Political Science Says: A Romney Presidency Would Be Doomed - Jack M. Balkin - The Atla... - 0 views
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What kind of president would Mitt Romney be?
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I'll draw on the work of Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who has argued that presidents' fortunes depend on how they establish their political legitimacy in the particular circumstances under which which they assume power.
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Our current political regime emerged in the wake of Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, and it has continued even through the Democratic presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It is politically conservative and skeptical of government, at least in contrast to the New Deal/civil-rights regime that preceded it. And the Republicans have been the dominant party. Skowronek's key insight is that a president's ability to establish his political legitimacy depends on where he sits in "political time": Is he allied with the dominant regime or opposed to it, and is the regime itself powerful or in decline?
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At best, Romney will be an affiliated president attempting to revive the Republican brand after it has been badly tarnished by George W. Bush; at worst, he will be a disjunctive president, unable to keep his party's factions together, and presiding over the end of the Reagan coalition.
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Romney has presented himself as a pragmatic, data-driven, hands-on problem-solver. In this respect he resembles our two last disjunctive presidents, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. Yet in order to secure his party's nomination, Romney has had to twist his positions to conform to the most radical demands of the Republican base.
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the Republican Party's policy solutions seem -- at least outside the ranks of the faithful -- increasingly ideological and out of touch. No matter what conditions the nation faces, the Republican prescription is to lower taxes, increase defense spending, and weaken the social safety net. These ideas may have made sense in the 1980s. But by 2012, they seem as irrelevant as the Democratic Party's arguments must have seemed to many Americans in 1979.
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technocratic expertise is a tenuous strategy for maintaining political legitimacy, especially when a president must make unpopular decisions. Nor will it be enough to satisfy his base.
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affiliated presidents have to choose which parts of the coalition to ally themselves with, risking the defection of the rest. This is the choice faced by presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who ultimately tilted in favor of a civil-rights agenda in the 1960s,
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Affiliated presidents also face enormous pressures -- or temptations, depending on how one looks at it -- to use military force to display strength, both to the outside world and, equally important, to their political base.
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Opposition to Barack Obama's presidency unified the Republicans. But once Obama is gone, the various factions of the party will find themselves in fierce competition, and the incoherence of the Republicans' various commitments will emerge starkly.
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he may make George W. Bush look good by comparison. During most of Bush's eight years in office, the Republican Party was united and willing to follow his lead. Romney will not be so lucky. The party he heads has become so rigid, radical, and unrealistic that, despite his best efforts, he may end up as the last of the Reagan-era Republican leaders -- a disjunctive president like John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, or Jimmy Carter.