(Nelson Rockefeller)
The Republican elites surprisingly have not gotten behind Mitt Romney (except Karl Rove) and Jon Huntsman. They were hoping that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels would jump in, but Conservatives resisted this idea. Republican elites then were pushing Tim Pawlenty. Michele Bachmann destroyed his will to run for President. Then they were trying to get Paul Ryan to run, he wisely declined. Now they are desperate and looking for someone to represent the standard of the Rockefeller Republicans.
From The Weekly Standard to The Wall Street Journal, on the pages of policy periodicals and opinion sections, the egghead right’s longing for a presidential candidate of ideas — first Mitch Daniels, then Paul Ryan — has been endless, intense and unrequited.
Profoundly dissatisfied with the current field, that dull ache may only grow more acute after Ryan’s decision Monday to take himself out of the running.
The problem, in shorthand: To many conservative elites, Rick Perry is a dope, Michele Bachmann is a joke and Mitt Romney is a fraud.
They don’t publicly express their judgments in such harsh terms, but the low regard is obvious: The Journal’s editorial board, the bible of conservative intellectual orthodoxy, pretty much excommunicated Romney from the movement in May for his health care sins. Then, last week, the editorial board suggested that Bachmann and Perry couldn’t be elected, and that “now would be the time” for “someone still off the field to step up.”
The editorial spoke, as it said, for “desperate” voters — but the board could have been talking about itself.
[….]
“Pawlenty was regarded by the conservative intelligentsia as the safe, solid, respectable choice. They would have settled for Pawlenty,” said Douthat. “You got the sense that he was interested in public policy. You don’t get the sense that Michele Bachmann is interested in public policy.”
[….]
“I would hope that whoever the Republican candidate is, he or she will not tell us that creationism or intelligent design is the equivalent of evolution — just another theory about the origins of the biological man,” said the syndicated Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who declined to weigh in on specific candidates, though Perry was recently recorded telling a young boy on a rope line that Texas schools teach both theories. “To put intelligent design on that level is like offering grade-school children a choice between astronomy and astrology,” he said.
[….]
“A lot of policy elites inside Washington ask themselves, ‘Who would I like to have dinner with?’ in this effete way,” American Enterprise Institute Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies Danielle Pletka said in a telephone interview from Paris. “There’s all too much intellectual snobbery in the Washington policy community.”
But while the right’s opinion elite may not have the broad sway of a Rush Limbaugh or Fox News, their indecision has consequences. In particular, they’re influential among the GOP’s donor class — much of which remains on the sidelines.
“We’re courting somebody to come court us,” quipped Ponnuru.
Read the rest: Conservative elites pine for 2012 hero
My message to Ponnuru, hopefully no one will court you. It’s time for the Republican elites to take a back seat. They have had a 23 year control of the GOP. The result has been mixed at best and terrible in some regards. The GOP has gone from a positive forward looking party, to one that dwells on the past and is perceived as negative. Many on the Right wants the optimism of the Reagan era GOP back.
The elites of the GOP are Progressives. Not the nasty Tranzi types, but still believe that an elite has a right to rule over the masses. Hence their attacks led by Karl Rove on Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann. They want only someone they approve of to be President. If Perry or Bachmann get the GOP nod, expect a defacto alliance between them and Democrats to defeat the Republican nominee. Should that person over come this double attack, he should immediately ostracize the GOP elitists and send them to the dustbin of history.
Nelson Rockefeller and Cabot Lodge are long gone.
Here’s Michele’s Bachmann’s destruction of Tim Pawlenty. This is what Conservatives need to do to the Rockefeller Republcians. Destroy them without mercy.
