Republican direct mail guru Richard Viguerie has a piece at Real Clear Politics about Mitt Romney’s lack of conservative Republican support:
First, because of his record in Massachusetts, where he was behind the coercive health care law, raising taxes and abandoning the conservative social agenda. Second, because he has flip-flopped on these and many other issues, bringing into question his character. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, because personnel is policy and Romney’s team is at best a group of establishment Republicans, and at worst a group of big government technocrats — both of whom will never make any effort to fundamentally reform Washington’s culture of spending and crony capitalism.
And the importance of personnel as policy should not be underestimated. When Ronald Reagan ran for President, conservatives could look at his team and see people they had known from the conservative movement for 10 or 15 years. We conservatives knew Reagan would govern as a conservative because we knew the people who he would bring with him — but when I once put the question of who were the conservatives on his team directly to Governor Romney, he blew it off.
Michael Gerson and Tom Ashbrook’s answer to this criticism was first to try to make the case that Romney did indeed have conservative advisors. The problem is, his list was made up of corporate lobbyists and Wall Street-types who actually proved my point — if the next Republican President enters the White House surrounded by Fortune 500 CEOs, then conservatives will once again have won the election for the Republicans, but lost the battle to reform Washington.
Hmmm. If only there were a candidate who was a principled fiscal conservative.
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