George Will, as usual, has it all wrong

George Will, in the form of a question, begins, at the end of his column, with this deeply flawed premise -- "Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles" -- and ends, at the beginning of his party's comeuppance, with this inescapable and somewhat rational conclusion -- "to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for this?"

This, of course, is the unpleasant Mitt Romney. And Will's piece is a pleasure to read. The prince of priggishness (Will, that is, not the other one, Romney) has helped to husband a party of intellectual opportunism and ethical degeneration for several decades now, only to awaken from his dogmatic slumbers in repulsion and horror at its repulsive, horrifying inevitabilities; namely, a "recidivist reviser" of "principles" who must somehow balance the vast, internal contradictions of an absurdly radical conservatism.

Will assaults the GOP's "last to be voted off the island" -- to quote an outstanding pol of High Competence, a leadership quality in low favor with the ideological Will -- for hedging his positions on ethanol, the auto industry, and collecting bargaining. Will understandably neglects, for reasons of sheer space, Romney's even greater heroics in backflipping on abortion rights, gay rights, health care, gun control, illegal immigration, climate change ...

The ellipsis is there for, "More to come." And, I probably missed some.

I've said this before and I'll say it again: Romney's faults are not Romney's fault -- not for a political animal. He inaugurated his Republican career when his party still permitted some autonomy of intelligence and empirically based decision-making. During his forced absences from the public stage, it was his party that slipped into recidivist revisionisms, thereby forcing Romney to serially revise his, uh, options -- of which he had none, not if he was to remain the Great Republican Hope.   

Strike that. Romney could have jumped ship; he could have changed parties and therefore have left his principles unchanged. That tactic, however, would have been enormously bold, especially seeing how Romney was sired by a Republican governor and potential Republican president and all. It's an Oedipal thing, I suppose. Plus, boldness just isn't one of Romney's congenital traits.

So, he's been stuck -- stuck with "surmounting so many obstacles" of GOP madness. And Romney has done an admirable, even an awesome, job of it. I'm unaware of any other GOP pol who could so nimbly navigate his party's elaborate web of appalling deceit, dissension and accelerating radicalism.

Comments

[R.C. Chile]

That's something that one could speculate on.What if Romney had switched parties and mounted a primary challenge to Obama?

[John Duffy]

From the right or the left? We'll never know.

[RC]

I can't think of a more apt phrase to describe George Will than "Prince of Priggishness". Thank you.

[Jorge]

Like a lot of New Englanders of Yankee descent, my ancestors were Republicans back to the Civil War. Most of my generation -- and quite a few of our parents -- bailed on the party during the Nixon era, making Massachusetts largely a one-party state. A few, like Bill Weld, the Chafees of RI, etc., stayed in it, trying to maintain influence of the old WASP elite and keep the party from becoming solely an instrument of southern white men and other cultural cranks. The BEST that can be said about Romney is that he is in this tradition, but I don't buy it; he completely lacks the character to stand for any set of principles, much less traditional, sane Republicanism. In any event, the idea that the party can be reformed from within has become a joke. Romney isn't going to do it. If he's elected, God forbid, he's not going to stop pandering to the lunatics in his party. (He's going to "double Guantanamo," remember?) Nobody, from the left or the right, should be reassured by Romney's transparent insincerity. Are you listening, Jonathan Chait?