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June 1, 2011 |
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By Matthew Continetti |
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COLD OPEN |
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Right now Democrats are giddy. They think Republicans handed them a winning issue by voting for Paul Ryan's budget. As we speak, Democratic consultants are warming up the Mediscare machine. Reporters are asking GOP presidential candidates whether they support the Ryan plan. The Democrats want to convince grandma that Paul Ryan is going to abandon them.
Of course, around this time four years ago, everyone believed the Iraq war would define the 2008 election. The fight in Washington over the surge in Iraq was nasty. John McCain and Rudy Giuliani were at the top of national polls of Republicans. The Democrats were closely divided between Hillary Clinton, who would go on to talk about that 3 a.m. call, and Barack Obama, who touted his antiwar credentials.
And none of it mattered. The economy was the decisive issue. The financial crisis caught John McCain unawares. He had long said economics was not his strong suit. His slapdash response to the panic was unpresidential. The collapse of Lehman Brothers sealed the deal.
What will be the defining issue of 2012? Will it be a new war or something worse? I worry that another financial crisis might develop before Election Day. And if that happens, then discussions of Paul Ryan's budget will be beside the point. America's problems will be greater than those addressed in the Path to Prosperity.
No one knows what the future holds. But we do know it arrives unannounced. |
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LOOKING BACK |
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"Whether all the stories in Game Change are true or not, we do know that the authors' sources want us to think the stories are true. That's the most revealing datum of all. Game Change is much less interesting for what it says than for what it is—a town dump where awful people can unload unflattering and embarrassing stories about their employers, colleagues, friends, and subordinates, knowing that the stories will be published willingly by mainchance reporters and read avidly by a public that loves to have it bucketed all over them. Game Change is an exquisite construction built from betrayal and deceit. It is a precise rendering of the political culture of Washington."
—Andrew Ferguson, "How the Game is Played," from our February 1, 2010, issue.
Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe. |
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FROM THE DESKTOP |
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The Anglophilic David Brooks
Is Benghazi the most pro-American capital in the Middle East?
When historians attack
Don't regulate automated cars
Why uncertainty hurts the economy |
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK (SO FAR!) |
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"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy, then an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then it becomes a tyrant and, in the last stage, just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."
—Winston Churchill, Grosvenor House, London, November 2, 1949. From Churchill By Himself, edited by Richard Langworth, p. 49. |
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LOOKING AHEAD |
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Be on the watch for articles on topics such as gender politics, Henry Kissinger, and Medicare reform in upcoming issues of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. |
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PARTING SHOT |
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Last year Ramesh Ponnuru and Reihan Salam coauthored a great piece on "The Republican Class War". The GOP, they argued, was becoming segmented by education. Higher-educated, affluent Republicans tend to support candidates like Mitt Romney, whereas lower-income Republicans with high-school but no college tend to support people like Mike Huckabee.
Let me offer a different way to think about the 2012 Republican primary. Rather than dividing the candidates between members of the establishment versus Tea Partiers, or moderates versus conservatives, let's separate the populists from the elitists. We'll borrow Jeffrey Bell's definitions: "Populism is optimism about people's ability to make decisions about their lives. Elitism is optimism about the decision-making capability of one or more elites, acting on behalf of other people."
Needless to say, these categories overlap. A Tea Party activist is a conservative populist. A member of the GOP establishment is going to be less conservative than the median Republican and more likely to embrace elitist policies. Still, looking at a candidate through the populist / elitist lens tells us more about his leadership style than whether he went to a Tea Party or signed the Taxpayer Protection Act.
Mitt Romney is an elitist. Romneycare in Massachusetts is a top-down plan to achieve the goal of universal health care. His recent embrace of ethanol subsidies suggests he is comfortable with the government picking winners and losers. His decision-making approach—get all the experts in a room and have them come up with a solution to a problem—smacks of elitism.
Tim Pawlenty, on the other hand, is moving toward becoming a populist in the Bellian sense. He says he's against ethanol even though he needs to win Iowa. He is trying to establish himself as a "man of the people." His stand against raising the debt ceiling pits him against elite opinion. He's not a technocrat.
I don't think an elitist can win the presidential nomination of the Republican party in 2012. So the big question is which populist—Pawlenty, Bachmann, or Cain—will win instead.
See you next week. And don't forget you can write me at editor@weeklystandard.com.
--Matthew Continetti
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