A Choice of Two Temperaments

[Geee]

National Review:

What an odd pair of front runners Republicans appear to have ended up with. Not the usual conservative vs. moderate pairing, but two quite unusual political figures with remarkably similar policy and political profiles but remarkably different temperaments and dispositions.

Let me say first: I used to work for Newt Gingrich. In the last year of his speakership, I was a “staff assistant” in his congressional office. I was 21 when I started there. No offense to anyone reading this who is now a staff assistant on the Hill, but that’s a very junior job—or at least it certainly was in my case: some policy research, some note-taking in meetings, some answering of phones, and the like. I didn’t spend all that much time with Gingrich (when I did, he was always very nice to me and to other junior staffers), and I don’t pretend to have learned much about him that you wouldn’t have learned from just following politics. So I offer my views as an observer of politics, not as any kind of expert on Gingrich.

What stands out about Romney and Gingrich, to me, is that they have in common a very unusual profile for a Republican politician. Both of them are fundamentally moderates: Very wonky Rockefeller Republicans who moved to the right over time as their party moved right and maybe as events persuaded them to move right, and they both still very much exhibit the technocratic countenance of the Rockefeller Republican—a program for every problem. Conservative humility about human nature and about the potential of technical solutions is not readily discernible in either one.

They’re also essentially in the same place politically—I can’t think of a single major issue on which Gingrich is more conservative than Romney, and with the possible exception of immigration (and perhaps Medicare reform, as I mention here, though it’s hard to be sure) I can’t think of one where Romney is more conservative. Substantively, their views are largely indistinguishable from one another. They’re part of a very broad consensus on policy among Republicans this year, which is one of the underreported stories of the year and is frankly in many ways a testament to Paul Ryan, who really defined the Republican agenda with his budget. The House Republican budget caused both Romney and Gingrich to take significantly more conservative positions on entitlement reform in particular than either one would otherwise have taken.

Moreover, both of them have moved back and forth on the same key issues in recent years—on health care, on climate, on immigration, on the social issues including the life issues; and these are obviously some of the most important issues to Republican voters. So the question of flip-flops, or the question of reliability, hangs heavy over both of them.

And yet, similar as they are, you don’t naturally think of them as belonging in the same category, because they have very different temperaments, and temperament can often matter even more than substance. Romney has a thoroughly executive disposition: He appears to have a very organized mind, intense discipline, a general sense of calm and restraint, and a systematic approach to everything he does. He expects change to result from a process, and so thinks about politics in terms of process. He exhibits each of these qualities to a fault—and as a result he can often seem rather cold, and his past flip-flops can seem even more unprincipled.