Matthew Bondy

January 19, 2011

My latest from the Guelph Mercury

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Ready, aim, misfire.

When asked by the moderators of the Fox News Republican debate in South Carolina on Monday whether he’s taken in any hunting since his last presidential bid, former Massachusetts governor and presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s gun fell silent.

“I went moose hunting – not moose hunting, I’m sorry, elk hunting – with friends in Montana,” he said. “I’ve been pheasant hunting. I enjoy the sport and when I get invited I’m delighted to be able to go hunting.”

This son of privilege, this northeastern pragmatist, this venture capitalist, is “delighted” to go hunting.

Of course, your average conservative Republican — especially when he’s on about his guns — doesn’t talk like that. Richard Nixon’s archetypal “Joe Six Pack” voter doesn’t talk like that. Feelings of unrestrained delight are for royals and dandies and the la-di-da crowd.

And rich guys.

Romney’s rich-guy persona continues to widen the cultural gap between himself and the folks doing the voting in November.

For example, only a rich guy cozies up to voters in the key primary state of New Hampshire by reminding folks he and his (perfect) family have a summer house — not a cottage, mind you, a summer house — in the Granite State.

Only a rich guy fluffs off his earnings from the speaker’s circuit — he typically pulled in about $40,000 per jibber-jabber — as “not much” when asked about his annual income.

Only a rich — or pampered, or timid or temperamental — guy would whine to debate moderators to intervene when his opponents land a rhetorical punch and follow it up with a little rough and tumble.

And only a rich guy would challenge a debate partner, on live cable news, to a $10,000 bet over competing versions of the truth.

Of course, Romney’s problem isn’t that he’s rich. Romney’s problem is that these missteps and many others signal a tin political ear and an inability to fit in with those “real” Americans that wealthy politicians often talk about but seldom understand.

Knowing that, one suspects that the Republican brain trust is earnestly searching out a running mate that can bring out the best and most personable in their candidate. Romney needs a vice-presidential sidekick that can help His Richness tone down the hoity-toity and connect with average Americans at the gut level.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, an early and energetic Romney supporter, probably and properly sits atop the shortlist. Christie is everything that Romney’s not, in the former’s ability to speak plain American English and engage voters in a remarkably authentic way.

Christie’s personality would not only balance against Romney’s, but may prove so infectious that it actually brings out the normal in the Massachusetts governor, helping prospects with middle class voters in the electorally rich regions of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and other competitive states.

If Romney’s personality wasn’t so impressively liable to turn off American voters, Christie might not be the right choice. Christie, like Romney, is a northeastern moderate; and Christie fails a key VP-candidate litmus test in that he can’t obviously deliver a major swing state like, for example, Republican Senator Marco Rubio might be able to deliver Florida.

But Christie might help Romney in a way that is more important, and more fundamental, than any other political calculation: he might help Mitt Romney become the kind of candidate you’d want to sit down and have a beer with.

And, hey, at least he’s buying.

November 17, 2011

My latest from the Guelph Mercury

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Nominate the most electable conservative. To the late William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the popular National Review magazine and America’s most consequential conservative intellectual of the last century, it was that simple.

Simple, it surely is. But easy, surely not — at least not in the realm of Republican primary politics, where presidential candidates need the support of their party’s base, which is anchored significantly to the right of the centre.

So who’s electable?

Of the entire bevy — which includes several governors, a former House speaker, several House members, a former senator and retired pizza restaurant magnate — only a few satisfy the criterion of electability.

Mitt Romney, a weak front-runner stuck at about 25 per cent support among Republican primary voters, checks this box. He looks and sounds like a president, whatever that means. He’s a successful Republican governor from Massachusetts, which gives him cred with the Democrat-leaning industrial states in the northeast and midwest, and he’s a polished operator – suspiciously so, to some – who rarely makes big gaffes or gets thrown off message.

Arguably the only other contender with serious national viability is former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who also served as U.S. ambassador to China. Along with Newt Gingrich (see: conservative, not electable) he is an intellectual heavyweight, and his foreign policy expertise and executive experience make him a genuinely qualified presidential candidate.

Who’s conservative?

It depends on what the word means in its application to the Republican party of 2011. If conservative means right-wing to the point of caricature and recklessly partisan, then there’s quite the line-up. Former House speaker Gingrich fits the bill, as does congresswoman Michelle Bachman, former restaurateur Herman Cain, and sitting Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

If conservative means traditionalist on social issues and hawkish on foreign policy, you’re looking at Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, whose national electability is aptly measured by his current poll standing of about three per cent. Or, if you mean conservative in the sense of heeding America’s long-standing opposition to government intervention in citizens’ lives and in the marketplace, then you’ve got yourself the admirable but unelectable-on-spec Ron Paul, a congressman of Texas.

