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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Jonah Goldberg
"If we could just take a little bit from each of them."
I've lost track of how many people I have heard say some version of this in the last couple of months. The "each of them" refers to the final four combatants for the Republican nomination.
You could take Newt Gingrich's verbal dexterity, encyclopedic grasp of politics and techno-optimism. Add in Rick Santorum's authenticity and religious conviction. Combine that with the essence of Ron Paul's principled passion for liberty and limited government. Stir vigorously and then pour into the handsome, squeaky-clean vessel of Mitt Romney (while keeping his business acumen and analytical skill). And voila, you'd have the perfect candidate.
Of course, you could just as easily have a Frankenstein's monster with Gingrich's verbal pomposity, Santorum's resentful and dour sanctimony, Paul's conspiratorial nuttiness and the full suite of Romney's Stepford Republican qualities. It calls to mind Homer Simpson's scheme to forcibly mate his pets in a burlap sack so as to create "a miracle hybrid, with the loyalty of a cat and the cleanliness of a dog."
This is one of the amazing things about the final four. The various factions of the
Santorum is the religious conservative, but he's a Catholic from Pennsylvania, not a Baptist from Mississippi or Texas. Romney is a devoted family man and business leader running as the authentic outsider, but he's a Mormon from Massachusetts who seems fake enough to be made from Naugahyde. Paul is the long-overdue libertarian in the
And then there's Gingrich. The former speaker of the House and leader of the Republican Revolution should be the elder statesman, the insider's insider. But he's managed to turn himself into the outsider who wants to fundamentally and profoundly change the world. He's a Southerner who converted to Catholicism with, as
This helps explain why
It's also why many are talking about a brokered, contested or open convention, even those people -- like
I don't buy it.
"You can make up all kinds of scenarios," Rove explained on "Fox News Sunday." "But in all likelihood what happens in the dynamic of the primaries, once somebody starts to win they keep on winning."
Except, as Chris Wallace dryly noted, "Here, nobody keeps winning." That's because Republicans keep voting against the front-runners -- because they don't like them.
The naysayers insist we're stuck with these candidates because that's the way things are, based on precedent and delegate math.
I see it differently. The experts have been wrong about quite a lot of late -- Barack Obama, the
If these four candidates are unacceptable to a majority of Republicans, they won't be accepted -- and something else will have to happen. What that "something else" will be, I don't know. But given the state of medical technology, a wild convention seems more plausible than sewing together the good bits from the current pack.
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