COMMENTARY

GOP fights political battles you can't see

4/8/2012

Five political contests are being conducted right now. Only two are evident to the naked eye.

The first visible contest pits Mitt Romney against Rick Santorum for the Republican presidential nomination. The results in Maryland and Wisconsin last week tell us who has a commanding lead there.

The second visible contest pits Mr. Romney against President Obama. It began this month with their twin addresses to a convention of newspaper editors in Washington. Mr. Obama has a 4-point lead, according to a Gallup Poll conducted last week for USA Today.

Now to the three contests below the surface:

One is Mr. Romney's attempt to wrest control of convention delegates from Mr. Santorum and Newt Gingrich. This is a subterranean game Mr. Romney likely will eventually win, quietly, slowly -- but decisively.

The second contest is over the character of the GOP. It is part of the eternal struggle between populists and plutocrats.

This class struggle is the mirror of the struggle among Democrats between the circle around Franklin Roosevelt, rooted in the faculty offices of Harvard, and the Southern Democrats, rooted in county courthouses and in the kennels of the yellow dogs.

The final contest is over the nature of conservatism. It may look like the struggle for control of the GOP, but it's larger than that. The struggle over the character of the party is fundamentally conducted in the heart, the struggle over the nature of conservatism in the head.

The week that the founding father of modern conservatism, Barry Goldwater, won the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, political scientist Andrew Hacker assessed the new movement this way: "The new conservatism is the result of the democratic process itself; the widening of new opportunities for millions of Americans who have risen to a better location in life and who at all costs want to ensure that they remain there."

That description now looks antiquarian. Modern conservatism has an economic component and a social component. It is chary of government involvement in the economy, but open to government restrictions in social and cultural life.

Not since the 1930s, when the economy was ailing and Democrats were remaking themselves, has America had so many parallel contests. And during that period -- indeed, for much of the era between 1916 and 1960 -- Republicans snoozed. They put up worthy candidates with formidable records, but did not roil the waters.

Today, passions among Republicans run high -- itself a departure from the norm. When Republicans of yore held a shootout, it was over the identity of their nominee, not over the ideology of their party.

Now the party is packed with passion, but not necessarily primed for resolution. Indeed, the emergence of Mr. Romney probably postpones the resolution of much of the Republican dispute.

He personifies the managerial wing of the Republican Party, the strain that included Herbert Hoover and both Presidents Bush. But he is at best a convert to movement conservatism and, to some in that movement, a sheep in sheep's clothing.

While the 2012 primaries and caucuses likely postponed the resolution of the battle over the character of the GOP, they intensified the conflict over the nature of conservatism. Ronald Reagan kept it under the lid of the boiling pot, but it began to spill over in 1988, scalding conservatives to this day.

Mr. Santorum is one of the first Republican politicians to electrify both economic and social conservatives. But his hopes in the visible part of this campaign are dwindling.

Mr. Santorum may conduct his last stand in his home state, which ordinarily would be an advantage but this year may be unfortunate for the onetime Pennsylvania senator, who was soundly defeated in his re-election battle six years ago.

Santorum forces point to May for their breakout. The terrain then favors him and the issues will be in his wheelhouse.

But his campaign may not endure that long, in part because of Mr. Romney's diligence in one of the invisible contests -- the process of peeling away delegates that look as if they are in the Santorum and Gingrich columns but in reality are not settled.

There is a tropism to politics that favors the front-runner. Mr. Romney, who lost the Iowa caucuses in January by a handful of votes, will look like the triumphant conquerer of Iowa in August.

Subterranean contests count. Some of them last decades. Some of them choose nominees.

David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Contact him at: dshribman@post-gazette.com