JONATHAN CHAIT AUGUST 17, 2011
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Ross Douthat asks why I've been mocking both the possibility that Mitt Romney might win the Republican nomination and the conservative attempt to draft alternative candidates into the race:
a question for writers like Chait and Larison, who have made sport of both Romney himself and of the conservative hope that someone else will emerge to take his place. As disinterested observers of the G.O.P. and as patriotic Americans who presumably want the best for their country regardless of which party holds the White House, whom do they think Republicans should want to join the race instead?
This seems like a good time to reset my view of the GOP race, but I'll start by answering Douthat. Answer: I don't think Republicans should want an alternative to Romney. They should want Romney. They should want a president who favors evidence-based technocratic solutions that promote general prosperity. But since most Republicans don't want those things, I don't think they'll nominate Romney.
If you take as a given that Republicans want to a candidate who best combines electability vis a vis President Obama with a genuine commitment to conservative movement principle, then they should have wanted Tim Pawlenty. Now that Pawlenty is out, and if we stipulate that Romney's shameful history of technocratic success renders him unacceptable, then they should draft a politician with some skill as a communicator and/or reaching out to non-base voters. I'd go with Marco Rubio -- make a dent in the Latino vote and you make Obama's reelection very tough -- or Paul Ryan.
Ryan is sort of a tricky case. He has huge positives and huge negatives. His economic plan is very, very unpopular, and likely to become all the more so if the presidential race focuses on its highly unpopular details. On the other hand, he's extremely good at presenting himself, dishonestly, as a compulsively honest, non-ideological budget fix-it man, and getting the political news media to act as his press secretary.
Ryan's potential candidacy is worth delving into as a sign of the state of the GOP field. Undecided presidential candidates answering questions about whether they will run speak in a language of their own, one that bears only a passing relationship to standard English. If you asked your friend if he wants to go see "Green Lantern" with you Friday night, and he replied, "No, my wife and I have theater tickets that night, and I hate Superhero movies anyway," you'd interpret that as a clear no. If a politicians gave the equivalent answer to the will-you-run question -- "I'm very happy serving the great people of wherever it is I'm from and I hate Washington" -- everybody would expect him to announce his candidacy within a few weeks.
By that bizarre standard -- that is, by the bizarre standards of presidential hint lingo -- Ryan has spent months jumping up and down, waving his arms and screaming that he wants to run for president.
Flat denials of interest are simply rote, signalling nothing whatsoever about their intent. I've been hyping his various unsubtle hints of interest, including his delivery of a foreign policy address, apropos of nothing. Ryan is undoubtedly considering a presidential candidacy, based on Stephen Hayes' reporting.
Now, that is not to say Ryan will run. The logistical hurdles, ably described by Chris Cilizza, are serious. Part of what Ryan is doing in his dance of the seven veils is to try to suss out whether the party establishment would rally behind him with the near-unanimity needed to overcome those hurdles.
So this is where we stand. The most seemingly formidable possible nominee is hampered with overwhelmingly exploitable weaknesses in the primary. The race is wide open, but the best position for a candidate to hold is crazy enough to appeal to the party base but also able to present a moderate face to the broader electorate. The party base has become sufficiently empowered over the last two years that I think its veto carries more weight than the establishment's; a candidate with the crazy but not the electability (i.e., Michele Bachmann) probably stands a better chance of nomination than a candidate with the latter but not the former (Romney.) That said, I've long thought the nominee would probably be somebody who could do both. That explains my bad horse race pick of Pawlenty, who turned out to be a poor campaigner, but also suffered from a terrible moment in the first GOP debate which sent his campaign into a death spiral from which it never recovered.
Rick Perry seemed like the best possible candidate to bridge the crazy-electable divide. But his initial image tilts a lot closer to "crazy" than "electable" than most predicted, and the establishment is nervous about him. Perry now leads in the most recent national poll, but this merely demonstrates the shallowness of Romney's support, which floated along on name recognition, the perception of being the front-runner, and a general lack of awareness of his many apostasies. Still, at this moment, Perry seems like the best bet.
13 comments
What about Huntsman? Not crazy enough? Saying, "Still, at this moment, Perry seems like the best bet" is like saying, at the moment being run over by a pick up truck is the best bet compared to being run over by a semi-trailer big rig truck.
- skahn
August 17, 2011 at 12:46am
It sure would have been nice if Obama or DOJ or SECSTATE had leaned a little harder on Perry to not execute that Mexican a few weeks back. Remember that? From Michael Graczyk's AP article 8 July 2011: **"Frankly if we don't protect the rights of non-Americans in the United States, we seriously risk reciprocal lack of access to our own citizens overseas," [SECSTATE's spokeswoman Victoria] Nuland said. "So this is why the secretary is concerned. ... We've got to treat non-Americans properly here if we expect to be able to help our citizens overseas." In Geneva, the U.N.'s top human rights official said Leal's execution amounted to a breach of international law by the U.S. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said the punishment "raises particular legal concerns," including whether Leal had access to consular services and a fair trial.** This would be such an easy issue to turn Perry into an unelectable monster if it were utilized properly and if the current administration hadn't already shown such weakness (which they'll posit is my misunderstanding of how the legal system works) regarding Leal's execution. After the blunder of not making it a bigger issue weeks ago, it will seem like backtracking and weak fingerpointing (the kind where 3 fingers point back at oneself) to recall this ordeal now, though it would still be helpful to remind people how poorly the US came to be viewed by the international community during the presidency of another Republican Texas governor who oversaw many many executions.
