The Economic Nationalist

It is still too early to be sure who the Republican presidential contenders will be in 2008, but the names showing up in opinion polls of sundry kinds just after the 2006 election seem to be John McCain, Rudolph Giuliani, Condoleeza Rice, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

Rice’s appeal, I don’t quite understand, so I won’t try to write about it here. Gingrich is a political and intellectual heavyweight whose well known libertarian-conservative views diverge from this blog’s, but his checkered personal history is equally well known and — I don’t know — he just doesn’t have that X factor; I can’t see him actually being elected president.

Giuliani does have the X factor. He doesn’t seem to give speeches so much as to converse with you straight from the podium. He is empathetic, strong, likable, famous, … a formidable candidate in every way. He looks like he is in poor health, though.

McCain has the X factor and the Q factor. (What is the Q factor? I don’t know, but whatever it is, McCain has got it.) He is the commanding political personality of the post-Clinton era. Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot, Bill Clinton, John McCain: politicians with the Q factor don’t come along very often. Like Perot, however, McCain strikes one as slightly mad. My guess is conventional: McCain probably cannot secure the Republican nomination, but if somehow he could, he would beat anyone the Democrats might put up, unless like Perot he suddenly self-destructed.

Pat Buchanan isn’t showing up in any of the polls. I don’t know whether he would like to run again, but he made his choice — an honorable but retrospectively mistaken one in my view — to run Reform in 2000. There is no groundswell behind Pat this time, nor has he suggested that he is considering running.

Then there is Tom Tancredo. Any economic nationalist has got to love Tancredo, but as yet he is not showing up in the polls.

This leaves Mitt Romney. I find him, by far, the most interesting potential presidential candidate. His health-care reform in Massachusetts is riveting. He has been married to the same girl since 1969, and like Giuliani he definitely has that X factor. An air of success, energy, accomplishment hovers about the man; and he does not seem in any way to be an ideologue. On the negative side: if you have heard Mitt Romney speak, then you know that his personality is not naturally warm, that there is a faintly mechanistic, synthetic quality in his presentation. As we are frequently reminded, Romney is a Mormon; but no one yet seems to know what if anything this means politically. Romney is not ranking very highly in the polls yet, but one gets the sense that he is the candidate Republican activists are turning out early to support. One keeps reading that Bill O’Reilly is practically already campaigning for the man on Fox News. What I want to know now is, is Romney an economic nationalist?

HJH

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Election 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.