Remember how I spent most of the last three years telling you that Mitt Romney was almost certainly going to be this year's Republican presidential nominee? Oh, how some folks objected to that! The Tea Party, I was repeatedly told, was a game changer. They had changed the very face of the party in Ought Ten and the old rules no longer applied. The tri-corner hat folks wouldn't stand for such an irredeemable squish as their standard-bearer. No siree bob!It was horseshit then, just as we know that it's horseshit now.
Institutions, particularly supposedly conservative institutions, are resistant to rapid change and they have establishments that protect them with every resource they have. The Tea Partiers figured that they could flip the GOP just as the anti-war McGovernites and the Clintonian "Third Way" types had remade the Democratic Party in their own image. They were wrong, mostly because they're populists and have little idea of what conservatism actually is. I'll grant you that they know what they want it to be, but that's largely a fantasy, not unlike traditional liberalism.
Conservative institutions, like conservatism itself, are predicated on the idea of gradual change. Republicans, who since the unlikely rise and fall of Newt Gingrich two decades ago, have posed as revolutionaries and forgotten that. The party doesn't just change in a few months, or even a single election cycle. It happens slowly, and when it doesn't, disaster looms.
The last time that the GOP seemingly turned on a dime was in the early 1960s. And even then, the change was much slower than people like to remember it. Folks these days think that Barry Goldwater just appeared out of nowhere. This is because a lot of folks really suck at history.
The Goldwater movement took almost a generation to come to fruition. The movement started immediately after World War II, with the Republican triumph in the congressional elections of 1946. During the Eisenhower years, the grassroots became infatuated with first the McCarthy movement, then the John Birch Society. Party wings were built around people like New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller on the left and Goldwater on the right, with Richard Nixon being more or less in the middle.
The party establishment, represented by congressional members, the governors and the remnants of Ike's reign, were unified in their opposition to Goldwater. But after 15 years of not attending to the grassroots, the establishment had found that the grassroots had been taken over. Because President Eisenhower was such a revered and heroic figure, the center held. But as soon as Ike was gone, so was the center. That trend accelerated after Nixon's razor-thin loss to Jack Kennedy.
There was also no clear anti-Goldwater to stop the insurgency. Nixon refused to run in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. Rockefeller was crippled by his divorce. Romney wouldn't run, and Scranton got in too late. The debacle at the Cow Palace was as unavoidable as the ass-kicking Lyndon Johnson handed Goldwater. But that movement built over the course of several years.
Then there's the Reagan Revolution, which also incubated over the course of several election cycles. Folks aren't inclined to remember that 1980 was Reagan's third run at the nomination.
While Reagan supported Goldwater, his subsequent record was considerably to the left of the Man from Arizona's. As governor of California, the Gipper increased social services and signed the biggest tax increase up until that point and the most liberal abortion law of the pre Roe era. Reagan's record, both as governor and president, was well to the left of his rhetoric, which modern Republicans and Tea Partiers either don't know or won't admit.
Unlike in the 1964 primaries, there was no shortage of "anti-Reagan" candidates in 1980, among them; George H.W Bush, Bob Dole, John Connally and Howard Baker. The multiplicity of alternatives had basically the same effect as having no opponent at all. I'm sure that Mitt Romney would be pleased to explain how that works.
The point is that the Goldwater and Reagan insurgencies built over the course of fifteen years. The Tea Party has only existed for just shy of 37 months.
While they did take over the House of Representatives, their caucus has also made it impossible for Speaker John Boehner to manage, which goes a long way in explaining why that fucker is crying all the goddamned time. The Tea Party's nominees also threw away a perfectly good shot at taking over the Senate. Delaware and Colorado were handed over to the Democrats. A write-in candidate won in Alaska, the first time that had happened in a Senate race in nearly 50 years. And Harry Reid, who had no business holding onto his seat in Nevada, did.
The Tea Party has an incredibly mixed record, and not one that made it likely for them to take over the presidential primary process as quickly as they believed they could. Because they themselves are leaderless, and because their patrons are more self-interested than they are interested in the movement, they never got behind a single presidential candidate, preferring instead to move back and forth between congenital losers like Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Perry. When they twice backed Newt Gingrich, everyone stopped taking them seriously.
