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.
