By Kevin Rogers
Staff writer
If Super Tuesday told us anything, it’s that the GOP primary season has been reduced to a stupor-inducing crawl to inevitability. The magic of waiting up into the wee hours of the night for the final tallies of the early primaries and caucuses is over.
In the end, a single battered candidate will emerge, and it’s likely to be Mitt Romney (R-Mass.), a weak candidate made weaker by his opponents and their refusal to accept defeat.
As the Super Tuesday results rolled in, the results mirrored the polls, and there weren’t any surprises. A Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) victory in Ohio might have injected a little fuel into the stagnant contest, but he failed to muster the support to pull off a win; after a failure in Michigan last week, Ohio may have been his last stand.
Santorum and Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) are left with few options. Gingrich could drop out and pledge his support to Santorum, or vice-versa. Such a move would present a single conservative opponent for Romney. This option should have been chosen about a month ago.
Santorum called for Gingrich to bow out Wednesday morning, according to a Fox News article from Wednesday. However, Gingrich stressed Tuesday night he would press forward given his strong win in Georgia. Neither will get out soon.
As long as Gingrich and Santorum keep splitting the conservative vote, Romney will continue his path toward the nomination.
Given the seeming inevitability of a Romney victory, it is difficult for a hardcore conservative to get excited about the general election. Romney lacks passion, vision and conviction. He is robotic at campaign events, recycles the same clichés each time he speaks, spews out a number of timid, establishment-approved policy proposals all while trying to gloss over the skeletons of Romneycare and policy flip-flops.
What’s worse is the thought of Romney taking on President Obama in the general election. Romney’s simply too mechanically nice to present an aggressive challenge to Obama in a debate. Romney’s health-care law in Massachusetts essentially voids any debate on Obama’s health-care plan.
For all their flaws, at least Santorum or Gingrich would be scrappy against the president; Romney will merely recite his approved lines in his trademark, friendly monotone.
In a year when we should have had our pick of strong conservative candidates, we’re stuck with the cookie-cutter candidate. In a year when we needed an exciting Republican answer to Obama, we’ll likely settle for the Republican John Kerry.
Sure, Romney looks the part of a presidential candidate, but looking the part is woefully inadequate. It will be hard for Romney to compensate for his flaws.
Eventually, Republicans will have to coalesce around Romney. He’ll win the votes, but not the passion that prompted huge Republican victories in Congress in 2010. He’ll have to hope independents and estranged conservatives dislike Obama more than they dislike him.
It’s never a good thing to run as the lesser of two evils, yet it seems to be Romney’s best hope.
I, like my fellow Republicans, will cast my ballot for Romney as the lesser of two evils. However, I will walk away from the polls believing we deserved a better candidate.
rogerskd10@bonaventure.edu
