The Republican Party faces two enormous challenges in 2012. One is defeating Barack Obama in the general election in November, and the other is to pick a leader to go up against him. There are six candidates in the Republican Primary: Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Jon Hunstman, and Newt Gingrich. Barring any major unforeseen developments, Mitt Romney is going to win. The mostly inoffensive handsome billionaire with both business and political credentials has been leading the race from the start. He won the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, which are the two earliest voting states. He seems poised to secure the nomination despite receiving about 30 per cent of Republican voters’ support. What Romney represents is the conservative pick. He is unexciting and humdrum, and his eventual nomination is indicative of why the Republican Party might lose the election in November despite facing off against a deeply wounded incumbent. The GOP (as they prefer to be known) keeps making the same old mistakes.
If the Tea Party and their rallying cry of lower taxes and less government interference drastically altered the direction of the GOP, then the logical choice would have been Ron Paul. He was the Tea Party before there was a Tea Party. “Dr. No,” as he was also known throughout his long tenure in the House of Representatives, has voted against any legislative measure not strictly allowed in the Constitution. Oftentimes, he was the lone dissenting voice. Paul has long been an advocate for libertarianism, and vows to end the Federal Reserve, bring America back onto the Gold Standard, and radically shrink the size of the government as well as its tax base. Pundits cite Paul’s non-interventionist, scaled back foreign policy as the reason why he’s not breaking through, but I think this is only half true. In reality Paul’s economic plans are just too “out there,” even for the Republicans. For a short time, calling social security a Ponzi scheme or likening health insurance to fascism were pretty standard Republican talking points. But now that the prospect of putting people who think like this into power seems very doable, GOP voters are backing off. Maybe they are less ideological than they seem.
On second glance, these same voters turned on and then tuned out Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich. All but Perry represented less conventional choices — Bachmann had religious fanaticism, Cain had three sequential 9s, Gingrich had intellectual snobbery — and they were eventually dropped. Perry and the late-blooming Santorum represent a throwback to the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush which most of us thought was discredited by two unwinnable wars and a failing economy. But in any respect, neither is a serious force to be reckoned with.
Finally there is Jon Hunstman. Seen by those on the left as the only sane Republican in the field, he has been repeatedly called out for working for Obama as ambassador to China and is considered too moderate. I doubt he will gain any more ground after a third-place showing in New Hampshire.
So we’ve come full-circle to Mitt Romney. His success has been more about the willingness to wait until his opponent’s support failed. With his future as the Republican Party’s nominee for president all but assured, Romney is now tasked with galvanizing support, which he will find extremely difficult. Unlike Paul or Obama, he has never had serious grassroots backing. It’s tempting to go for the least offensive, most neutral option, but in doing so, Republican voters are making a genuinely boring choice. Sometimes boredom works, but with political tensions at seemingly new heights, 2012 does not appear to be a year for vanilla. If Romney thinks that he can ride into the White House on the apathetic shoulders of a third of the republican electorate, then he should really consider consulting John McCain, John Kerry, and Bob Dole. They too understand the demands and rigours that come with being a political footnote.
