Purge the Party Now; Win in 2016
BY ERICK ERICKSON
The internecine fights we are witnessing are about a conservative movement starting to separate itself again from the Republican Party. Unfortunately, neither of the front runners has legitimate conservative integrity to claim the banner of conservative movement leader, but they will both try. Mitt Romney will hold the banner for conservatives within the GOP, and Newt Gingrich will hold the banner of the traditional alliance of conservatives without.
Conservatives will probably need one more election cycle either fighting an incumbent Republican President or starting over in 2016 with a fresh, clean slate purged of potential heirs to the Bush years to finally decide whether the movement will stay fully entwined with the GOP as an organ of the party or transition back to its traditional place as a key player within the GOP but with truly independent identity.
Erickson blogs at RedState.com
BY RICH LOWRY
This isn't a crisis; it's a primary. A dispiriting one, to be sure, but it shouldn't obscure the significant strengths of contemporary conservatism.
The historic 2010 elections that produced a conservative majority in the House led to the passage in that chamber of a genuinely transformational budget in the form of the Ryan plan. Every Republican presidential candidate swung around some version of that plan, the centerpiece of a partywide policy consensus that is to the right of any other in recent memory. There are robust conservative alternative media across all platforms, a mature network of national and state-based think tanks and an aroused grassroots movement that sprang up spontaneously in 2009 and breathed life into a GOP discredited by the decadent phase of the Bush years and devastated by its defeat in the Obama sweep. American public opinion is broadly conservative and highly distrustful of the federal government. If this is a crisis, every ideological movement should want to suffer one.
About that primary: it is generating more heat than light. Romney has all the hallmarks of a classic Establishment Republican and Gingrich of a conservative upstart. But neither is challenging the triad of postwar conservatism consisting of limited government, traditionalism on social issues and a muscular national defense. The starkest differences between the two have to do with style and background. Surely, Romney is not the presidential candidate Tea Partyers had in mind when their uprising began. Yet his candidacy tells us something about the historic rightward trend in the party. Here is the son of George Romney, a Rockefeller Republican in good standing, running to be the champion of a thoroughly Reaganite party.
The domestic priorities for a Republican President have already been teed up: repeal Obamacare, sign the Ryan budget, and--although this isn't as fleshed out--reform taxes. Should these happen, it would reverse liberalism's major gains from 2009 to 2010 and headline what would be the most consequential period of conservative reform since Reagan.
Lowry is the editor of National Review
Not a Stake But a Say
BY NICK GILLESPIE