The US presidential campaign of 2008 proved so enthralling that on Saturday, HBO aired a movie, Game Change, based on a single, small aspect of it: the travails of then-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, as recreated by Julianne Moore. This year’s battle could never hope to compete with the drama of four years ago, with its epic struggle of Barack Obama versus Hillary Rodham Clinton, pitting two historic firsts against each other. However, the current Republican primary contest might nevertheless have movie potential — if only for Comedy Central.
The race has produced no end of laughs, most recently multimillionaire and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s attempts to come across as a regular Joe. The latest was his admission that, while not himself a fan of NASCAR racing — a sport that plays big in the white, male, lower-income demographic — “I have some friends who are NASCAR team owners.”
Earlier he had sought to ingratiate himself with a Detroit audience by boasting that, as a good patriot, he drove US cars and that his wife even drove “a couple of Cadillacs.” Short of wearing an “I am the 1 percent” T-shirt, it’s hard to know how he could have got it more wrong.
Still, the best Romney joke is not by him, but about him: “A conservative, a liberal and a moderate walk into a bar. The bartender says: ‘Hi, Mitt.’”
And yet if that gag applies to Romney, it also applies to his entire party.
Last week’s Super Tuesday, in which Romney squeaked ahead, revealed a Republican Party that is deeply, even structurally divided. The personality quirks of this second-rate field have hidden the extent to which the four remaining candidates represent distinct strands within Republicanism that are proving impossible to reconcile.
Romney is the embodiment of country-club Republicanism, patrician, fiscally conservative, faithful to Wall Street, with roots in the more liberal northeastern US. Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum speaks for theo-conservatives, who share his regret that the Supreme Court legalized contraception in 1965 and that so many women now work outside the home.
Former US House speaker Newt Gingrich is a skilled exploiter of the culture wars, though that sits alongside what the Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum calls “techno-optimism,” typified by Gingrich’s fantasies about colonizing space. And lastly there is US Representative Ron Paul’s undiluted libertarianism. If the Republican Party cannot settle on one of these four candidates, it’s partly because it cannot settle on any one of the four creeds they represent.
The party is divided along almost every axis, by religion, class and region — with Romney, the Mormon millionaire from Massachusetts on the wrong side of each line. In the past, Republicans have suppressed those divisions in order to rally behind a candidate whom they believed could win. However, this year, with the party selectorate now dominated by hardcore conservatives, they are unwilling to make that compromise.
The result, says Applebaum — who describes herself as a former Republican — is that the party is caught demanding “incompatible, impossible things”: ever-lower taxes, but higher military spending and untouched entitlements, especially for the elderly. It wants government to stay out of, say, the auto industry (Romney), but to get into the bedroom (Santorum). The tension between these positions is getting unbearable, with only a dogmatic loathing of the very idea of government to unite them.
When the UK’s Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron travels to the US next week, doubtless removing his jacket and rolling up his sleeves to watch a game of college basketball in Dayton, Ohio, with Obama, he will comfort himself that such headaches are an ocean away. And yet this week laid bare the divisions which — while lacking the lurid colors of the Republican fight — increasingly mark his own party.
A telling edition of BBC TV’s Newsnight show brought together a Conservative-only panel to debate the proposed mansion tax. In one corner, MP for North East Somerset Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose very speech patterns signal a traditional Toryism that regards property as near sacred and to be left well alone. In the other, ConservativeHome Web site editor Tim Montgomerie, who wants wealth, not income, to be taxed and who advised cash-poor old folks sitting in £2 million (US$3.1 million) houses to get a loan to pay the tax. Rees-Mogg accused Montgomerie of socialism; Twitter duly hailed him as more radical than Labour, clocking that he even wore a leftie beard.
In fact, this was not a left-right split, but an internal battle neatly characterized by one Liberal Democrat source in the Times as Economist readers versus the Country Life set. The former group is made up of unsentimental economic liberals, metropolitan in outlook, whose spiritual leader is the UK’s Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne. The latter consists of shire Tories, who believe the countryside and property represent something more than a source of revenue. Some of them hope that, underneath all that modernizing nonsense, Cameron belongs to their tribe.
There are other divides, too. Note the resignations last week of two below-radar Tories — MP for The Wrekin in Shropshire Mark Pritchard and Member of the European Parliament for the East Midlands Roger Helmer — over Europe. Recall that while former Tory prime minister John Major faced just nine Euro-rebels, Cameron saw 82 of his own MPs vote against him on the EU.
Class plays a part too: Witness Pritchard’s past description of himself as a “little council house ad,” or Nadine Dorries’ complaint that “policy is being run by two [privately educated] boys who don’t know what it’s like to go to the supermarket and have to put things back on the shelves because they can’t afford it ... What’s worse, they don’t care either.”
Even US-style family values feature. Some of those Tories opposing the cut in child benefit to higher earners are appalled that the effect will be to punish those families where the woman has chosen to stay home to bring up the kids.
Central to the problem is Cameron himself. Forced to run to the right to defeat a rival for the leadership, David Davis, in 2005, he led plenty of Conservatives to believe he would be one of them. They are disappointed, “restless and disgruntled” and looking for a cause on which to fight, according to one coalition insider.
None of this equals the fratricidal viciousness currently on display in the US, but what Cameron sees next week should serve as a warning to him: This is what happens when the right divides against itself.
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