Until now, Republican candidates have been arguing about which of them is best suited to defeat Barack Obama. The challenge now for Romney is to show not only that he can lead his party, but define it. Chicago Tribune |
Chicago Tribune | Editorial
We won’t predict any presidential nomination other than Barack Obama’s. his chance of emerging from primary season as the Democratic candidate looks good.
We will, though, project that the Republican nomination now is Mitt Romney’s to lose. Which he could.
That said, Tuesday night’s results from Iowa’s caucuses sealed Wednesday’s inconvenient realities for other candidates who have marketed themselves as anti-Romneys. As a group, their prospects have never looked as bleak as they do right now. Just as Romney’s prospects have never looked better.
Romney’s victory over Rick Santorum by eight votes statewide had pundits tut-tutting Wednesday the former Massachusetts governor hadn’t yet vanquished the rest of the field. File that under True but Off-Point: Romney finished first in a state where he was given up for dead.
The certainty through much of 2011 was that some other, not-so-stiff Republican — Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Chris Christie of New Jersey, maybe even Sarah Palin of Reality TV — would upstage Romney in Iowa: The state looked so foreboding to the frontrunner that for months he rarely campaigned there. When none of that materialized, the arrival of rootin’-tootin’ Rick Perry supposedly condemned Romney to a Texas-style hanging. Then came Newt Gingrich’s allegedly lethal candidacy, him burying Romney in public opinion polls.
Instead, Romney won Iowa — and he’s favored to win New Hampshire’s primary next week. Gingrich and Perry — we’d never say these two are “humbled,” but they’re running on fumes. Tim Pawlenty? Herman Cain? Michele Bachmann? Gone, gone, gone. Iowa did its quadrennial job of winnowing the weak, through long months of retail campaigning and one climactic night.
Romney, though, soldiers on, boasting one more primary season victory than many Republicans expected. We can’t be the first to nickname him “Landslide.”
What Romney can’t boast, though, is that he has won over the most energizing, arguably most energized force in American politics. Love them or loathe them, the so-called tea partiers have changed this nation’s policy discussions in ways no one could have predicted when the Obama presidency began. They shaped the 2010 election and aspire to do the same in 2012.
We say “so-called” because the tea party has evolved less as a neatly defined group than as an organizing agenda that animates many millions of voters. To the extent we dare generalize: These Americans see a growing and confiscatory government with a growing and confiscatory debt. They recognize that Republicans have overspent and overborrowed essentially as much as Democrats.
Until now, at least, they haven’t viewed Romney as a change agent who wants Washington brought to heel.
All of which now presents the Republican Party with great opportunity and risk: What will it be? And can any single candidate more than pretend to lead it?
If Romney positions himself as the unreconstructed Eastern establishment Republican he has been throughout his career, he invites a more conservative, third-party candidate to complicate the general election. If he tacks too far to the right, he frightens independent voters fed up with the most rancorous tea partiers.
The solace for Romney, of course, is that his winning the primary season would double, to two, the number of presidential nominees who need to placate their noisiest camp followers: Liberals upset that Obama hasn’t delivered the Utopia they expected are a reliable source of hectoring for the White House.
Thus far Romney has been patient, unflappable, unexciting. He hasn’t egregiously pandered to conservative extremes during the primary election phase in ways that would hurt him among centrist voters in a general election campaign.
In the short run, Romney still has to focus on Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who nearly tied him in Iowa, and Ron Paul of Texas, who finished third. Santorum came from nowhere, peaked at the right moment, and only now faces the intense scrutiny that other candidates haven’t been able to survive. Unlike Romney, he lacks organization, money and a game plan more elaborate than driving county to county in a pickup truck.
As for Paul, his strategy seems aimed at influencing the party and its nominating convention. We were charmed by his candor when Terry Moran of ABC News asked, “When you lay your head on your pillow at night, do you see yourself in the Oval Office?” Paul’s response: “Not really.”
Until now, Republican candidates have been arguing about which of them is best suited to defeat Barack Obama. The challenge now for Romney is to show not only that he can lead his party, but define it.
