Schribman On GOP

                                         

David M. Shribman: Battle joined once more for Grand Old Party's soul

LEBANON, N.H. — Up here in tranquil New Hampshire, where the hills glow peacefully in the summer sunshine, everyone's talking about the war for the soul of the Republican Party.

Hold it, I am thinking. Haven't I witnessed several wars for the soul of the Republican Party?

Six in my lifetime alone, now that I'm counting.

There's no denying that there's a struggle within the Republican Party as it moves toward the first presidential primary here, tentatively (and, given the nature of this campaign, perhaps mischievously) scheduled for next Feb. 14. Already the party is divided every which way — between regulars and irregulars, economic conservatives and social conservatives, established politicians and newcomers, Westerners and Easterners, males and females.

The Republicans haven't been at each other's throats this much since ... the last election.

In our historical imagination, the Republicans are the sober, organized, unflappable ones — the quiet members of Rotary and Kiwanis who do their duty, tend to commerce, stiffen their upper lips at adversity, and take everything in stride. They're the party of social order and stability. The reality is quite different.

Look back at the last century — go all the way back to the critical election of 1912, when giants strode the Earth and four of them, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and Eugene V. Debs, ran for president — and you can count nine distinct battles for the soul of the Republican Party. The Democrats, the ones ridiculed as being the disorganized and emotional pugilists in American politics, have had only four such battles, fewer than half their rivals'.

This time the battle for the soul of the Republican Party pits three former governors, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Jon Huntsman of Utah, against each other — and against a group of rebels that includes Reps. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Ron Paul of Texas, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and businessman Herman Cain. But the Republicans had a similar struggle in 2008, when Sen. John McCain of Arizona, only four years after being considered a vice-presidential possibility on the Democratic ticket, had almost nothing in common with his Republican rivals, primarily Romney and former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas.

Four elections earlier, commentator Patrick J. Buchanan took on President George H.W. Bush here in New Hampshire, painting Bush as effete and feckless and indicting him for being an apostate from the true Reagan faith. At the 1992 Republican National Convention, Buchanan spoke openly of a "culture war."

It turns out that Ronald Reagan and Bush played central roles in two other GOP struggles — the one that spanned the 1976 and 1980 elections (main themes included the aggressiveness of modern conservatism and the validity of supply-side economics); and the one in 1988 (main themes were whether and how the Reagan revolution would be extended, and whether and how the demands of religious conservatives should be accommodated).

Major struggles over the nature of conservatism also occurred in 1940 (over Wendell Willkie's views on internationalism) and in 1952 (when the Taft and Eisenhower wings clashed).

Perhaps the most significant GOP struggle occurred in 1964, when the Eastern Republican establishment personified by Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York was challenged, and defeated, by the new Western conservatism represented by Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater's landslide defeat at the hands of President Lyndon B. Johnson left the Republican Party in tatters — only to be revived four years later when former Vice President Richard M. Nixon beat Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey as the Democrats were undergoing one of their own internal struggles.

The Democrats' internecine battles have been far less frequent, but just as explosive.

The 1968 split, which continued through the 1972 election, was over Vietnam and cultural matters. It led to violent disruptions outside the Chicago convention hall; made the party vulnerable to the Republican taunt that the Democrats had become the party of amnesty, acid and abortion; and opened the door for many blue-collar voters, ardently Democratic since the New Deal, to abandon their party. That split followed the upheavals over race in 1948 (when Strom Thurmond and his allies bolted the party) and 1964 (when the national convention divided over which Mississippi delegation to seat).

The party also split in 1928 over legalized drink and the degree to which the Democrats, who nominated Gov. Al Smith of New York for president that year, should identify themselves with Catholics and the immigrant families from Ireland and Eastern Europe that increasingly were becoming part of the political mainstream.

There's no obvious reason why the party of stability, as Republicans sometimes regard themselves, has had more upheaval than the party of change, which is how Democrats sometimes think of themselves. Perhaps it is because these internal struggles often precede and follow the appearance of political titans, and the Republicans have had two in modern times (Dwight Eisenhower and Reagan) while the Democratic century was dominated by one (Franklin Roosevelt). The Goldwater-Rockefeller fissure was in large measure the result of the struggle to replace Eisenhower, just as the more recent fights in the Republican Party have been conducted in Reagan's long shadow.

But the truth is that both major parties have had inner contradictions. The Democrats' were almost fatal: The fight between Southern conservatives and Northern liberals so divided the party that it took a generation for it to recover.

The Republicans' main contradiction, between the traditional conservative yearning for stability and the modern, muscular conservatism forged in reaction to the Great Society, has not yet been resolved. That, more than Afghanistan policy and Romney's views on climate change, is what the 2012 primary and caucus season — and the latest of the many fights for the soul of the Republican Party — is really about.

Schribman Dead Wrong On Romney

         

So now there is a front-runner. By virtue of mathematics (the money he has raised) and chemistry (the way his rivals treat him), former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

There's danger in that position. The GOP field didn't gang up on Romney in their New Hampshire debate this past Monday, but that's only because many of the candidates are just getting their campaign legs and are breathing the sweet air of being in presidential politics for the first time.

