GOP fight far from over

By SCOT LEHIGH

New York Times News Service

The Florida primary may be over, but the battle for the Republican Party isn’t — and, frankly, it shouldn’t be. After just four contests, the party hasn’t decided what it truly is, let alone who it wants as its leader.

Instead, the GOP’s id and superego are locked in a war of the roses. Mitt Romney is the safe, solid favorite of a Republican establishment that still believes in sober, cautious conservatism focused mostly on economic stewardship, fiscal restraint, and a strong defense. Author of an assortment of multi-point plans, Romney mentions them so infrequently he can hardly be said to be campaigning on them. At core, he’s peddling the same candidate-centric quality Mike Dukakis offered in 1988: supposed economic know-how and managerial competence.

Romney has never been an ideological crusader, a conviction conservative, or even a committed long-time Republican, which is why his occasional attempts to portray himself as any part of that comes off as phony.

To cite just one example from last Thursday’s debate, Romney has moved all over the map trying to explain why, during his days as an independent, he chose to vote in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary, where he cast a vote for Paul Tsongas. Under fire from Gingrich, Romney implied that was a way to vote against Bill Clinton. He has previously suggested that by voting for Tsongas, he was trying to boost the Democrat he judged most beatable in the fall.

On Thursday, he offered this “clarification”: “I’ve never voted for a Democrat when there was a Republican on the ballot.” That’s simply nonsensical in the context of his Tsongas vote; of course there wasn’t a Republican on the Democratic primary ballot. But in the GOP primary that year, both President George H.W. Bush and challenger Pat Buchanan were on the ballot.

The much more logical explanation inheres in what Romney himself said during his 1994 debate with Ted Kennedy: An independent during the time of Reagan and Bush, he didn’t want to go back to the Reagan-Bush days. Unenamored of either Reagan or George H.W. Bush, Romney was likely genuinely attracted to Tsongas’s socially liberal, fiscally moderate message. No surprise there; after all, that’s the way Romney himself ran in 1994.

His philosophical vagaries notwithstanding, one can say this about Romney: As governor of Massachusetts, he was a good and competent manager. That, however, generally isn’t the kind of thing that stirs heartfelt passion in the Republican soul.

If Romney speaks to the party establishment, Gingrich has come to conjure up the GOP’s rebellious, anti-Washington, anti-establishment spirit from the vasty deep. That’s passing strange in that the former speaker has long been a creature of the very semi-permanent D.C.-based money-making demimonde that Tea Party types distain.

Gingrich, however, has long understood the political utility of Henry Adams’s description of politics as the systematic organizations of hatreds. He is adroit at kindling the resentments and grievances of the conservative base.

While Romney usually uses the conciliatory language of an executive trying to build bipartisan support, Gingrich favors the language of bombast. Thus his description of Obama as a “Saul Alinksy radical” waging “a war against religion.” People, policies, and questions he disagrees with are “idiotic,” “stupid,” or even “despicable.”

As part of his base-bonding effort, Gingrich regularly rails against the “media elite”; contrived confrontations with figures like Juan Williams, John King, and Wolf Blitzer are a favorite tactic.

It will take more campaigning, more primaries, and more voters’ verdicts before Republicans decide what message and messenger they want. And in and of itself, a long primary campaign is not a bad thing. The challenge, however, will be in pulling the party back together afterward. The divisiveness this bitter campaign has engendered may prove hard to heal.