Real Clear Politics
April 8, 2012
The Political Battles You Cannot See
By _David Shribman_
(http://www.realclearpolitics.com/authors/?author=David+Shribman&id=14829)
SILVER SPRING, Md. -- Five different political contests are being conducted
right now. Only two are evident to the naked eye.
The first of the visible contests pits Mitt Romney against Rick Santorum
for the Republican presidential nomination. The results here in Maryland and
in Wisconsin last week tell us who has a commanding lead there.
The second visible contest pits Romney against President Barack Obama. That
one began this month with their twin addresses to the convention of
editors in Washington. Obama has a 4-point lead, according to a Gallup poll
conducted last week for USA Today.
Now to the three contests below the surface.
One is being mounted by Romney to wrest control of convention delegates
most people assumed were the property of Santorum and Newt Gingrich. This is a
subterranean game Romney likely will eventually win, quietly, slowly --
but decisively.
The second contest barely beneath the surface is over the character of the
GOP. It is part of the eternal struggle between populists and plutocrats.
Don't think of this as a proxy for Romney vs. Santorum no matter how many
times the former senator goes bowling. This class struggle began before they
arrived on the scene and will continue after their departure. It is the
mirror of the struggle among Democrats between the circle around Franklin
Roosevelt, rooted in the faculty offices of Harvard, and the Southern
Democrats, rooted in county courthouses and in the kennels of the yellow dogs.
The final contest is over the nature of conservatism. It may look like the
struggle for control of the GOP, but it's larger than that. Conservatism is
a movement; the Republicans are a party. For many years they lived
separate lives and may do so again. The struggle over the character of the
party
is fundamentally being conducted in the heart, the struggle over the nature
of conservatism in the head.
The week that the founding father of modern conservatism, Barry Goldwater,
won the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, political scientist Andrew
Hacker assessed the new movement -- planted in the same soil that created
John Kennedy's New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society -- this way:
"The new conservatism is the result of the democratic process itself: the
widening of new opportunities for millions of Americans who have risen to a
better location in life and who at all costs want to ensure that they
remain there."
That description now looks antiquarian. Modern Conservatism 2.0 -- created
in a world where Goldwater is a memory for all but a few, where his protege
Ronald Reagan is a symbol but not an intimate presence, and where vast
swaths of working Americans have a conservative impulse -- has an economic
component and a social component. It is chary of government involvement in the
economy but open to government restrictions in social and cultural life.
How wealthy a country this must be to afford, or to tolerate, five vital
contests at once! But this is a time of economic privation and of political
riches; not since the 1930s, when the economy was ailing and the Democrats
were remaking themselves, did America have so many parallel contests. And
during that period -- indeed for much of the era between 1916 and 1960 -- the
Republicans snoozed, putting up worthy candidates with formidable records
(Charles Evans Hughes, Herbert Hoover, Thomas Dewey) but who did not stir
the drink, nor roil the waters.
Today, passions among Republicans run high -- itself a great departure from
the norm for almost a majority of Americans, who recall the GOP as a
sleepy outpost of politicians who defined themselves by what they were against
(the New Deal, mostly but not always fervently) and what they wanted to
promote (prudence and thrift, mostly). When the Republicans of yore held a
shootout, it was over the identity of their nominee, not over the ideology of
their party. This was true even in the principal ideological struggle of the
era, in 1952 between Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio and Gen. Dwight D.
Eisenhower. Eisenhower, without any discernible ideology, prevailed.
Now the party is packed with passion, but not necessarily primed for
resolution. Indeed, the emergence of Romney probably postpones the resolution
of
much of the Republican dispute.
He personifies the managerial wing of the Republican Party, the strain that
included Hoover, 1940 nominee Wendell Willkie, to some extent Dewey and
certainly both Presidents Bush. But he is at best a convert to movement
conservatism and, to some in that movement, a sheep in sheep's clothing.
Indeed, to conservatives he is reminiscent of Averell Harriman's 1967
assessment of Maxwell Taylor: "He is a very handsome man, and a very impressive
one," Harriman said, "and he is always wrong." Probably unfair to both men,
but there are no points for fairness in war or politics.
While the 2012 primaries and caucuses likely postponed the resolution of
the battle over the character of the GOP, they intensified the conflict over
the nature of conservatism, one that Reagan kept under the lid of the
boiling pot but which began to spill over in 1988, scalding conservatives to
this day. Santorum is one of the first Republican politicians to electrify
both economic and social conservatives, but his hopes in the visible part of
this campaign are dwindling.
Santorum may in fact be conducting his last stand in his home state, which
ordinarily would be an advantage but in this peculiar year may be
peculiarly unfortunate for the onetime Pennsylvania senator, who was soundly
defeated in his re-election battle six years ago.
Santorum forces continually point to May for their breakout -- the terrain
there favors him and the issues will be in his wheelhouse -- but his
campaign may not endure that long, in part because of Romney's diligence in
one
of the invisible contests, the process of peeling away delegates that look
as if they are in the Santorum and Gingrich columns but in reality are not
settled anywhere.
There is a tropism to politics, and it favors the front-runner. Watch how
Romney, who lost the Iowa caucuses in January by a handful of votes, will
look like the triumphant conquerer of Iowa in August. The subterranean
contests count. Some of them last decades. Some of them choose nominees.
--
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