In his influential daily e-mail The Transom, which was excerpted yesterday on RealClearPolitics, Ben Domenech took note of the disagreements that have opened up between conservative pundits amid Romney’s post-convention difficulties:
For the past several weeks, Mitt Romney has been surrounded by critics from the DC-Manhattan elite who’ve denounced him for a lackluster, unfocused campaign, teeing off on Team Romney in the wake of the 47 percent comments for a number of issues—but mostly, in my read, from failing to take their advice. Romney’s defenders, meanwhile, have been many of the same individuals who spent the primary season torching him in effigy as the encapsulation of everything they hate about the Republican ruling class. For months the elites bashed the base for failing to suck it up and see the big picture, to line up for Romney and come on in for the big win. But they got their wish! The Tea Party—once again proving its pragmatism once the general election season rolls around—lined up in the immediate aftermath of the Paul Ryan pick and has proven they can grow up.
… Why is this happening? A number of reasons, but chief among them that the Tea Party just wants to beat Obama—they understand that as a necessary first step before continuing any of their internal battles on policy grounds. In contrast, while most insiders want to win, they value the importance of winning on their own terms. The Tea Party could be freaking out about any number of things from Romney … Heck, his re-endorsement of Romneycare in the past few weeks barely got a peep … They’ve largely sucked it up, making peace with the idea that they’ll have to keep him honest if he gets to the White House. But consider the criticism from those center-right elites over Romney’s failure to mention Afghanistan in his convention speech. Those who long for Bush III, dissatisfied with rise of a more libertarian base, took Romney for the block in the primary. Now it’s become evident that Romney isn’t running to be Bush III in most policy arenas—he has his own class of insiders, his own establishment, many of whom are his friends and colleagues from business, not from politics. The gripes from Bush-era foreign policy types is also an indication of how much they prioritize those issues over Romney’s own bias toward domestic policy fixes—his failure to mount a defense of the Freedom Agenda is a cause of significant frustration from those still fighting the last wars. There’s a bit of the spurned sweetheart effect here, too—the insider class and the opinion leaders view Romney as owing them to some extent for their willingness to line up quickly to pronounce Rick Perry unacceptable—but it’s now clear their support for Romney is mostly unrequited …
The divide that Domenech is describing is real enough: The aftermath of Romney’s “47 percent” moment featured one group of conservatives lining up to defend him and another group (this writer included) lining up to criticize him, and the defenders were, indeed, mostly the kind of Tea Party-oriented pundits — at sites like RedState and Townhall and elsewhere — who had been most hostile to his candidacy once upon a time. And as Michael Brendan Dougherty notes in a follow-up, this is part of a general pattern where the Tea Party wing of the party tends to be purist in primary campaigns but then proves itself to be eminently pragmatic in the general election (remember Scott Brown?), throwing itself enthusiastically behind even flawed candidates in the interest of defeating the liberal enemy.
But the claim that “the insider class and the opinion leaders” somehow foisted Romney on the party’s grassroots, which is repeated by Domenech in today’s edition of the Transom and then amplified by Erick Erickson of RedState, strikes me as mostly revisionist thinking.
Recall, first of all, that Romney was the candidate embraced by many more ideological conservatives in 2008, against the moderation of McCain and the squishiness of Huckabee. The current nominee owed his post-2008 credibility as the party’s heir apparent, in other words, to the willingness of many conservatives in the online/grassroots/talk radio world to buy his True Conservative sales pitch during the last presidential campaign.
By 2012, of course, the landscape had changed, health care had risen in importance, and a mobilized Tea Party went looking for a less-compromised alternative to Romney. But here’s the thing: The “D.C.-Manhattan elite” that Domenech is criticizing didn’t want Romney either. There was no big Romney cheering section in the elite conservative press: National Review conspicuously failed to repeat their 2008 endorsement, The Weekly Standard pined desperately for (grassroots-friendly!) figures like Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, The Wall Street Journal was viciously hard on Romney and probably would have been behind Tim Pawlenty if the Minnesotan hadn’t flopped early, eminences like George Will were similarly harsh, and so on and so forth. Indeed, for much of the primary campaign, the most Romney-friendly press in the conservative-land probably emanated from (of all places!) Ann Coulter and the Drudge Report.
