Washington – Conservative leaders know whom they really want for president in 2008.
Alas, he’s dead.
“I still think what most conservatives around the country are looking for … is the next Ronald Reagan,” said Gary Bauer, president of the socially conservative group American Values. “I don’t think people are looking for a continuation of the Bush era. They’re looking for somebody who resembles more clearly what they remember from the Reagan era.”
Much as memories of John F. Kennedy cast an intimidating specter over Democratic presidential contests for decades, so Reagan does now among Republicans seeking an electoral Messiah during the party’s darkest time in years. They miss his sunny optimism; his appeal across the conservative spectrum, uniting social conservatives, economic conservatives, and national security conservatives; his communication skills; and his true-grit combination of toughness and humor.
So far, no Republican candidate can claim Reagan’s transcendent, transformative mantle.
“Reagan communicated to the population at large the truths of conservative ideas and ideals,” said Bill Greene, president of the conservative website RightMarch.com. “We don’t have, at least in the top tier, someone that is able to do that.”
Front-runner Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor? Not being a social conservative hurts him with many activists.
“I don’t think the party can successfully nominate a pro-abortion candidate and win the White House,” said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council. “I think it’s a ticket for Hillary Clinton to win the White House.”
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who leads the GOP field so far in fundraising? He has the Reaganesque hair and good looks. Yet doubts fester about whether his recently adopted conservative stances on social issues are “a road to Damascus, not a road to Des Moines, experience,” Bauer said Wednesday at a press breakfast.
Arizona Sen. John McCain? He’s long fought the conservative fight.
Yet he’s also famously fought with conservatives – he called some religious conservatives “agents of intolerance” in 2000, and others are wary of his quest for campaign finance reform – and that’s remembered even as McCain tries to patch things up.
Conservatives saw Reagan as “one of their own … who attained widespread popularity as one of their own,” said Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
None of the current leading GOP candidates “has that magic,” a problem accentuated because for the first time in the post-Reagan era, there’s no clear claimant to the Republican nomination, Ornstein said.
Many recognize with regret that Reagan was one of a kind.
“This may be a lot like the music you listened to as a teenager,” Bauer conceded.
