George Will, the greatest newspaper columnist of his generation and one of the best of all time, has a dazzling dissection of Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney that is a diatribe without a conclusion, as it skirts its real ending: Who else? In practical terms, there is no one else, which is why this cycle has been such a gut-twisting, teeth-gnashing, surly experience for everyone on the center-right side of the spectrum.
This is not just a bad field, it is an embarrassing one, perhaps the worst ever put forth by a major political party; with merely one plausible president in a large group of nine.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Utah Gov. John Huntsman are credentialed on paper, but disqualified themselves by their halting performances in the debates.
The rest are unqualified and/or unelectable, and the fact they don’t know it disqualifies them even more.
Besides being bad, the field is destructive in an additional manner, as, instead of bridging the Tea Party and the institutional Republican Party, it does everything possible to drive them apart.
Each candidate confirms (and exaggerates) the worst suspicions that either side holds of the other: of the GOP establishment as facile, place-holding, and willing to say and do anything; of the Tea Party as fringe-friendly and overemotional, being all heart and no head.
Romney is not a bad man, but he comes from the market, which caters to appetites, and survives by tweaking and changing the model in response to consumer demands.
Thus the impulse of keeping the customer happy, whether a voter in blue Massachusetts, a conservative GOP primary voter in Iowa, or a swing voter weighing both sides.
Romney, National Review’s Rich Lowry says, can impress, not inspire, shaping his plans to please all sides a little, saying enough to pass muster with primary voters but not scare independents next year.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., moved on some things when expedience called, but went to the mat on security issues, linking his career to the surge in Iraq when that was unpopular. A leader needs at least one fixed point of reference. Romney has nothing thus far.
The Tea Party candidates, on the other hand, are from the Christine O’Donnell wing of the party, uninformed on large matters, occupied with side issues (like “government needles”), burdened by baggage and out of their league.
No one will elect a House member, or an entrepreneur lacking wider experience, to the presidency. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was dumped by his party; former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum by his state in a wipeout of epic proportions. (When your horse loses his last prep race by 18 lengths, the Kentucky Derby doesn’t loom large in your future.)
There are people with feet in both camps — Govs. Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Chris Christie of New Jersey, for starters — but these belong to the classes of 2009 and 2010, and are a little too green for this season. Hence the reliance on Marketer Mitt.
Hence also Will’s inability to finish his column by telling us what to do next.
Will thinks Mitt’s flips make him unelectable; but they’re likely to make him a far smaller target, especially if conditions are bad. If unemployment stays up, or Iraq falls apart, people may care less that he flipped on abortion and climate, and there’s always the question “What next?”
Conservatives think the GOP owes them, but they owe it to the GOP and themselves to put up better people. Mere competence may come to seem like a bargain, compared with Obama, or this collection of losers that the conservative movement coughed up.
Do conservatives deserve this, as Will seems to ask us? If they can’t do much better, well, yes.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