Oddly enough for a party that describes itself as republican, the GOP is more like a royal family. With the exception of George W. Bush and Goldwater, there is a very strict hierarchy in winning its presidential nomination. And the Goldwater and Bush exceptions exist only because the Republican party was never going to nominate Nelson Rockefeller or Pat Buchanan under any circumstances.
Eisenhower begat Nixon, who in turn begat Ford. Reagan challenged Ford in '76 and lost. Reagan was challenged by Bush four years later and became the nominee in '88. Dole fought Bush for prize in '88 and was awarded it in '96. John McCain fought the good fight against George W. Bush in 2000 and was rewarded for it at the end of his term. Romney ran second to McCain and he stands as the nominee today.
That isn't a fluke, folks. That's a line of royal ascension. And that's precisely how the modern Republican party is designed to work. The Tea Party isn't going to change that overnight, if they can ever change it at all.
The time has come for me to put on my prognostication hat yet again, which may seem rash, what with the election still being seven months away and all. Or not. You see, I couldn't agree more with former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough when he says the following;
"Nobody thinks Romney's going to win. Let's just be honest. Can we just say this for everybody at home? Let me just say this for everybody at home. The Republican establishment -- I've yet to meet a single person in the Republican establishment that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election this year. They won't say it on TV because they've got to go on TV and they don't want people writing them nasty emails. I obviously don't care. But I have yet to meet anybody in the Republican establishment that worked for George W. Bush, that works in the Republican congress, that worked for Ronald Reagan that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election."If you look at the swing state polls, Obama is a ahead of Romney in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. Yes, it's early. Yes, it's a fairly thin spread. And yes, I expect the numbers to go up and down some between now and the first Tuesday in November. But I also expect that what we're seeing now is pretty much what we'll see on Election Day.
The economy is improving and Governor Romney is an exceptionally bad candidate with the highest negatives for a challenger in my memory. The primaries hurt him with independents, and his expected flip for the general is going to kill him with conservatives. Besides which, Obama is already president and the circumstances that historically take down incumbents (which I've written about at length before) just don't exist.
So yeah, I really don't think that the establishment believes Willard Mitt Romney is going to be the 45th President of the United States and neither does anyone else. The establishment only wanted him because he won't lose as badly as anyone else in the field would. Barack Obama would skin Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich alive, whereas Romney keeps it within a respectable five points. He'll do better than John McCain did - if only because Lehman Brothers isn't around to collapse again - but that's about it.
That being said, let's look to 2016, shall we? I promise, it'll be fun.
If history is any guide (and I would suggest that it's the best one we have), Rick Santorum is the clear front runner and the presumptive nominee the next time out. "But what about all of the GOP rock stars who sat this one out?" you might be asking. "What about Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour and Jeb Bush?" To this, I would answer, "What about them?"
With the exception of Jeb - because there's no way that anyone named Bush would be nominated, let alone elected, this soon after George W's disastrous reign of error - the standouts had a clear shot at beating Obama and chose not to. When both the economy and the President's numbers were still in the dumper, all of them made a conscious decision to stay home. Any one of them could've unified the party in ways that Romney can't. And I think they'll be punished for it when they come out to face a weaker, non-incumbent Democrat four years from now.
Back in 2006 Barack Obama had a long heart-to-heart with former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Daschle told him that he sat out the 2000 campaign, when his polling was pretty good, because he thought that he'd have a better shot in '04. But then Daschle lost his seat in 2002, killing his chances forever. More than any other single reason, that conversation with Tom Daschle was why Obama ran when he did. He was far more inclined to wait, just like the non-running Republicans later did.
On the other hand, Santorum was the longest of long shots and worked his ass off in a tough year to become the heir apparent. He took the shot and did far better than any sane person had reason to believe he would. Shit, Romney didn't even bother compiling an opposition research file on Santorum before Iowa.
Nobody hates Santorum more than I do (although I hate Gingrich a lot worse), but even I have to respect that. And I suspect that a good number of primary voters are going to respect it, too.
