Scott Spiegel

Over the past few weeks, a controversy has been brewing between conservative commentators Ann Coulter and Mark Levin over the relative fitness of frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.

In her columns and TV appearances, Coulter has been stumping for Romney and stomping all over Gingrich.  On his syndicated radio talk show, Levin has been denouncing Romney as a non-conservative and bolstering Gingrich as a flawed but superior alternative.

The tiff echoes Coulter’s endorsement earlier this year of Chris Christie, before he insisted he wasn’t running, and Levin’s dismissal of Christie as a RINO.  In both cases, Levin has expressed contempt for the “Republican establishment” trying to decide the GOP nominee, though it would be hard to characterize Coulter as part of any establishment.

Coulter’s endorsement of Romney is a bit puzzling, when one recalls her animosity toward John McCain and her tongue-in-cheek threat to campaign for Hillary Clinton if McCain got the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.  Coulter argued then that Republicans do not win elections when they run moderate candidates, because such candidates appear ideologically weak against genuine leftists such as Obama.  On the contrary, because this is a center-right country, Republicans win when they run unapologetic conservatives such as Ronald Reagan, who offer a contrasting alternative to the Democratic candidate.

Coulter has reconciled this apparent contradiction by arguing that McCain was consistently moderate or center-left.  In contrast, Romney has flip-flopped and been inconsistent, but has switched from liberal to conservative positions.

Levin claims that Gingrich has a stronger track record as a conservative than Romney, including the former’s efforts to get the first Republican majority reelected in the House in 68 years and his implementation of welfare reform.  Levin warns that we can’t trust Romney to go to bat for conservative principles, given his spotty past.

I sympathize greatly with Levin’s frustration that we can’t seem to find a strong, consistent, articulate conservative this election cycle who’s willing to run, doesn’t have heavy personal or political baggage, and can maintain a double-digit showing in the polls.  I worry whether anyone we nominate—Romney, Gingrich, or someone else—will consistently stand up for conservative principles once president.

I’m no Romney fan, and I empathize with those who claim his major virtue is his electability.  However, the more I think about Coulter’s argument—or rather, my take on it—the more I think she’s right, but with one major caveat.

As Coulter explained to Sean Hannity recently, the most important thing we need our next president to do—among the many Democratic messes that have to be cleaned up—is to repeal ObamaCare.  The GOP can’t get rid of ObamaCare without a Republican president, unless they have a supermajority in the Senate, a majority in the House, and no Republican defectors.  None of this is guaranteed.  A Senate supermajority will be especially difficult to achieve, perhaps even more so than putting a Republican in the White House.

As Coulter noted, ObamaCare must be repealed as soon as the 113^th Congress and the 45^th president are sworn in.  One of the many compromises/blunders Congressional Democrats made in order to ram ObamaCare through was pacifying voters with a phony claim that the bill would save money over the next 10 years; they did so by having ObamaCare taxes kick in starting in 2010 but most benefits not begin until 2014.  This gave the GOP a leg up in getting the bill repealed—but it gave them only so much time.  Coulter predicts that once people start collecting their “treats” and federal insurance starts crowding out the private market, the bill will never be repealed.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments for and against the ObamaCare individual mandate in March; however, it is not certain that the court will find the provision unconstitutional, or that Congressional Democrats won’t find some way around the ruling.

Thus, if the most important thing for the next president to do is to repeal ObamaCare, then I would paraphrase William F. Buckley, Jr. and recommend that we vote for the most electable Republican who will repeal ObamaCare.  Assuming that all seven contenders would repeal it—and all have credibly pledged to do so—and that Romney is the most electable candidate, this suggests we go with Romney.  Other issues are important—but not as important as repealing ObamaCare.

The situation recalls moderate Republican Scott Brown’s battle against Democrat Martha Coakley for the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat in November 2009.  Brown’s win in liberal Massachusetts, and his swearing in as the 41^st GOP Senator—the one needed to block Democrats’ supermajority—was seen as a referendum on ObamaCare, because Brown had sworn to vote against the House’s version of the bill.  (Democrats cheated by using budget reconciliation to meld the Senate and House bills, but that’s another story.)

Brown ran on a platform of promising to vote against ObamaCare.  As I wrote at the time, Senator Brown could propose “a bill using Medicare funds to subsidize partial-birth abortions for illegal Islamist immigrant tax cheats with Al-Qaeda ties, and he would still be Republicans’ hero for having voted down the health care bill.”

Similarly, Romney could be squishy on all kinds of issues, and conservatives would still be grateful—as long as he repeals ObamaCare.

But here’s the caveat: Is Romney in fact the most electable Republican?  Will RomneyCare, and the fact that Obama cited it as a model for ObamaCare, do him in?  Will Romney be more electable than Gingrich, who formerly supported the individual mandate on a national level?

