The official start of GOP voting is framed by some unmistakable paradoxes. Iowa's field of mediocrities

The candidates say it on debate stages. Voters say it at campaign rallies. It is a staple of Republican rhetoric that 2012 is the most fateful election in decades — a big and perilous moment around which national destiny will hinge.

Here’s what does not get said as often: This big moment on history’s stage is being filled by politicians who so far have looked way too small for the occasion.


Bad manners, to be sure, to state it quite like that on Iowa caucus day. This is supposed to be an uplifting exercise, when discerning Midwestern voters inspect their choices and command the rest of the country to see new dimensions of leadership in candidates who previously seemed like ordinary pols.

But the official start of Republican voting — arriving at last after long months of speculation about who’s running and who’s not, of debates, of wild gyrations in the polls — is framed by some unmistakable paradoxes:

• Lots of evidence suggests American politics is more fluid and radicalized and impatient with the status quo than at any time in a generation. But the person regarded as the clear front-runner, Mitt Romney, is an emphatically conventional politician who, while possessed of a formidable resume, has stayed at the top mainly through a steady, plodding approach that depends heavily on the defects of his rivals.

• At a time when the make-up of the Republican Party is growing ever-more conservative and ideologically charged, Romney’s victory would represent the second consecutive time, after John McCain’s 2008 race, that the GOP nomination has gone to a center-right candidate who has demonstrated little interest in ideological crusades.

• With a clear opportunity to win the gold medal of American politics — knocking off an incumbent president — Republicans produced a field of dwarves. Romney has been the only candidate who has managed to project an aura of presidential plausibility over a sustained period of time. Yet, despite being universally known, he is not the choice of three out of four Republicans, polls show.

There have been countless flurries of excitement over the past year on the Republican side. But, in retrospect, much of it has been false drama — a series of one-act plays in which people like Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and now, maybe, Rick Santorum enjoyed turns as the person most likely to mount a real challenge to Romney and, ultimately, President Barack Obama.

But in every case so far the spotlight found more weaknesses than strengths in these politicians. The Gallup Poll identified no fewer than seven moments last year when the title of “Republican front-runner” changed hands. This frenetic movement apparently reflected a sense of impoverishment, not bounty. The pollster likened the fluid Republican race to two other election years — 1964 and 2004 — when leaderless opposition parties had agonized over their presidential nominee, before ultimately selecting a loser for the general election.

Brad Holder, 51, of Hinton, Iowa, stocks shelves overnight at a grocery store and is an undecided voter. He leans toward Rick Perry after attending his Monday event in Sioux City. But on the whole he’s unimpressed with the field.

"There are none you can single out,” he said. “They just don’t quite have the pizzazz. I don’t want to use the word dull, but they are. They don’t have that excitement.”

Here is a good place for what journalists call the “to be sure” paragraph: To be sure, surprises constantly happen. Romney could falter badly here in Iowa Tuesday, or in New Hampshire next week, and what looks like an implacable candidacy would suddenly seem fragile. The latest polls show him in a three-way fight for first place in Iowa, against Santorum and 76-year-old libertarian Ron Paul, and with a commanding lead in New Hampshire. Any stumble might allow a Romney alternative to gain real, and lasting, power.

William Kristol, the conservative commentator who has noted acerbically the irony of a year of unconventional politics producing such a conventional front-runner, said he holds out hope for “a nominee on the fifth ballot, like FDR in 1932.” He also noted that at the time, Roosevelt seemed like a comparatively timid and uncreative candidate, so it may be too early to dismiss Romney and others as being unequal to history’s calling.

For now, however, there are three big factors that have converged to push Republican politics in an uninspired, and uninspiring, direction:

It’s the Republican Way

Yes, this is the era of the tea party. Sure, there are a lot of conservative activists who will never fully trust a former abortion-rights supporter who backed a health care mandate in Massachusetts.

But the reality is that, as Bill Clinton has noted, Republicans tend to fall in line, not fall in love.

“There’s always a mainstream conservative — you can call it the establishment — and an insurgent, and the mainstream person has always won. Always,” said Charlie Black, the former John McCain and Mitch Daniels adviser who recently decided to support Romney.

Ed Rollins, the veteran operative and former Bachmann campaign manager, agreed that settling is just the Republican way: “Conservatives may not be in love with Romney. They weren’t in love with McCain. They weren’t in love with Dole. They weren’t in love with a lot of the candidates we’ve had in the past.”

“After all the town meetings and attack ads,the straw polls and streams of analysis, you’re left with this paradox: Republican passion for removing Barack Obama from the White House is/may be sufficient to enter into a passionless marriage with a candidate whose chief asset is judged to be his electability,” said presidential historian Richard Norton Smith.

