The Competent Conservative

In this piece, Mark Halperin gives a fairly accurate assessment of Romney as the “front-runner for 2012″ GOP nomination and the most prepared to go against Obama.

In a party that has often picked its presidential nominees by primogeniture, Mitt Romney is now the front-runner for 2012 and presumably will hold on to that status for the foreseeable future. “No Apology,” however, is not a classic candidate-in-­waiting book, since it lacks the standard treacly dose of intimate anecdotes meant to reveal the politician’s softer side. Instead, even the few personal stories featured in its pages are intended to illustrate Romney’s ideology and policy ­preferences.

Romney, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2008, writes in the introduction that “this book gives me a chance to say more than I did during my campaign” about the issues that are important to him. As a candidate, he explains, he felt limited by the rigid formats of debates and advertisements. Romney’s bigger campaign problems may well have been his failure to settle on a consistent message and his constant struggle to escape both the caricature of him as a flip-flopper and the suspicions surrounding his Mormonism. Romney deals not a whit with either his well-earned reputation for moving right on critical issues or the unique political challenges his Mormon faith represents. If he runs again, he will have to address both matters. It is striking that he chose not to do so here.

Despite his emphasis on policy, Romney offers no major new proposals, and often merely lists the pros and cons of the leading options for tackling some of the thorniest issues facing the country. But the book will be helpful to those unfamiliar with Romney’s worldview and starched style, his impressive business background and strong family bonds. “No Apology” resonates with Romney’s voice and manner, including his corny sense of humor, blunt patriotism and strait-laced formality. “I am optimistic about America’s future,” he writes, “because I’ve seen the heart of the American people.” That he neglects to put forward significant new ideas is due in part to his old-­fashioned instincts. He longs to restore many aspects of American life he remembers from childhood and believes that the solutions are already out there, just waiting for a competent conservative president to implement them.

The Romney who emerges from “No Apology” is the version some of his advisers hoped to promote in 2008: a steady, smart technocrat with a record of accomplishment in the private sector and a history of working across party lines. Taking a cue from George W. Bush’s successful 2000 strategy, Romney now plays down the divisive social matters that tripped him up before, saying that the best course on issues like abortion and gay marriage might be just “to agree to disagree.”

The book’s title is drawn in large part from the conservative complaint that the current occupant of the Oval Office, in both words and attitude, is too quick to place blame on America. Throughout the book, Romney uses rhetoric clearly intended to woo the Fox News-Rush Limbaugh wing of the party, a group at present drawn to the magnetic Sarah Palin. “It is an extraor­dinary moment we are in,” Romney writes, “when an American president is eager to note all of America’s failings, real and perceived, and reluctant to speak out in defense of American values and America’s contributions to the freedoms enjoyed around the globe.”

Romney’s primary worry is that America will become “the France of the 21st century — still a great country, but no longer the world’s leading nation.” He scores President Obama for what he casts as a failure to be sufficiently tough with China, Russia, terrorists and terrorist states, and for what he views as a host of misguided economic policies. Some of the book reads like an accessible lecture for bright college students, although Romney has a habit of repeating certain buzzwords to irksome effect. He may make no apology, but Romney’s readers might require one for this typical turn of phrase: “America is freedom, and freedom must be strong.”

But the principal theme in the book is Romney’s censure of Barack Obama, leveled in a less caustic fashion than Rove’s, but still an overarching assault. He avoids personal attacks on the president but says that one of Obama’s “presuppositions is that America is in a state of inevitable decline” and that his policies are “the most harmful to the future generations of America.” Even if Romney is not the Republican standard-bearer in 2012, he has formulated a sharp argument against the incumbent and, more than any other would-be challenger thus far, has laid down a clear road map for his party when things get rolling next year.

Read the full article here.

Tags: Halperin Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney 2012, No Apology, Rove Romney