As usual, Kathryn Jean has no idea about the latest thing that has her panties in a bunch:
Mitt Romney — is an example of someone who came to the wisdom of conservatism through practical experience. He saw its reasonableness in the face of liberal overreach. We should want to embrace such conversions. We should want to encourage people to get Right. Or we can fervently close the door to them and their contributions and fresh blood. What a good move for a movement that needs re-energization and recruits.
Now, Mitt Romney is a fine man, but he would be a terrible choice by the McCain campaign because he simply isn’t a potentially effective Republican leader. et me see if I can clock down slow enough to put this in terms that even a Catholic schoolgirl can understand.
1. Nominees for president and vice-president are leadership positions in the Republican Party, which is dependent upon conservative and evangelical Chistian votes.
2. There are many people in the Republican party who are not leaders.
3. A disinclination to embrace as leaders those whose commitments to conservative are recent, partial, or otherwise doubtful is perfectly reasonable on the part of conservatives. Likewise for evangelicals.
4. These reasonable disinclinations are reinforced by the actions of so-called conservative leaders who have led in a distinctly non-conservative manner over the last 20 years.
5. A rejection of Mitt Romney as a presidential or vice-presidential candidate is not tantamount to kicking him out of the Republican Party or the broad conservative movement.
In general, there is something distinctly problematic about an outsider who wants to come in and lead. It seldom ends well, as the Germans learned after embracing an Austrian outsider. One of the reasons for the disastrous state in which conservatism finds itself, particularly the conservative media, is that so many of its self-appointed leaders are not really conservative and hail from very different social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds than the great mass of conservative America. Can it really be considered any great surprise that irreligious Ivy Leaguers, naturalized aliens and secular New York City Jews have failed to provide successful intellectual leadership for religious conservatives from the heartland?
Until American conservatives refuse to permit non-conservatives and foreigners to act as their leaders, they will continue to be little more than a speed bump for the trans-nationalist American liberals who are already in a position to dominate American politics for the next generation.