Romney Courts Social Conservatives

John Fund, writing in today's Wall Street Journal:

Romney Rides High
A Mormon from Massachusetts wows social conservatives.
Monday, September 25, 2006 12:01 a.m.

WASHINGTON--Right now John McCain is the front-runner for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. But everyone expects that a single major competitor will emerge to challenge him from the right. The question hung in the air of this past weekend's Family Research Council summit in Washington: Who will that candidate be for the GOP's powerful social conservative base?

FRC officials says they invited Mr. McCain to speak, but he declined. But another potential candidate benefited greatly from showing up. Surprisingly, it was Massachusetts' Gov. Mitt Romney, a Mormon with a Harvard M.B.A who governs the nation's most liberal state. The 1,800 delegates applauded him frequently during his Friday speech and gave him a standing ovation afterward. Mr. Romney detailed his efforts to block court-imposed same-sex marriage in the Bay State and noted that the liberal Legislature has failed to place a citizen-initiated referendum on the ballot. He excoriated liberals for supporting democracy only when they think that the outcome is a foregone conclusion that favors their views. He certainly picked up fans at the summit. "I believe Mitt Romney may be the only hope social conservatives have in 2008," says Maggie Gallagher, author of a book defending traditional marriage.

The tall barrier many see as blocking his acceptance by evangelical voters--the fact that many Americans view Mormonism with suspicion or worse--may prove to be a mirage. "Everyone I talked to said they didn't have a problem with it," one attendee told me. "If enough people say that to each other, Romney creates a virtuous circle in which evangelical activists decide he's acceptable." Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition, notes that something similar has happened in recent years as devout Catholic and evangelical Protestants have increasingly focused on areas of agreement. "Romney won't be the ideal choice for evangelicals, but against a McCain in the primary or a Hillary Clinton in the general election there's no doubt where most would go," he says.

Recently, the person most likely to be viewed as the conservative alternative to John McCain would have been Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist or Sen. George Allen of Virginia. But Mr. Frist has lost support as he has failed to herd the unruly cats of the Senate and been viewed as a Washington insider. As for Mr. Allen, he was welcomed by delegates, who sympathized with the hazing he's gotten over his use of the term "macaca" to describe an Indian-American working for his opponent. Almost no one seemed to care about the recent discovery of his Jewish ancestry. But Mr. Allen has clearly suffered from his accident-prone Senate re-election campaign. One noted that he has gone from twice being named the front-runner for the 2008 nomination in National Journal's semi-annual poll of 100 GOP "insiders" to being a beleaguered incumbent in his home state. Now he's even facing fire from the right. "I'm disappointed Sen. Allen has chosen to attack [Democratic opponent] Jim Webb for once opposing inappropriate roles for women in the military," says Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness. "He's pandering and panicking."

Other social conservatives addressed the FRC summit and received warm greetings. They included Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and former speaker Newt Gingrich. But for now all are viewed as either too little known or carrying too much baggage to win the nomination. That said, Mr. Gingrich was given a rock star's welcome at the summit's closing banquet. "He is on Fox News so much that conservatives have forgotten his fall from power and now think of him as a statesman," says Fred Johnson, a prominent social conservative from Iowa. "When he said the U.S. was now in World War III against terrorism, every talk show ran with it."

Mr. Romney's can't match Mr. Gingrich's rhetorical flair or Mr. Huckabee's down-home homilies. But he impressed three separate and distinct audiences in Washington last week in a 24-hour speaking blitz. On Thursday about one out of eight House Republicans came to hear him address a weekly luncheon hosted by Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia. Mr. Kingston told the Boston Globe that Mr. Romney made a very positive impression and was clearly positioning himself for the role opposite Mr. McCain that Mr. Allen once occupied.

Immediately afterward, Mr. Romney went across town to address a group of K Street lobbyists and economic conservatives. "He was impressive in explaining how he governed as a conservative in Ted Kennedy's home state," said columnist Robert Novak. The next morning, Mr. Romney appeared before the Family Research Council's summit. "He won over a lot of people when he recalled how as a businessman he had rescued the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City," says Chris Butler of Americans For Tax Reform.

That experience helped solidify Mr. Romney's reputation as a can-do manager who knows how to delegate. "He is the only elected official I've met with who gave me a detailed power-point briefing on my area of expertise," says Bob Moffit, a health-care expert at the Heritage Foundation who worked with Mr. Romney to craft a law mandating that everyone in Massachusetts buy health insurance.

