“This election is about competence, not ideology,” said Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential contest, who then proved himself an incompetent candidate, losing in a landslide to George Bush the Elder. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and this may be true of a pretty bad candidate, for this explains why, in a country in which President Reagan wracked up two consecutive landslides, conservatives haven’t put one of their own on a national ticket in the nearly 30 years since.
Conservatives call it a plot by establishment squishes, who just want to go to parties in Georgetown and distance themselves from those who think Arugula is a small Balkan country and bitterly cling to religion and firearms.
But it’s competence, not ideology, that is their problem, and that problem is not hard to define.
Let us go back to the late 1980’s and look at the winners and losers in various GOP fields. In 1988, the elder George Bush was challenged by Jack Kemp, Pierre du Pont, and Pat Robertson, among others; and in 1992 as the incumbent, by Pat Buchanan.
In 1996, Bob Dole was challenged by Phil Gramm, Steve Forbes, and Buchanan, who this time won New Hampshire. In 2000, George Bush the Younger was challenged from the left by McCain, and from the right by Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, and Alan Keyes.
In 2008, McCain was challenged on the right by Mike Huckabee (a social conservative), Mitt Romney (a fiscal conservative), Rudy Giuliani (a law and order conservative) and Fred Thompson, (a complete conservative, who ran less well than them all.)
Of these, most were seen as presidential in nature, but the conservative base had problems with most of them: Giuliani because he was not anti-abortion; Romney because he was a recovering moderate, and McCain because he was … McCain.
In 2012, Romney was back, assailed from the right by a cohort distinguished by underachievement: a congresswoman who served for five years in House, a marketing king who never held office, a former House speaker who was terminated by his own caucus, a former senator who lost his seat six years ago in a landslide, a crank congressman from Texas, and a four-term governor whose resume was golden and whose campaign, as it turned out, was not.
Save for 2008, when all were “big,” and most suspect, one sees a pattern emerge. The “establishment” figures are the ones with credentials and gravitas, while the conservatives lean to vanity candidates, to pundits and preachers, to the publicity-driven, to one-cause-or-trick-ponies, to those unelectable for various reasons, to those past their prime, or before it, or people whose prime never came.
To reject them was not to reject conservative principles, it was to reject the implausible. President Robertson? President Gingrich? Not after that meltdown. President Keyes?
“Memo to file: Find better candidates,” writes Mona Charen, noting that in 1996 “Dole won the primaries because his opponents, Pat Buchanan and Steve Forbes, were not seen as presidential, and then carried only six states between them,” compared to the winner, who won 44.
Conservatives do have good candidates, they just don’t run them for president, leaving the field to the unqualified and the incoherent, the sad and the strange.
To win presidential elections, you need to have plausible presidents. It’s the competence, stupid. It’s really as simple as that.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