So if the so-called conservatives aren’t electable, are the electables conservative?

Again, it depends what you mean. Romney has been accused of flip-flopping more than once. His former liberalism on social issues — he once ran to the left of Ted Kennedy on social issues in a Massachusetts senate election — is not forgotten by the party’s very active and influential evangelical constituency. But he ran a solid campaign for the Republican presidential nod in 2007-2008, and his policy positions on key issues of conscience, economics and foreign policy have been tightly aligned with the conservative consensus at least since the beginning of his post-gubernatorial political career.

Huntsman is a conservative more in the traditional sense than in the rigid, purist, tea party sense. He favours facts on the ground over air-tight ideologies on issues ranging from national security decision-making to climate change. His approach is incrementalist, as inclusive as possible, and imbued with the conventional trappings of statesmanship not often seen and less often praised in modern American politics; virtues like magnanimity, fair-mindedness and intellectual acuity.

Huntsman is also — sadly for America and embarrassingly for the Republican party — polling only marginally above absolute zero.

If Romney clinches the Republican nomination, Buckley’s rule will have been satisfactorily applied, as Romney passably, but only passably, meets the broadest range of criteria as an electable conservative.

If Huntsman were to rally and roar to the top of the party ticket, something greater even than the electoral prescription of Buckley will have been served: the restoration of American conservatism itself.

October 20, 2011

My latest from the Guelph Mercury

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Blame the mess he inherited. Blame the financial crisis. Blame the Republicans if it makes you feel better. But whatever the root cause, make no mistake about the corresponding effect: U.S. President Barack Obama’s incumbency is unusually vulnerable heading into the 2012 election cycle.

Like him or not — and most like him — the core electoral metrics aren’t shaping up for the president.

For starters, Republicans don’t fear him. Sounds petty, maybe, but that’s life, and that’s politics.

The increasingly far-right and populist Republican party rarely even dignifies Obama with a tough, fair-minded negotiation any more.

During the debt ceiling debacle this summer — during which Obama repeatedly said he was prepared to take “significant heat” from his own party to strike a grand deal on deficit reduction and entitlement reform — the GOP, led by House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, responded with one simple syllable: “No.”

And when Obama sought permission from Congress to deliver an address on jobs and the economy — the commander in chief technically can only give a speech to congress if he’s invited, even speeches like the state of the union — Speaker John Boehner expressed an only slightly more elegant disinclination to oblige his president.

In both instances Obama could have thrown a punch but didn’t.

Lately, he’s been more fiery and confrontational, but most of it has backfired already. He recently addressed the congressional black caucus, and told them — to their very mixed subsequent reaction — to stop complaining about his presidency’s lack of progress.

It was like watching a Quaker driving a tank. He gave the “tough” thing a shot and ended up hurting himself.

But the lack of an Obama fear factor in Washington isn’t the only troubling measure of Obama’s electoral prospects. The economy is still in the tank, and historically, presidents don’t make re-election with a national unemployment rate of eight per cent or higher.

The U.S. continues to register poor growth and historic market volatility, and incredibly inconveniently for the president, the European debt crisis is hanging over the U.S. financial sector like the sword of Damocles. Pair that up with the business community’s reluctance to make new investments and new hires due to uncertainty over the administration’s plan to raise taxes on certain segments of society, and you’ve got a recipe for flat or negative medium term growth.

But it’s not all bad news. Obama has performed well on security, blunting what is normally a Republican advantage.

Obama has drawn America’s profile and investment in Iraq down to new lows. He personally assembled and continues to oversee a strategy to preserve gains and reduce exposure in Afghanistan. He’s been remarkably tough and aggressive on terror, and he’s moved the Democratic party rhetorically and conceptually in line with the realist-based school of foreign policy normally associated with tough, hard-headed conservative policy-makers.

As we head toward the 2012 cycle, the presidency is very much up for grabs, with Obama ahead on security, behind on moral authority, vulnerable on the debt issue, and with Americans feeling generationally weak as a nation and an economic community.

Soon — either just before the Republicans declare a nominee or immediately after — the GOP’s line of attack will start to emerge.

Watch for the Republicans to hammer away on Obama’s high-tax, high-spend, high-debt Democratic profligacy, and for Obama to defend himself on the basis of extraordinary circumstances calling for extraordinary fiscal measures and a long-term vision for fundamental economic change.

And then watch the American people ask the only timeless and universal political question: “Which is worse?”