In Nixon's backyard, GOP voters look high and low for a conservative

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published February 5, 2008 at 12:30 a.m.

Text size

Photo by Danny Johnston / Associated Press

GOP candidate Mike Huckabee greets supporters during a campaign rally at the airport in Texarkana, Ark., on Monday.

More Airlines & Aerospace

More stories »

Like any good tourist at the Nixon library, I'm having my picture taken with Nixon and Elvis. There's a giant, wonderfully incongruous cutout of the president and The King in the lobby - just to remind us, I guess, that the world was always a profoundly strange and disturbed place.

Today, we have McCain and Romney (although it's long-shot Huckabee who plays the bass guitar) who would be president, or at least the Republican nominee. The King role, however, remains noticeably vacant.

The polls suggest John McCain could run away with a big win tonight - and possibly with a clear path to the nomination - in the mega-primary. He's got the lead. He's got the endorsements. He's got the momentum.

And yet, if I had to call the race right now, I'd call it unsettling - even if it does get mostly settled by tonight.

As you may have heard, conservatives apparently don't like McCain (not all conservatives, I suppose, just all of them I've talked to or heard on the radio).

And enough conservatives either don't trust Mitt Romney or don't like his religion or just don't like him, which is why he's trailing.

And, meanwhile, Romney says he wants Mike Huckabee to drop out because he's convinced Huckabee is stealing votes from him and, therefore, allowing McCain to win. And Huckabee, who may fall into the conservatives-who-don't-like-Romney category, says Romney is the one who should drop out.

I can only say that this is a race Dick Nixon would have loved.

A few weeks ago it looked as if the Democrats would become a two-person race, in which only one of them would tear up, and in which one of them would inevitably get knocked out today.

And the Republicans - this was the conventional wisdom, anyway - would be struggling to find a winner in a field that a lot of Republicans say they find uninspiring.

"Uninspired" is the very word that Peter and Crystal Maltby both used when I talked to them about the field.

Peter said he just moved from Utah and said, half joking, that he was tired of Mormons. And McCain's age, he said, was an issue.

"I'm going to vote," he said. "But I'm just not inspired."

Crystal piped in, "We're not inspired, but we're not switching. We're not voting for Hillary."

I came deep into the heart of conservative Orange County, in the part of Orange County that no one would call the O.C.

I talked to a lot of Republicans who were unsettled - and who weren't voting for Hillary Clinton. You can learn only so much from anecdotal evidence, but you don't have to be a pollster to figure out this is an uneasy time here for Republicans.

California wasn't always the California of today. It used to be where Republicans came from. There was Nixon. There was Reagan. At the Reagan library, where the Republicans debated last week, every candidate tried to lay claim to the Reagan legacy.

At the Nixon library, you can find the story of the 1968 campaign, in which Nixon beat Mitt Romney's dad, George, in the year the country was nearly ripped apart. George Romney was known as a moderate Republican - and could actually run a campaign as a moderate.

And now?

If you go to a library, you can read in a recent National Review article by conservative writers Ramesh Ponnuru and Richard Lowry that "As it stands, Republicans are sleepwalking into catastrophe."

It's a strange moment for Republicans. George Bush's approval ratings hover around 30 percent, and it's not simply a personal rejection. There's some question about whether the conservative coalition works anymore. All the polls show the Democrats leading on the important issues. The Democrats are raising far more money. At primary stop after primary stop, more people are voting on the Democratic side. And yet the main argument in the Republican race is whether any of the remaining candidates are truly conservative - or, as McCain puts it endlessly, "foot soldiers in the Reagan Revolution."

Let's just say there are some nonbelievers among the faithful. Check these headlines:

The headline on a Pat Buchanan column on McCain reads: "The Great Betrayal."

Time magazine has a piece called "The 'I Hate Romney' Club" and tells a story of Huckabee mocking Romney for the way he ate his Kentucky Fried Chicken the other day - peeling off the breaded part and using a knife and fork. Would you vote for such a man? According to Time, Huckabee said when presented with a golf club that it would be wasted on him. "I'd be like Mitt Romney eating fried chicken."

Rush Limbaugh says a McCain nomination would destroy the Republican Party. And on his show Monday, he said, "John McCain has stabbed his own party in the back, I can't tell you how many times."

Hugh Hewitt warns that talk radio may save that same party from McCain. Ann Coulter said she would vote for Hillary over McCain. You don't have to believe she'd do it, but I swear she said it.

Bill Kristol's New York Times column defending McCain was titled, "Dyspepsia on the Right." Suddenly, the Republicans who have lost Congress, and who might lose the White House next, are the dyspeptic generation. And that's without eating fried foods.

And, on the campaign trail, McCain and Romney are exchanging hard and harder shots about which one is actually conservative enough.

You don't have to be a political analyst to get this. You just have to have been poked in the eye at some point in your life.

McCain actually went to Massachusetts to campaign, just to take a close-up poke at Romney. The only surprise is that he didn't take a shot at him over the Patriots' Super Bowl disaster. It's personal, of course, between them. But the fight plays out over politics, and you wouldn't want to be in the middle of this huddle.

McCain is running an ad saying that Romney is, well, a flip-flopper. This is not exactly a new charge, but this one has a John Kerry twist to it. The announcer says, "Mitt Romney was against Ronald Reagan before he was for him."

Romney's ad says: "Imagine a debate between McCain and Hillary Clinton. On amnesty for illegal immigrants, they agree. On voting against President Bush's tax cuts, they agree. On imposing an additional 50 cents a gallon tax on gasoline, they agree. On blocking conservative judges, they agree."

Then the ad, which might be fudging a few facts, shows Bill Clinton, in the toughest shot of all, speaking of Hillary: "She and John McCain are very close."

You think Bill Clinton understood what he was saying? Of course he did.

McCain is close to people not necessarily popular with the conservative movement, and not just ones named Clinton. Last week, on the day after the Reagan library debate, he held a news conference with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani on the topic of global warming. It was striking, but it was also the way you can win in California.

McCain needs moderates and independents to win in November. Because McCain can attract them, he would probably be the Republicans' strongest candidate - so long as conservatives actually vote for him, too.

Romney and McCain were both coming back to California - the big prize - to make the argument a final time. Romney said, "The entire nation is watching California. If I win California, that means there will be a conservative in the White House."

McCain is going to San Diego, to try to make the case that he's seen the light on immigration, meaning that he won't ever co-sponsor legislation with Ted Kennedy.

Which brings us back to the anecdotal evidence.

I ran into John and Inese Svalbe in Newport Beach at a mall, in front of Bloomingdale's.

I was talking to people about the Republican race, and Inese Svalbe said, "We're in a quandary."

John is voting for Huckabee. Inese is voting for Romney, but doesn't feel good about it. She says she's going to write his campaign a letter to pin him down on certain issues.

Inese Svalbe says that come November, she'll vote for whichever Republican is on the ticket, but that she wishes she could feel better about it.

"I envy the Democrats," she says. "They love both their candidates. They love them equally, because they're both exactly the same."

OK, that's a very Republican point of view, and she must have missed the little Obama-Clinton dust-up in South Carolina. But she does have a point. The Democrats are, for the most part, happy with their choices. On the day when nearly half the states go out to vote, on a day when John McCain may in fact close in on the nomination, many Republicans are still searching.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News