A year ago, Romney’s route to the nomination looked like the highway to Heaven. As the rich, successful, respected governor son of a rich, successful, respected governor father, Romney trod the well-worn path of dynastic inheritance, a tradition in American politics that stretches from the Adamses to the Bushes. In a party that respects order and hierarchy, or used to, Romney had another, analogous advantage: like Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, Bush the elder, and John McCain before him, he had previously been the runner-up. He was next in line. It was his turn. His history as a Massachusetts moderate Mormon was a problem, of course, but not to worry: his fourth M would more than make up for it. Money talks, quite as loudly in politics as it does in conservative ideology.
Money isn’t everything, though, even for Republicans. A bit of luck adds bang to the buck, and Romney has had remarkable good fortune in those he has shared the stage with. His rivals in reputed reasonableness obliged him by dropping out sooner (Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty) or later (Jon Huntsman). What remained was a kick line of clowns, knaves, and zealots for the fabled base to examine, exalt, and, as soon as each surged past Romney to the top of the polls, expunge. The Donald flashed first, but Trump the Candidate smelled less sweet than Trump the Fragrance. Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin’s understudy, muffed her lines. Herman Cain fell fast when the grievances of a disgruntled ex-mistress packed him off to political Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan. Rick Perry slunk out with an “oops,” but his most damaging lapse was to blurt that only people without “a heart” would treat as criminals the blameless children of immigrants without papers. To flick away these four, Romney barely had to raise a finger.
Newt Gingrich proved a harder nut to crack. When Perry plummeted, Newt soared, largely on the strength of channelling the base’s basest biases: fierce hatred of the mainstream media, condescending disdain for the freeloading, work-averse poor, and racially tinged contempt for the allegedly secular-socialist, anti-religious (though Islam-friendly), Kenyan anti-colonialist, teleprompter-dependent “food-stamp President.” Gingrich went after Romney, too—but from the left, for job-killing “exploitative capitalism.” After Gingrich humbled him in South Carolina, Romney fully deployed the fourth M in Florida: he and his “unaffiliated” Super PAC spent fifteen million dollars on negative TV ads attacking Gingrich for erratic, corrupt leadership as Speaker of the House and subsequent heresies such as agreeing with Nancy Pelosi that something ought to be done about climate change. It worked. Like the Cheshire Cat’s cheerful smile, Gingrich is fading.
Now it’s Rick Santorum who blinks in the spotlight’s glare. He is “the last consistent conservative standing,” in the estimation of one of the right’s more prominent bloggers. He is also the most “conservative” conservative standing—the most reactionary, really—and, it had been widely assumed, the least encumbered by baggage: no ex-wives, no ex-mistresses, no interplanetary fantasies, no lingering reputation for moderation, no record of vowing to “preserve and protect a woman’s right to choose” or coöperating with Democrats to make access to health insurance universal. (There’s no such thing as Santorumcare.) Because Romney, with his liberalish past, can’t afford to go after Santorum from the left, his attack machine hasn’t had much to work with. It has been reduced to scavenging the record for the burrs and crumbs that inevitably stick to the sleeves of anyone who (as Romney tried and failed to do) has served a term or two in Congress. Senator Santorum voted for “wasteful earmarks”! He voted to raise the debt limit five times! He’s a “Washington insider”! The banality is astonishing, and if Republican voters fall for it they deserve the contempt in which Romney manifestly holds them.
Santorum’s trifecta earned him a fifth M: momentum. Abruptly leading Romney in national polls, he could have chosen to carry his blue-collar credentials (however dubious, however belied by the policies he advocates) into this week’s primary in Michigan, the state where Romney grew up and where his father was governor. Instead, Santorum waded into the fever swamp of culture-war claptrap that has long been his preferred habitat. Contraception, prenatal care, the “phony theology” of environmentalism, the “anachronism” of government (even state government) funding of “factories called public schools”—he couldn’t resist any of it, any more than he could resist comparing the stakes of this year’s election to those of resisting Nazism. (He denied intending to liken President Obama to Adolf Hitler, though he had earlier warned that Obama’s road leads to “the guillotine.”)
Last week, the day before the twentieth and probably final televised debate of the Republican Presidential primary season, the banner headline on the Drudge Report, a heavily trafficked conservative (and currently pro-Romney) online news aggregator, was SANTORUM’S SATAN WARNING. The story was about an address, delivered in 2008, in which Santorum described Satan’s successes in “attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality.” In that speech, originally unearthed by the liberal Web site Right Wing Watch, Santorum declared that “the Father of Lies” had already conquered “academia,” the mainline Protestant churches (“gone from the world of Christianity as I see it”), and “the popular culture.” A fourth institution, government, “was the next to fall.” According to Santorum, “the body politic held up fairly well until the last couple of decades, but it is falling, too.”
At last week’s debate, Satan got another shout-out from Santorum. To be fair, he was referring to the radical Islamist concept of the United States itself as “the great Satan,” not to the institutions of the United States that he thinks Satan already controls. Still, it was an odd verbal tic. Also, Santorum said that the Affordable Health Care Act will add trillions to the debt. Romney said so, too. And Gingrich said that President Obama favors legalizing infanticide. None of these things are true. Like victory, lies have many fathers.
Original Article
Source: new yorker
Author: Hendrik Hertzberg
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