NYT
If the Republican presidential candidates go any farther right, they’ll be opening their town meetings by biting the heads off squirrels.
“Let’s kill the death tax!” cries Mitt Romney in New Hampshire, lashing out at that onerous levy on multimillion-dollar estates. “Let’s give the death tax the death penalty!” one-ups Rudy Giuliani. Coming soon: Let’s slice open the death tax’s stomach and burn the entrails before its eyes.
Meanwhile, there’s John McCain, snarling about how that children’s health care bill would require an unthinkable tax increase on cigarettes: “A dollar a pack increase for cigarettes? So we want to take care of children’s health and we want everybody to smoke?” And then Mitt tops the entire pack by confiding that while on the campaign trail, he spends his evenings reading the motel Bibles.
Nevertheless, the social super-conservatives are restive. Giuliani, McCain, Fred Thompson — what are all these ladies’ men doing in their primary? And while Mitt Romney has changed everything but his name in order to make them happy, a sizable chunk of the Christian right cannot seem to forgive him for being a Mormon. When Bob Jones University Chancellor Bob Jones III endorsed Romney, he couldn’t resist insulting Mitt’s faith in the process. (“As a Christian, I am completely opposed to the doctrines of Mormonism ...”)
The old guard of the religious right is terrified that if Rudy Giuliani gets the nomination people will conclude that the evangelical leaders aren’t all that powerful after all or — horror of horrors — that the evangelical rank and file are not obsessed with abortion and homosexuality to the exclusion of everything else.
Their affections are up for grabs, so all the Republican candidates betook themselves to Washington this weekend to woo the Values Voter Summit. (Social conservatives, having been so successful in appropriating the word “life” are now trying to commandeer “values.”) They’d been warming up for days. Down in South Carolina, Romney dismissed the United Nations as a total failure and called for the creation of a new world body made up only of countries that agree with us. Up in New Hampshire, Rudy made fun of Hillary Clinton’s proposal to give a $5,000 nest egg to every newborn American and asked his audience who they thought would qualify for that cash — “the children of illegals?”
Even Fred Thompson emerged from his cave long enough to make an appearance yesterday. Thompson’s tendency to look down and read his remarks provided the audience with some of the most prolonged views of the top of a bald politician’s head in recent history. When you feel compelled to use an index card for lines like, “We must have good laws. We must do our best to stop bad laws,” you have been spending too much of your life filming 30-second bits of dialogue.
Thompson wasn’t quite what the V.V.’s hoped for. (It probably did not help that it had just been reported that he said that he had no regrets about lobbying for an abortion rights group since it happened in “private life.”) While his campaign had the summit awash with volunteers, the candidate himself couldn’t work up any energy even when he was railing against abortion and gay marriage. Nothing worse than phlegmatic pandering.
Now Mitt Romney — there’s a man who can put the pep into pander. “I am pro-family on every level, from personal to political,” he told the summiteers. (Take that, Rudy.) He reeled off anti-abortion pledges — not just the requisite anti-Roe Supreme Court nominees, but promises to “oppose abortion in military clinics, oppose funding abortion in international aid programs and I will work to ban embryonic cloning.” He was almost as impassioned as he was during his Senate race against Ted Kennedy when he talked about the “dear, close family relative who was very close to me” who died from an illegal abortion and his firm conviction that “we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that.”
When it comes to flip-flopping, this year’s Republicans make John Kerry look like those early martyrs who had their tongues torn out rather than renounce even the most obscure tenet of their faith. Do the values voters believe Mitt won’t flip back again? Should the people who admired Rudy Giuliani’s refusal to sign the idiot no-taxes-no-matterwhat pledge just presume that he was being insincere (pretend-pander) when he promised that he would rule out a tax increase for any purpose whatsoever? Are his fans voting for the Rudy who thought the flat-tax idea was stupid, or the new one who kinda likes it?
And are they voting for the Mitt who refused to sign a no-taxes pledge, or the one who is now bragging about having signed it at every conceivable opportunity? (When this man says “change begins with us,” he means it literally.)
This is a sensitive point, you know. We’ve been burned before. There was this Republican candidate in 2000 who opposed using U.S. soldiers for nation-building and promised he’d never invade a country without an exit strategy ...
Bob Herbert is off today.
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