Yes, it is possible for two different sides of one question both to be wrong at one time. Take the case of Jeb Bush and the movement conservative purists who want no part of him or the rest of his family, what with Phyllis Schafly, et al., labeling him one in the long line of Establishment losers who have been leading the party to certain defeat.
But if anyone knows about losers, it ought to be Schafly, who backed the biggest GOP loser in history — the man who lost in a blowout to Lyndon B. Johnson, carrying only six states outside of the one that he lived in. That election of 1964 opened the door to the Great Society, the byword for the mistaken and decent intentions with which roads to the Dark Side are paved. Schlafly gave Barry Goldwater his slogan — “A Choice, not an Echo.” People chose not to take the choice, deflating the claims made since by her cohort that real conservatives win all the time.
Just as false is the equally misguided theory that impure Republicans lose. Reagan won two terms, but so did Dwight Eisenhower, an establishment centrist if ever there was one; Richard Nixon, who arguably governed to the left of John Kennedy; and George W. Bush, who thought compassion a genuine function of government.
It is true that John McCain, Bob Dole and Mitt Romney all lost, but no one can name a conservative who might have done better in their respective election years. In 2008, conservatives were just as irate at Giuliani and Romney as at McCain. In 1996, Phil Gramm and Pat Buchanan would have done much worse than Dole did. In 2012, had Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum defeated Mitt Romney, they would have likely lost to President Obama by 14 points (or 40) instead of just four.
Nor is the Republican Party filled with frustrated stalwarts, whose voice has been silenced by Establishment trickery. Polls show that the ‘very conservative’ are only about one-fourth of the GOP rank and file, the same number as Republican ‘moderates.’ Both are outmatched by the ‘somewhat conservative,’ who at 40 percent are the bedrock of the Republican party, and who always determine its choice.
Nor did Romney lose because of his moderate squishiness. Exit polls show he demolished Obama on matters such as values and leadership, and lost only because he trailed him by 60 whole points on the singular issue of “cares about people like you.” He lost not because he wasn’t right-wing enough, but because he wasn’t enough like our 43rd president, who got 44 percent of the votes of Hispanics (Romney got 27 percent) and won working-class states like Ohio and Iowa, both of which Romney lost.
That said, Jeb himself is not without sin. He stresses the differences he has with the base, not the differences they both have with the Democrats. He seldom mentions the things that they both have in common — such as the whole of his record in Florida. In fact, he seems barely to notice that Obama exists.
“The distinction to make,” National Review editor Rich Lowry says, “is that he is a pre-Obama conservative. The last six years have marked an entire epoch of Republican politics — defined by the rise of the Tea Party and the fight against Obama’s agenda — that Bush has largely been absent from.” And Bush’s big obsessions of Common Core and immigration aren’t really germane to the fight he needs to pick now with Obama — a fight that he and the base can both fight together, which he has so far failed to begin.
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Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
