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Cleveland
Plain Dealer
More
steps forward than back in GOP platform
By
Kevin O'Brien
Thursday,
August 23, 2012
The
battle between Mitt Romney and conservatives is joined. This is a
healthy thing
for Mitt Romney and the country.
It's
likely to be a little unnerving at times for Romney, who is trying on a
brand
of conservatism not native to Massachusetts. And it's likely to be
frustrating
at times for conservatives, because they're not going to convince the
Republican standard-bearer of their righteousness in every case, nor
will they
win every battle.
With
this week's drafting of the 2012
platform,
however, the
conservative influences that have set out to turn the Republican Party
into a
serious option for Americans concerned about the future of the country
have
done pretty well.
Should
Romney win November's election, he won't be any more bound by the
platform than
any other
president of any party ever has been. He'll play his hand his way, as a
president must. Platforms obviously cannot anticipate every critical
event that
shapes a presidency, and no one would want a president to be limited in
how he
can react to unforeseen developments.
Still,
conservatives should expect Romney to require fairly constant reminders
from
the right to stay on course.
The
friendly pushing and pulling will begin in earnest on Monday at the
convention,
with the adoption of a platform that seems somewhat more congenial to
the
grass-roots convention delegates' outlooks than to the desires of the
party
establishment or the presidential candidate.
And
the persuasion must continue. Conservatives simply cannot give Romney
the
elbowroom George W. Bush enjoyed on a host of issues -- especially in
the
fiscal realm.
Judging
by large portions of the platform, so far so good.
The
Democrats, ever in search of distractions to take Americans' minds off
of
President Barack Obama's dismal performance, are "squealing
like pigs" --
to quote the
ever-restrained Vice President Joe Biden -- about an anti-abortion
plank that
has been around for 12 years. This item of GOP boilerplate would go
further to
protect unborn children than Romney would.
No
matter. The chances of someone ever sliding a bill onto President
Romney's desk
to put in motion a proposed constitutional amendment to end abortion on
demand
and get rid of the morning-after pill are about as great as Curiosity snapping
a
photo of a Martian waving hello.
It's
a traditional GOP grand gesture: bold, sweeping and, for the
foreseeable
future, unattainable.
Other
planks show the leavening influence of the Tea Party movement and its
indispensable drive toward restoring constitutional government and even
an item
or two from the shopping list of the GOP's loosest cannon, Ron Paul.
Tea
Party-led efforts based on the 10th Amendment to return the states to
their
proper constitutional role as a check on federal power and reach -- a
lofty,
laudable goal -- get a favorable mention…
Read
the rest of the article at the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
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