Earlier today, Instapundit asked:
Back in 2008, the social-cons were all-in for Romney, to the point where Hugh Hewitt’s take became a running tagline (“You know who this is good for? Mitt Romney!”) that’s still used by by bloggers from time to time. Now, not so much. So what changed about Romney since 2008 to make him un-conservative?
He’s posted one response that works quite nicely, but it’s not a complete explanation of why I don’t support him (perhaps partly because I’m not what can properly be called a “social-con”).
In 2008, I wasn’t “all-in” for Romney even when I voted for him in the Georgia primary. At that point the only serious candidates left were him, John McCain and Mike Huckabee, whose rhetoric had balanced the worst of the “religious right” with the worst nanny-statism of the big-government “right” (it is possible to balance the best of those tendencies; he just didn’t do it) (though if he had I still wouldn’t have voted for him). Romney was then what Santorum is now: the least unacceptable of a bad lot, due in some part to the fact he wasn’t being sold as inevitable. It wasn’t yet his turn. He wasn’t yet entitled to anybody’s vote.
Now he’s His Electable Inevitableness, all the things that made McCain impossible for me to vote for in the primary campaign, and should have made me withhold my vote that November, Palin or no Palin. You watch: if Romney gets the nomination he’ll try to recapture the conservatives he’s spent this entire campaign cycle alienating, by choosing a running mate from deep within our own ranks, on the assumption that if it got the right to vote for McCain it’ll get the right to vote for him.
That’s why I’ve sworn not to fall for it if it happens again. I will not be an enabler.
Anyway, I think Reynolds is misstating the situation back in 2008. Despite his nanny-statism it was Huckabee, not Romney, who was the darling of the low-information social-con voter—after all, he won the Georgia primary that year.
Anyway, all of this points to another of my Rules to Vote By. The first one was, If you can’t figure out how a ballot proposition is supposed to achieve its stated objectives, VOTE NO. You just need to look at California, where 99% of the laws on the books that actually accomplish anything, are the result of ballot propositions that were voted in by people who assumed that if they couldn’t understand it it must be a good idea.
The new one relating to this subject is, Never vote for the guy whose TURN it is.
Update, early March: Here’s another one: never vote for a so-called conservative who can’t manage to get along with Rush Limbaugh. That leaves out both McCain and Romney.
