What Brooks doesn't discuss is what this says about today's GOP. Why is a pragmatist like Romney forced to transform himself into some culture-warrior pro-life hunter and grovel at the altar of James Dobson?His stump speech features generic Republican lines that could be uttered by any candidate at any time, almost as if they were originally designed for someone else and implanted onto him. He recently got into a more-anti-abortion-that-thou fight with Sam Brownback.
Maybe this market-tested, generic approach is working. Romney is ahead in Iowa and New Hampshire and tomorrow he is going to win the Iowa straw poll, though probably by less than some think.
Yet the campaign ill-fits the man. His audiences are impressed, but often unfulfilled.
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He’s a 1950s consensus man — he asked his grandkids to call him Ike, after his hero — who is play-acting at being Pat Buchanan.
The GOP is still very much the party of DeLay. This is the party that Rove and Bush built.
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