The Republican voters of Iowa could not make up their minds. Months of flirting with different candidates preceded their decision to give Rick Santorum a moment in the sun. Hardly able to believe his own good luck, he could not help knowing, even in the euphoria of his virtual dead heat with Mitt Romney for first place, that he too would probably sink back into the obscurity from which he had only just emerged. He told his astonished supporters, gathered in a ballroom in Johnston, Iowa, ‘I’ve survived the challenges so far by the daily grace that comes from God.’ Romney remains the presumptive Republican candidate, having won in Iowa by eight votes, but suddenly Santorum looks like the principal alternative.
Santorum, aged 53, a rich lawyer who represented Pennsylvania in the US Senate from 1992 to 2007, depicts himself as the pro-family candidate. The Catholic son of an Italian immigrant, he is attractive to fundamentalist Protestants because of his opposition to homosexuality and abortion, and his scepticism about the theory of evolution. He favours a militant foreign policy against Islamists and supports ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques against suspected terrorists. American Muslim groups protested Santorum’s suggestion, in a November debate, that Muslims should be singled out for scrutiny at American airports. Gay rights activists have conducted a campaign of scurrilous abuse against him, while Hispanic groups resent his plans for a more vigorous blockade of the Mexican border against illegal immigrants.
A mere two weeks ago, Santorum’s tie with Mitt Romney and his victory over Ron Paul were unimaginable. Despite tireless campaigning in all of Iowa’s 99 counties, he stayed near the bottom of the popularity list. He admitted that one of the 380 ‘town hall’ meetings he conducted in the state last year was attended by only a single citizen. Why the sudden burst of popularity? When Newt Gingrich emerged in December as temporary favourite, mainstream Republicans began pouring money into anti-Newt TV commercials, denouncing him as a superannuated scoundrel. The ads worked, scuppering Newt’s candidacy and creating a vacuum that Santorum was able to fill. Santorum has not yet endured the wounding investigations that have harmed his rivals. Now an immense spotlight will be turned on him. Even if there are no skeletons in his closet, his policy positions mark him as a rank outsider, unlikely to prevail for long.
The near-tie with Santorum was far less pleasing to Mitt Romney (64), who had hoped and expected to be the outright winner. He can still reasonably expect to win the Republican nomination next summer, but it’s hard to imagine that he can beat the incumbent in the general election next November. Once a sensible middle-of-the-road fellow, Romney found during the autumn campaign that he had to move sharply to the right to win favour with the Republicans’ militant ‘Tea Party’ activists. They still didn’t quite trust him but he has been everyone’s second choice, the more or less steady frontrunner since last April. Apparently willing to say whatever the voters want to hear, however, he has gained a reputation for unprincipled opportunism.
Romney spent the autumn rummaging around in his own past for something about which he had shown long-term consistency. The only things he could come up with were decades of loyalty to his wife and an even longer fidelity to his faith. Unfortunately for his election prospects, that faith is Mormonism. At the height of the Vietnam war during the late 1960s, Romney was hard at work as a missionary in Bordeaux and Paris, trying in vain to turn bibulous Frenchmen into teetotalling Mormons.
Snapping at the heels of Santorum and Romney is the 76-year-old Ron Paul, the most consistently libertarian of the candidates. He is a genuine minimalist when it comes to government, outspokenly opposed to all foreign adventures, a foe of taxation and currency manipulation. Lots of other Republicans pay lip service to that idea, but when it comes to the point, most can’t resist seeking special advantages and subsidies for favoured programmes, especially those related to defence. They know that most voters reward the man who brings federal money back to his district rather than the man who declares, in a tone of high righteousness, that he offers them nothing but the opportunity to be free.
Paul came third in Iowa, with 21 per cent of the vote. The others, made jittery by his outspoken and principled remarks, had entered into a conspiracy of silence about him during the autumn. But they could not budge his hard-core supporters. Paul divides Republicans right down the middle. His isolationist views have made him anathema to half his own party, while his government-slashing approach to domestic policy repels virtually all Democrats.
