WE WERE talking to Kevin DeWine, the personification of a slick, establishment Republican and the chairman of the Ohio state party.
“How do you explain that an extremist like Rick Santorum can be taken seriously as the potential Republican nominee? Why has the party shifted so far to the right?” A Japanese journalist participating in the visit organised by the US state department’s Foreign Press Center before yesterday’s Super Tuesday elections asked the $64,000 question.
During the campaign, Santorum talked about “the dangers of contraception”, criticised pre-natal exams, called President Obama a “snob” for advocating university education and said a speech by John F Kennedy made him “want to throw up”. DeWine fidgeted and mumbled about the polls showing Santorum in the lead being unreliable. (In the event, Mitt Romney later edged ahead of Santorum.) The party had always been “a delicate balance between social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, economic conservatives, national security conservatives . . . ”, DeWine said. “Politics is addition, not subtraction. I have to build a coalition out of my base, with as many independents and right-thinking Democrats as I can. I cannot win just with my base.”
That is the nightmare for Republicans, and one reason they may lose the November presidential election. Their ugly, protracted nominating process is turning off the independents who voted Republican in the 2010 midterms, driving them back into the arms of Barack Obama.
The truth is more colourful than DeWine’s bland description of a conservative base with varying priorities. Nourished by a steady diet of disinformation and venom from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, it includes climate change deniers, gun fetishists and fundamentalist Christians who hate abortion but approve of torture.
As Ryan Lizza writes in the upcoming issue of the New Yorkermagazine, "The appearance of a Republican Party almost entirely composed of ideological conservatives is a new and historically unprecedented development . . . Movement conservatism finally succeeded in silencing, co-opting, repelling or expelling nearly every competing strain of Republicanism from the party."
In the past decade, the number of Republicans calling themselves conservatives has risen from 62 to 71 per cent. Those calling themselves moderates have declined from 31 to 23 per cent. There have been 11 Republican front runners in the polls in one year. At this time four years ago, John McCain virtually accepted the Republican nomination in Ohio. The best Mitt Romney could hope for last night was a commanding lead that will nonetheless take weeks or months to reach a definite resolution.
Three factors have destabilised and drawn out the nomination race: Mitt Romney’s reputation as an unreliable conservative – hence the search for a “not Romney”; new primary rules adopted by the party; and the advent of “Super Pacs” shoring up candidates who would otherwise have quit.
In his constant attempt to convince Republicans he’s a true conservative, Romney has enlisted some of the party’s most notorious “wingers”: Donald Trump, proponent of the “birther” controversy that says Obama wasn’t born in the US; and Jan Brewer, the Arizona governor responsible for an anti-immigrant “papers please” Bill so draconian that the federal government filed a lawsuit against it.
The Republican party was inspired by the 2008 race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to change its rules for this year’s primaries. The Clinton-Obama race lasted into June, galvanised the Democratic party and strengthened the eventual winner. To slow their nomination process, the Republicans imposed penalties on states that held early primaries, and adopted a system of proportional representation for contests in January, February and March. The move backfired, because contrary to the Democrats, who liked their candidates in 2008, Republicans in 2012 don’t like theirs.
Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have been able to stay in the race because under the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling, both found “sugar daddy” millionaires to fund their Super Pacs. Gingrich’s benefactor, the casino owner Sheldon Adelson, is motivated solely by Gingrich’s support for Israel. In the midst of the uproar over birth control, Santorum’s mentor, Foster Friess, joked that aspirin was the best contraceptive if held between a woman’s knees.
The Republican establishment cringed in the corner while the wingers took over their party. There are now feeble stirrings of opposition among moderates like Rudy Giuliani and Jeb Bush.
To borrow a phrase from the Arab Baathists, there’s a growing consensus that the Republican party needs a corrective movement. When Democrats moved leftward under George McGovern and Walter Mondale, they were crushed, writes New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, arguing that there’s nothing so instructive as a good drubbing at the polls.
If Romney wins the nomination but loses to Obama, social conservatives will again argue that Republicans lost for want of ideological purity. But if Santorum were wiped out by Obama, the party would be forced to shift towards the centre.
“An alcoholic doesn’t stop drinking until he hits bottom,” Nocera concludes. “The Republican Party won’t change until it hits bottom. Only Santorum offers that possibility.”
