Branding the Old Party
The event was already running behind schedule when Chuck Laudner made his way to the front corner of the Pizza Ranch restaurant in Boone, Iowa. He struggled to kill time as Rick Santorum struggled to reach the podium. Over the past weeks, Laudner, a former executive director of the Iowa Republican Party, had been introducing the onetime Pennsylvania senator across the state. At first it was at small gatherings little noticed by the media. But that transformed overnight. On Monday, a crowd filled every inch of floor space, forcing Santorum to slowly trudge to the front, handshake by handshake.
Laudner reiterated his standard pitch. “Tomorrow night at about seven o’clock, Iowans are going to gather,” he said. “They’re going to take two votes. At the beginning of the night, they’re going to take a vote and tell the world who they think the next president should be. By the end of the caucus, they’re going to take votes on all of those platform planks that create all of the things we stand for: life, family, American sovereignty, constituting limited government. It was my desire when I jumped on board this campaign to make those two votes match.”
Laudner is right. The Iowa caucuses aren’t just about winnowing the presidential field; they’re meant to define the soul of the party—and its platform—ahead of the general election. Yesterday’s results achieved the first goal, excluding the crop of candidates—Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich—unprepared to wage a national campaign. But the party’s soul remains in limbo. The final days of caucus campaigning revealed a divided party. The devil’s deal between fiscal and social conservatives that had helped advance each faction’s agenda is starting to disintegrate.
Last night counts as a loss for Mitt Romney. He might have gathered an eight-vote lead to finish ahead of Santorum, but that’s six votes fewer than in 2008, a year when 4,000 fewer Iowans turned out for the GOP caucuses and Romney faced a challenging field of competitors. But Romney still remains the inevitable nominee. Santorum and Ron Paul lack the infrastructure, financial resources, and broad appeal to fight for the nomination past the first several contests. For all the hand-wringing, the invisible primary of party elites should once again select the nominee, handing it to Romney.
This should be welcome news to any voter with the slightest interest in effective government. With the ascent of the Tea Party, the GOP has operated as a redoubt for fanatics more willing to watch the country burn than to stray from their ideology (remember the debt-ceiling fiasco?). Romney’s no moderate, but he’s not entirely off his rocker. He may want to cut the federal workforce by 10 percent, but unlike Rick Perry, he isn’t advocating turning Congress into a part-time body; he might appoint conservative justices to the Supreme Court, but unlike Newt Gingrich, he wouldn’t just ignore court rulings he didn’t like.
But Romney’s support in Iowa has little to do with his views on policy. He has refrained from any hint of policy discussion during stump speeches and town halls and makes no effort to hide that fact. “I don’t think I’ve spent a lot of time trying to describe differences on policy in detail between myself and the other candidates,” Romney said at a press conference Sunday in Atlantic. “But instead I’ve focused on the things I believe in and the choices Americans have to make.” At events in Iowa, Romney supporters primarily tout their candidate’s ability to win the general election or offer a vague explanation about how Romney’s business experience would help him in the White House.