By JJ McCullough

Sie time ago, it became a matter
of consensus among the American
punditocracy that the 2008 US
presidential primaries were basically
bad news for conservative voters.
Republicans were cursed with a crop of
exceedingly lacklustre candidates, the
pundits declared; a situation that would
make a race that the GOP was already
supposedly destined to lose even more
hopeless and depressing.

So maybe something’s wrong
with me, because I’m conservative and I
like basically all of the 2008 Republican
nominees. Indeed, one could argue that
this is actually the most dynamic and
engaging cast of Republicans to arise in
some time; certainly much more than the
rather tepid Bush-McCain tournament
of 2000, or the even lamer Bob Dole
coronation of 1996.

My favourite racehorse at
present remains former Massachusetts
Governor Mitt Romney. A sane man
with sensible policies who is also jolly
and upbeat in a way only Mormons seem
to be able to muster, Romney seems to
be the right guy at the right time. He
knows what Bush did right, like the
War on Terror, and defends it staunchly,
but also knows how far the Republican
establishment has drifted from their
supposedly sacred low-spending, fiscally

8

responsible principles—and pledges to
reassert them.

The Governor’s supposed token
deficiency (the pundits have named
exactly one for each candidate, creating
some sort of bizarre flaw tabulation) is
that he’s too much of a flip-flopper to

possessing a level of intellectualism that
a reactionary partisan-for-life will never
have. If Romeny’s own account is to be
believed, the governor grew consciously
disillusioned with liberalism as _ his
political career developed, becoming
more conservative as he realized the

earn the trust of inherient flaws
the conservative “R t of the  left’s
base. Exhibit A omney Ss eems O arguments, and the

in this regard is
a horrible video

be the right guy at

common-sense of
the right’s. He’s a

from 1994 that skilled debater for
shows Romney e e the very reason
declaring how fhe right time.” that he intimately
much he hates understands _ the
Ronald Reagan rhetoric and tactics

and loves abortions. At the time, he
was running to unset Ted Kennedy as
Massachusetts senator, and evidently it
was the opinion of Romney’s handlers
that the best way for a Republican to
do this was to attempt to out-liberal the
Senate’s most liberal member. Bizarrely,
this strategy failed.

Romney now claims _ to
be staunchly pro-life and Reagan’s
ideological heir, in what many critics
call a very strategically convenient
about-face. There is a case to be made
for the merits of such an apparent
flopper, however. A man who has been
a true believer in the other side, and then
abandoned them is ultimately a man

of the left, and can now outsmart the
opposition on their own terms.

But this back-story is somewhat
irrelevant in the larger scheme.
Whatever his history, Romney is reliably
conservative today, but is a_ useful
candidate for primarily other reasons.
As a successful New England politician,
nominating Romney as the GOP flag-
bearer would help tone down perceptions
(which are increasingly justifiable) that
the Republican Party has all but resigned
itself to merely being a Southern-
bloc party of the former Confederacy.
Conservatism is a viable ideology even
in so-called “blue states,’ however,
and at any given moment a great many

 

Plenty of Good Picks in the Republican Crop

more people are Republicans than can
be bothered to realize it. The problem
with American conservatism is that the
message has gotten lost in the medium.
When people think “Republican”
they now increasingly think of the
personalities who comprise the loudest
faces of the party, the stereotypically
self-righteous, boorish Evangelicals
with irritating drawls and bad hair, rather
than the ideological principles of small
government and personal responsibility.
A non-accented Northern leader who
doesn’t see the Republican Party as a
mere appendage of his local Baptist
congregation is what the GOP really
needs to give the American conservative
movement appeal to a broader base and
new generation.

Former New York Mayor
Rudy Giuliani is attractive for largely
the same reasons as Romney, and has
faced largely the same criticisms. As
another Republican who is running to
the right after spending a great deal of
time governing to the left, Giuliani has
done a lot less to distance himself from
his former views, retaining pro-choice
and pro-gay views that are generally
anaemic to his part’s base. Yet he’s a
national celebrity and people love him
for largely non-ideological reasons,

Continued on Page 21