WOULD a Mitt Romney administration register any differently on the conservatism meter than a Rick Perry administration, or for that matter a Herman Cain administration? Peter Beinart argues that it wouldn't, and I agree. My colleague argues that it would, and I agree too. How's that? Well, here's Mr Beinart's key paragraph:

I can't find much to disagree with here. One of the more amusing scenes in the generally excellent HBO movie version of Andrew Ross Sorkin's "Too Big to Fail" comes when Hank Paulson, the Treasury secretary, and Neel Kashkari, his assistant secretary, try to explain the too-big-to-fail financial institution problem to the department's press secretary, Michele Davis, who exclaims, "Then why weren't they regulated?!" The funny part is that it's impossible to imagine a senior Republican staffer at such a meeting in 2008 saying something like that. The press secretary speaks the line because she's a stand-in for the audience, who are supposed to be wondering the same thing, but it's politically implausible.

My colleague, however, writes:

Surely Messrs Romney and Perry would call upon some of the same people, especially in cases in which personnel decisions are outsourced to the GOP apparatus. But this is a big country, and Messrs Romney and Perry are very different kinds of conservatives with very different backgrounds from very different places. I would expect a Perry administration (as unrealistic as that now seems) to teem with Texans, supply-side ideologues, and socially conservative GOP apparatchiks with southern accents. I would expect a Romney administration to abound in private-sector paladins, go-getting Mormon McKinsey types, and more academically mainstream conservative economic advisers. Messrs Romney and Perry surely have very different Rolodexes, and the most-called-upon people in their Rolodexes also probably have very different Rolodexes. The "real" Mitt Romney is constituted by his extended network of political allies and advisers. It seems to me just bizarre to think that Mr Romney's network is so similar to Mr Perry's or Mr Cain's that there would be no politically meaningful difference in the culture or content of their administrations.

I can't find much to disagree with here either. But I also don't really think there's much of a clash between these two views. A Romney administration would probably involve a significantly different flavour of conservatism from a Perry administration, and would entail different alliances, recruit different people, and focus on different issues; but I doubt it would be any less conservative along a simple single-axis measurement. By way of analogy, a Republican president elected in 2000 who wasn't a Southern evangelical like George W. Bush might not have launched a multi-billion-dollar global effort to fight HIV/AIDS that involved massive funding for faith-based organisations and strict mandates for increased abstinence promotion and anti-prostitution campaigns. But it's hard to argue that the PEPFAR programme wasn't "conservative".

My colleague cites Daniel Larison's claim that Mr Bush "presented himself as a conservative while arguably governing farther to the left than anyone, including his father, in the previous thirty years." There's a big difference between "arguable" and "convincing". Mr Larison pins his characterisation of Mr Bush as a leftist on his "expansion of the federal role in education", presumably through the "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law, and his expansion of the "welfare state", presumably with Medicare Part D. Neither of these moves were particularly non-conservative, unless you come from Mr Larison's emphatically anti-federalist branch of conservatism: NCLB is based on a traditionally conservative emphasis on test scores and teaching "the basics", while Medicare Part D was a massive government giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry. Most conservatives themselves didn't see them as non-conservative until Mr Bush became unpopular in 2006 and the self-serving narrative began to coalesce that his failure was due to insufficient ideological purity. Mr Larison might justifiably consider the dramatic expansion of the security state over the past decade to be a violation of conservative principles, but the majority of self-described conservatives in America don't see it that way. Anyway, if Mr Larison's point boils down to a claim that, pace Mr Beinart, a Romney administration might prove no more conservative than that of George W. Bush, then I think Mr Beinart would consider his point taken.

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