By these lights, all the alarums and excursions of 2011 were mainly a distraction: beneath the veneer of unpredictable politics Republicans have in fact settled into a very familiar place: “We’ve seen this movie before,” said political scientist Steve Schier of Carleton College. “Everybody got so caught up in the day-to-day oscillations of the polls and so forth that they missed the continuities.”

Incentives

In America, it may not yet be true that anyone can grow up to be president, but it’s increasingly true that anyone can grow up to run for president. And that’s what a lot of Republicans this cycle did, aware that they had little chance to actually win but believing with good reason that this was a good way to advance themselves.

The two main incentives in politics are publicity and money — and there is plenty of both to be had for running for president and making waves, usually through saying provocative things. Gingrich and Bachmann, even if they don’t become the nominee, are in better position to lead ideological movements and put themselves in demand as commentators because of their presidential bids. The same would have been true for Cain, though his drawing power is reduced because of the sex scandal that ended his campaign.

But these candidates running for reasons of self-interest rather than because anyone actually expects them to win tend to divert attention from the actual purpose of a nominating process: to test the seriousness of people who might actually be president.

This is especially true, said Republican consultant Mike Murphy, in an era when voters are already in an angry mood, and the media covers politics in a nonstop news cycle in which big and trivial events get blurred in a “feedback loop.”

“Environmentally, the primary is being conditioned to reward protest candidates,” Murphy said. “That’s not an environment where [many] ‘bigger’ establishment candidates want to run.”

“Romney,” Murphy added, “is really just trying to navigate and survive the more radicalized parts of the Republican Party.”

The Talent Gap

Republicans this year find themselves in something of generational slackwater in this election cycle.

There are younger, talented Republicans, such as Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who judged themselves not ready to run for president this time.

There were also a number of potentially formidable Republican governors — Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels — of an older generation who chose for various reasons not to run.

This left Romney not competing against the most promising presidential-level talent this time.

“It’s not like the old days of Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan,” said Washington Examiner columnist Michael Barone. “They were all pretty well-known candidates. It’s just sort of a weak field.”

Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes went a step further, asking: “Would Romney be odds-on to win the nomination if Mitch Daniels or Chris Christie or Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush were in the race?

Not likely.”

That doesn’t mean, Barnes and others argued, that Romney couldn’t grow into a more forceful standard-bearer for his party in the process of campaigning against President Barack Obama.

And if Romney hasn’t captured the imagination of his party, he’s shown that he can wear down its resistance and win over the respect of voters, however grudging it may be in the case of many conservatives.

“Nominating Romney wouldn’t mean Republicans are drifting away from their strong conservative positions in 2010. Quite the contrary. Romney has embraced exactly those positions,” Barnes said. “Romney wasn’t a conservative in 1994 when he ran against Teddy Kennedy, but he is now, including on social issues.”

Republican presidential strategist Mary Matalin agreed that Romney has already proven he can develop as a messenger and national leader: “His articulation of his principles is clear and hits conservative high notes; his attacks are clever and memorable and delivered with a velvet glove; his defense of his record is realistic, consistent and not delivered defensively; the Ann and Mitt show has been the best I have seen. He is in his groove and looking like a happy warrior.”

The predominant sense in the party, however, is that Republicans are well on their way to answering a first-rate political opportunity with a second-rate presidential nominee.

As National Review editor Rich Lowry quoted one conservative lamenting: “We don’t have our A team on the field.”

For the most part, Republicans are trying to look on the bright side: envisioning a GOP administration driven by conservatives on the Hill, and looking for leadership in their next generation of officeholders, rather than the presidential front-runner.

“This would be a very different race had Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie or Haley Barbour decided to run for President. Frankly, I think any of them could defeat the current field,” said Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, a former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

“The real division in the GOP these days is not between moderates and conservatives. It is between pragmatists and ideologues. That same division plays itself out almost every day in the House and Senate GOP Conferences,” Cole continued. “The next GOP president will be forced to govern as a conservative to maintain the support of the GOP rank and file and its caucuses in both the House and Senate. Anyone who thinks we are going to nominate an Eisenhower, Nixon or Ford is out of touch with the GOP electorate. And any GOP politician who believes he can govern from the White House as anything other than a conservative is delusional.”

And besides, Rollins noted: “We have a great bench – some of the governors, some of the new congressional members, they obviously chose not to run. If Romney doesn’t win, it’s a whole different ballgame.”

Jonathan Martin, Charles Mahtesian, and James Hohmann contributed to this report.