- Konstantin
August 17, 2011 at 1:12am
If we're going to play what Republicans "should want" why shouldn't they want Huntsman? I assume he, too, favors, um, "evidence-based technological solutions that promote general prosperity." He would be a much stronger match against Obama (you know, doesn't seem weird like Romney) and, unlike Mitt, Huntsman seems to possess a human size amount of personal integrity and shame. True, he may not be quite so much the hardcore technocrat (or experienced firer of workers), but Jon Huntsman would seem to be by far the best What They Should Want. I know the real life knocks against Huntsman that make him an impossibility (he's not catering to bigoted, ignorant yahoos and thus has no chance), but Douthat has lobbed a softball. It should be pretty clear - not just to Democratic bloggers but to anyone who's not a fool or partisan who survived the W. Bush years - what the Republicans "should" want: someone who's not a yahoo, someone who doesn't get his instructions from the Lord, someone who has a shred of integrity (rules out Romney), someone with a basic willingness to get along with the reasonable and respected members of his political opposition, someone open to the opinions of experts (be they climate scientists or economists), someone not trying to repeal the New Deal, someone who will explain basic facts to the ignorant (rather than cravenly feed their delusions and prejudice), someone who's come to grips with basic 19th century science (evolution) in the 21st century, someone who accepts and is comfortable with the fact that we now live in a multiracial country, etc., etc. That leaves only Huntsman. The Republican apologist Douthat has set himself up. Chait recoils and then goes all gentle. There's a strange mercy Chait shows with Douthat and the child libertarian Will Wilkinson that may speak well of Chait as a person (and I'm guessing friend), but which is nonetheless odd and counter-productive. It doesn't do justice to Chait's gifts and, what's much worse, doesn't do justice to the precarious place our country is now in. Now in because of people (awful, incompetent and/or dishonest) and ideas (cruel and/or false) that the Douthats and Wilkinsons continue to advocate or defend.
- mtinora@me.com
August 17, 2011 at 1:23am
Yeah, what Grimes said.
- ironyroad
August 17, 2011 at 2:27am
Sometime, somewhere America will hit the wall and all our silly politics will just seem like that. We are rapidly squandering our great advantages of natural resources and functioning Democracy. The Republicans win elections by turning us against each other- the Perry and Bachmann campaigns are the latest iterations of "hate the other." they use their bizarre form of Christianity with it's highly selective moral focus to exploit only the most divisive issues like abortion while being purposely oblivious to poverty, racism and the corrupting influence of money on politics. Romney might be the best in the race but that's not saying much.
- paskunac
August 17, 2011 at 6:34am
If Ryan jumps in, you can bet the national political media will make up for their prior incompetence and focus on all those details that make the Ryan plan not only unacceptable but an outright fraud. As for Pawlenty, I too picked him because of his evangelical bona fides, executive experience, and overall good appearance. Little did I know that Bachmann would have a monopoly on the evangelicals - in my area of the Bible Belt, the evangelicals are reading Pawlenty's book, but maybe it's the substance not the code. As for Perry, up to now Chait has viewed his potential candidacy as being weak, another Texan with lots of bluster, something the country wouldn't be ready for after eight years of the Bush debacle. One would think that the same country that elected Obama couldn't possibly elect Perry. On the other hand, that country didn't elect Bush either. I've made the case that electing Perry may be the only path to economic recovery because he's likely to experience a Keynes conversion when he faces a re-election against a lousy economy (the flat earthers in Congress would continue to oppose Obama but not Perry). But how many times can we count on divine intervention to save us from ourselves. If the dustup with Bernanke is what we should expect from a Perry presidency, it will take divine intervention to save us from ourselves.
- rayward
August 17, 2011 at 7:38am
Actually, they should want sane Republican primary voters to join the race. And the polls. Their electorate is flawed, and the candidates are only responding to the signals that the most ardent conservative Republicans give them.
- chaitless
August 17, 2011 at 9:20am
Chait, I'm seriously starting to doubt your judgement here (which I was consistently on board with)... Do you HONESTLY think that Michelle Bachman has a better chance at getting the nomination than Mitt Romney??? Guys, am I missing something, or has John gotten so wrapped up in analysis that the obvious is slipping away from time to time?
- RJSampson1
August 17, 2011 at 10:28am
Chait, I'm seriously starting to doubt your judgement here (which I was consistently on board with)... Do you HONESTLY think that Michelle Bachman has a better chance at getting the nomination than Mitt Romney??? Guys, am I missing something, or has John gotten so wrapped up in analysis that the obvious is slipping away from time to time?
- RJSampson1
August 17, 2011 at 10:28am
Why didn't Huntsman raise his hand on the 10% revenue question at the last debate? What does he have to lose, by distinguishing himself in some fashion?
- stanmvp48
August 17, 2011 at 10:36am
They should want a president who favors evidence-based technocratic solutions that promote general prosperity. But since most Republicans don't want those things... It's not that they don't want solutions to promote general prosperity. They just think we can't afford them. It's like Woody Allen said about Earl, the inventor of the Sandwich. When times were hard and he was trying to discover the sandwich, he had to skimp on meals to save money for food.
- Nusholtz
August 17, 2011 at 11:10am
Okay, now we have it. I was waiting to see who Jonathan would anoint as the new front-runner. This is the kiss of death for Rick Perry.
- liberalref
August 17, 2011 at 11:39am
Nice one, lib :-)
- NR409654
August 17, 2011 at 9:36pm