12.19.11
Mitt Romney is the Republican Nominee for President
Earlier this year I raised the ire of some by predicting that Mitt Romney would, based upon an examination of history, be the Republican nominee for President. Six months later I feel that I must, with some reluctance, recommit myself to that prediction. With the latest polling showing that then intense negative attacks on Newt Gingrich have eroded his chances of winning in Iowa the last realistic chance of stopping a Romney nomination has evaporated.
Let’s look at the latest polls. Ron Paul’s fanatical supporters are busy cheering the fact that they show their candidate with a statistically insignificant lead. However, their real importance is that they show Gingrich declining and Romney rising. Ron Paul is anathema to the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party. Paul’s rise in Iowa is extremely helpful to Romney because it will cause, especially if polls in the final days of the race show Paul in the lead, voters to trickle away from other candidates to Romney in order to prevent the embarrassment that a win by the clownish Ron Paul would represent.
The latest national polls likewise show that the slow decline of Gingrich’s numbers is allowing Romney to finally climb higher than the low-20’s cap on his support that we’ve previously seen. Having to write about the fact that the chances of Speaker Gingrich being nominated for President are declining pains me – it is certainly not without a basis in reality that I have previously been referred to as the “Asian Newt Gingrich” and I certainly have a long-term affection for the Speaker and agree with him on almost every issue of national and international importance. Indeed, I still think – all other things being equal – that of all of those campaigning to be President that Gingrich has the most obvious potential to be a great and transformational President. However, from where I am sitting it seems to me that the massive deployment of money and resources against Gingrich in Iowa have blunted his advance there and that overcoming such a reverse would require a lot of money or time and, alas, Gingrich has neither at this point. Without Iowa the chances of the Speaker winning the nomination rest upon winning South Carolina and then Florida and then defeating Romney over a marathon-length campaign and I just, from where we are standing today, don’t see where either the money or the institutional support for such an endeavor would come from.
Thus, without something like another miracle for the Speaker (something that I wouldn’t say is impossible, given that it took one for him to get to where he is today), Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee for President.
The reasons I enumerated in June for predicting Romney’s nomination remain, in my view, sound. The Republican Party has a long history of eschewing politicians who excite the party’s base in favor of nominating the early frontrunner who is typically the runner-up from the previous contest for the nomination. The only Republican nominees in that period to truly defy this pattern were Dwight Eisenhower (a World War Two hero who only barely won the nomination from the pattern candidate, Robert Taft), Barry Goldwater (who defeated Nelson Rockefellar scandal tarred his campaign) and George W. Bush (who was the son of a former President and was running four years after a weak cycle in which no genuine runner-up emerged). Well, I suppose that Gerald Ford might also qualify here but, insofar as he was an incumbent President running under unique circumstances he can be considered anything other than an outlier.
Mitt Romney meets both historical criteria. He was the runner-up in 2008 and he has consistently managed to regain a narrow lead in national polls even as one candidate after another has briefly managed to overtake him.
The truth is, as I have said before, that we could do worse than have Mitt Romney as President. While it may not thrill many hearts to hear a man described, as I would Romney, as having a record of competence in the public and private sectors and moral rectitude in his personal life, it’s definitely not bad. The Presidency is so singular and unique a job that no one really knows with certainty how one will live up to it until they actually get started.
I will say this for Governor Romney – I believe that he can do the job. He reminds me a great deal of Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. I believe that, like Harper, Romney is a careful politician of basically conservative instincts who has repeatedly compromised to navigate the hazards of a liberal electorate. Yet I retain hope that a President Romney, like Prime Minister Harper, will, especially if he has the aid of a Republican-controlled and Tea Party-oriented Congress, prove to be a capable steward of the nation’s affairs and be able to use his basic solidity as an asset in leading a careful and steady rightward march. It may be infuriating at times to fire-breathing conservatives such as myself, but it absolutely could be made to work.
Adam Yoshida is a the author of The Blast of War.
