I have to admit I’ve been trying to stay with my resolution not have an opinion on the most probable or desirable nominee of either party. I’ve endorsed the proposition that, this time, the nominees should be the product of the vetting process centered around the debates and early primaries (and, of course, the Iowa caucus).
But there are trends I have to notice. On the Republican side, the big money and the establishment media are already saying that it’s really a contest between Bush and Walker. Bush, in this view, has experience, intelligence, and big money, but he’s also more an establishment/corporate candidate than a conservative reformer. Walker, by contrast, has the virtue of being a polarizing rebel with a genuinely impressive record of winning tight elections without compromising principle or policy. It’s even said that he’s the Republican’s Obama — which means he’ll inspire the base and, more generally (and unlike recent Republican nominees), dazzle as a campaigner. I have to add that he differs from the president in not being an eloquent and often polished speaker (read and hear Obama’s recent Selma speech.)
I have to notice that big money is also behind Walker, and he seems also to be a candidate that the establishment can believe in and hopes to mold (on, for example, foreign policy). Not only that, he’s now morphed into the generic union-busting candidate. His own intention was to be satisfied with reining in the public-employee unions to whom Wisconsin’s future had been wrongly or even unconstitutionally mortgaged. And not to push right-to-work legislation, which he said he regarded as a distraction from his agenda. His very aggressively Republican legislature gave him little choice but to accept said legislation. His preference had been to allow his populist appeal to include members of industrial unions, who sometimes can distinguish their cause from that of government workers.
For now, Walker is getting up to speed on foreign policy. His stands on the social issues (as are Bush’s) are being criticized as more expedient than anything else. His campaign against the the lazy professors of the University of Wisconsin system has hit some rhetorical and real snags.
The number of right-to-work states is on the rise, and the campaign for such reform has attracted the biggest and most persistent kind of Republican donor. Unions are fading not because of some kind of new birth of individualistic consciousness among workers but largely because they no longer can ”deliver the goods,” given the realities of the dynamic 21st-century competitive marketplace. At this point, union dues do often seem like money for nothing. Still, from my conservative and semi-populist view, it’s easy to have a consciously selective nostalgia for the time when unions could deliver a “family wage” for many American workers. And I don’t regard the generic campaign against unions as the heart of my Republican reform agenda.
That’s not to say that I deny that it’s “reactionary” not to acknowledge that unions, pensions, tenure, employer and employee union, and maybe even government entitlements are probably withering away, and that we have to think about how to help sustain the failing middle class and the struggling families of ordinary workers in a post-union environment and without undesirable and actually pretty inconceivable new births of dependency. American workers, everyone knows, are going to be, more than ever, found on the extremes of being either insecurely entrepreneurial independent contractors or tightly tethered to scripts written by the ”cognitive elite.” On such concerns, I refer to the work of Yuval Levin.
So overall, I hope for serious candidates other than Walker, Bush, and Rand Paul to emerge.
On the Democratic side, Hillary is clearly in big trouble. Even if she survives the e-mail thing, it’s easy to predict that will be the first of many aggressive assaults on her integrity. She seems old and tired and without much enthusiastic support where it counts. I agree with the experts who say that if she falters the most likely Democratic nominee is Virginia’s Senator Tim Kaine. He will be a formidable candidate.