The Republican Institution

Political campaigns have become far more shallow over the years as orthodox political strategy has evolved to stress appearances over substance. Most candidates try to craft a message designed to offend as few voters as possible. This works fairly well in many Congressional districts, which are usually drawn to include comfortable majorities of either Republican or Democrat voters. Even some states are amenable to this approach to campaigning. However, a Presidential candidates must ultimately appeal to a broad base of voters that have many different regional, economic, and social concerns. The difficulty of making this kind of appeal in a convincing way seems to be increasing as voters become more skeptical of politicians in general. When candidates have trouble selling their candidacy to the voters they may decide to poison the electorate against their competitor. However, when a candidate attempts to attack a rival he often ends up telling us more about himself than he does about the candidate he is attacking. I believe that this is the point we have reached in the Republican Presidential nomination battle.

Mitt Romney is a squishy moderate or a true conservative, depending on who you listen to, but no matter what you think his political leanings are I think it is safe to say at this point that Mr. Romney's real passion in life is winning the next election. If you look at Mr. Romney's political positions over the last 10-15 years what is most striking is how they have evolved in a way that appears calculated to appeal to that maximum amount of the voters that I mentioned earlier. His left leaning positions on taxes, the Reagan legacy, and abortion slowly melted into a slightly right of center platform that you can almost plausibly call conservative by the time he was running for the GOP nomination for the first time in 2008.

The same could be said of the GOP establishment, if you can figure out who or what that is. The precise combination of lobbyists, politicians, bureaucrats, think tanks, and media personalities that make up the GOP 'establishment' has never been clear. Many of the groups that get lumped in this classification are happy to be GOP insiders when their interests align with the Republicans, but are quick to do some bipartisan outreach when they need something from the government that GOP members running in conservative districts don't quite feel safe signing on to. The GOP establishment, like its champion Mr. Romney, sometimes has unexpected evolutions in its adherence to standard conservative ideology. Just in the last few years we had an outbreak of big government feavor that manifested itself in the Troubled Assest Relief Program (TARP) and some mild bailout bloating. Upon the rise of former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who isn't the first suspect that you would round up if you were trying to find an 'outsider,' the GOP establishment worked itself into a frenzy to defeat him. This has been perplexing to many people who see little difference between the Romney insider and the Gingrich insider, but that isn't the point. The real problem with Mr. Gingrich isn't insider or outsider, but who is in control now.

Mr. Romney has a lot of friends, some of whom are especially friendly because they're on his retainer. Since Washington is a spider web of influence the friends that Mr. Romney has retained can also tap into many more friends. If they have a hard time rallying around Mr. Romney's 59 point economic agenda they thankfully have a much more plausible point of common interest, namely their own power. I think what we're seeing on display in the GOP Presidential nomination process is the institutional inertia of the Republican Party. Winning the Presidency is secondary to keeping themselves in power and for whatever reason the GOP establishment has decided that their lives will be easier with Mr. Romeny, even if he goes down to defeat in November.

I know that the establishment would argue that this conclusion simply isn't true. It is widely claimed that Mr. Romney is the most electable candidate because he can appeal to moderates. I don't know whether Mr. Romney is the best candidate for appealing to moderates, but apparently he isn't the best candidate to appeal to Republicans, which one would think would also be an important quality. The whole point of the primary system is to pick the most electable candidate; indeed, the most electable candidate should be the one that wins the primary elections. Instead of that, we've learned which candidate will best protect the interests and the perks of the institutional Republicans. We can only hope that he also happens to be the candidate who is best equipped to win in November.