It's Official: The Reagan Revolution Is Over

Question: How can a candidate for president raise US$23-million in three months--only slightly less than John McCain and Rudy Giuliani combined--and still register barely above zero in polls of members of his own party?

That is the sad story of Mitt Romney, the movie-star handsome former governor of Massachusetts. Romney registers a dismal fourth in Republican opinion polls. Yesterday's LAT/Bloomberg poll put him at 8% approval among Republicans.

A year ago, Romney looked like an emerging Republic star. He had rescued Massachusetts from a large budget deficit without raising taxes. And he had engineered a state-wide health insurance plan that delivered universal health insurance coverage to all of Massachusetts' residents--again without raising taxes. A hugely successful businessman, he had rescued the 2002 Olympic games from a corruption scandal.

In small-group sessions in 2005 and 2006, Romney dazzled elite audiences with his command of fact and easy, humorous speaking style.

He would begin by talking about the importance of data--of checking your assumptions--and of keeping the discussion open to dissenters. He was talking about state governance of course. But everybody heard the implied criticism of President Bush's management style. And after he left, his audiences would nod their heads over their coffee cups and say, "If only somebody like that had been running this war ? "

But sometime in the summer or fall of 2006, Romney reached a strategic decision. He would not run as a pragmatic problem solver. He would run as the conservative in the race: the tax-cutting, pro-life, pro-gun, pro-traditional-marriage heir to George W. Bush.

He even dropped hints that if nominated, he would choose Florida governor Jeb Bush as his running mate.

And this past week, he chose the George H. W. Bush presidential library as the site of his first major foreign policy address.

At the same time, he has given short shrift to his breakthrough health-care achievement. In fact, he rarely refers to it in his speeches, apparently fearing that one ingredient of his plan--a requirement that every non-poor state resident buy a health insurance policy or face a tax penalty--will offend the antigovernment sensibilities of Republican primary voters. None of this is working.

In part, Romney's difficulty in gaining early traction can be traced to his own vulnerabilities: He has become more conservative since his first political race, and (as I noted in last week's column) YouTube is now crowded with clips of him saying one thing in 1994 and very different things in 2004, 2005 and 2006.

But it seems to me that something bigger is going on.

Had you asked a shrewd Republican observer in, say, 2004 to guess who the party's next nominee would be, he or she would probably have named George Allen, the senator from Virginia--a popular former governor, son of a legendary football coach, famous for his cowboy boots and chewing tobacco. Allen was a solid, down-the-line conservative on everything from taxes to guns to abortion. He was hiring all the top consultants, raising money, making friends and seemingly cruising to an easy re-election win in 2006.

Instead, he lost. Lost in Virginia, where Bush had beat Kerry by nine points! If Allen could lose in Virginia, then no conservative was safe anywhere.

In some shrewd instinctive way, the Republican party is sensing that the United States has changed. And just as the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and Grant eventually ran out of Civil War generals to nominate to the presidency, so perhaps time has run out for the old Nixon-Reagan coalition that came together to vote against the social upheavals of the 1960s and the 1970s. The 1960s and 1970s were, after all, a very, very long time ago.

Romney seized on Allen's defeat as an opportunity to position himself as the authentic Reagan conservative in the race--in a year when the Republican party may for the first time in a generation be looking for something other than a Reagan conservative.

Rudy Giuliani, the Republican frontrunner, is not exactly a moderate, of course. But he's not a traditional conservative either. He appeals to Republicans, not by running against government but precisely because of his record in making government work. Above all, his success in fighting crime recommends him. Under Mayor Giuliani, the number of murders in New York declined from over 2,000 per year to under 700. With government again providing safety to the people, the city recovered its economic strength.

Mitt Romney had an equally compelling story of executive leadership to tell. He chose not to. He chose to run as Bush's heir in a year when even Republicans are looking for Bush's opposite. That choice is looking more and more misguided. It may soon look fatal.