It has been almost 36 years since California Gov. Ronald Reagan took his fight for the Republican nomination all the way to the 1976 convention. The party hasn’t seen as close a race since. But that may change this year, if the current candidates keep failing to articulate a conservative vision that can unify the party.
Six months after he had conceded in Kansas City, and two months after President Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in the general election, Reagan addressed a fledgling gathering of activists in Washington called the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.
In that speech, Reagan outlined his vision for a “New Republican Party.” One that would abandon the “country club-big business image that, for reasons both fair and unfair, it is burdened with today.” Instead, Reagan encouraged conservatives to make “room for the man and the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before.”
“Our first job is to get this message across to those who share most of our principles,” Reagan said. Republican candidates “must be able to communicate those principles to the American people in language they understand.”
Our existing crop of candidates has failed to articulate such principles so far. Take Rick Santorum, who told National Public Radio in 2006: “This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone … [that] government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom. … Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world.”
Well, Reagan is one conservative who did not view the world in Santorum’s communitarian way. In that same 1977 CPAC speech he said, “Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society.”
Mitt Romney’s record also conflicts with some core principles that Reagan outlined that day. “We believe that liberty can be measured by how much freedom Americans have to make their own decisions, even their own mistakes,” Reagan said. This sentiment runs directly counter to the individual health insurance mandate that Romney signed into law as governor of Massachusetts. No conservative, at the state or federal level, should be in the business of telling individuals what they must buy.
But if the takeaway message from Reagan’s speech was about anything, it was about the need for conservatives to expand, not shrink, their movement. “If we allow ourselves to be portrayed as ideological shock troops, without correcting this error, we are doing ourselves and our cause a disservice. … I want the record to show that I do not view the new revitalized Republican Party as one based on a principle of exclusion.”
It is not too late for Romney and Santorum to revisit the problems that are preventing each of them from uniting conservatives everywhere.
For Santorum, he needs to drop his President Obama-like mercantilist tax policies. He must reaffirm that the individual, not compassionate conservative government programs, are the foundation of freedom in America.
For Romney, he must abandon the fiction that the regulate-mandate-subsidize Massachusetts health care system is a workable model for any sector of the U.S. economy.
If neither of the top two remaining candidates is able to articulate a vision that is compatible with conservative principles in the coming months, the party seems destined for another contested convention, followed by a general election loss — just like in 1976.
Conn Carroll is a senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