Much of the party’s donor class, too, was deeply wary of Romney, which is why both Pawlenty and Perry seemed capable of giving him a real challenge for a time. Lots of Bush donors wanted Mitch Daniels in the race, there were donors who wanted Haley Barbour, and much of the New York/Wall Street money stayed on the sidelines until very late in the game, hoping that Chris Christie would get in. Yes, by the time the race was down to Gingrich, Santorum and Romney, the donors were all-in for Romney, but it was almost as much a marriage of convenience as the Tea Party’s eventual reconciliation with the nominee.
And who, exactly, was arguing that to nominate Romney was to “come on in for the big win”? The elite view of Romney, so far as I can tell from my own inside-the-Beltway conversations, has always been that he’s a desperately flawed general election candidate who deserved reluctant support only because he happened to draw an extraordinarily weak field of challengers in the primary campaign. If he had faced a better class of populist, he would have lost, and deservedly so. But it’s not the fault of the “DC-Manhattan elite” that the Tea Party rallied briefly around wannabe cable-news personalities Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, or that Rick Perry made Pawlenty look like Cicero, or that the voters of South Carolina decided to give Newt Gingrich an extra two weeks in the spotlight instead of rallying around the strongest remaining not-Romney candidate. Indeed, given how lukewarm the pundits and donors were to Romney’s candidacy all along, perhaps Republican populists need to look in the mirror, and recognize that the lackluster performance of all the Tea Party candidates in what was supposed to be the Tea Party’s year might say more about that movement’s limitations than about the machinations of its enemies.
That is, if the Tea Party movement does have real “enemies” within the conservative fold. I read the The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard and National Review consistently over the last few years, and apart from the last days of the debt ceiling debacle, the coverage of right-wing populism from those elite, New York and Washington-based outlets was almost universally positive. Which is why I don’t really think that the division of conservatism — and particularly conservative media — into squishy Acela corridor centrists and hardy right-wing activists even makes much sense on its own terms. Nobody pushed harder for Romney to add Paul Ryan to the Republican ticket, for instance, than the Manhattan insiders at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Nobody has spent more time arguing for making this election into a clash of Big Ideas than the D.C. insiders at The Weekly Standard. At both the elite and grassroots level, the Republican party is much, much more consistently conservative than it used to be: If a maverick figure like David Frum is your best example of the moderate Republican establishment, I think Frum himself would be the first to acknowledge that as evidence that said establishment no longer exists.
What does exist, as Domenech’s second paragraph suggests, are real policy differences between different factions of conservatism: Between the Rand Paul and Marco Rubio wings on foreign policy, between conservatives who favor a “one nation conservatism” and those who prefer the “makers-versus-takers” vision of American society, between social conservatives and libertarians on the usual range of social issues, between modernizers who want the party to move to the center on immigration and modernizers (like the aforementioned Frum) who want it to move to the center on other issues instead, between pro-business politicians who like corporate welfare and pro-market activists who want to slash subsidies for industry, between flat-taxers and family-friendly tax reformers … I could go on.
But these differences cut across the elite/populist divide. Bill Kristol might be criticizing Romney for his “failure to mount a defense of the Freedom Agenda,” as Domenech suggests, but then again Kristol’s fellow insider Peggy Noonan is criticizing him for being too thoughtlessly bellicose and insufficiently realist on foreign policy. My colleague David Brooks criticized Republicans today for being too focused on the heroic entrepreneur, and addressing voters as “potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens.” But the Wall Street Journal editorial page, no less elite than any Times columnist, has consistently criticized Romney for being too timid in his defense of the entrepeneurial spirit, and too limited in his supply-side forays. Meanwhile, the famous “47 percent” line is one that clearly appeals to some of the party’s richest donors and deepest-pocketed insiders … but it’s also one that’s been pushed by self-consciously populist figures like, well, Erick Erickson, who spends a great deal of his time criticizing the very “elitist Republicans” who Romney’s fundraising comments were pitched toward.
All of which is to say that there is no one “elite” position on any of these issues, any more than there is some “elite” rush to abandon Romney’s candidacy. Rather, there’s a recognition among many observers that the Republican nominee is underperforming in what should be a winnable election, and there’s a debate about the roots of this underperformance that’s pretty clearly geared toward salvaging a stumbling campaign. (I’m pretty sure that Noonan, Kristol, et. al., as much as any writer at RedState, still think this election is entirely winnable for Romney.) Grassroots conservatives, no less than any inside-the-Beltway writer, have a great deal to contribute to these debates. But those contributions would profit from a recognition than the right’s divisions don’t map neatly onto lines of geography and class and cocktail parties — and, rather more pressingly, that the current Republican nominee isn’t really a standard-bearer for any cause within conservatism save his own.