These three frontrunners, Santorum, Romney and Paul, represent three sides of contemporary Republicanism. They also illustrate their party’s increasingly dysfunctional situation. To win the Republican nomination these days, candidates have to believe, or at least pretend to believe, the same things as their party’s most zealous Tea Party activists. Otherwise they won’t win the early primaries and won’t generate the publicity, momentum and funding that are vital to carry their campaigns into the spring. If they do give voice to these beliefs, however, even with fingers crossed behind their backs, they will at once alienate a huge part of the electorate.
Independent voters, a growing section of American middle class, don’t care enough to participate in events like the Iowa caucus but they will decide the outcome in November. Last time they leaned toward Obama and helped him win. They will never lean toward Santorum or any other Republican who’s on record endorsing the Tea Party’s list of no-compromise pledges. These pledges include a refusal to vote for tax increases in any circumstances, climate-change denial, ostentatious love of firearms, scepticism about evolution, and an attitude to state-sponsored health care that regards it as an assault on tradition and freedom.
Republican candidates this year are also required to say that Obama is a left-wing fanatic and that, on turning him out, they will drastically reduce the reach of the government, eliminate entire federal departments, and balance the budget. They are, in effect, standing on a tightrope, searching for language sufficiently militant to gratify Tea Party activists while trying not to provoke too much derision in the national press. They’re also trading insults and trying to shake one another off the rope. The insults reached a new level of intensity on the day of the Iowa caucus, with Gingrich bluntly describing Romney as a liar.
The run-up to the Iowa caucus was unusually volatile, unpredictable and engrossing. One by one, all sorts of unlikely candidates enjoyed brief popularity surges. One by one, investigative journalists cut them down to size again, or else they accidentally shone an embarrassing light on their own shortcomings. It happened to Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, who were caught short on matters of religion, memory loss, sexual harassment and influence-peddling respectively. Cain, former CEO of a pizza company, dropped out after exhibiting a phenomenal lack of knowledge about the outside world and as news of his sexual exploits became ever more damaging. His decision came as a blow to all satirists.
Meanwhile, many prominent Republicans declined to enter the race at all, among them Chris Christie, the popular governor of New Jersey, and Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, son of one president and brother of another. That was a source of regret to strategists who believed the party could rally around one of them more readily than around any of the candidates who ac tually entered the field. On the other hand, the spectre of Sarah Palin’s late entry into the race has been giving the same strategists nightmares. The brassy Alaska populist did nothing to help John McCain when she was his vice-presidential running mate in 2008, and she remains almost as clueless about the nature of the rest of the world as Herman Cain.
The forecast for all these Republican candidates is stormy weather, whereas Obama, who seemed doomed a few months ago, has started to feel the warmth of a wintry sun. Political commentators on the right speculate that there must be something wrong with the system. Actually, the current situation reveals just the opposite. James Madison, who drafted the Constitution in 1787, sought a system that would bring virtuous men into government, would entrust them with only limited authority, and would ensure that their ambitions were counteracted by the ambitions of other virtuous men. No one would be able to gain too much power or abruptly change the system. This year’s Republican candidates fail nearly all of his tests and none are likely to win.
Madison’s system has been working for over two centuries, well enough constructed that it still operates efficiently; flexible enough to incorporate such amendments as the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of women, and superb in its capacity to forestall jarring changes. Throughout most of American history, humdrum figures have occupied the White House. For each Washington and Lincoln there have been half a dozen nonentities, presidents like Van Buren, Tyler, Harrison, Polk, Taft and Harding, who are deservedly forgotten by all but the professional historians. There’s a lot to be said for their lack of charisma; what the system needed was caretakers, and this was the role they played.
Candidates are obliged, during the long campaigns of our era, to imply that they will be able to shape the future decisively. The reality is quite otherwise; presidents spend most of their time reacting to events, finding themselves hemmed in by circumstances, checked by the constitutional arrangements, and obliged to mollify conflicting groups inside their own parties.
The tedium of politicians’ lives is just about fathomless; no wonder they compensate with euphoric rhetoric and inspiring promises. Taking the long view, however, America has benefited from electing dull leaders. They have provided the unbroken political stability that inspired generations to immigrate, improvise, invest and invent, creating a resilient, productive and optimistic society. Perhaps eventually a candidate will glimpse this truth and campaign on the genuinely conservative promise of stability, incremental change, and conformity. But don’t look for such wisdom from any of this year’s crowd of Republican hopefuls; they just don’t have the imagination for it.