In taking down Mitt Romney this morning, David Brooks had a good line that I hope is true.
As Walter Mondale was the last gasp of the fading New Deal coalition, Romney has turned himself into the last gasp of the Reagan coalition.
Actually, I don’t care if Romney is the last gasp, or Huckabee, or McCain, or Thompson…just so long as it is the last gasp of the Reagan coalition.
Brooks’ overall point was that the Mittster is totally, irredeemably unelectable in November and so GOP caucus goers should look elsewhere (wink…wink…McCain…nudge…nudge). It’s actually pretty good advice.
If the Republicans in Iowa are going to base their votes on electability, then they should caucus for a Democrat.
In a group of candidates composed of the delusional and the lying, McCain becomes attractive by default.
I think McCain is their best chance to win the general election, and that’s why we’re seeing voters nudged in that direction. The others are either completely nuts, criminals, morons, or some combination of all three.
An interesting column by Brooks. He does write them occasionally–I wonder if we will see a single interesting column by Kristol. I doubt it.
One of the paragraphs I found most illuminating, even though it is somewhat off the main point, was this one:
“And yet as any true conservative can tell you, the sort of rational planning Mitt Romney embodies never works. The world is too complicated and human reason too limited. The PowerPoint mentality always fails to anticipate something. It always yields unintended consequences.”
This helps one to understand how an otherwise smart-seeming person like Brooks can worship a clearly un-smart man like Bush. If intelligence “never works”, then one is left with gut feeling, and the thing to admire in a politician is not rationality, but irrationality, which Bush has in spades. Furthermore, if reason never works, then we can solve the world’s problems, so why try?