NATCHITOCHES, La., January 25, 2012—Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum claim that Mitt Romney isn't really conservative. They offer as evidence these damning items:
- Mitt Romney signed a Massachusetts health care reform bill that included individual insurance mandates.
- Mitt Romney claims to be pro-life, but he didn't appoint pro-life judges to Massachusetts' courts nor demand that anti-abortion provisions be included in his health care reform bill.
- Mitt Romney believed that global warming is real, and he favored a cap-and-trade approach to fighting it.
Gingrich and Santorum have defined conservatism to suit themselves. On none of these issues do they take a principled conservative political position. Romney does. Here's why.
Global warming is neither conservative nor liberal. Global warming is either real or it's not. If it's real, it's our fault or it's not. Reality doesn't care about political labels.
If you believe that global warming is real and that it's our fault, there are conservative and liberal ways to attack the problem. The liberal approach would be top down - a bureaucracy, new regulations, and federal control. For instance, we might change CAFE standards to require 50 mpg for all passenger cars. We might require that all cars built after a certain date be electric or hybrids. We might ban the burning of coal.
Conservative solutions are market-based. Cap-and-trade was promoted decades ago by conservatives and economists as a way to reduce sulfur oxide emissions by creating a market for them. The liberal approach was to require specific technologies. Carbon taxes provide incentives to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but they don't require it and they leave the hows up to consumers and markets.
Conservatism offers no answers on the reality of global warming, but only on how to deal with it if it's real. For Santorum to suggest that Romney isn't conservative because he believed in global warming is intellectually bankrupt, phony conservatism. Romney favored cap-and-trade as a solution, and if the problem is real, that's a conservative solution to it.
The sanctity of life isn't a political position; it's religious. Conservatives who oppose abortion often have no problem with capital punishment. If you believe the difference is that the fetus is innocent, recall that many conservatives don't consider the collateral damage (the deaths of innocent civilians, including more than a few fetuses) that accompany an action like the war in Iraq to be an unreasonable price to pay for American policy objectives.
Again, conservatism and liberalism have nothing to do with your beliefs about the morality of abortion, but only with what you want the government to do about it. A liberal who believes that abortion is okay is inclined to make it a basic right, then demand that government do all it can to support that right. A pro-choice conservative would tell you that if you want an abortion, pay for it yourself.
A pro-life conservative would conclude that if abortion needs regulating, it needs regulating at the state level. A pro-life liberal would automatically look to the highest level of government (federal) to deal with the problem, and not getting satisfaction from the legislature, would try to get the issue decided by the courts.
Gingrich's assumption that Romney should have appointed pro-life judges to do what the legislature wouldn't do and the people of Massachusetts didn't want it to do is pure liberalism.
Aren't individual mandates liberal? They are a case of government making you do something that you might not want to do, like paying taxes, but even Grover Norquist doesn't believe in zero taxes.
The people of Massachusetts wanted universal insurance coverage. The liberal approach would be single-payer, to make the government the sole provider of insurance. That's still what many liberals are hoping for at a national level. It eliminates both markets and choice.
If you're going to have universal coverage, you have to have universal participation. Requiring people to participate in a market when they don't want to is not conservative, and the courts have yet to decide whether it's legal. But given the goal of universal coverage, the mandate in Massachusetts at least retains private insurance markets and leaves it to individuals to decide just where their mandatory insurance is going to come from. It's the most conservative way to achieve that goal.
Of the three issues examined here, the individual mandate is the only one that hinges on a policy, not a belief or a fact of nature. The policy itself can be liberal or conservative, and the goal of universal insurance coverage is liberal. But we live in a federal system, and the liberal people of a liberal state are free to choose liberal goals. Then-Governor Romney chose the most conservative path to that goal, and that does nothing to negate his conservative credentials.
Mitt Romney clearly is not a social conservative in the mold of Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich. But he is a small-government conservative. His impulse has always been to choose markets over legislatures and legislatures over courts. Unlike Santorum and Gingrich, he seems to believe that people should be free to choose policies he doesn't like, that in a truly conservative country you teach them correct principles and they govern themselves.
That entails risks, risks that liberals, Santorum and Gingrich just aren't prepared to run. If Romney's policy impulses are moderate, at least he chooses to pursue them by conservative means. That's more than you can say of his opponents.
James Picht is the Senior Editor for Communities Politics and teaches economics at the Louisiana Scholars' College in Natchitoches, La., where he went to take a break from working in Moscow and Washington. But he fell in love with the town and with the professor of Romance languages, so there he stayed. Now he teaches, annoys his children, and makes jalapeno lemonade. After a lot of flip-flopping, he's decided he likes Romney, but sometimes he wakes up in the night thinking nice thoughts about Paul. He tweets, hangs out on Facebook, and has a blog he totally neglects at pichtblog.blogspot.com.
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