Let’s not blame Bush for Romney

posted at 12:13 pm on January 4, 2012 by Karl

George W. Bush has enough to answer for without hanging Mitt Romney around his neck. Yet that’s a major theme of Erick Erickson’s rambling and occasionally incoherent post-Iowa rant:

The reason this Republican primary season is so chaotic is because George W. Bush failed to have a successor. Had President Bush had a Vice President to run for President, Bush would have undoubtedly made different policy decisions, but even aside from that there would have been an ascertainable front runner coming from the Bush administration to win or lose.

Because there was not such a thing and because the GOP likes orderly processes, we had to go back to 2000 and dredge up John McCain.

The Republican field was unable to reboot because we had no logical successor coming out of the White House to either win or lose. We went back to McCain and have had to work our way back through unresolved issues from 2000. And now, when the field should be rebooted, we’re having to deal with Mitt Romney who should have been displaced by an heir in 2008 and instead, because the 2008 season did not reboot the crop of candidates, is now the guy three quarters of the GOP does not want who is about to be the nominee.

Our process is chaotic because Bush left us no heir to win or to be rejected through a cathartic process of locking in gains or moving on from Bush. Yes, this one is Bush’s fault.

Erickson identifies with the tea party, but is he or the tea party really upset that big-spending, “compassionate” King George II did not provide a the line of sucession? Of course not, which is why Erickson ends up complaining “Bush left us no heir to win or to be rejected.” However, had Bush offered up a RINO Veep as common foe to true conservatives, wouldn’t that Veep have had even greater institutional advantages and been even more difficult to defeat than John McCain or Mitt Romney?

Blaming Bush ends up being part of a larger pattern as he bemoans Rick Perry’s loss in Iowa:

Had Santorum run a successful retail campaign and caught fire on his own accord, he’d have been vetted by now and probably also succumbed to the Romney machine. His campaign was not successful, it’s just all the others sucked so bad.

***

If Rick Perry drops out of the race it will be the ultimate failure of the tea party movement to see the race come down to two or three big government conservatives. Romney and Santorum both hide behind compassionate conservatism to expand the state to suit their purposes. Only Rick Perry has run a campaign to make Washington “as inconsequential to our lives as possible.”

If I were Perry, I’d wake up tomorrow, say I refuse to surrender the Republican Party into the hands of big government conservatives after all the gains the tea party has made, and then announce I’m firing all my political staffers and communications staffers and ask South Carolina to help me reboot to victory. Make it an Alamo stand and, if like at the Alamo Perry goes down, perhaps there’ll at least be a rallying cry for small government conservatism left over.

That’s just me.

Well, it’s likely not just Erickson; it looks like Perry is staying in. But anger and denial are not a substitute for judgment. Erickson paints Santorum as lucky, but luck is often the residue of hard work. Erickson writes about campaigns that “sucked,” but avoids discussing the central role of the candidate in his or her campaign. In general, I would prefer not to dump on Perry or Erickson for supporting him. My bias toward a NotRomney and my appreciation of how well Perry’s record of success contrasts with Obama’s failures is documented. But Perry in fact rebooted his staff once already, so maybe the problem is elesewhere.

If Erickson knows which Perry staffer told Perry to insult conservatives who disagreed with him on Gardasil vaccinations and the Texas Dream Act, he ought to provide a name. (Indeed, Erickson recently tweeted about all the email he gets from people whose big objection to Huntsman is his insulting the base, so he ought to get this.) Also, the names of the staffers who told Perry to botch questions from the media and voters — as large as which Departments he’d eliminate to as small as his favorite books — those names would be good to have also. The names of those who forced Perry to get in late and the names of those who stopped him from demanding to be better prepared? Yeah, I want those also. Pretty much anyone responsible for Perry looking like a caricature of George W. Bush when Obama is going to campaign on blaming Bush should be on the list.

I think everyone, with the possible exception of Erickson, knows whose name should be at the top of that list. If Rick Perry is the executive and man I have been led to believe he is, he would be the first to take personal responsibility for his failings as a candidate. Then again, Perry’s decision to soldier on to South Carolina, further dividing the NotRomney vote, may suggest I am again overestimating Perry. Or it could be Perry was persuaded that Romney really should be the nominee, on the theory that it’s better to win or lose with a known moderate like Romney than for conservatives to get sucked into another W-esque experience with big-government conservatives like Gingrich or Santorum. However, if that’s the case, the true conservatives may need to turn down the rancor toward Romney.

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