February 6, 2008

We've Been Here Before

Ken Whitehouse at NashvillePost.com writes today that Mike Huckabee's win in the Tennessee Republican presidential primary shows that "there is an enormous fracture in the structure of the Tennessee Republican party," with the establishment backing John McCain and Mitt Romney and the grassroots backing Huckabee.

He wonders if the party will be able to come together in the fall.

Calm down. We've been here before. This is what a Republican primary is all about - letting Republicans, including its big financial donors, its grassroots activists, its social conservatives, economic conservatives and security conservatives, sort through the field and pick a nominee. And often that nominee is someone who is not fully acceptable to one group or another.

Not even Ronald Reagan was universally beloved by Republicans in 1980 - in fact, he lost half a dozen early primaries to George H.W. Bush and even finished third in one state behind John B. Anderson before eventually securing the nomination in a field that also included Tennessee's own Howard Baker, Bob Dole and former Texas Gov. John Connally.

There were enough moderate Republicans who didn't like Reagan that Anderson was able to mount a strong general-election campaign as an independent.

Eight years later, Vice President George H.W. Bush, a moderate Republican, won the nomination but the field also included the conservative former Delaware Gov. Pete du Pont, economic conservative hero Jack Kemp, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and televangelist and social conservative Pat Robertson.

Closer to home, two years ago, Tennessee's Republicans saw a bruising primary battle between former congressmen Ed Bryant and Van Hilleary and former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker for the U.S. Senate nomination. Bryant and Hilleary battled for the conservative vote, Corker was the establishment's choice. Many conservatives weren't thrilled with Corker's primary win, but in the fall they came together with the party's moderates and its "establishment" to help Corker defeat the Democratic nominee.

And so it will be again this fall.

A large political party is a coalition of coalitions, filled with people who agree on many things but rarely on everything. The party wins by nominating someone who most of its members agree with on a majority of issues. If you're a member of a large political party, the primaries are when you get to be a purist, the general election is when you support the team.

I'm not going to tell you who I voted for yesterday, other than to say it was one of the candidates who finished in the top three in Tennessee. Nationally, there is no guarantee that my preferred candidate will get the nomination or even be on the ticket as the vice presidential nominee.

The nominee may not fully agree with me - or with many Republicans - on immigration or taxes or social issues or foreign policy, but there are some things I can know with certainty about our eventual nominee: President McRomabee will make a better president than either Sen. Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, will be better on the war and taxes and social issues than Clinton or Obama, and will nominate better judges for the federal courts than either Clinton or Obama would.

That's why, no matter who is the nominee, on Nov. 4 I - and millions of Republicans nationwide whose preferred candidate did not get the nomination - will stand at the voting machine and push the button for the Republican nominee.