Once they feel their political survival is at stake, their restraint will disappear, and one after another they will send arrows Romney's way. Those arrows will provide opportunities for fellow contenders — and will challenge Romney's mettle, providing evidence that he is strong enough to engage President Barack Obama in the general election or raising questions about his suitability as the party nominee.

Sometimes front-runners stumble. Democrat Gary Hart did in 1988, for example, but Mr. Hart's fall was more a matter of personal conduct than political profile.

Mr. Hart was in many ways ideally suited for his party at the end of the Reagan era. He was a Westerner, an apostle of new ideas, no stranger to military issues, nimble in debates and stentorian on the stump. His fall, after an apparent affair with a young woman, was one of the political benchmarks of the era, removing the press's hesitancy to examine the personal lives of politicians and postponing the Democrats in their effort to sculpt a new image for themselves.

Despite the perils in leading the pack, though, it's a lot better to be the front-runner than one of the other contenders. More often than not, front-runners prevail and win their party's nomination: Walter F. Mondale in 1984, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Robert J. Dole in 1996, George W. Bush and Albert Gore Jr. in 2000 are among many examples.

This pattern is particularly strong among Republicans, who, at least in presidential politics, are temperamentally more inclined to respect customary lines of authority and the prerogatives of party elders. Three of their last four elected presidents were respected party figures who had run for the White House before, and the fourth (George W. Bush) was the son of a president, the grandson of a senator, the brother of a governor and himself the governor of the largest state headed by a Republican. Indeed, every Republican nominee for the past four decades, with the exception of Bush and Gerald R. Ford, an appointed but incumbent president, had run for president before.

This factor, along with Romney's bulging campaign treasury and the deference the other candidates displayed last week, underlines Romney's position — a position so commanding that he actually outpolled Obama in the latest Washington Post-ABC News Poll. Indeed, Romney has more than four times as much support in New Hampshire as his nearest rival, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who isn't even in the race (yet).

New Hampshire is vital for Mr. Romney, who owns a vacation home in the state and whose primary residence is in a neighboring state. His defeat there four years ago at the hands of Sen. John McCain represented a substantial repudiation, as Massachusetts politicians from John F. Kennedy's time on have prevailed in New Hampshire -- including Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge (1964), who didn't even campaign and managed to beat Sen. Barry Goldwater and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller in a remarkable write-in effort, and former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas (1992). The only exception, besides Mr. Romney, was Edward M. Kennedy, who was defeated by an incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, in 1980.

This time Romney simply cannot afford to lose the state, especially since he has all but abandoned efforts in Iowa, whose caucuses will precede New Hampshire's primary by eight days.

He can explain away a loss in Iowa: He won't have competed, and the contest there is shaping up as a social-conservatism derby that is not to his tastes nor to his strengths. But losing New Hampshire, where he is well-known and where conditions favor him, would be fatal to his presidential hopes — especially since South Carolina, another social-conservative state, is likely to hold the next primary.

Romney was stung in Iowa in 2008 by former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, which was bad enough, but losing in his home region to McCain five days later was too much for his campaign to absorb.

The big talk in the last days of spring is the way former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota linked Obama's health care plan, which is anathema to Republicans, to Romney's plan in Massachusetts by speaking of "Obamneycare." Pawlenty used the word again at the debate Monday at St. Anselm College, but its long-term effect may be to elevate Romney into a political, if not moral, equivalent of the president — not the sort of tactic that always benefits a challenger.

The health care issue underlines Romney's biggest task, which is to counter the notion that he is willing to change his views with the political breezes. His opponents believe he supported legalized abortion and a health care plan in Massachusetts because the political atmosphere in the state demanded it, and that he abandoned those views once he ascertained that the national political atmosphere required him to do so. Then again, he is being pilloried for his failure to change his mind on global warming.

The result is a political conundrum for Romney as great as any front-runner has had since Mondale was tarred as being the instrument of traditional Democratic special interests, especially organized labor. If Romney adjusts his position on global warming, he will be declared an opportunist. If he doesn't, he will be at odds with a major tenet of the modern Republican creed.

Right now Romney is determined to make sure Republicans don't change their minds.

The health care issue underlines Romney's biggest task, which is to counter the notion that he is willing to change his views with the political breezes. His opponents believe he supported legalized abortion and a health care plan in Massachusetts because the political atmosphere in the state demanded it, and that he abandoned those views once he ascertained that the national political atmosphere required him to do so. Then again, he is being pilloried for his failure to change his mind on global warming.

The result is a political conundrum for Romney as great as any front-runner has had since Mondale was tarred as being the instrument of traditional Democratic special interests, especially organized labor. If Romney adjusts his position on global warming, he will be declared an opportunist. If he doesn't, he will be at odds with a major tenet of the modern Republican creed.

Right now Romney is determined to make sure Republicans don't change their minds.

