by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
Nominating Mitt Romney is sort of like taking Grandma\u2019s castor oil. Republicans are dreading the thought of downing their unpleasant-tasting medicine but worry that sooner or later they will have to.<\/p>\n
By any logical political calculus, the former Massachusetts governor is an ideal presidential candidate. Ramrod straight, fit, and well-educated, he knows all sorts of facts and figures and comes across like a cinematic chief executive.<\/p>\n
At any other time, an informed technocrat like Romney would seem a dream candidate. Yet in the run-up to this election, Americans are completely turned off by Washington\u2019s so-called experts, such as Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Attorney General Eric Holder \u2014 and, increasingly, Barack Obama himself.<\/p>\n
As a former governor and presidential candidate, Romney has been fully vetted. In these racy times, Mormonism is viewed as more a guarantee of a candidate\u2019s past probity than a political liability. So there is little chance that a blonde accuser will appear out of Romney\u2019s past, or that in late October 2012 the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0will uncover a long-ago DUI charge.<\/p>\n The calculating Republican establishment believes Romney has enough crossover appeal to independents to beat a shaky Obama. It still has nightmares of tea-party senatorial candidates Sharron Angle and Christine O\u2019Donnell, whose 2010 primary victories led to inept campaigns and Republican losses in the general elections in Nevada and Delaware, respectively.<\/p>\n Although conservatives dub Romney a flip-flopper for changing positions on abortion, gun control, and health care, the base knew all about those old reversals in 2008, when it nonetheless praised Romney as the only conservative alternative to maverick moderate John McCain. Apparently the party has moved to the right since then. Tea partiers worry that, once in office, a moderate President Romney would prove a reach-out centrist \u2014 spending borrowed money like George W. Bush did on No Child Left Behind or the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, thereby ruining for good the now-suspect Republican brand of fiscal sobriety.<\/p>\n The result of those worries is that Romney has become the process-of-elimination candidate. The Hamlet-like governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, hemmed and hawed and bowed out, as most knew he would. The charismatic and controversial Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin decided they were making too much money to go through another nasty political race.<\/p>\n If finger-pointing magnate Donald Trump was going to bet a campaign on Obama\u2019s reluctance to disclose official documents, he would have done better to demand the release of the president\u2019s mysteriously secret college transcripts and medical records rather than his birth certificate. In the debates, the audiences liked what former Sen. Rick Santorum had to say, regretting only that it came out of the mouth of Rick Santorum.<\/p>\n Rep. Michele Bachmann once soared as the anti-Romney and then crashed when 90 percent of her statements seemed courageous and inspired \u2014 but 10 percent sounded kind of weird.<\/p>\n Then came the most promising Romney alternative, job-creating Texas governor Rick Perry. He looked as presidential as Romney but immediately proved even more wooden in the debates. His \u201cbrainfreeze\u201d moments were made worse by occasional goofy explanations that seemed most un-Texan.<\/p>\n New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Florida senator Marco Rubio were always crowd favorites, and they\u2019re certainly hard-charging conservatives. Yet at some point, both realized that their scant years in office were comparable, in theory, to the thin r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of Obama when he entered the presidency clueless.<\/p>\n Rep. Ron Paul\u2019s shrill talk on fiscal sobriety is as refreshing as his vintage-1930s isolationist foreign policy is creepy. Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman is a sort of weak Romney doppelganger, raising the same paradox that money, looks, polish, and moderation this year are cause for suspicion, not reassurance.<\/p>\n Many like businessman Herman Cain\u2019s straight-talking pragmatism. Yet more are worried that he might not know that China is a nuclear power, or that we recently joined the British and French in bombing Libya. By now, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich knows almost everything about everything. But lots of Newt\u2019s original \u2014 and now abandoned \u2014 positions were as liberal as Romney\u2019s. And not all that long ago, he seemed as brilliant and glib \u2014 and recklessly self-destructive \u2014 as his contemporary and antagonist Bill Clinton.<\/p>\n To beat an ever-more-vulnerable Obama, Republicans keep coming back to someone who resembles a Romney, with strengths in just those areas where Obama is so demonstrably weak: prior executive experience as a governor, success in and intimacy with the private sector, a past fully vetted, and an unambiguous belief in the exceptional history and future of the United States.<\/p>\n In short, if Republicans are happy in theory that Mitt Romney could probably beat Obama, they seem just as unhappy in fact that first they have to nominate him.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Nominating Mitt Romney is sort of like taking Grandma\u2019s castor oil. Republicans are dreading the thought of downing their unpleasant-tasting medicine but worry that sooner or later they will have to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[362,563],"tags":[321,35,553,32,353,514,1060,450,219,205,564],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-lW","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":418,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-clear-alternatives-in-the-presidential-debate\/","url_meta":{"origin":1360,"position":0},"title":"The Clear Alternatives in the Presidential Debate","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 6, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton FrontPage Magazine Forget all the pre-debate handicapping and advice about what Mitt Romney needed to do or what Barack Obama had to avoid. Last night\u2019s debate clarified the stark choice facing American voters on November 6. On the one hand, we heard a candidate who endorses limited\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":467,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-the-hare-romney-the-tortoise\/","url_meta":{"origin":1360,"position":1},"title":"Obama the Hare, Romney the Tortoise","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 10, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The 2012 race has turned into one of Aesop's classic fables. After each new media blitz against the no-frills Mitt Romney, a far cooler President Obama races ahead three or four points in the polls \u2014 only to fall back to about even\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":769,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obama-romney-doggy-wars\/","url_meta":{"origin":1360,"position":2},"title":"The Obama-Romney Doggy Wars","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 20, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Last week the\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0ran a piece on presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney\u2019s high-school years, in which he supposedly was cruel to a shy, perhaps gay fellow student. The piece,\u00a0mirabile dictu, appeared in the middle of the Biden-Obama reversal on gay marriage. Errors were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1062,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/south-carolina-debate-a-perfect-distraction\/","url_meta":{"origin":1360,"position":3},"title":"South Carolina Debate: A Perfect Distraction","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 21, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner The Race Going into South Carolina The primary race that has just started and should still be wide open is already supposedly almost over \u2014 but still isn\u2019t quite. The conventional wisdom is that Mitt\u00a0Romney\u00a0\u2014 bleeding a bit by the successful, counter-conservative anti-Bain commercials,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Campaign 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Campaign 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/campaign-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":392,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-game-changes\/","url_meta":{"origin":1360,"position":4},"title":"The Game Changes","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 19, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Usually after a presidential debate, both sides spin the results. But after the first face-off between President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney, Obama\u2019s exasperated handlers made no such effort. How could they when most opinion polls revealed that two-thirds of viewers thought Obama\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1306,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/what-does-romney-really-think-about-vietnam\/","url_meta":{"origin":1360,"position":5},"title":"What Does Romney Really Think About Vietnam?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 23, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Mitt Romney recently said\u00a0something\u00a0on\u00a0Fox News Sunday\u00a0that raises questions about his understanding of history and its pertinence for foreign policy. In the course of talking about the war in Iraq and the \u201clessons learned\u201d from that conflict and its \u201cerrors,\u201d Romney responded to a question\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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