[Romney] has virtues. He is managerial and not a utopian progressive. If elected, he will for a time be mindful of the commitments he has made. He will fight for the repeal of Obamacare, for, If he does not do so, he will be toast, and he knows it. He will also work hard to put our fiscal house in order, for he really does believe in managerial competence, but I would not rule out tax increases. After all, he agrees with Barack Obama that those who take in more than $200,000 a year should pay more than they do now. If there are any openings on the Supreme Court in his first couple of years in office, Romney will probably nominate conservatives. But, after the midterm elections in 2014, all bets are off. Managerial progressives see elections as problems to be solved. They re-tailor their positions to the tastes of the electorate they expect to face (at least, as they understand that electorate).Even more problematic is Romney's lack of clarity on first principles, especially at a time when the public mind is turning against liberalism and open more than ever to the conservative argument:
Even more to the point, Romney is not going to make the conservative argument – and that matters enormously. When Lincoln said, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed,” he spoke the truth. In my lifetime, there has never been a moment when the American public was more open to the conservative argument than it is now. Barack Obama, his “stimulus” bill, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank have given liberalism a very bad name. This could be the turning of the tide. It could be the moment in which we begin to pare away at the administrative entitlements state. But that can only happen if we win the argument over its legitimacy. And if we do not make that argument, we certainly cannot win it. Nothing that Romney has said in any of his speeches to date or in any of the debates suggests that he believes that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the administrative entitlements state. It needs a bit of tweaking here and there. Expenditures and revenues must be brought into balance. But it is in principle sound. That is what he believes. That is the position he will espouse.
The reason why Lincoln is the greatest president is that during the greatest struggle the country has ever faced, he returned time and time again to the natural rights and natural right principles of the Founders. He began the process of recovering the public mind, which at the time was slowly drugging itself with theories of secession and slavery as a positive good. He knew the only way to argue against the evils of slavery was to base his argument on principles that are universal in scope, principles that existed before the creation of any government. Lincoln could never explain the wrong of slavery if he based his argument upon the opinion of the majority. He could never explain that wrong if he based his argument on possible "inefficiencies" that slavery posed (in fact, slavery prospered because of the invention of efficient machines such as the cotton gin). He had to go to the root of the problem. He had to explain why it was wrong for anyone to enslave anyone else without that man's consent. To do this is to go to the level of principle, something which Romney will not do publicly or otherwise, because if he were to do that, he would have to explain the wrong in principle created by Romneycare in Massachusetts--a wrong that is present no matter if it were confined within a single state or the policy of the federal government.
I will leave with this: it is important to remember that Rahe's critique, however, does not apply just to Romney: it can be aimed at most the presidents who served during the twentieth century.
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