Maybe Mitt, like GW. Bush, is just a big Daddy's Boy. He's run his campaign, much as Bush has run his presidency, as though the only thing he had to learn from his father were negative lessons. GW. thought his father hadn't pushed hard enough on Iraq and didn't get mean enough to win re-election and a little off base to raise taxes. He was determined to not make those mistakes. Mitt saw his father labeled as a weirdo when he sought the '68 nomination and, at a time when he was a favorite for the nomination, told a Television station, "When I came back from Vietnam, I'd just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get," and that he no longer supported the war.
In his surpassingly disingenuous campaign for president, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has borne only the most superficial resemblance to his father, the late and former governor of Michigan, but starkly different political trajectories. Although he didn't actually march with Martin Luther King, George Romney was the kind of old-style Republican who strongly backed civil rights, became an opponent of Vietnam, and got axed as Nixon's HUD Secretary.
Mitt's campaign has run in the opposite direction: hard right. But until Michigan, his archconservative makeover -- from the fellow who promised to out-gay Teddy Kennedy to the terror-warrior growling about doubling the size of Guantánamo -- hadn't been convincing enough to help him carry a primary. But Romney managed to convert his familiar name into a victory tonight that (at least temporarily) saved his candidacy -- and plunged the already muddled GOP race into a kind of beautiful chaos.
Beautiful, that is, for Democrats.
The oddest thing about Romney's win is that it came in a state in economic crisis -- a place that you'd have expected to overwhelmingly reject a man who made millions as a downsizing consultant. You'd also have expected former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who pushed his economic populism here harder than his Christian Dominionism, to fare better. But there is no explaining Republican voters this year. Not even to themselves.
Huckabee's "Christian Leader" campaign in Iowa, while it worked for the unusually conservative evangelical Republicans there, undoubtedly made most of the independents and evangelical Democrats who might have listened to his economic message in Michigan tune him out for good. And when he starts talking out of the other side of his mouth -- like John Edwards holding forth on "the Two Americas" -- as he did in Michigan, Huckabee clearly confuses a lot of evangelical Republicans as well. He's echoing what many of them have told pollsters for years -- that they're a lot less conservative on economic issues than on the moral wedges -- but it's still a drastically new message, and thus a bit suspicious-sounding. Huckabee's more pragmatic problem in Michigan, of course, was that he couldn't match Romney's months of organizing and advertising, or John McCain's familiarity with the folk he wooed successfully in 2000.