For those who find some issue other than ObamaCare more important, or are willing to risk not having it repealed for the satisfaction of running a preferable but less electable candidate, my arguments won’t be persuasive.

But for those who think that the #1 priority of the next president should be undoing ObamaCare, Romney’s electability is the pressing unknown that must be discovered.



 Print This Post

Related articles

• Meet Romney’s New Surrogate: Ann Coulter (themoderatevoice.com)
• Mitt Romney desperately embraces Ann Coulter (thanks, Newt Gingrich!) (dailykos.com)
• Sean Hannity Confronts Ann Coulter With Her Anti-Romney Comments From Last Year (mediaite.com)
• Ann Coulter: Tea Party Ignores Romney Because They’re Looking At Who Is ‘Calling [Obama] A Kenyan’ (mediaite.com)
• Team Romney mount an expensive but effective attack ad week against Newt (worldviewtonight.wordpress.com)

Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

Unless Mitch Daniels has an unprecedented change of heart or Rudy Giuliani lives up to rumors he’s planning another run, I’m throwing my support for the 2012 Republican presidential nominee to a candidate who isn’t yet competing.  Here’s why:

1. Republican gubernatorial candidates in 2010 did spectacularly well, mostly by emulating New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s style and substance on the campaign trail.  Christie is on the cutting edge of the Republican Party: Other GOP governors are taking his lead by standing up to public sector unions, refusing to raise taxes, declining to fund unaffordable public works boondoggles, and slashing spending.  Even Democratic governors such as Andrew Cuomo are following Christie’s playbook.

2. Christie has a talent that Donald Trump supporters wrongly insisted would make the latter a uniquely formidable candidate: the ability to take the fight to the enemy.  In Trump’s case, they meant his confronting President Obama over the trivial birth certificate issue, whereas Christie has been battling teachers’ unions in New Jersey.  But Christie’s fearless propensity to confront his current opponents bodes well for his future capacity to face off with a certain big-eared neophyte who stumbles off track without his teleprompter, and always looks nasty and petty when he fights back.

3. Christie is wildly popular as a potential candidate among Republican voters, a fact that gets masked by the fact that his non-candidacy means he’s excluded from many straw polls.  But John Zogby regularly includes Christie as a choice, and Christie took first place in all four of the primary polls Zogby’s run since November 2010.

4. Waiting until the last minute to announce his candidacy, after the current crop of candidates has had its sorry say, is neither a foolish nor an unprecedented strategy.  Confidantes say Christie is still considering running, but might wait to announce until after November 2011, when he may be able to help Republicans take over one or both chambers of the New Jersey Legislature.  Christie may also be waiting until passage of pension reform and other state legislation—i.e., until he has more fully secured his record of accomplishment as governor.  Anyway, in this country it’s always better not to appear to be lusting for power, more charming to be dragged kicking and screaming into office rather than appear to be drooling over the prospect like Gingrich, Pawlenty, or Paul.  I’m perfectly content to be despondent for the next six months by the presence of a weak field if it means Christie will enter the race this fall.

5. Christie has no patience for fools, of which there are plenty in New Jersey, but even more in Washington, where the stakes are higher.

6. Christie is electable.  He won the governor’s race in a heavily Democratic state that went for Obama over McCain by 16 points, despite facing a conservative third-party candidate and being outspent five-to-one by the incumbent opponent.  Though he claims not to be interested in the presidency, Christie has plausibly admitted, “I already know I could win.”  Fundraisers around the country are imploring him to meet with them.  Diverse conservatives from Henry Kissinger to John Boehner to Ann Coulter who know something about electoral politics have been begging him to run.

7. He’s articulate, passionate, and colorful, and makes fewer mistakes when speaking off the cuff than Obama makes when using his teleprompter.  In this amazing video—one of dozens of similar videos floating around YouTube—watch him slowly eviscerate a pro-union audience member’s loaded questions, rhetorical tricks, and sneering tone, to such a degree that by the end of his brilliant answer even she seems to be nodding in agreement.

8. All the other candidates have fatal flaws.  Most are too inexperienced or naïve (e.g., Cain, Paul) or slick and ingratiating (e.g., Pawlenty, Romney).  Cain, for example, is making the rounds of the talk shows bragging about how he has no foreign policy, while Pawlenty is already boring the nation with trite pronouncements such as, “We are going to win it, and it’s going to start right here in Iowa.”  In contrast to others in the field, Christie can use to his advantage the fact that he has a distinguished career as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey and two hugely successful years in executive government, yet is not a typical politician who says things just to make people feel good.

9. The Obama campaign is already investigating Christie’s background and trying to find dirt on him to intimidate him.  Surely we can’t let liberals get away with their lowbrow tactics yet again.

