Is Romney a serious contender?

By Heraclitus

Although I expressed my annoyance with Andrew Sullivan in some comments to one of Michael's posts below, he has some good observations about Mitt Romney, particularly on his speech at CPAC. Sullivan notes that he talks the "theocon" talk, but will not be able to do a great deal about actual policy, especially at the state level, as president.

Still, his rhetoric on the judicial branch was vulgar: the usual boilerplate about men "in black robes" thwarting the will of the people. Has it occurred to Romney that the entire point of an independent judiciary is to thwart the will of the people sometimes? I get the feeling that large parts of the Republican party would rather the judiciary didn't exist. That's a strange position for true conservatives to take. But, as you know, I think true conservatives are increasingly rare in the GOP...

I know what the national polls say. I know he makes John Kerry look like a stopped clock on, well, anything. But he'll have an understanding with the religious base: I'll do whatever you want, give you the judges you want, and you'll forgive me for being a Mormon. He has no core principles, and they understand that. What matters to Dobson et al is results. They've had enough of men like Bush who are sincere evangelicals but useless in actually implementing the theocon agenda. Romney's their tool - and a very competent, effective one. And they are his tool. It's a solid basis for a political marriage. I think he's the most formidable long-term candidate on the right. Up against Clinton, he'd probably win.

What exactly Sullivan's evidence is for that last claim, I don't know. As governor Romney presided over one of the most massively wasteful public expenditures in Massachusetts history, the so-called Big Dig in Boston. The Big Dig went from being a joke and an embarassment to an episode of criminal incompetence reminiscent of our current President when the ceiling of a tunnel collapsed a killed a woman. I don't see Romney getting past this in a national election, though it is indeed unlikely that the wingut base would care. He's been travelling so much, even a year or more before this, that he was rarely in Massachusetts to govern. At one point, he was out of town and his lieutenant governor was at a conference for lieutenant governors somewhere in the Caribbean, so the state comptroller of someone like that was actually in charge of the state. Again, I just don't see this mixture of naked grasping and political amateurism flying in a national election. He left his home state in the hands of a bureaucrat, but we're supposed to trust him as president? So if Romney does win the nomination, I'm not so sure he'll sail as easily as Sullivan seems to think in a national election, even against Sullivan's bête noire, HRC.