Re-winding to 2007 and Beyond

By H.N. Burdett

In terms of candidates in the race for the 2012 presidential nomination, Republicans now find themselves in a spot not unlike the one they occupied four years ago: firmly wedged between a rock and a hard place.

Back in 2007, the conservative faithful were less than delighted with the front-runner, Rudy Guiliani. Yes, it was impressive that a Republican had got himself elected mayor of New York, an urban bastion of liberalism. And, yes, he had national recognition as a tough guy committed to the fight against terrorism in the wake of 9/11. But deeper right-wing thinkers wondered how much he had to bend and bow to progressivism to win the office. While he might know plenty about winning over liberal-leaning undecided voters, how would this transfer into national governance?

As it turned out, the Guiliani boom fizzled into ballot box bust once the state primary elections began. At that time, Arizona Senator John McCain was entrenched at around 15 percent in the polls. He was also having problems patching and re-wiring his faltering campaign. He fired some of his campaign staff and others were on their cell phones trying to learn what other campaigns might have a spot for them.

It is understatement to recall that McCain was hardly the darling of either the GOP hierarchy or its rank-and-file. Nor is it exaggeration to suggest that no elected official at that time raised the hackles of his party brethren more than he did.

His positions that ran against the grain of the party included support for gun control, liberalizing immigration policy and, most particularly, co-sponsoring campaign finance reform that would limit corporate contributions, thereby plugging the mother's milk of GOP candidates. Compounding his plight, McCain was viewed as a mite too friendly with the Senate's liberal poster twins Ted Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Uttering McCain's name was, to put it mildly, enough to make avowed conservatives gag.

Then the Republican primaries got underway and a funny thing happened on the way to the Republican National Convention. McCain was winning. He won in Maine, which had been considered low-hanging fruit for either Guilani, an easterner, or Mitt Romney, a New Englander. McCain won in South Carolina, defeating Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and Tennesse Senator Fred Thompson, though it was suspected that the latter two canceled out one another and opened the path for a McCain victory. And McCain won in Florida over Guiliani, the last hurrah for the New York mayor who turned around and endorsed the Arizona maverick.

What McCain had going for him was name recognition, by way of a compelling narrative as an American prisoner during the Vietnam war. He was repeatedly beaten when he refused his captors' offers to be released from the notorious Hanoi Hilton, recognizing that it would be used to both encourage United States anti-war sentiment and suggest that the son of a prominent U.S. admiral was treated in a manner different from other prisoners.

Moreover, McCain was a prominent supporter of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose endorsement was seen as validation of the misguided foreign policy of the Bush administration. The drumbeat of war overpowered all other objections to his candidacy.

What remained of the anybody-but-McCain mantra among GOP conservatives was silenced by his victories in the Pine Tree, Palmetto and Sunshine states. If McCain's detractors had not been metamorphosed into cheerleaders, their objections at least receded at the unlikely prospect of a southwest senator showing clout at the polls both in the northeast and, even more significantly, below the Mason-Dixon Line, where the southern strategy had been a winning formula for the GOP since it was shaped nearly 40 years earlier by Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond.

Today an anybody-but-Romney mentality persists among the dominant conservative element of the Republican party. Though Mitt Romney polls consistently high in the field of eight contenders for the GOP nomination, his numbers are more reflective of the 25 percent of Republicans who remain moderate. For this vanishing breed, the only alternative can hardly be mistaken for viable: former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who most recently plunged to a measly 1 percent in the polls and can in no way be considered a serious obstacle to Romney's race for the nomination.

Though Texas Governor Rick Perry seems to be the most logical choice of conservative Republicans, there's little evidence of pushing and shoving to board his sputtering bandwagon. They are not so much bothered by the fact that Perry was once a Democrat, or even that he headed the 2000 Texas campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore. Fundamentalists and born-agains, who still carry substantial weight in the Republican party, are known to embrace rather than revile converts.

Besides, Perry has offered the startling revelation that the last Democratic presidential contender for whom he voted was Jimmy Carter. It was an admission that he failed to vote for Gore, a candidate whose statewide campaign he led. In the Lone Star state, it is well known that there is no love lost between Perry and his predecessor as governor, George W. Bush. So it is indeed possible that Perry just did not vote for either Bush 43 or Gore in the controversial 2000 election.

Perry's feud with Bush can both hurt and help him. Revisionist history may credit Bush's preemptive war policy with initiating the democratization of the Arab world, should that actually happen. At the same time, Bush's borrow and spend policy to pay for the war and his requesting and receiving higher and higher debt limits are precursors to today's global economic woes.

Furthermore, Perry has been less than a rousing success in the series of Republican campaign debates, to say the least. He compounds the fact that he is rhetorically challenged by announcing that he will be more selective in the future about the debates in which he will participate. By so doing, he could better use the time required to prepare for debates by capitalizing on his flesh-pressing forte. While this may be a wise move by a candidate who thrives on shaking hands, slapping backs and throwing red meat to a like-minded crowd, it also begs the question that if he is unable to tangle with the likes of Mitt Romney, how would he fare against Barack Obama? A chicken wearing a 10-gallon hat and genuine leather boots is less than an inspiring vision.

Meanwhile, conservative Republicans would still prefer not to be left with a choice between Romney, whose philosophical credentials they are unlikely to ever approve, and Perry, who gets slam-dunked routinely by Republican strategists all the way up to W.'s "brain," Karl Rove.

Even when the Texas governor leaves the debate podium, he is known to put his foot in do-do up to his boot tops. After Herman Cain's 9-9-9 abomination brought him back from the campaign exit door and atop the polls alongside Romney, Perry's attempt to roll out his own flat-tax proposal was pushed out of the headlines by his dunderheaded resurrection of the phony baloney about where Barack Obama, three years into his presidency, was born. Thinking Republicans, conservative and moderate, groaned in unison.

Conservative minions had earlier tried unsuccessfully to push New Jersey Governor Chris Christie into the race for their party's presidential nomination. Spurned there, they turned to Cain, who was already in the race. He is personable, a businessman and a motivational speaker adept at both kowtowing to deep-pocketed corporate interests and chiding African Americans for remaining on the "plantation" of the Democratic party. But Cain's staying power remains cloaked in genuine doubt.

There are now rumblings that the next GOP flavor-of-the-month will be Newt Gingrich. While Romney cannot seem to get traction beyond the one-quarter of his own party's rank-and-file, Gingrich has to dig out of a much deeper hole. He has been mired as a single-digit wonder. But Cain's unlikely skyrocketing gives hope to the former Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Yet, despite his loyalty to the memory of Ronald Reagan, whose name he invokes at each and every opportunity while conveniently bypassing the two Bushes; despite his authorship of the Reagan era Contract with America; despite his probable authorship of the Reagan re-election slogan about Americans being better off than they were four years earlier, Newt Gingrich is yesterday's news.

Now that might not be all that bad for a party that still worships Reagan, conveniently forgetting that the Great Communicator's supply-side "voodoo" economics jump-started our current economic catastrophe. But the atmosphere is very different from what it was when Reagan was at the helm.

From the diminishing Tea Party to the emerging Occupy Wall Street movement, the vox populi screams, "We're mad as hell and we're not taking it any longer!" By the grace of a Constitution mandating a nation ruled by law, if there is a revolution it is likely to be bloodless.

At another time, in another place, Gingrich, a former high-profile member of the ruling elite, would be less likely to be seeking to lead his country than he would be frog-marching to the guillotine.
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