One Of Them

by digby

I had a delightful conversation recently with a very smart and experienced political observer who told me that Romney would likely end up being the GOP nominee — he was the establishment choice, business guy, good brand, looks good on TV. The elites had signed off on him just as they’d signed off on Junior, Dole, Senior etc and that’s how it’s done.

Since a truly open primary on both sides is unusual (and Bush has badly damaged the establishment along with everyone else) it will be interesting to see if they have the same power they usually do. Rick Perlstein pointed me to this piece in TNR today in which Noam Scheiber discusses the history of GOP establishment dominance but wonders if it will hold up this year as usual:

In effect, the Romney campaign provides a near-perfect test of who really wields power in the GOP. On the one hand, conservative elites look at Romney and see a tall, good-looking, well-spoken, highly successful capitalist who, on top of all that–dayanu!–is willing to pretend he opposes gay marriage, abortion, and illegal immigration. In addition to Sekulow, Romney wowed the likes of Jerry Falwell and Gary Bauer at last October’s meet-and-greet with evangelical heavies. He performed a similar feat two weeks earlier in a meeting with the Baptist leadership of South Carolina. Romney won positive reviews this January at a conclave of influential conservatives sometimes called the GOP’s Renaissance Weekend. And he has thus far gained the admiration of anti-tax jihadist Grover Norquist, disgraced evangelical huckster Ralph Reed, Focus on the Family honcho James Dobson, and much of the staff of National Review.

On the other hand, the typical conservative evangelical looks at Romney and sees a dangerous cult member. As Amy Sullivan has noted in The Washington Monthly, there is a geyser of anti-Mormon sentiment just waiting to be tapped among heartland evangelicals. Sullivan cites, for example, the firestorm a Baptist leader recently ignited simply for apologizing to Mormons after a coreligionist called Utah “a stronghold of Satan.” Similarly, a prominent conservative activist recently related the following exchange to my colleague Michelle Cottle: “I asked a friend of mine who’s a pastor in Middle America, ‘You have a choice between two candidates: Hillary Clinton versus someone who is good on social issues and who is a Mormon.’ And my friend said, ‘I don’t think I could vote for a Mormon.'” And on it goes.

Suffice it to say, if Romney comes up short, it will amount to a repudiation of the party elite by the grassroots. I, for one, will have no choice but to concede that the GOP establishment isn’t quite the decisive force most Democrats (and more than a few Republicans) assume it to be. If, on the other hand, Romney clinches the nomination despite the intense suspicion he arouses, we will have unassailable proof that the GOP is dominated by its establishment.

I’ll put my money on the establishment every time. The Right is the party of authority and they will do as they are told. In my opinion the religious right pooh-bahs will also go along to protect their party prerogatives and they will assure their flocks that Mitt is one of them even if he is a Morman (or Rudy or anyone else.)

Choosing Mitt speaks volumes about what the big money boys really care about and what they think matters in campaigns:

If there’s one knock on Romney, then, it’s not that he’s a Mormon, but that he hasn’t sufficiently paid his dues to unite the GOP hierarchy behind him. The combination of a fractured establishment and deep hostility from a key part of the GOP base could be a potential deal-breaker. That’s why you see John McCain, the onetime frontrunner, attacking Romney as a fraud even as he largely gives Giuliani a pass.

But, in a way, McCain is missing the point. The people he has to convince aren’t the people who watch debates on TV. It’s the people who pal around with the candidates backstage. And they already know Romney’s a fraud. They just happen to think, in the words of a certain Focus on the Family patriarch, that “he’s very presidential.”

“Presidential” — the magic word evoked by panting pundits and Republicans alike to describe rich, white, conservative men who look good good on TV. “He’s right out of central casting” they exclaim! (In fact, lately, they are literally out of central casting.) But I would never underestimate the power of that “presidential” claim. People really do cast their president as much as vote for him (or her) and the press, being an integral part of the entertainment industrial complex, is even more invested in those values than the public at large. The GOP big money boys know all about this stuff — they are marketers and they hire spokesmen for their products every day. (In fact, St Ronnie of Hollywood made his bones as a mouthpiece for GE.) Casting is one of their very best skills.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in this race, which is unusual in that it doesn’t feature a true heir apparent. I guess the question now is whether Hollywood Fred is reliable enough for the money boys and makes a better spokesmodel. He’s the only one to make a profit at it, after all.(Rudy is a wild card too — if he maintains traction with the base with his drooling sadism, they can probably be persuaded that he’s crooked enough to do what he’s told.)

But old Mitt really is one them — a rich, white businessman who will reliably advance the interests of the tribe and that is what matters. After all, their boy Bush may have screwed up the whole world, but he delivered for them. They’ll back whichever candidate will do that the best.

The Dems, on the other hand, will have their president chosen like they always do — by the press, as it should be.

.