On Tuesday, Florida clarified what was already apparent in the race for the Republican presidential nomination: The nominee will either be Senator John McCain or former Governor Mitt Romney.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, overplaying the evangelical hand in a bid to win the South Carolina primary, lost whatever chance he had of winning the nomination by suggesting that the Constitution should be amended to conform with “the Bible.” As Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund pointed out, after that remark, Huckabee only polled one in seven non-evangelical votes in the Palmetto State’s primary. Huckabee replicated the miscalculation of South Carolina once made by televangelist Pat Robertson who, when running for president in 1988, bragged that the state was his, owing to the large evangelical Christian population.
Evangelical Christians are not monolithic in their politics and the large military and former military population in South Carolina like candidates like military hero McCain.
Huckabee’s miscalculation not only hurt his chances of building on his evangelical base, it hurt his chances of winning the GOP presidential nomination and prevented the once-likely scenario of being invited to be McCain’s running mate from playing out. Neither McCain and certainly not Romney are now likely to ask the affable Huckabee to run with them in 2008.
Having already dealt with the question of who might be McCain’s running mate here and here, we now turn to speculation about who Mitt Romney’s running mate would be if he were to win the Republican nomination.
Let me preface everything by saying that Republicans will nominate the former Massachusetts governor at their electoral peril. I agree with Frank Rich, the New York Times columnist, who says that two “miracles” would insure a Republican victory in November, in spite of this being the Democrats’ election to lose. Miracle #1: The Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton. Clinton is “box office poison,” the most disliked politician in the country. Consistently, more than 43% of the general electorate have indicated that they will not vote for Senator Clinton under any circumstances. Nominating such a person would be tantamount to political suicide on the part of Democrats. After the racially-charged campaigning in which the Senator and her husband have recently engaged, this is even more the case.
Miracle #2: The Republicans nominate McCain. Just a few months ago, McCain was written off. The race, it was said, came down to Rudy Giuliani, the liberal former mayor of New York, and Romney, the flip flopping former governor of Massachusetts. From the standpoint of traditional Republican conservatives, though, Giuliani didn’t feel like a match and Romney didn’t gibe with one of the key things that voters are looking for this year, authenticity.
McCain, still derided by PAC-addicted conservatives like Tom DeLay, among others, and excoriated by various radio talking heads, still must sell himself to his fellow Republicans. They don’t like his willingness to work with independents and Democrats. This crowd may still convince Republicans to drink the poison, nominating the faux conservative Romney, who parrots the script, but who has no discernible political principles. If so, no matter who the Democratic nominee is, the Republicans will lose, even if the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton. There are simply too many YouTube videos of Mitt Romney debating himself for him to beat the Democratic candidate for president, who will be well financed in 2008.
But who might Romney ask to be his running mate should he be nominated?
Part of what any nominee strives to do when selecting a vice presidential teammate is someone who compensates for his deficiencies. This is precisely where the troubles begin for Romney. He has enormous deficiencies. There are three major ones which stand out.
Deficiency #1: Other than a few sparsely populated Western states–Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, he has no strong base of support. One might expect him to have some strength in the northeast, having been governor of Massachusetts. But he became governor there by portraying himself as something of a Bill Weld liberal Republican. As he moved through his one and only gubernatorial term and the 2008 presidential election, Romney cast himself as a conservative, losing the support of what might have been his base in a general election. He became so unpopular that, after deciding not to run for re-election, voters repudiated his legacy in the 2006 elections there, turning Republicans out of the State House. And neighboring New Hampshire refused to give Romney its endorsement in its first-in-the-nation primary, a place that should have been a gimme for Romney.
Deficiency #2: Romney’s Atwaterish campaign of slash-and-attack is out of sync with the national mood. This year, anyway, Americans are looking for candidates who uphold values like civility and a willingness to work with members of the other party. Americans are increasingly skeptical of hyperpartisanship. Embracing this mood presents both parties to do something which Ronald Reagan understood very well. Reagan expanded the base of the party. The Rove-ites, of which Romney is an obvious disciple, believe in “getting out the base.” Feed them enough red meat, the Rove crowd believes, and you’ll get enough to squeak by. Americans this year don’t like polarization and its resultant paralysis. Romney picked the wrong persona for 2008.
Deficiency #3: As mentioned above, Romney’s flip flopping leaves one wondering, should he select a conservative or a liberal or a moderate?
I frankly don’t know who Romney could choose or from what elements of the GOP coalition he could choose to help him to be elected as president.
He might want to pick a big state governor, such as Rick Perry in Texas or Charlie Crist in Florida, the latter of whom endorsed McCain this past weekend. But the problem with both of them is that they have no national security credentials, something Romney wouild badly need in the general election, even if the campaign should turn mostly on economic issues.
Sober-minded US Senators could help him on national security issues. But many of the younger GOP senators are so neoconservative doctrinaire that it’s doubtful they could help a GOP ticket which is going to have to present a slightly different platform on Iraq if it hopes to win in 2008.
Romney will have to be somewhat creative in selecting a running mate. A particularly creative vice presidential candidate may give him to change the subject away from his deficiencies as a presidential candidate. But even when Walter Mondale put forward the then-three term member of the US House of Representatives, Geraldine Ferraro, to be his running mate, the first female nominated on the ticket of a major party, although people were excited by the precedent-shattering event, it did nothing to alter the results. Ronald Reagan was re-elected in a landslide.
No matter how many gimmicks he may try–and Romney is a very able salesperson, it’s doubtful that he can win the presidency.
Mitt Romney may be a great person. He may even have what it takes to be a great president, as I believe his father George Romney surely did have. But he’s made so many bad choices, painted himself into so many corners through his cleverness and disingenuousness and created such a distastefully nasty image of himself, that the best thing that could happen for his long term presidential prospects is for him to lose the fight for the nomination in 2008, then do something that will cause the American people to invest him with credibility and see him in a different light.
Ultimately, I suspect, the American people, who have been tolerant of cleverness in their pols in the past, aren’t going to buy what Mitt Romney is selling this year. Not even Slick Willie or Tricky Dick could win in 2008. I doubt that Robot Rom can either, no matter who his running mate might be.
Pray that you lose this year, governor. You’ll be able to come back to fight another day. That won’t happen if you go down to defeat in November. In the country’s one-and-done presidential politics of today, you’ll have to kiss your presidential chances goodbye forever.