It's important to also understand that the Senator accomplished what he did with zero organization and even less money. For awhile there, he was a credible alternative to Romney, who has nothing but organization and money. Do you think that Santorum won't spend the next four years building a war chest and political infastructures in the early primary states? It isn't as if he'll have anything else to do. Moreover, the GOP would be crazy not to return to a "winner takes all" distribution of delegates next time, which will heavily favor Santorum because his name identification will be so much higher than everyone else's.
Finally, it'll be Rick Santorum's turn in four years, which is usually the only reason the party needs to give someone its nomination.
Don't get me wrong, even a walking mediocrity like Joe Biden, who will also be approximately 600 years old, will kick Santorum's ass across the country and back again. The only thing Santorum will be able to beat Biden at is talking for a really long time while making himself look progressively worse, something that the current Vice President actually put on a lab coat and fucking invented.
But I actually think that would be a good thing for the party, if only because it would resolve the long, low-level civil war that's making the GOP look like the Liberal Party of Canada.
The Republican civil war, which has been going on since 1992 (albeit with a short break between 2000 and '06) goes something like this; "We lose when we nominate sane people Gerald Ford, George H.W Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney. George W. Bush's 'compassionate conservatism' was an accident that we paid for later. We have to run well to the right of the electorate to win, like Reagan did!"
The only problem with this viewpoint is that it ignores history and its bothersome facts.
Jimmy Carter lost for the same reasons that Ford and the first Bush did, he faced a ruinous primary and (in Bush and Bob Dole's cases) a third-party challenger that took heavily from his vote.) It should also be remembered that '76, '80 and '92 were all very tight races until the very last week of each campaign. None of them were the "gimmie" elections that they're popularly remembered as today.
I'm not going to pretend that "compassionate conservatism" didn't help Bush the Younger beat Al Gore, but it was hardly decisive. This is because Bush mostly ignored Gore, preferring instead to run against the ghost of Bill Clinton's cumstains as the economy slid into recession. And that was decisive, or at least as decisive as losing the popular vote actually can be.
Dole (as I believe Romney will) ran against somewhat popular president in a good or improving economy, making it hard to imagine any Republican beating the incumbent. And John McCain, while running in the wake of an unpopular president of his party and supporting an even less popular war, was still winning against Obama - until the NYSE unexpectedly decided to shed over half its value in a fucking day. That's pretty hard to overcome, especially when you have a chatty moron on your ticket and you happen to be an ancient mariner with a history of cancer.
The fact is that the Red Hots' theory that "running to the right of the electorate" has never actually been tested in a situation where other factors weren't dominant. Barry Goldwater ran a classic libertarian campaign, but he did so mere months after the assassination of a sitting president of the other party. And I've never heard any serious person suggest that either JFK or LBJ wouldn't have beaten Goldwater handily under almost any circumstance.
I was not-so-secretly hoping that the GOP would have put the theory to the test this year by nominating Sarah Palin and getting it over with. Palin would go "full retard", thinking that she's smart while farting in the bathtub, and giving Obama 20 points in the popular vote and at least forty five states in the Electoral College.
The Republican establishment decided instead to give it to Mitt Romney. But they're not helping themselves by doing so, at least not in the long run. The people that don't know anything about politics (or the American people) will still point at a losing Romney; just as they did Ford, Bush 41, Dole and McCain as a Shining Path Republican who couldn't win an race if they were strapped to a fucking rocket and fired over the finish line.
Well, it looks as if the Tea Party Red Hots of the world are going to get to test their theory in just four years. Rick Santorum is going to go into the primaries as the frontrunner, and Republican frontrunners almost always win the nomination. They'll have their guy endlessly talking about the evils of amniocentesis in what will probably be an even better economy than America has today. And they'll have him doing it against what will almost certainly be a weaker Democratic nominee than Barack Obama is.
I think it will result in the most humiliating loss the Republicans will have suffered since Goldwater, but I could be wrong. Let's get Romney out of the way and find out.
Let's resolve the issue, once and for all. Let's go full retard!
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