What is the strange thing about this year’s Republican primaries? That nothing has gone quite as planned.
The grand clash between the right and right-center never developed. The conflicts that were supposed to rage between ideologies turned out to hinge upon questions of character.
And the clash of the insurgents against the Republican Establishment collapsed in confusion over questions of who belonged where.
What about all those hard-core conservatives in the GOP base who would never accept the likes of Mitt Romney? This lasted until things began to get serious — about the time of the Florida primary — when rational voters focused in the inescapable fact that he was the only one with a chance of defeating President Obama.
At that point, Romney’s one-time support for abortion (and his reported 1992 primary vote for Paul Tsongas) were properly tossed in the dust bin of history.
Only a relatively small number of voters said that conservative cred was their primary interest. Most went along with “electability.” Sorry, Rick, Rick, and Michele.
What of the battle royale that seemed to be raging, between Mitt the moderate and Newt the Insurgent, the architect of the 1994 rebellion and landslide; the bete noir of the Left for so long?
It turned out that Newt, too, was riddled with heresies: global warming; support for the individual mandate on health care, work for Fannie Mae, whose bubble when broken brought on the financial implosion.
But the ton of bricks that the powers that be unloaded upon him when he seemed poised for a breakthrough had nothing to do with his politics, and everything to do with the fact that they found him too egocentric, too self-absorbed, to be president, a judgment which he in his reaction proved to be only too true.
Did he have to say that a blow to his chances was as bad as the strike on Pearl Harbor? To imply that ads run against him were human rights violations? Did he have to pick the day Rick Santorum left the trail to be with his very sick child to try to elbow him out of the race in his favor?
Members of Congress can be unstable or drunk or now and then gaga, but a president has to be in his right mind when his phone rings at three in the morning. Even cold sober, no one wanted Gingrich to answer that call.
As for Romney, doubts centered on “authenticity,” in what had become his second profession. Hearing him talk was like watching Michael Jordan play baseball.
Authentic enough in his original calling, he spoke politics like the second language it was. Critics feared he was writing the ads for the Democrats. Did he really say he liked firing people, wasn’t concerned for the poor, and thought $370,000, (which he made making speeches) wasn’t that much?
If we can tell the insurgent (a millionaire lobbyist) from the establishment candidate, (a mega-rich businessman), it still raises the question of who the Establishment is.
In South Carolina, the Establishment is Jim DeMint, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, all Tea Party leaders. None opposed Romney: Haley endorsed him, DeMint helped him, and Scott did nothing to interfere with his rise.
In Florida, Marco Rubio, a movement conservative and Tea Party hero (and protegee of Jeb Bush, of the Establishment) also helped Romney. If you can’t tell the players without a scorecard, you can’t tell the teams apart either.
This isn’t the story line that we were promised. It’s much more complex than you think.
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Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
