http://www.nationalreview.com/node/427764/print Get Committed
By Ramesh Ponnuru — December 1, 2015
Republicans should ask more from their presidential candidates.
That assertion runs counter to a common theme of political coverage, which is that the party’s base demands that the candidates run so far to the right that they cannot win the general election. But that’s not a plausible explanation of why John McCain and Mitt Romney lost. (Even if you accept the ideas that the primaries forced Romney to tell illegal immigrants to “self-deport” and that this statement hurt him with Hispanics, it wasn’t his poor showing with Hispanics that cost him the election.)
And conservative voters have not actually asked Republican candidates to make many specific commitments. To a large extent, they approach the presidential primaries by asking which candidates are conservatives rather than by asking what conservative things they would attempt to do as president. These are related questions, but looking at the first in isolation from the second amounts to looking for badges of tribal identification.
There are obvious exceptions. Primary voters want the candidates to reflect them in being broadly pro-life, anti-tax, and pro-defense. Americans for Tax Reform asks candidates to pledge to voters that they will not raise taxes (a pledge that Republicans can take without losing any votes). Free-market groups have made the Export-Import Bank a litmus test, with the result that most of the presidential candidates say they would not support its renewal.
Some of the questions conservatives should ask are relatively open-ended. They should demand that their candidates explain how they would replace Obamacare, for example, though the candidates could reasonably provide different answers. There are a lot of moving parts to health policy. (Most of the candidates, to their discredit, have not yet given a detailed answer about Obamacare’s replacement.) A candidate ought to tell us how he intends to reform the tax code and entitlements, too. Consider that the essay-test portion of the primaries.
But there are also some yes-or-no questions conservatives should ask, some simple and specific commitments they ought to press the candidates to make.
continued
