Brooks: Romney can’t win in November

David Brooks has an interesting account of how Romney created himself as a presidential candidate:

The most impressive thing about Mitt Romney is his clarity of mind. When he set out to pursue his party’s nomination, he studied the contours of the Republican coalition and molded himself to its forms.

Earnestly and methodically, he has appealed to each of the major constituency groups. For national security conservatives, he vowed to double the size of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. For social conservatives, he embraced a culture war against the faithless. For immigration skeptics, he swung so far right he earned the endorsement of Tom Tancredo.

But, Brooks continues, though Romney has become the consensus candidate of the Republicans, the one who is most acceptable (or least unacceptable) to all factions, he cannot win in the general election, because the conservatism that he has so meticulously adopted is a thing of the past. Brooks is not saying, as he initially appears to be saying, that Romney cannot win because of the “PowerPoint mentality” with which he constructed himself as a conservative candidate; Brooks is saying that Romney cannot win because he’s a conservative candidate. As always, the main objective of Brooks, the New York Times’ token “conservative,” is to discredit conservatism and make it disappear. Brooks, naturally, is a big fan of Giuliani’s.

Striking the same note as Brooks, Huckabee consultant Ed Rollins said recently that the Reagan coalition is dead. In a symposium at National Review Online, most of the participants reply that the Reagan coalition is not dead.

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David B. writes:

Ed Rollins is a prime example of what is called a political consultant. I think I first heard this term in the late 1970’s. I first heard of Rollins as being a major political consultant for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign. Since then, Rollins has been a favorite guest on the Talking Head Shows. The hosts like Rollins because he is “non-ideological.”

Rollins was in the news in a big way after Christie Todd Whitman’s election as Governor of New Jersey in 1993, I think it was. Rollins was the “consultant” in Whitman’s campaign and gave an interview in which he took the credit for her victory. He told the interviewer that the Whitman campaign had paid black ministers in New Jersey not to boost Whitman’s opponent too strongly. This would supposedly hold the black vote down.

After this hit the news, Rollins was a media target briefly. He gave the usual mea culpas, claiming he was “drunk” when he made the comment. Since then, he has worked for the more liberal GOP candidates, such as McCain in 2000. This year Rollins is employed by Huckabee.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 03, 2008 11:35 AM | Send