Mitt didn't have to do it ...

February 21, 2012

So as Mitt Romney continues to fail to entice conservatives to his campaign cause, a thought:

He didn’t have to do it.

He didn’t have to try to appeal to the Republican Party’s conservative base to win the nomination. Indeed, “Massachusetts Mitt” might have been better situated to win the nomination.

Think about it.

In 2008, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, among others, both claimed to be the “real” conservative in the party. John McCain, a comparative moderate, won.

In 2000, George W. Bush presented himself as a “Compassionate Conservative” and a “Reformer With Results,” the popular governor of a large, diverse state. He overwhelmed his avowedly conservative challengers.

In 1996, Bob Dole, the Washington insider of Washington insiders, won the party’s nomination against other, allegedly more conservative foes.

In 1988, George H.W. Bush won … and he was pro-choice until he had to be pro-life to become Ronald Reagan’s VP. He also was the first to use the term “voodoo economics” to describe Reagan’s (and now Republican dogma) economic policies.

1980, obviously, is the exception that proves the rule.

Even going back to 1968, Nixon was a moderate, an Eisenhower-linked Republican with strong anti-Communist credentials.

Basically, in the last 50 years, the Republican Party has nominated the most-conservative (or pretty durn conservative) candidate in the field in two competitive primaries: Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Ronald Reagan in 1980. In the two elections they participated in as first-time presidential candidates, they were a collective 1-1: Reagan won easily, while Goldwater was crushed.

As an aside, let me say that my guess is that whoever wins this year will be so conservative that he, too, will be crushed, making arch conservatives 1-2 in first-time elections in the last 50 years.

So Mitt Romney may well have been better served by being more moderate. He would have distinguished himself from the conservatives running for the Republican nomination, and would have undermined some of Ron Paul’s appeal in the campaign. Because whatever the mythology is of how to win the Republican nomination, as a practical matter the Republican Party tends to nominate comparative moderates as its presidential candidate … and those moderates tend to do pretty well in presidential elections.

Barry Goldwater famously claimed that moderation in the defense of justice is no virtue, and that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. That may be true—well, no it mightn’t—but it is certainly not true in presidential politics. Moderation, not extremism, is the key to victory.

As both Mitt Romney and the Republican Party are probably about to find out.

8:56am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPUuPyGnWLfw

(Notes: 33)