That's not to say Mr. Romney doesn't have critics back home. Even Romney allies acknowledge that should Democrat Deval Patrick win this fall's gubernatorial race to succeed the retiring Mr. Romney, his health-care plan could become a bureaucratic nightmare. Larry Cirignano, the head of the Boston-based group Catholic Citizenship, faults Mr. Romney for not allowing local officials to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He also criticizes the governor for reversing a decision to replace a state advisory commission on gay and lesbian youth with one representing all youth. Only a few hours after the announcement, Mr. Romney changed his mind. Commission chairman Kathleen Myers said she is convinced he reversed course after being "inundated" with protest calls. "It wasn't a profile in courage from a conservative's point of view," notes Mr. Cirignano.

But sniping from his home state isn't the greatest challenge facing Mr. Romney. While he is well known in the early primary state of New Hampshire, he still has scant organization in Iowa, which will vote before New Hampshire. Reporters will continue to dog him over his position on abortion. Mr. Romney says he is now "very firmly pro-life" after having frequently expressed pro-choice views. Last year, Mike Murphy, a strategist for his 2002 governor's race, raised further questions when he told National Review that, all along, Mr. Romney has been "a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly." Mr. Romney said Mr. Murphy was speaking only for himself.

But Mr. Romney also has many advantages. He is perhaps the only candidate who can plausibly claim a base in several states. He has a contributor base in Massachusetts; a large reservoir of political goodwill in Michigan, where he was born and his father served as governor in the 1960s; and the loyalty of many Mormons in Utah and neighboring states. He has a built-in corps of volunteers and contributors in any state where Mormons, the fastest-growing religion in America, have a real presence.

And then there is the charisma and poise that Mr. Romney seems to exude naturally. "Many people say he certainly looks like a president--sort of a cross between Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy," says Genevieve Wood, who founded the conservative Center for a Just Society. Anyone who draws comparisons to those political genes merits further watching.

[Back to RomneyWatch '08.]

The Last Tomcat Stands Down

Today the Navy officially retired the F-14 Tomcat.

Its mission was to protect the carrier battle group from hostile aircraft. With its twin engines, the all-weather-capable Tomcat could more than get the job done, flying at twice the speed of sound, and carrying Phoenix, Sidewinder and Sparrow missiles and a 20 mm Gatling gun. In addition, the Tomcat had a vast array of air-to-ground ordnance, making it much more than simply a defensive weapon.

And it has served in that role well for over thirty years, the Tomcat's first operational deployment occurring in September 1974. They saw service in the skies over Vietnam (covering the evacuation of Saigon), Libya, Iraq, and countless other intercepts and incidents that make up the untold story of the Cold War. Now, they're gone.

Then, the Tomcat Sunset weekend highlight will take place Friday at 10 am, with the Final Flight Ceremony at hangar 500. It will end, appropriately enough, with the final F-14 flying off into the distance. The Navy says the aircraft will likely be bound for the Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, where it and other retiring Tomcats will be stored in the "boneyard," or, as it is officially designated, "war reserve."

F-14 from VF-84 "Jolly Rogers" prepares for launch. Picture from Voodoo.cz.

One of the premier fighters in the history of aviation, and the most storied fighter in the U.S. inventory, has returned from deployment for the last time.

The F-14 Tomcat, a swing-wing twin-engined fighter-interceptor, is slated for retirement as the last active-duty squadrons still flying the F-14 returned to Oceana Naval Air Station. The squadrons will be re-equipped with the F/A-18 Super Hornet.

That would be despite the fact that the F-14 is still a better fighter. The problem is age - the F-14 has been in active service since 1973; the F-18 design is a good ten years younger, while the Super Hornet design is younger still, with models not entering service until the early 1990s. Older planes need more maintenance time. The maintenance demands are forcing the F-14 out of service.

Makes you wonder, though; maybe they ought to just build some new F-14s, with new electronics. The basic design is still a good one. The new F-18s are slower and heavier that the older F-14s.

But the threat has changed as well. The F-14 was an answer to the Soviet threat, a way to keep Warsaw Pact bombers and fighters away from NATO convoys in case everybody's nightmares came true. (See Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October or even better, Red Storm Rising, to see how the Tomcats were used and were intended to be used.) For naval aviation, the need now isn't so much to defend against enemy aircraft as to be able to strike deep into enemy territory.

I just hope we're not ignoring tomorrow's war while preparing for today's.

For more information:
The F-14 Tomcat Association
Wikipedia
FAS.org
Voodoo.cz
Tomcat Alley
Technography

UPDATE: A couple of looks back...
Neptunus Lex
Chaotic Synaptic Activity, Part I and Part II
Instapinch, Tomcats, Oceana Fly-in Part I, Part II, Part III

The Modern Socialist

Via Peter Robinson in The Corner:

No longer is it said that the state can outperform the market. Rather it is said that the market itself suffers from certain “failures” that justify forms of state intervention to protect individuals who are hurt in the process. The movement toward collectivization of all public activities, if it is to take place today, will not rest on a single bold initiative that casts aside the private sector. Instead, it will take place in the form of a multiple attack along different margins, where each individual struggle does not generalize easily across the board.

