My last post was about how the fractured nature of the Republican party will lead to its loss in November, is proving more true each day. Just today, the tea-party favorite former U.S. senate candidate Christine O’Donnell decided to endorse moderate establishment candidate Mitt Romney. This move was clearly made politically, but will it play well with the tea-party conservative voters who are hoping to nominate anyone but Romney? Not quite.
Romney represents everything the tea-party has hoped to cleanse the Republican party of. There is no single Republican that better embodies the D.C. GOP elite than the former Massachusetts Governor. When the tea-party staged their congressional revolution in 2010, it was in hopes of removing these neo-conservatives from power after their extreme frustration with the President’s healthcare overhaul.
Mitt Romney’s healthcare law in Massachusetts was the model for the President’s overhaul, and it is for that reason that the tea-party has had such difficulty warming up to him. O’Donnell correctly sees that Romney truly is the only chance the GOP has of beating the President in November. Her hope is that an early endorsement will allow her supporters the opportunity to warm up to him through her, but that will be a difficult task.
Likely, the voters that put O’Donnell’s tea-party friends in office in 2010 will become disengaged. The only hope the GOP has of winning is to bring in a candidate that con both assuage the establishment party-goers as well as the tea-partiers. Mitt Romney is not the ideal candidate for either of these tasks. His lack of conservative credentials makes him a target for the tea-party, yet every step he makes to prove his credentials to these radicals pushes him farther away from the moderates in his own party
Romney’s strategy this season is to try and stay quiet so that neither sect of the GOP will have ammunition against him. But with Gingrich, who is this week’s tea party favorite, in the lead, it is hard to stay silent. Romney is having to respond to attacks from Newt on the right and Obama on the left, which is leaving him vulnerable and weak as a candidate.
But Romney is the GOP’s best chance. The tea-party radicals are more likely to turn out for a bad GOP candidate (in their opinion) than the moderate wing of the party is for a tea-party backed candidate. But unless Romney is allowed to start moving back toward the center soon, it is likely that he will have done irreparable harm to his standing with moderate Republicans and Independents. The longer this primary season drags on, the more he will need to pretend to be a radical conservative, the more he risks blowing it in November.
If the other GOP primary contenders knew what was good for their party, they would get out of Romney’s way. Allowing him to begin moving toward the middle soon would assure victory for the party over Obama in November. The more he is forced to pander to the tea-party base, the more of a flip-flopper he will look like during the debates against Obama as they race for the middle.
Meanwhile, the President is continuing to build his credentials as a moderate and bank on an improving economic forecast over the coming months. As Romney continues to descend into self-destructive sound bytes, the President is hoping that Gingrich’s momentum will carry him through the primary and set up November to be an easy choice for Independent’s between acidic has-been Newt Gingrich and the proven leader Barack Obama.
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