Newt vs. Mitt

Newt vs. Mitt

Your humble correspondent is having a tough time this nominating season. A couple days ago, I was reading the comments section on one post in NRO's Corner, and a guy wrote "sometimes he's great, sometimes I'm worried he's going to announce his plan for windmills on Mars." There's only one candidate in this race who this comment can be about, and it's not the guy with Stepford Hair®.

Fast forward to today, and sure enough, we're going to have a moon base by the time Newt is 8 years into his hypothetical Presidency.
I actually really sympathize with the guy. He has probably 5 really amazing ideas every day, and 10 disastrous ones. If he kept his mouth shut and put all 15 on notecards and re-read them in the evening, he himself could figure out which ones were the 5 good ones. The problem is that he just sorta announces all 15 of them at once. I'm not opposed to a moon base; indeed, I think it's a long time coming, and heaven knows (!) if we don't, someone else will. Nevertheless, Newt's biggest problem is that things like this feed into a public perception that the guy is a little too much of a bombastic dreamer, and not quite enough of a statesman. The deal is that Newt is brilliant. Really. The problem is that he's also just occasionally, well, bonkers, and has a tendency to light fuses while sitting on the firecrackers.

On the other side of the ledger, we have The Perfect Republican, who seems to have every advantage.
Private sector experience? Check.
Executive experience? Check.
Ability to compromise with Democrats? Check.
Calm, collected demeanor? Check.
Nationwide name recognition? Check.

But then, there's the inconvenient fact that no one likes him, and he makes George H. W. Bush seem like a wild-eyed visionary of the first order. Even the (political) assets he has have become liabilities. He can't seem to justify what he did in finance capitalism, or explain why wealth and investment is a healthy thing in a market economy. His executive experience has become an albatross of the first order, and negates the best argument the GOP has against the current President. His ability to "compromise" with Democrats has come off like an unprincipled stance on every issue he touches, and the calm outlook has revealed an Obamesque technocrat, rather than a discerning leader. But hey, thanks for the Olympics. We're sure you'll win Utah.

Whether or not Governor Romney is or isn't these things, the fact of the matter remains that people are in no mood to wait to find out whether or not he really is ready to occupy the White House. They want solutions, they want them explained, and they want them now. Moreover, we still have no idea why Governor Romney is running. Every campaign needs a narrative, something that ties in with a coherent idea of what America is and what it should be. Governor Romney has not provided that; Speaker Gingrich has an idea, but it often comes off as schizophrenic and disjointed.

Sooner or later, we'll have to see a Romney "vision." And voters will have to be convinced that a Gingrich vision is something more like the USA they know and love, and less like a sci-fi novel, even one where we're the Good Guys. Both frontrunners (I think) see America as a wonderful, dynamic place -- a land of opportunity and a long tradition that rewards those who work hard, play by the rules, and combine modern life with our rich cultural heritage to leave something worthwhile for the next generation. Romney will have to articulate that; Gingrich will have to limit it to that. We have seen the Obama vision for America; can anybody offer a better one?

Required Reading for Monday

John O'Sullivan, on the Euro crisis, corporatism, and sovereignty. Excellent post from Conservativehome.

Fight! Fight!

This is a fascinating essay: Kundera vs. Havel, 1968, just after the tanks rolled in. Kundera comes down on the side of optimism, yet concerned about further rocking the boat because Czechoslovakia is a small nation; Havel, on the other hand, calls for a more active Czechoslovak society, pointing out that

Really: if we are going to persuade each other that a country that wanted to establish freedom of expression --something that is a commonplace in most of the civilized world --and that wanted to prevent the omnipotence of the secret police, stood as a result of this at the center of world history, then we will not seriously become anything but smug fakes, ridiculous in our provincial messianism! Freedom and the rule of law are the first preconditions of a normally and healthily functioning social organism, and if some state tries, after years of absence, to renew them, it is not doing anything historically immense, but simply trying to do away with its own abnormality, to normalize…

As they say, read the whole thing. The Havel quote is better, but Kundera's no fool either.