Opinion

Real-life righties

If you follow politics, you’d have spent 2011 certain that conservatives didn’t want Mitt Romney to be the Republican nominee. That’s what the loudly expressed views of self-styled conservative leaders suggested: They made it clear that on a variety of issues, health care primarily and abortion secondarily, Romney’s record as a candidate and governor in Massachusetts was too moderate to be acceptable.

Well, guess what? In the New Hampshire primary, Romney won the support of 42 percent of conservatives, more than doubling the conservative take of his nearest rival, Ron Paul.

A Gallup poll taken last week shows Romney as the candidate most acceptable to conservatives nationwide, with 59 percent saying he’d be an acceptable nominee. (Fifty-one percent say the same of Newt Gingrich, and 46 percent say so about Rick Santorum).

Even in Iowa, 46 percent of the voters who stood up for Romney in the caucuses described themselves as either “very conservative” or “somewhat conservative.”

South Carolina is next up, and a poll by the reliable Democratic firm PPP last week had Romney leading there with 30 percent to Newt Gingrich’s 23 percent — in a state in which 79 percent of Republicans describe themselves as either somewhat conservative or very conservative.

So what gives? Why are conservatives lining up behind a politician of whom Rush Limbaugh has said flatly: “Mitt Romney is not a conservative” — a sentiment echoed by Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and 2008 Iowa caucuses winner?

The answer lies in a misunderstanding of the “conservative” voter. It’s a mistake to think that voters who describe themselves as “conservative” think about politics and react to politicians the same as people who are professionally or avocationally conservative.

Those of us who are professionally or avocationally conservative get into the weeds when it comes to politicians’ view. So for us, it isn’t enough that Mitt Romney now says he is pro-life; we know that in 1994 he ran for senator in Massachusetts as an unapologetic abortion supporter. He says flatly that he changed his mind, but people for whom the pro-life cause is central find such a record untrustworthy.

But that isn’t true of the conservative voter. That voter listens to Romney, and she hears Romney say he’s pro-life. That’s more than likely enough for her if the issue is important to her.

Because his rivals know that’s usually enough, they find themselves spending time in debates and money on TV trying to convince her that she shouldn’t take Romney at face value. They’re trying to turn her from a rank-and-file conservative into an avocational conservative.

But that’s not her calling. She has other things to do. They want her to dig the way they dig, to view Romney with suspicion rather than implicit acceptance.

But what reason has Romney given her to distrust his sincerity? She’s watched him some over the last year. He seems like a pleasant and well-spoken guy. He’s won two states already. The other Republicans have all kinds of obvious problems and drawbacks. Romney seems to have fewer. Why shouldn’t she back him?

This also helps explain why Romney hasn’t been derailed by his signature legislation, the Massachusetts health-care law requiring that everyone in the state purchase an insurance policy. He says he thinks that it was a good idea for his state but that it wouldn’t be a good idea for the country. He says he’d repeal ObamaCare.

The other candidates and the conservative media are telling her not to trust Romney, that he’s lying, that he won’t do it — or that he’s so compromised by the Massachusetts law that he wouldn’t be able to bring the fight on health care to Obama.

In the end, she has to make the judgment: Do I trust that he means what he says now? He says he’d repeal ObamaCare. She doesn’t like ObamaCare. What more does she have to hear?

That’s the call. And it turns out to be a lower hurdle for Romney to clear than many of us expected.

In the end, professional and avocational conservatives want a candidate who was in the trenches with them, who speaks their language and whose views resonate with theirs down the line. They want purity.

The conservative voter? She doesn’t care all that much about purity. Turns out she wants a winner.