In GOP Debate, Romney Wins the Clash of the Unreliable Conservatives

On the Florida debate stage Monday, there were four Republican candidates: the most fiscally conservative, Ron Paul; the most socially conservative, Rick Santorum; and the two frontrunners, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, who insist that they're more conservative than one another.

Strange that a job requiring as diverse a skill-set as the presidency begins in a vetting process focused on ideology, especially since frontrunners are never ideologically consistent. But it is imperative that they fake it. Republican voters, who like the connotation of "conservative," say it's a quality they prefer; revealed preference suggests what they actually want is an inconsistent right-leaning opportunist (George W. Bush, John McCain) who helps them evade certain kinds of cognitive dissonance (like hating deficit-financed government health care in theory and loving the budget-busting Medicare prescription-drug expansions in practice).

Mitt Romney helps his supporters to feel as though they're principled conservatives, even as they support a Massachusetts moderate, by muddying the distinction between the political and the personal. Romney's biography driven campaign is meant to say, "Of course I'm conservative! Can't you see that I made all this money in private enterprise, built a fortune thanks to my ascent in a fair meritocracy, stayed married to my wife all these years, had all these kids, and find the entrepreneur in me earnestly pained by President Obama's incompetence?"

For Newt Gingrich, the narrative meant to obscure his personal and political failings goes like this: "I'm one of you, and you can't deny our tribal connection. I fought for us in the 1990s against Bill Clinton. I believed we were a rightful majority before anyone. I have even more contempt for the media than you do. Others may say Obama is incompetent; I'll be damned if political correctness will stop me from explaining that he's a Kenyan anti-colonialist, and if liberals think that's racist it only proves that they're the real bigots."
Neither man's narrative is inaccurate in its particulars.

Romney really is a wildly successful businessman with a traditional family life. And Gingrich is indeed a right-wing culture warrior. In attacking one another, maximum damage is done by focusing on specific heresies against ideology, so that it becomes harder and harder for a voter to support either man and still think of himself as a principled conservative. For example, the individual mandate is now widely denounced on the right as unconservative, and hearing that Romney and Gingrich supported it is enough to cost them some votes.

The cognitive dissonance is too much for some.

On Monday, Mitt Romney won the night by articulating, more effectively than ever before, his opponent's least defensible ideological heresy: influence-peddling on behalf of special interests, and thereby profiting off their attempts to increase the size, scope and power of the federal government. What follows is a transcript of this most important exchange of the night, when moderator Brian Williams wisely got out of the way:

MODERATOR: Speaker Gingrich, just tonight, two hours ago, in fact, you released your '06 contract with Freddie Mac. We alluded to this earlier. Your company was paid $25,000 a month, $300,000 for the year. But it didn't provide a further explanation of services for Freddie Mac. Why one year's worth? Governor Romney today used the expression "work product." He wants to see your work product, and the word "lobbying" has been thrown around, and you strongly disagree with that.

NEWT GINGRICH: Well, first of all, if you read the contract -- and we can go back and check the other years. We had to work through the process of getting an approval because it was a confidentiality agreement. But if you read the contract which we have posted, and the Center for Health Transformation had to get permission to post, it says very clearly supposed to do consulting work. The governor did consulting work for years. I have never suggested his consulting work was lobbying. So let me start right there. There is no place in the contract that provides for lobbying. I have never done any lobbying.

Congressman J.C. Watts, who for seven years was the head of the Freddie Mac Watch Committee, said flatly he has never been approached by me. The fact is that Congressman Rick Lazio, who is chairman of the Housing Subcommittee, said he has never been approached by me. And the only report in the newspaper was "The New York Times" in July of 2008, which said I told the House Republicans they should vote no, not give Freddie Mac any money, because it needed to be reformed. So there's no --

MODERATOR: So you never peddled influence, as Governor Romney accused you of tonight?

NEWT GINGRICH: You know, there is a point in the process where it gets unnecessarily personal and nasty. And that's sad. The fact is I have had a very long career of trying to represent the people of Georgia and, as Speaker, the people of the United States. I think it's pretty clear to say that I have never, ever gone and done any lobbying. In fact, we brought in an expert on lobbying law and trained all of our staff. And that expert is prepared to testify that he was brought in to say here is the bright line between what you can do as a citizen and what you do as a lobbyist. And we consistently, for 12 years, running four small businesses, stayed away from lobbying, precisely because I thought this kind of defamatory and factually false charge would be made.

If you missed Gingrich's unwittingly damning admission, here it is: the former House speaker was engaged in behavior so much like lobbying that he had to hire an expert on lobbying law to avoid meeting the legal definition. That's going to be emphasized by his critics in coming days, even if passed too quickly for the audience to notice.

Romney then pressed a related point:

MITT ROMNEY: Well, Mr. Speaker, you were -- on this stage, at a prior debate, you said you were paid $300,000 by Freddie Mac for an historian -- as an historian. They don't pay people $25,000 a month for six years as historians. That adds up to about $1.6 million. They weren't hiring you as an historian. And this contract proves that you were not an historian. You were a consultant.

NEWT GINGRICH: I was a consultant.

MITT ROMNEY: It doesn't say that you provided historical experience, it said that you were as a consultant. And you were hired by the chief lobbyist of Freddie Mac, not the CEO, not the head of public affairs. By the chief lobbyist at Freddie Mac.