10. Christie has done a fantastic job as governor of New Jersey in his first term, and shows more promise than any of the other GOP presidential candidates.  His failure to run could cost Republicans the White House and hand Obama a second term.

 Print This Post

Related articles

• Listen: Chris Christie Is ‘Thrilled’ People Ask Him To Run In 2012, He ‘Just Doesn’t Want To Do It’ (mediaite.com)
• Obama’s Re-Election Campaign Digging Up Dirt On Potential Opponent, Chris Christie (nicedeb.wordpress.com)
• Mitch Daniels’ decision not to run in 2012 helps ex-governors – DesMoinesRegister.com (news.google.com)
• Chris Christie Reacts To Calls For Him To Run For President (huffingtonpost.com)
• Chris Christie Rebuked By New Jersey Supreme Court Over School Funding (huffingtonpost.com)

In the event that the imminent failure of Democrats’ socialized medicine bill leads them to some soul-searching—perhaps listening to what their constituents have been telling them all summer, or taking GOP advice to start from scratch—it’s worth noting that House Republicans have introduced 32 health care reform bills since the spring, all languishing in the referral stage.

Many of these lonely bills deal with just one or several aspects of health care reform, rather than offering grand, sweeping Ten-Year Plans that will change Health Care As We Know It.  Not all the bills are knockouts; a couple are downright stinkers.  But virtually all contain some good ideas, and some of them contain nothing but good ideas—which means that no Democrat will ever for a moment consider any of them.

For those desiring ammunition to counterattack the liberal slander that conservatives criticize everything on health care they hear from Democrats but have no ideas of their own, here’s a primer on the legislation prepared by our devoted GOP servants in the House:

•    Several bills are flat-out winners, including Clifford Stearns’ Health Care Tax Deduction Act, Michele Bachmann’s Health Care Freedom of Choice Act, and Rodney Alexander’s Sunset of Life Protection Act.  These laws provide for income tax deductions of health insurance premiums and prescription drugs; medical expenses; and long-term care premiums, respectively.  That’s it.  All three bills are so short they could fit on a cocktail napkin together and still have room for a list of Obama’s failed Cabinet nominations.  This is not surprising: bills covering what individuals are allowed to do for themselves require less verbiage than bills mandating what individuals are required to do for their government.

•    Marsha Blackburn’s Health Care Choices for Seniors Act and Louis Gohmert’s Patient-Controlled Healthcare Protection Act allow seniors to opt out of Medicare and receive vouchers for health savings accounts, an arrangement analogous to school vouchers (another excellent idea liberals oppose).  Edward Royce’s Flexible Health Savings Act allows individuals to carry over unused health savings account funds from year to year.

•    John Shadegg’s Health Care Choice Act eliminates restrictions on interstate governing of health insurance, the primary cause of the limited within-state competition among private insurance companies that President Obama keeps bleating about.

•    Two bills—John Gingrey’s HEALTH Act and Michael Burgess’ Medical Justice Act—enact malpractice tort reform by regulating lawsuits for health care injuries or deaths.  William Thornberry’s Medical Liability Procedural Reform Act sets up state “health care tribunals” or medical courts to adjudicate claims.

•    Several unobjectionable but minor bills extend benefits for veterans, reserve members, and their dependents.

•    A few bills would amend the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to supposedly make it more accountable; however, these bills give the costly, bloated SCHIP so much legitimacy that I’m automatically suspicious of their authors’ credibility.

•    Other bills have good intentions but will lead to more bureaucracy and regulation than they aim to prevent; for example, Thornberry’s Health Care Paperwork Reduction and Fraud Prevention Act, which proposes a “Commission on Health Care Billing Codes and Forms Simplification” to standardize billing paperwork.  No doubt the government will first need to establish a separate commission just to simplify the Commission’s name.

•    Thornberry has proposed two more bad bills (why do public officials who want to meddle in our affairs always invent so many devious ways to do it?).  One is the Partnership to Improve Seniors’ Access to Medicare Act, which subsidizes student loan repayment for doctors who accept Medicare patients; not specified in the bill is how much of our bountiful federal surplus we’ll have to dip into to cover this provision.  Another is the Patient Fairness and Indigent Care Promotion Act, which allows doctors to deduct for tax purposes any unrecouped costs from “patient bad debt”—because nothing increases accountability like providing incentives for doctors not to check beforehand whether patients can pay their bills!

Other GOP bills contain additional provisions, and many of the bills are a mixed bag; but the point is that they’re all better than HR 3200, which is putrid right down to its last period.  Considering even a few key GOP bills over the next couple of years would be a sound way to address individual components of health care reform, in a piecemeal fashion, rather than upending our economy right this minute just because Democrats insist on artificial deadlines to maximize their political gain.

In the meantime, the proper response to any liberal who claims conservatives have no ideas of their own on health care reform should be a resounding, “You lie!”