Ezra Klein's Wonkbook 
BREAKING: The GOP primary is turning out as everyone has known it would for months now. Mitt Romney won Florida last night. He won it big, in fact. He won in every income group. He won among every age group. He won among every education level. He won among whites and Latinos. He won among catholics and protestants. He won among voters worried about foreclosures and voters who were not so worried about foreclosures. About the only group he lost were those who consider themselves "very conservative." (Full exit polls here.)
And, barring a truly extraordinary turn of events, he is going to win the primary. That will make 2012 the second presidential primary in a row in which Republicans rallied around someone they didn't totally trust, and perhaps didn't even totally like, in order to win the general election. In 2008, Sen. John McCain went from conservative pariah to GOP standard-bearer, and this year, the guy McCain attacked as too wishy-washy on core Republican principles will carry the flag. For all the upsets in individual primaries in 2010, Republican voters are, on net, vastly more pragmatic, at least when it comes to candidate choice, than they are typically given credit for.
But perhaps that's not such a good thing. So argues the New Yorker's George Packer, anyway. Substantively, the Republican Party has moved far to the right over the last decade. Compare Romney's platform to that of George W. Bush, for instance. The question, for many, has been whether electoral losses will force them back to the center.
So far, no. And if Romney wins, the answer is probably still no. The Republican Party keeps choosing politicians who they don't, in their heart of hearts, truly believe to be conservative. That's the story conservatives tell about Bush's eventual fall from grace (actually, about both Bushs' falls from grace), and it's part of the story they tell about McCain's loss in 2008, and it will be the story they tell if Romney loses in 2012. You can write the post-mortem now: 'Of course America wasn't going to vote for a liberal Republican from Massachusetts who had passed the country's first individual mandate, been on both sides of Roe, and was a leveraged buyout specialist in an age of job insecurity. Next time, we absolutely have to nominate a real conservative! Next time, we''ll give Americans a real choice.'
Packer compares this to the Democrats' 1972, when they did what they really wanted and nominated George McGovern. "McGovern’s debacle forced the Democratic Party to find its way back from the ideological wilderness—from being the party of delegate quotas and 'acid, amnesty, and abortion.' Every successful Democrat after 1972, from Carter to Clinton to Obama, has had at least one foot in the party’s center. A Gingrich rout in November might have the same effect on Republicans—it might drive their party back toward the center, and toward mental health, in 2016. But if Romney wins the nomination and loses the election, the party will continue down into the same dark hole where Palin, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Santorum, and now Gingrich all lurk." |