It is folly for Gingrich to keep claiming that he was paid $1.6 million as a historian. One gets the strange feeling he is so enamored of the title that he doesn't care whether voters find it plausible. Nor was that his only tone deaf response:

MITT ROMNEY: You also spoke publicly in favor of these GSEs, these government sponsored entities, at a very time when Freddie Mac was getting America in a position where we would have had a massive housing collapse. You could have spoken out aggressively. You could have spoken out in a way to say these guys are wrong, this needs to end. But instead, you were being paid by them. You were making over $1 million at the same time people in Florida were being hurt by millions of dollars.

NEWT GINGRICH: Well, this is a good example. As a businessman, you know that the gross revenue of Bain wasn't your personal income. We had a company. The company had three offices. The company was being paid. My share annually was about $35,000 a year. And the fact is I offered strategic advice, largely based on my knowledge of history, including the history of Washington. Government-sponsored enterprises include, for example, telephone cooperatives, rural electric cooperatives, federal credit unions. There are many different kinds of government-sponsored enterprises, and many of them have done very good things. And in the early years, before some people, particularly Jim Johnson and other Democrats, began to change the model you could make a pretty good argument that in the early years, those housing institutions were responsible for a lot of people getting a lot of good housing.

MITT ROMNEY: There's no question about that, but we're talking about one. We're talking about Freddie Mac. And that one did a lot of bad for a lot of people. And you were working there making over $1 million for your entities --

NEWT GINGRICH: For the entities. As long as we agree, for the entities.

Isn't that bizarre? "Hold on, sir, I didn't take $1.6 million to peddle influence on behalf of Freddie Mac -- an entity I created and from which I profit took $1.6 million!" Why does he think the distinction helps him?

Romney knows better:

MITT ROMNEY: Owned by you. I don't know whether 100 percent owned by you, but I presume. Owned by you, over $1.6 million. And you said it was $300,000. It was $1.6 million. That's a difference.

NEWT GINGRICH: So, Mitt, what -- Mitt, what's the gross revenue of Bain in the years you were associated with it? What's the gross revenue?

MITT ROMNEY: Very -- very substantial. But I think it's irrelevant compared to the fact that you were working for Freddie Mac.

NEWT GINGRICH: Wait a second. Wait a second. Very substantial.

MITT ROMNEY: You were working for Freddie...

Here Gingrich doesn't seem to grasp why conservative voters draw a distinction between what Romney did at Bain and what Gingrich did at Freddie Mac. But how can he not grasp it? Has Gingrich convinced himself deep down that his time in the House and the influence peddling he did were ancillary to his paydays? That he really was valued as a historian? It seems impossible, yet he really does seem to think he and Romney were engaged in similarly unobjectionable behavior.

Here is how the lengthy exchange reached its end:

NEWT GINGRICH: Did Bain ever do any work with any company which did any work with the government, like Medicare? Medicaid?

MITT ROMNEY: We didn't do any work with the government. I didn't have an office on K Street. I wasn't a lobbyist. I didn't -- had never worked -- I've never worked in Washington. You were working. We have congressmen who also say that you came and lobbied them in favor...

NEWT GINGRICH: I didn't lobby them.

MITT ROMNEY: You have congressmen who say that you came and lobbied them with regards to Medicare Part D, at the same time your center was taking in contributions.

NEWT GINGRICH: Now, wait. Whoa, whoa. You just jumped a long way over here, friend.

MITT ROMNEY: Well, another -- another area of influence-peddling.

NEWT GINGRICH: No, not -- now, let me be very clear, because I understand your technique, which you used on McCain, you used on Huckabee, you've used consistently, OK? It's unfortunate, and it's not going to work very well, because the American people see through it. I have always publicly favored a stronger Medicare program. I wrote a book in 2002 called "Saving Lives and Saving Money." I publicly favored Medicare Part D for a practical reason, and that reason is simple. The U.S. government was not prepared to give people anything -- insulin, for example -- but they would pay for kidney dialysis. They weren't prepared to give people Lipitor, but they'd pay for open-heart surgery. That is a terrible way to run Medicare.

I am proud of the fact -- and I'll say this in Florida -- I'm proud of the fact that I publicly, openly advocated Medicare Part D. It has saved lives. It's run on a free enterprise model. It also included health savings accounts and it include Medicare alternatives, which gave people choices. And I did it publicly, and it is not correct, Mitt -- I'm just saying this flatly, because you've been walking around this state saying things that are untrue -- it is not correct to describe public citizenship, having public advocacy as lobbying. Every citizen has the right to do that.

MITT ROMNEY: They sure do.

NEWT GINGRICH: And what I did on behalf of Medicare I did out in the open, publicly, and that is my right as a citizen.

In that last back and forth, Gingrich -- who earlier was unable to grasp the difference between private-sector consulting and former government officials lobbying -- appears equally clueless about the difference between a citizen publicly advocating that Congress do something and a former House Speaker being paid to publicly and privately advocate specific Congressional action.

If anyone in the audience didn't grasp the distinction, Romney concluded the exchange by explaining:

MITT ROMNEY: Here's why it's a problem, Mr. Speaker. Here's why it's a problem. And that is, if you're getting paid by health companies, if your entities are getting paid by health companies that could benefit from a piece of legislation, and you then meet with Republican congressmen and encourage them to support that legislation, you can call it whatever you'd like. I call it influence-peddling. It is not right. It is not right. You have a conflict. You are -- you are being paid by companies at the same time you're encouraging people to pass legislation which is in their favor. This is -- you spent now 15 years in Washington on K Street. And -- and this is a real problem, if we're going to nominate someone who not only had a record of -- of great distress as the speaker, but that has worked for 15 years lobbying.

It's devastating because it's true.

Original Article
Source: the Atlantic 
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