for Romney no matter what he says. Tea Party people, to the extent they can be generalized beyond the obvious policy commonalities (where they exist), are not the humorless, Objectivist Club literalists who favor issuing the Constitutionally-mentioned “Letters of Marque and Reprisal”. The audience Romney should have aimed for did not see Atlas Shrugged three times; they saw Battle: Los Angeles. Twice.
But it’s not as though it’s a case of overshoot. He did not, from Establishment GOP standing, somehow blow past Tea Party territory on the way to Paulifornia; rather, he went off in the wrong direction and came back through unfamiliar territory. His defense of RomneyCare is partly rooted in a genuine belief that it is the right answer, at least for Massachusetts, and partly from the conviction that an attempt to walk it back like Mitch Daniels did with “Cap & Trade” simply would not fly. This is unfortunate, and it is exactly the sort of timid foot-dragging and risk aversion which plagues the GOP, at the expense of the Tea Party.
[pullquote]I don’t want a candidate who runs due to some perverse sense of duty[/pullquote]Why can’t we have a supercharged Tea Party candidate to charge the base? Instead we get this parade of sickly glue horses and weak riders bowed over in the saddle. These guys have all lost the race before they get their boots on. I don’t want a candidate who runs due to some perverse sense of duty, or whatever it is that semi-animates these zombie candidates with coiffed hair and fake smiles.
I’m not overly concerned with style, but I do believe that if you are truly fired up about your ideas, and possess the stones that it’s going to take to prevail against Washington’s Wall of Socialism, then it will show not only in the things you say, but in the way you speak. So why are we stuck with a bunch of retreads?
Opposition to the policies of Mitt Romney will soon be characterized as bigotry. GOP mainstreamers should be ver-r-ry careful about this. I could have supported Romney this time around, except that he has demonstrated his complete lack of ability to get it right this year. We now face a radically different set of problems than we did in 2008, so don’t sell me the old stuff. It’s not working, and as a phenomenally successful businessman, Mitt Romney should understand that.
I’m not pro-anybody at this point. I’m anti-people who clearly “don’t get it”, and Mitt Romney just sealed his fate on that regard.
