Romney for President
Many conservatives are finding it difficult to pick a presidential candidate. Each of the men running for the Republican nomination has strengths, and none has everything — all the traits, all the positions — we are looking for. Equally conservative analysts can reach, and have reached, different judgments in this matter. There are fine conservatives supporting each of these Republicans.
Our guiding principle has always been to select the most conservative viable candidate. In our judgment, that candidate is Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. Unlike some other candidates in the race, Romney is a full-spectrum conservative: a supporter of free-market economics and limited government, moral causes such as the right to life and the preservation of marriage, and a foreign policy based on the national interest. While he has not talked much about the importance of resisting ethnic balkanization — none of the major candidates has — he supports enforcing the immigration laws and opposes amnesty. Those are important steps in the right direction.
Well, I guess it's official. NRO has decided to drop any pretense of actual conservatism and just go for something that vaguely resembles it. I love the utterly slimy weasel-wording of "the most conservative viable candidate." That BS came right out of Fred Barnes' mouth.
I would say that these guys need to have their resumes polished up nice and shiny, because the next election is going to expose them for the frauds they are, but I'm way too cynical for that. They'll throw a little tantrum when the voters tell them exactly what they think of their opinion, and then in the true spirit of the utter waste of space that makes up most right-wing pundits, they find six or eight excuses on which to blame it all and they'll be right back at it come 2009.
So, Andy, what do you think of your boys at NRO now?
Our guiding principle has always been to select the most conservative viable candidate. In our judgment, that candidate is Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. Unlike some other candidates in the race, Romney is a full-spectrum conservative: a supporter of free-market economics and limited government, moral causes such as the right to life and the preservation of marriage, and a foreign policy based on the national interest. While he has not talked much about the importance of resisting ethnic balkanization — none of the major candidates has — he supports enforcing the immigration laws and opposes amnesty. Those are important steps in the right direction.
Well, I guess it's official. NRO has decided to drop any pretense of actual conservatism and just go for something that vaguely resembles it. I love the utterly slimy weasel-wording of "the most conservative viable candidate." That BS came right out of Fred Barnes' mouth.
I would say that these guys need to have their resumes polished up nice and shiny, because the next election is going to expose them for the frauds they are, but I'm way too cynical for that. They'll throw a little tantrum when the voters tell them exactly what they think of their opinion, and then in the true spirit of the utter waste of space that makes up most right-wing pundits, they find six or eight excuses on which to blame it all and they'll be right back at it come 2009.
So, Andy, what do you think of your boys at NRO now?
posted by Anonymous | 4:03 PM
10 Comments:
Personally, I don't really care. So the editors of NRO endorsed Romney...big deal. It's like when the editors of the Winston-Salem Journal endorse liberal candidates all the time... I chuckle about it, but I still read the paper. No need to get bent out of shape about it...
That was response number two on the list of responses I guessed you would make.
The Winston-Salem Journal is not a national publication that claims to represent conservative thinking, Andy. Hardly an apt comparison.
Steve, I don't care... That's the only response that matters. If you're upset about NRO's endorsement, stop reading NRO.
From National Review Online:
NR is an institution — and one that pays my light bill to boot. As an institution it comes to corporate — as in collective or institutional — decisions. So while I found the NR Editorial endorsement of Romney cogent and persuasive in parts, it does not reflect my own personal assessment of the race or what would be best for conservatism, the GOP or, much more importantly, America. So who am I for? Nobody quite yet, though I'm against quite a few folks. But we can discuss that later.
Still, if you're curious, my hope of all hopes remains that we have a brokered convention and Phil Gramm gets nominated. I'm only sort of kidding.
Now who has his panties in a twist?
And besides, who said I give a rip who N(ational) R(epublican) O(rifices) endorses or that I ever read them? The only time I read anything on NRO is if someone points me there. Usually whoever points me there is saying, "Look what these neocon idiots are up to now!"
I don't have my panties in a twist, but since you were the one who asked me, "So, Andy, what do you think of your boys at NRO now?", I responded that I didn't care what NRO does. After you responded to that, I replied again that I didn't care. Let me say for the 3rd time that I don't care who NRO endorses.
From National Review Online:
Last night Rich Lowry explained a bit about NR's endorsement process to Hugh Hewitt:
HH: Take me inside first the process by which National Review arrived at its endorsement.
