Steyn exhibits the childish anti-Romney prejudice that could lead to a McCain nomination

A correspondent had written to Mark Steyn:

“I respect that Mitt Romney is a successful businessman and good family man, but I want a president with brass balls. We are still at war. Sometimes I think even Hillary has more of that mojo quality than Romney. Very few people of any political persuasion seem excited about Romney (even among conservatives). Some conservatives may like Romney over McCain, but that is about it.”

To which Steyn, at the Corner, replied:

This problem is entirely of Romney’s making. He needed a Mister-Moderator-I’m-paying-for-this-microphone moment, and every time McCain offered him one, with some contemptuous snarl in his direction, Mitt would put on his more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger expression and say prissily that he wasn’t going to descend to personal attacks. It’s never good to play to your caricature, and Mitt’s caricature (as Kathryn well knows) is that he’s an insipid technocrat Ken doll propped up by a lavishly funded campaign. I mentioned a day or two back the Powerline post about McCain’s willingness to knee his opponents in their privates. By just taking it, debate after debate, Mitt gave the impression that, like Ken, he didn’t even have private parts to be kneed in.

Everybody on the Romney campaign mailing list knows what it’s like on debate night: You get a rapid-fire response from Mitt’s guys every 15 seconds about McCain’s latest “Straight Talk Detour”. Cute. But at some point Mitt needed to do that for himself—to get indignant and clobber McCain back, live on TV. Iowa and New Hampshire are gone: there’s no more retail politics. It’s TV image now, and the image of Mitt—not the answers, not the command of policy, but something more basic—has led many Republicans to conclude there’s something missing.

To return to what I said about playing to caricature, most of us know very little about Mormonism. To the general populace, the word conjures two enduring stereotypes: old-time bearded patriarchs with multiple brides, or Donny and Marie. Romney very obviously wasn’t the former, and so he wound up getting dismissed as some obscure ninth Osmond brother, too nice to slug it out with the gangsta death-metal crowd. The campaign should have understood this and nailed it well before NH.

Now, I’m not going to dismiss Steyn’s criticism of Romney, since I made the same criticism after the Wednesday night debate. Romney does need to show more toughness. But even if Romney lacks what a Powerline writer called the knee-to-the-groin instinct, does that mean he shouldn’t be supported? Does that mean he’s not viable? He has after all won the Republican vote in New Hampshire and in Florida (which, as it turned out, was not a truly closed primary, but I haven’t gotten to the bottom of the mystery yet), and won a resounding success across the board against McCain in Michigan. So he’s not an electoral cipher. He has the ability to win votes, notwithstanding his lack of the fighter’s instinct that Steyn (and I) would like to see.

So why doesn’t Steyn support him? Why does he write an entire article bemoaning the inevitable nomination of McCain, while not even mentioning the one and only candidate who can stop McCain?

It is a weird and contemptible childishness, which comes down to saying: “Romney is too clean-cut, Romney is not one of us, Romney is not cool. Therefore I’ll let the anti-conservative, pro-open-borders egomaniac McCain take over the Republican party.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 02, 2008 05:58 PM | Send