Jonah Goldberg focuses his latest National Review Online column on the significance of the most recent developments in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination:
[T]he real significance of the last week or so is not the breaking up of the political logjam of candidates but of the policy logjam.
Not only did Romney and Gingrich blur the lines between the GOP and Barack Obama, they also sharpened the distinctions between themselves and the rest of the GOP field.
In this, they were playing catch-up with Mitch Daniels, Indiana’s extremely effective governor and putative front-runner among conservative policy wonks, the Bush family, and insomniacs. Daniels yanked away collective-bargaining rights for public workers years ago, without the Sturm und Drang that accompanied Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s more tepid reforms. Just this month, Daniels successfully withdrew all state funding of Planned Parenthood, a holy grail for social conservatives.
Daniels, however, also steadfastly refuses to sign anti-tax activist Grover Norquist’s pledge to never raise taxes. He famously called for a “truce” on social issues, which social conservatives translate as “surrender” to the Left since they rightly believe that the Left is the aggressor in the culture war. And last week he playfully suggested that he might tap former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice as his running mate. Floating a pro-choice veep is not the way to reassure social conservatives.
For those paying attention, these should be fascinating developments given the perennial claims that the GOP base is too right-wing, extremist, and closed-minded to tolerate such philosophical diversity. (And with the exception of Gingrich and Paul, there are no Southerner candidates in a party allegedly captured by the South.)
