The radical dangers of Mitt Romney's America

As president, the shape-shifting Republican would bow to the far Right — and sacrifice many of the programs and ideals that make this nation great

One of the nation's most prominent columnists told me in the past few days that he had almost written that Mitt Romney was the inevitable Republican nominee, but at the last minute, pulled back and hedged his prediction with a formulaic qualifier. Not me. For months, I've been boldly stating that it's Romney. After all, I asked, who the hell else have they got?

Well, right now, Newt Gingrich — ahead in Iowa, closing in New Hampshire, pulling away in South Carolina, beating Romney by the astounding margin of 47 percent to 17 percent in the probable rubber-match state of Florida. Can it last? Is the year so weird that the traditional metrics — money, organization, a long-term strategic plan — don't matter, or won't make enough of a difference? I still believe, logically, perhaps stubbornly, that in the end, the unpalatable Romney is likely to prevail over the improbable Gingrich or some last hour, unthinkable incarnation of yet another non-Mitt. 

The resistance to the obvious nominee reflects the nagging instinct of the GOP's dominant right wing that, whatever his peccadilloes and his pyrotechnic deviations from orthodoxy, Newt is at heart a conservative, and that Mitt is at heart a con man. 

Both propositions are amply justified on the public record, but for conservatives, the judgment about Romney should be irrelevant. The Right shouldn't be afraid of him; it's the rest of us who should. If elected, Romney would be imprisoned in his presidency by wary Republicans who would watch his every move and threaten his renomination if he ever dared to be pragmatic. Whether he means what he says, doing it would be his only politically viable choice in the White House.

Mitt Romney's America would be a narrow and bigoted place.

Romney often invokes Ronald Reagan, the man he blithely disclaimed during his 1994 Senate race in Massachusetts. But Romney is no Reagan, who so embodied the conservative principles to which he did genuinely subscribe that he was free to transcend them — to compromise and event to commit moderation — when he decided that was the sensible course, or even essential to the national interest. 

Thus, Reagan raised taxes after cutting them. He worked with Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill to save Social Security despite his earlier view that it "should be made voluntary." Then he worked with Ted Kennedy to pass sweeping immigration reform that provided for amnesty. He denounced "the evil empire" and then made peace with Mikhail Gorbachev. This was, to certain conservative elites, the most unthinkable transgression of all. William F. Buckley Jr. called Reagan's nuclear arms control treaty a "suicide pact." Rep. Dick Cheney rebuked the president, who in turn said of his critics: They "have accepted that war is inevitable."

And long before his second-term treaty-making with the Soviets, Reagan's pragmatism had riled the self-appointed keepers of the right-wing flame. For permitting grain sales to the Soviet Union, columnist George Will attacked the administration "for lov[ing] commerce more than it loathes communism." William Safire delivered his harsh verdict on the president's move toward the middle on Social Security and taxes, including his move away from the flat tax. All this, he wrote, was "Reagan's white flag" — which "invited... grinning contempt." 

Yet none of this noise mattered, and no one inside his own party seriously thought to challenge the president in 1984. He was simply, unassailably "Mr. Conservative" — and he could bend or change the rules, holding his base in the country while inside-the-Beltway critics spoke mostly to themselves. As the Moral Majority's Ron Godwin conceded in a 1982 Washington Post piece (subscription required) reporting on complaints about Reagan's "liberal" and "moderate" advisers, the president had a bond of trust with GOP voters: "They like him and are pleased with them."

In contrast, Romney is seeking — and at best, will have to settle for — grudging acceptance from skeptical Republicans. As president, he would be on permanent probation because he lacks fundamental strength with a GOP base that is decidedly more hard-line than it was during the Reagan era. Romney more closely resembles the first George Bush, who, after courageously recognizing the fiscal folly of his famous pledge of "no new taxes," was harried and wounded by Pat Buchanan in the 1992 Republican primaries. Bush had been Reagan's vice president, his natural successor, but like Romney now, Bush senior faced a wall of conservative skepticism, both when he lost the nomination in 1980 and when he finally won it in 1988. Then he violated his parole by agreeing to a tax increase. Romney knows this history, and would not choose to repeat it. As president, he would not be that Bush. He would have to be the anti-Reagan — because he would not be less right wing, but more reliably and inflexibly just that, incapable of dispensing with his party's dogma where and when it was wrong.