RL: (laughing) I don’t know, Hugh. It’s a really tightly held process here. It’s like selecting the Pope. We can’t reveal too much, but…
HH: How many people got a say in this?
RL: Well, it’s our senior editors, our publisher, our president and our Washington editor and myself. And we’ve been talking about it the last two weeks or so, just because this is our, through the quirks of our publication schedule, this is our last issue before people vote in Iowa and New Hampshire.
So complaining to anybody else at NR or NRO is not really going to do any good. In fact, complaining won't do any good, period. If the magazine endorsed somebody besides your guy, you say, "I disagree," you hope it does Romney as much good as it did Phil Gramm, and then life goes on.
I don't see a great deal to disagree with in the editors' assessment; every one of these guys has a major strength and some significant weakness, and I may weigh the decisive factors a bit differently.
I said yesterday that the grassroots salesmen for the candidate matter a great deal. For example, even if I agreed with Ron Paul on most issues, the fact that so many of his grassroots backers TYPE IN ALL CAPS and swear like sailors and declare themselves the only "REAL Republicans" etc., and blurt out "Neocon Jew" like they have Tourette's Syndrome — sorry, pal, as Dennis Miller said yesterday, "I'd rather take a shower in a Bangkok storm drain" than endorse an attitude like that.
Huckabee's supporters may be inching down this path. Today, I don't want to hear from anybody trying to persuade me that Huckabee was right on the theological doctrine when he raised the issue of what Mormons believe about Jesus and the devil. I'm still waiting to hear from somebody a persuasive case that Mitt Romney's Mormon beliefs will somehow negatively affect his performance as President. If Romney had pledged to have multiple first ladies or to bring back Prohibition, we would be having a different conversation. He hasn't, and so when supporters of a particular candidate, or the candidate himself, seem a bit excessively focused on another candidate's faith... it doesn't reflect well on them or him.
Lowry really is a moron.
It's not about principle or who would make the best executive or who stands for conservatism, it's apparently about the attitude of each candidate's supporters. I'll take a look, but I'll bet not a single one of the founders wrote a word on that in all of their assessments of what it took to become the chief executive.
So Romney, who doesn't seem to have a single conservative bone in his body, gets NRO's endorsement because he is in favor of the war and because his supporters are polite. If this is the pearl of conservative thought, no wonder the movement is dying like a syphilitic whore.
Who decides which of these pinheads becomes spokesman for the conservative movement? Do they self-proclaim or is it by popular acclaim? If it is the latter, I'm going to start suspecting that conservatives are just as stupid as liberals make them out to be.
Joe Carter from Evangelical Outpost said:
Has National Review jumped the shark?
I don’t mean to be glib or facetious in raising the question for I love the magazine dearly. NR was a formative influence on my political philosophy and continues to shape my thinking. It introduced me to conservative ideas, policies, statesmen, and writers. Indeed, three of my favorite conservatives—Ramesh Ponnuru, Ross Douthat, and Byron York—still write for the august publication.
But over the past few years (at least that is the time that I began noticing) there has been a shift to what I call "Manhattan Conservatism." Because almost all of the NR staff lives and works in New York City, their concerns and values tend to reflect a NYC/DC-centric urban cosmopolitism. They've adopted a watered-down form of big-tent fusionism in which embracing any non-liberal ideas are enough to earn you the label of "conservative" (a Manhattan Conservative can have the same views on abortion and gay marriage as the liberal intelligentsia so long as they embrace supply-side economics or torturing terrorists). Mention people in Georgia and they are as likely to think of the country in Asia as they are the Peach State. (Indeed, on The Corner last week, several people mocked the Southern state.)
The Manhattan Conservatives' infatuation with Rudy Giuliani is a prime example of how far they are from the mainstream of conservative thought. But when it came time to endorse a Presidential candidate they realized (at least all but Richard Brookhiser) that endorsing a mayor who once "ran as a liberal" would be a bit much.
Instead they chose to endorse the second most moderate candidate in the race: Mitt Romney.
Now to be fair, Romney is not an unacceptable candidate if the criteria is simply to endorse a Republican. But to pass over true conservatives for a moderate is a slap in the face to the magazine's dedicated readers.
This is why magazines and newspapers should get out of the endorsement business; you can't win either way.
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