In an even worse excess, the Editors shift from skewering Speaker Gingrich to a peremptory dismissal of two other admirable conservatives, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. Perry has been a tremendously successful governor of Texas — a state that has experienced job growth while the national economy, under Obama, languishes in a near depression (or is it a “jobless recovery”?). Like Governor Perry, Representative Bachmann of Minnesota is a champion of limited government in the framework of the original Constitution. She has fought President Obama tooth and nail on Obamacare, the national debt, and other crucial issues — often holding to the fire the feet of a spaghetti-spined Republican establishment.
Playing to the cheap seats, the Editors mock Perry’s deficiencies as a debater — he needs “to spend much of his time untying his own tongue.” Do we really need to turn National Review into American Idol — and over trivia that pales beside Perry’s impressive executive record? Bachmann is a superb expositor of conservative principles, but the Editors are in a huff over her occasional resort to hyperbole — most infamously, overstating the dangers of Gardasil in an otherwise devastatingly competent critique of Perry’s vaccination mandate. Such rhetorical gaffes seem pretty tame in a field of candidates whose flaws run substantive and deep. And were she to win the nomination, President Obama wouldn’t be able to exploit this vulnerability — even if he had the expert advice of Jon Corzine and of all the “corpse”-men in the 57 states, armed to the teeth with every breathalyzer the English embassy could find.
The Editors also want to drum Ron Paul out of the field. I think this is unwise, too, but not worth dwelling on. Paul has zero chance of being nominated, and the Editors give good reasons for discrediting his candidacy — although I think they’d have done well to clarify that when they refer to “the movement he leads,” they are not talking about the Tea Party (as opposed to an extremist anti-government fringe that likes to represent itself as the Tea Party). I’ll stick with Perry and Bachmann. The Editors’ position on this pair of good conservatives is astonishing when one compares it to their claim that Governor Huntsman “deserve[s] serious consideration.”
Here is the totality of their argument: “Governor Huntsman has a solid record, notwithstanding his sometimes glib foreign-policy pronouncements; his main weakness is his apparent inability, so far, to forge a connection with conservative voters outside Utah.”
Seriously? When you ask conservatives and Republicans what they think of Governor Huntsman’s bid, you don’t get a bunch of psycho-babble about “inability to forge a connection.” You get, “Why would Republicans nominate a guy Obama picked for an important role in his administration?” Huntsman was the president’s ambassador to China — a fact the Editors, remarkably, omit. So, when it comes to Bachmann, the Editors think “anti-vaccine rumors” are a disqualifier; on Huntsman, however, somehow the little matter of his service in the Obama administration doesn’t even rate a mention. To be clear, I am not suggesting that there is anything dishonorable about Huntsman’s service. But we’re not talking about whether he should be ostracized; we’re talking about whether he is a viable candidate in a race Republicans must frame as a referendum on the Obama administration. How bad can the administration be if we’re going to recruit our nominee from it?
