“I am free to acknowledge that his powers are full great, and greater than I was disposed to make them. Nor, entre nous, do I believe they would have been so great had not many of the members cast their eyes towards General Washington as President, and shaped their Ideas of the Powers to be given to a President, by their opinion of his Virtue.” – Pierce Butler, South Carolina constitutional conventional delegate
Unlike Mr. Butler and his fellow framers, those of us looking for a presidential candidate do not have the good fortune to have Virginia’s most prominent son, George Washington, among our choices.
But we still have the presidency, and next November, we have an opportunity to choose whether to stay the course, and re-elect Mr. Obama, or elevate him to private life and replace him with one of the GOP candidates currently out on the trail.
It’s a given that conservatives and Republicans prefer Mr. Obama return to Illinois. Traditionally, the question has been “who is the best Republican candidate to do that?” But in 2012, the traditional answer – “the most conservative candidate who can win,” isn’t enough. This time around, a candidate’s principles matter more than ever.
Making that switch won’t be easy. Typically, campaigns turn on small things, fleeting images or turns of phrase that are more powerful than a thousand stump speeches. Remember Michael Dukakis, complete with helmet, riding in a tank during the 1988 campaign? How about Gerald Ford calling Poland a free country during the final debate with Jimmy Carter? Or Reagan’s one-liners that reduced both Carter and, four years later, Walter Mondale into landslide victims?
We love those little moments because, in an instant, they humanize, and sometimes humiliate, candidates who are otherwise scripted within an inch of their lives.
But they are also trivia. They tell us little about a candidate’s philosophy and even less about what he would do if entrusted with the most powerful position in government.
In 2008, we didn’t even reach this pitiful level of rigor. Instead, the majority of voters cast their ballots for a gifted politician with a paltry resume who promised them hope and change. They got neither. He got a Nobel Peace Prize.
What’s the GOP to do?
Republicans have a wide-open, but very familiar presidential field. Ron Paul and Mitt Romney are running again. Newt Gingrich has resurfaced, as has Rick Santorum. And somewhat newer faces like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have added color and interest, Herman Cain, a darling of the tea party set, is already fading. Tim Pawlenty never caught fire and has withdrawn. And former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson? Rumor is he’s running, but in which direction remains unknown. It’s the same for former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who is a media favorite, but rarely out-polls the margin of error.
From this field of would-bes and never-will-bes one theme has emerged: the federal government has gotten too big, meddlesome and expensive. It needs to be cut, capped and, if possible, balanced so that the economy can get moving again and jobs and growth can re-appear.
In many ways, this over-arching message differs little from that of previous GOP presidential candidates. In 1996, GOP nominee Bob Dole’s favorite prop was his pocket edition of the Constitution. He cited whenever possible the text and virtues of the 10th Amendment and how he would return states to their proper role in the federal system. In 1980, Ronald Reagan told crowds that he believed in states’ rights and the restoration of balance between the federal and state governments. He was chided then for making allusions to Jim Crow and segregation, much as tea partiers who invoke the 10th Amendment are chided today.
Despite that, the current candidate field shares Reagan’s view of a bloated federal government that treats the states as accounting fictions rather than as partners. But that the issue still has to be mentioned at all shows that even the popular, principled Reagan was unable either to permanently shrink the federal government or revivify federalism.
Why should this crowd be able to succeed where he failed?
“Are you ready to fight them?”
This doesn’t mean we should give up on the work Reagan started. Finding someone suited for the job, though, demands that we ask ourselves a few simple questions, beginning with “what attributes we want in a president?”
One answer comes from an interview my colleague Scott Lee recently conducted with Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli on Lee’s “The Score” radio show.
Cuccinelli, who has received a few calls from GOP presidential candidates, said that “every voter should start every race with that question in mind.” We shouldn’t be looking for a “nice guy.” Instead, Cuccinelli suggested,” we should look for someone who is an intellectual conservative,” whose approach to a problem isn’t “what would a conservative do – because that means they aren’t really a conservative. But what is the limited government answer to the problem. And should we be doing anything, period? I want to see someone who has a track record of thinking that way. ”
That’s taking the Reagan example and going a step further – all the way back to Barry Goldwater.
But there’s one more, very important quality he says we need to look for, namely, a candidate who is willing to set his or her own course: “When your own team goes the wrong direction, are you ready to fight them? That’s the ultimate test of mettle.”
The candidate who comes closest to meeting these criteria is likely, in Cuccinelli’s mind, the one who will not only make the best challenger for Mr. Obama, but also the best person to carry on the work Ronald Reagan began 30 years ago.
He may be right. But I would add one more quality to look for in a candidate that’s just as important: can any of them inspire the sort of confidence Pierce Butler had in George Washington? Can we trust them to wield the formidable powers of the presidency with humility, fairness and, above all, restraint?
If one of them meets that standard, we’ve found our winner.
