Tomorrow is Super Tuesday and, like many other conservatives around the country, I will finally get a chance to vote for my preferred candidate for president. But with just about twenty-six hours to go before the Minnesota GOP caucuses begin, I'm still not sure who that candidate is. I doubt if I'm alone in having mixed feelings and strong reservations about all the remaining GOP contenders.

But the time to choose is fast approaching and the way I see it now it boils down to a choice between an almost guaranteed loss in November with a candidate who--at least for the moment--adheres more closely to conservative principals or a possible victory with a candidate who regularly flouts conservative conventions and is driven by no real ideological principals other than what he happens to think about a particular issue at a particular time. It's a classic lose-lose with the real calculus being which loss is less damaging.

When Mitt Romney first threw his hat into the presidential ring I thought he had no chance of ever winning the 2008 general election. And nothing since then has changed my mind on the matter. I have yet to see one convincing argument that he is the man best able to beat whichever Democrat candidate he would face.

People keep talking about getting out the base, energizing the base, blah blah blah. The fact of the matter is that the reason the GOP had its clock cleaned in 2006 was not that the conservative base stayed home. This myth keeps cropping up, but if you look at the polling data from the election you will see that the main reason for the Blue Tide was that Democrats killed Republicans among independent voters (57% to 39% compared to 49% to 48% in 2004).

Conservatives may not like independent voters and may be unwilling to cater to them, but the reality is that without at least close to half of their support, the GOP will not win in 2008. Romney could get the base out like never before and still suffer a crushing defeat because of his limited appeal to independents. I'd love for someone to be able to convince me otherwise, but I haven't seen anything that would indicate that this isn't the case.

And whether conservatives like it or not, the reality is that McCain appeals to independents and even some Democrats. Beyond the polling and primary results that confirm this, I can attest to the fact that independents and some Democrats that I have spoken to have said that McCain is the only Republican they would even consider supporting. If it's a choice between Romney and Clinton, I could see independents and some Democrats who don't particularly enjoy the prospect of another Clinton administration holding their noses and voting for Hillary. But if it's McCain versus Hillary, they might just decide to vote for a Republican after all.

It's going to be a very very difficult year for the GOP no matter who the candidate is. With McCain, you at least have a legitimate prospect of victory.

Then there's the idea that it's better to lose with a candidate who shares more of your views than compromise for the sake of winning. I can certainly understand that position and in some situations I think it's the best path to take. Two problems this year though:

- The future of the Supreme Court is at stake. It's entirely conceivable that the next President will have the opportunity to name six new justices in their term. That will shift the balance of power on the Court one way or another for years to come. Conservatives have not always been happy with the outcomes of Supreme Court decisions in recent years and the pace at which the Court has tilted toward a more originalist approach. But it undoubtedly has and that tilt has allowed for slow but steady incremental success in a number of critical areas including abortion. Yes, we'd all like it to be faster, but we're moving in the right direction. Losing the White House will not only halt but reverse that trend.

- Romney is a good man with many fine qualities. But if I'm going to sign up for a sacrificial defeat of Goldwater-like proportions, I want it to be with a man of Goldwater-like convictions. With the prospects of a McCain nomination looming ever closer, a number of pundits are suddenly touting Romney as some kind of conservative standard bearer. Yet most of them kept their distance from Romney for all these months hoping for a real conservative to support. Why? Because they doubt if this latest incarnation of Romney is the real deal. There can be a certain nobility and honor in defeat, but not by going down with The Mitt.

One last point, what I'll call the JB factor. In the dangerous world we live in, you need a President with the ability, as JB likes to say, to "sack up." With all of McCain's shortcomings, there doesn't seem to be much doubt that he's got a pair worthy of a President in wartime. Romney? Well, as Mark Steyn mentions the jury is still out:

This problem is entirely of Romney's making. He needed a Mister-Moderator-I'm-paying-for-this-microphone moment, and every time McCain offered him one, with some contemptuous snarl in his direction, Mitt would put on his more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger expression and say prissily that he wasn't going to descend to personal attacks. It's never good to play to your caricature, and Mitt's caricature (as Kathryn well knows) is that he's an insipid technocrat Ken doll propped up by a lavishly funded campaign. I mentioned a day or two back the Powerline post about McCain's willingness to knee his opponents in their privates. By just taking it, debate after debate, Mitt gave the impression that, like Ken, he didn't even have private parts to be kneed in.

There are occasions in politics (and world affairs) when you need your guy to be on the giving end of the knee in the groin.

So all that being said, I must be voting for McCain, right? Not so fast. While my head is telling me that's the right choice, my heart just hasn't been able to come around to it yet. Maybe by tomorrow night it will. Or maybe I'll just say screw it and vote for Ron Paul. With no good choices in sight, how bad would that really be?

Labels: 2008 Election

Posted by Chad--Link