OPINION:
The race for this year’s Republican presidential nomination has hinged and continues to hinge on the answers to two very important questions.
The first is whether former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney can expand on the support he enjoyed four years ago by winning widespread acceptance within his party. That question remains to be answered. He did “win” in Iowa on Tuesday, but he didn’t do much better there than when he lost the state to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in 2008. He won this time because the second question had been answered before voters flocked to their caucuses to vote.
That question was which of the other candidates would emerge as the most viable anti-Romney candidate. They all took turns in that role as Iowa voters moved from Michele Bachmann to Rick Perry to Herman Cain and finally to Newt Gingrich in search of someone other than Mr. Romney for whom they might comfortably vote. Each of those candidates either failed to perform adequately or for other reasons faded before caucus night. For a time, though, each of them drew more support in the constantly cited polls coming out of Iowa than Mr. Romney.
Ron Paul is not part of this list because he enjoys his own base of support regardless of the other candidates and didn’t seem to add to or lose that support as others soared and, ultimately, crashed and burned.
Finally, however, Iowa Republicans decided to give former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania a shot. In a sense, he was lucky that they alighted on him last and went to the caucuses before he had been tested, attacked and dissected by his opponents and the media. By the time the smoke cleared, he was the only arguably viable anti-Romney candidate standing, and as a result, he got the vote that had been shifting from one candidate to another during the past few months.
On one level, Mr. Santorum’s surge and near triumph is proof that for all the talk of how politics has changed, it hasn’t. Not even all the media money thrown around has made much difference. After all, he put things together the old-fashioned way. He didn’t have a lot of money, but he set about visiting Iowans wherever and whenever he could find them. He visited every one of the state’s 99 counties, not as a gimmick, but to win the support of Iowans one at a time while other candidates and their superPACs were writing checks to television stations or counting on their debate skills to carry them through. If nothing else, Mr. Santorum has proved that a state like Iowa is important because it provides candidates like him a chance to strut their stuff without millions of dollars in the bank.
His performance on Tuesday answers that second question. Michele Bachmann is gone, Newt Gingrich is mad, and Rick Perry is regrouping, but the anti-Romney forces have themselves a horse. Social conservatives are gathering this weekend in Texas to discuss “uniting” behind one “conservative” to deny Mr. Romney the nomination, and anyone who doubts the meeting is about anything other than boosting Mr. Santorum will be proved wrong.
For a time, it appeared Republican antipathy toward President Obama would attract voters who believed Mr. Romney might be the strongest candidate in November, but he wasn’t able to sell himself with that argument alone and didn’t successfully broaden his case to attract many of those leaning in his direction because they felt he might be right.
Mr. Romney’s problem is not that he is too liberal. His stated positions, after all, are more conservative today than they were when many on the right rallied to him in an unsuccessful effort to deny Arizona Sen. John McCain the nomination four years ago. It is that they aren’t sure he gets it or understands them. That problem was reinforced Wednesday as he stood beside that very same John McCain in New Hampshire, glorying in Mr. McCain’s support and hoping Mr. McCain will give him what he needs to win there and beyond. To conservatives, it seemed the ultimate brushoff, and it’s one they won’t soon forget.
Mr. Romney is smart and decent and might make a great general-election candidate and a pretty good president. He’s a far better candidate than he was four years ago, but that fact is not reflected in the polls or in the Iowa caucus results. What’s more, he’s more than just acceptably conservative and more of a limited-government, free-market conservative than the man he must now defeat. He has run an efficient campaign, but it may be that he and those around him are incurably tone-deaf.
Mr. Romney will win in New Hampshire and must be considered the favorite from that point on, but a tone-deaf campaign could make it difficult for him to lead a united party into the fall.
David A. Keene is the former chairman of the American Conservative Union and a member of the board of the ACU, the National Rifle Association, the Constitution Project and the Center for the National Interest.
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