Steve Benen: A Misguided Appeal For A Moderate Mitt

[Proud Liberal Dem]

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/a_misguided_appeal_for_a_moder034545.php

I agree with Benen's piece that argues against this odd notion that is apparently floating around among the punditocracy somewhere out there that if Romney were to win the GOP nomination and somehow manage to defeat Obama that he is somehow likely to govern as a moderate "Massachusetts Mitt" as POTUS. After witnessing the power that the Tea Party currently wields over the GOP in terms of being able to threaten and intimidate Republicans- even supposedly "moderate" and reasonable ones like the Maine twins and my own Senator Lugar- into totally refusing to cooperate with President Obama and the Democrats in Congress, there is nothing to suggest to me that, aside from teabaggers simply vanishing after November or the "moderate" Republicans (all 2 or 3 of them) staging a successful coup and grasping control of the party back from the teabaggers, a Republican in the WH in 2013 will be under considerable pressure to kowtow to the Tea Party agenda in terms of judicial appointments, appointments to federal agencies, and decisions about bills passed by Congress that land on his desk. Should the Republicans maintain control of the House AND capture the WH and Senate (a nightmare scenario if I ever heard one) in November, such pressure to cater to the Tea Party would only increase on a President Romney and he would risk severe alienation and loss of political capital if he disappointed them (though I'm sure he wouldn't). Put more simply, it would be a HUGE mistake to give Mitt, who has adopted increasingly harsh Tea Party rhetoric during this campaign, the benefit of the doubt that he might transform into "Mr. Moderate GOPer" if he were to win the WH. I'll take that one step further and argue that we MUST assume the worst of ANY of the potential GOP candidates if any of them were to win in November and work to ensure their defeat of their nominee in November.

[CanonRay]

1. I stupidly thought Bush would govern as a moderate because his election was so close

Don't buy it. They have an agenda, and it doesn't include us.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

2. I did too (initially)

I thought that his (P)residency would be a one-term blip and that we'd regroup and retake Congress and win the WH again in 2004 and I still tend to think that, absent 9/11, we just might have given his mediocrity and general laziness. Bush's first few months in office were pretty disastrous for him politically and, aside from getting his tax cut plan passed, most of his agenda was stymied by Congress and the Dems and the Dems had, in fact, been able to recapture the Senate briefly due to Jim Jeffords' defection. I don't think that, without 9/11, he would have ever been able to get the invasion/occupation of Iraq off the ground either. I also thought (or maybe hoped) that due to the divisiveness of the election caused by the recount and it being thrown into SCOTUS that he might govern in a more bipartisan fashion, which, of course, never happened, especially after 9/11 and especially after he and his party went on to smear Democrats running in the 2002 midterms. Once he was practically coronated as "the decider" or "commander-in-chief" following 9/11, I actually began wondering if our democratic form of government would even survive or if it would die "with thunderous applause".