David M. Shribman, a North Shore native and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

(mailto:dshribman@post-gazette.com , 412 263-1890). Follow him on Twitter at ShribmanPG)

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Commentary

Romney is the perceived front runner by the left wing establishment media not the Conservative movement just want to make that clear.

Shribman Questions For GOP Presidential Candidates

  

  David M. Shribman: Some questions for the Republicans who would be president

  

National Perspective David M. Shribman The Salem News Fri Jun 03, 2011, 07:36 PM EDT

Even in Iowa and New Hampshire, where voters expect to meet each of the presidential candidates at least once, few people get a chance to ask them more than one question. For those of us who live elsewhere, even one question is out of the question. But if I had a chance to pose just one, here's the one I'd put to some of the major Republican contenders:

Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House: You may be one of the most important Republicans in the second half of the 20th century, having moved from gadfly to House Speaker, even as you moved the Republicans in the House from hopeless members of an oppressed minority into a robust majority. Still, hardly any of your former colleagues — the ones who, presumably, owe you the most for their positions and influence — have given your candidacy a second thought.

By definition, leaders have to have followers, which prompts this question: Why do Republican officeholders shy away from you in such numbers and with such fervor, and, to reverse the classic formulation Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. applied to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do you combine a second-class personality with a first-class intellect?

Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts: You're the front-runner — and you face a problem at the front of the calendar. Last time out, in 2008, Iowa smacked you down, placing you nine percentage points behind Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas (but 12 points ahead of the eventual nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, which underlines the unpredictability of the state). Though you have high name recognition there, you are mostly known for not being enough — not conservative enough, not consistent enough, not Christian enough (which is the prejudice that dares not speak its name).

You know that a smart governor, Bill Clinton, once skipped Iowa and won the whole thing. You might, too. But Clinton had a pretext — the presence in the race of an Iowa native son, Sen. Tom Harkin. That's where Rep. Michele Bachmann may come in handy. Though she represents Minnesota in the House, she's from the aptly named Waterloo, Iowa. So: Do you compete in Iowa?

Tim Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota: You're the new conservative darling, all the more alluring because you come from the state that spawned liberal darlings Hubert H. Humphrey, Walter F. Mondale and Paul Wellstone. (Not that conservatism, of the social nature, hasn't been flourishing in the state for the past quarter-century. It's just that few people outside Minnesota have noticed the sea change in the state that was the only one Mondale carried in 1984.)

But there remain nagging questions about your economic conservatism, underlined by the comments of former GOP Gov. Arne Carlson, who admittedly is no friend of yours. Still, you must answer this question: Did your actions as House majority leader and then as governor ease or exacerbate the current fiscal crisis in Minnesota?

Jon M. Huntsman Jr., former governor of Utah: You've moved seamlessly from your role as U.S. ambassador to China into presidential candidate, following a star turn in Beijing with a star turn in Lebanon and Portsmouth, N.H. You have a facile answer, but not a thoughtful answer, to the question that is on the minds of both Democrats and Republicans: How could you serve a president as ambassador to perhaps the most important nation on Earth and then run against him for president?

Huntsman's "disloyalty to the president of the United States, regardless of the president or to which party the president belongs," wrote Erick Erickson, managing editor of the conservative website RedState.com, "should not be rewarded by any patriot of this country."

Rick Perry, governor of Texas: You presumably know that two of the last three Republican presidents have been governors and that nine of the last 10 have been from the banks of the Ohio River or west of it. You know, too, that Republicans have been the guardians of state prerogatives for the last several decades. But how does a man who believes that the federal government's role should be minimized and that the states' roles should be maximized, explain why he wants to step away from the governor's office in Austin — where there are no term limits — and move into the Oval Office in Washington?

Rick Santorum, former senator from Pennsylvania, and Michele Bachmann, House member from Minnesota: You both infuriate your opponents and beguile your supporters, the former primarily social conservatives, the latter primarily economic conservatives. But with you, Mr. Santorum, having lost your re-election bid in 2006 by 18 percentage points and you, Ms. Bachmann, having run behind the GOP presidential candidate in every county in your district in 2008, how can you expect to run credible elections nationwide?

Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska: You're the biggest media star in the party, with the potential of raising the most money (and the most hackles from the left), but your unpredictability may have been transformed from an asset into a disadvantage. Just this week you were on a political tour with no evident theme or purpose, except to project yourself onto the national scene. But a question lingers: Why did you resign a position of political leadership with barely any notice and no apparent reason, and if it was to influence the national debate, how have you done so?

Ron Paul, House member from Texas: You're the straightest shooter in this group, the truest believer, the most consistent political figure. Plus you have perhaps the most devoted core of supporters of any American political figure since Barry Goldwater — and, something that can be said for no one else listed in this column — the respect and admiration of your opponents. You've run for president three times now, and this question nags at you: Are you enhancing or diminishing your views by making them the basis of a presidential campaign, and do you risk becoming something of a Harold Stassen, who is remembered more for being a perennial presidential candidate than for being a creditable governor of Minnesota and president of the University of Pennsylvania?

David M. Shribman, a North Shore native and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.