Listening to Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck discuss politics can blister your cerebral cortex. They are fools who operate without the most basic facts or any accurate historical framework. That is why O’Reilly thinks that Mitt Romney is an Eisenhower Republican and Glenn Beck thinks that Obama is a radical socialist who doesn’t like white people. I want to make a point about trying to assess the ideological bent of presidents and potential presidents. You can’t go by their record alone, or by their rhetoric. They will do what it is possible to do, not what they would do if given a free hand. Mitt Romney, if elected, will be faced with one radical bill after another. He will not veto them all. He will not go to war with a Republican Congress. He will sign most of their radical agenda into law. He will not stand up to the radical right any more than Eisenhower stood up to Joe McCarthy. The difference today is that McCarthy is no longer an outlier in the GOP, but the norm.
If you want Eisenhower Republicanism, you already have a fairly good facsimile in the Obama administration. It’s not that Obama is on the same ideological plane as Eisenhower, but when you combine a fairly orthodox Democrat in the White House with a radically conservative Congress and a Democratic Party that isn’t united behind the president, what you get looks a lot like what Eisenhower produced. It wouldn’t be too bad if the economy wasn’t so crippled and Congress could actually agree on anything.
As someone from the White House told me, the president didn’t run for office to spend all his time bickering about the goddamned debt ceiling. Where we are is not where he wants us to be. The same thing would hold true with Romney. If you elect Romney, you get a massive rightward lurch, even if Romney himself isn’t that crazy.
