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Why the GOP Should Fear a Romney Presidency
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| Parent(s) |
Party
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| Contributor | Patrick |
| Last Edited | Patrick Oct 27, 2012 01:19am |
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| Category | Opinion |
| Author | Jack M. Balkin |
| Media | Website - Yahoo News |
| News Date | Thursday, October 25, 2012 07:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | If Mitt Romney is elected, he will be the fourth Republican president in the Reagan regime. That regime is no longer in its glory days. Demographic shifts have weakened the Republican electoral coalition, while Republican politicians have grown increasingly radical and ideological. At best, Romney will be an affiliated president attempting to revive the Republican brand after it has been badly tarnished by George W. Bush; at worst, he will be a disjunctive president, unable to keep his party's factions together, and presiding over the end of the Reagan coalition.
Throughout his career, Romney has presented himself as a pragmatic, data-driven, hands-on problem-solver. In this respect he resembles our two last disjunctive presidents, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. Yet in order to secure his party's nomination, Romney has had to twist his positions to conform to the most radical demands of the Republican base.
Part of Romney's problem is that the Republican Party's policy solutions seem -- at least outside the ranks of the faithful -- increasingly ideological and out of touch. No matter what conditions the nation faces, the Republican prescription is to lower taxes, increase defense spending, and weaken the social safety net. These ideas may have made sense in the 1980s. But by 2012, they seem as irrelevant as the Democratic Party's arguments must have seemed to many Americans in 1979.
Romney has been vague about his policy solutions because he rightly surmises that many of them will be quite unpopular. Yet once he becomes president, he will be forced to promote ideological commitments that are increasingly discredited with the public or risk losing political support within his own party. Romney, like Carter and Hoover, has argued that he will be an excellent administrator who will bring special problem-solving skills to the White House. But technocratic expertise is a tenuous strategy for maintaining political legitimacy, especially when a president must ma |
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