The long-standing objective of the modern closet socialist is to consolidate the separate beachheads after they are taken over. Thus, state dominance can be portrayed as a device that takes the irrationality, impersonality, and cruelty out of markets and not as a device that dispenses with their use altogether. In effect, the discourse takes the form of an intellectual two-step. Step one: markets are all right when they work. Step two: but markets do not work in this particular area, be it health care, labor, housing, agriculture, or whatever, each with it sown “special” problems.

In one sense, the quiet blessing in this approach is that it obviates the risk of a catastrophic conversion to state control through aggressive nationalization. But it gives rise to a multiple-front war in which substantial chunks of voluntary markets always find themselves at risk. The case against overall socialism is irrefutable today. But the desire to keep up with its egalitarian objectives continues to exert a considerable influence in practice.

Richard Epstein, Free Markets Under Siege, Hoover Press, pp. 10 -11

September 11, 2006

It has been five years since 2,996 people were murdered because they lived that day as they had any other.

I'll be dropping back to this post from time to time today to leave a few thoughts; right now; I'd like to leave some links of some great coverage & reads:

The 2996 Project is remembering the victims of the attacks.

National Review Online has a lot up, including a symposium featuring (among others) Mark Steyn and James Lileks and a link to its archives from that week.
A couple of notewothy pieces:
James Robbins, "Are We There Yet?"
David Pryce-Jones, "Resenting."
John O'Sullivan, "Patriotism Faded."


John Donovan at Argghhh! has good posts here and here.

Michael Ledeen, "I'm Still Angry."

Neptunus Lex, "Five Years On."

Cox & Forkum have a pair of excellent cartoons & posts up:
"Refresher Course" and "Confronting Terrorism, Part V."


SteelJaw talks about being in the Pentagon during the attack: Part I and Part II.

There are some well-done newsposts at these sites as well:
Winds of Change
Wizbang
PajamasMedia

Tyler

*** ***

*** Where We Stand Now ***
Mark Steyn, writing in today's NRO symposium:

Mark Steyn
In the end, very little changed. The so-called “9/11 Democrats” are almost as invisible a presence as the “moderate Muslim,” and, insofar as one can tell, are most likely outnumbered by members of the Scowcroftian unrealpolitik Right still wedded to stability uber alles. In theory, if you’d wanted to construct an enemy least likely to appeal to the progressive Left, wife-beating gay-bashing theocrats would surely be it. But Islamism turned out to be the ne plus ultra of multiculti diversity-celebration — for what more demonstrates the boundlessness of one’s “tolerance” than by tolerating the intolerant. The Europeans’ fetishization of the Palestinians — whereby the more depraved the suicide bombers are the more brutalized they must have been by the Israelis — has, in effect, been globalized.

Anyone who’s mooched about the Muslim world for even brief amounts of time is struck by what David Pryce-Jones calls its “intellectual poverty”: It has a remarkable lack of curiosity about anything beyond its horizons. That hobbled it for centuries in its wars against the west. But our multicultural mindset is its mirror image: For isn’t the principle characteristic of “multiculturalism” its almost total lack of curiosity about other cultures? The multicultis make bliss of ignorance: You don’t need to know anything about Islam, you just have to feel warm and fluffy about it, and slap that “CO-EXIST” bumper sticker on your Subaru. If you want to know how little changed on 9/11, look at how it’s being observed in the nation’s schools.

James Lileks, writing in the same, is a bit more optimistic:

James Lileks
Half a decade later the changes seem small, and perhaps that’s a blessing. If 9/11 had been followed by 10/17, 11/02, 12/24, the Smallpox Epidemic of ’02, the EMP blackouts of ’03, and so much promiscuous anthrax distribution that mailmen tottered around in Hazmat suits on the hottest day of July, America would look quite different. But the other shoe didn’t drop — or rather, Richard Reid was KO’d before he could light it — and consequently we don’t look at the paper for news about the latest attack. We look at the ads in the paper for news about plasma-TV sales.

If 9/11 had really changed us, there’d be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there’s a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors. The Empire State Building took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again, but we don’t. And we don’t seem interested in asking why.

The good news? We returned to our norm: cheerful industrious self-directed Americans who think in terms of fiscal quarters, not ancient grievances, and trust in Coke and Mickey to spread our message of tolerance and prosperity. The bad news? Same as the good. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.

I suppose I'm more in sync with Steyn; although Lileks makes some great points. Deep down, I'm still mad. I want to hurt them. I want them destroyed, and I want it done now.

But what passion was there, has faded. It was weird here - among my friends, it's like no one was really angry that thousands of their countrymen had been murdered. Very strange. As for now - well, it's a passing thought at best, it seems.