Mitt Romney has a gift for words — self-destructive words. On Friday he did it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a “severely conservative governor.”
As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.
That’s clearly not what Mr. Romney meant to convey. Yet if you look at the race for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, you have to wonder whether it was a Freudian slip. For something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism.
Start with Rick Santorum, who, according to Public Policy Polling, is the clear current favorite among usual Republican primary voters, running 15 points ahead of Mr. Romney. Anyone with an Internet connection is aware that Mr. Santorum is best known for 2003 remarks about homosexuality, incest and bestiality. But his strangeness runs deeper than that.
For example, last year Mr. Santorum made a point of defending the medieval Crusades against the “American left who hates Christendom.” Historical issues aside (hey, what are a few massacres of infidels and Jews among friends?), what was this doing in a 21st-century campaign?
Nor is this only about sex and religion: he has also declared that climate change is a hoax, part of a “beautifully concocted scheme” on the part of “the left” to provide “an excuse for more government control of your life.” You may say that such conspiracy-theorizing is hardly unique to Mr. Santorum, but that’s the point: tinfoil hats have become a common, if not mandatory, G.O.P. fashion accessory.
Then there’s Ron Paul, who came in a strong second in Maine’s caucuses despite widespread publicity over such matters as the racist (and conspiracy-minded) newsletters published under his name in the 1990s and his declarations that both the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act were mistakes. Clearly, a large segment of his party’s base is comfortable with views one might have thought were on the extreme fringe.
Finally, there’s Mr. Romney, who will probably get the nomination despite his evident failure to make an emotional connection with, well, anyone. The truth, of course, is that he was not a “severely conservative” governor. His signature achievement was a health reform identical in all important respects to the national reform signed into law by President Obama four years later. And in a rational political world, his campaign would be centered on that achievement.
But Mr. Romney is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, and whatever his personal beliefs may really be — if, indeed, he believes anything other than that he should be president — he needs to win over primary voters who really are severely conservative in both his intended and unintended senses.
So he can’t run on his record in office. Nor was he trying very hard to run on his business career even before people began asking hard (and appropriate) questions about the nature of that career.
Instead, his stump speeches rely almost entirely on fantasies and fabrications designed to appeal to the delusions of the conservative base. No, President Obama isn’t someone who “began his presidency by apologizing for America,” as Mr. Romney declared, yet again, a week ago. But this “Four-Pinocchio Falsehood,” as the Washington Post Fact Checker puts it, is at the heart of the Romney campaign.
How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!
My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.
Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.
The point is that today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.
One in eight active registrations is invalid or inaccurate. At the same time, one in four people who are eligible to vote — at least 51 million potential voters — are not registered.
The report found that there are about 1.8 million dead people listed as active voters. Some 2.8 million people have active registrations in more than one state. And 12 million registrations have errors serious enough to make it unlikely that mailings based on them will reach voters.
“These problems waste taxpayer dollars, undermine voter confidence and fuel partisan disputes over the integrity of our elections,” said David Becker, director of election initiatives at the center.
Mr. Becker warned that poor record keeping at the registration stage is not evidence of fraud at polling places. “These bad records are not leading to fraud but could lead to the perception of fraud,” he said.
What seems clear is that many people who are eligible to vote and want to do so fail because of flaws in the registration rolls. In 2008, roughly “2.2 million votes were lost because of registration problems,” according to a report [ http://vote.caltech.edu/drupal/files/report/Final%20report20090218.pdf ] from the Voting Technology Project [ http://vote.caltech.edu/drupal/ ] of the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Heather Gerken, a law professor at Yale, said the new report from Pew quantified and illuminated just how poorly the election system manages its most fundamental task.
The flaws in the voter registration rolls have a disproportionately negative impact on mobile populations, including students and other young people, the poor and members of the military, the Pew report found.
“It’s not clear that it has a uniform partisan effect,” Nathaniel Persily, a law professor and political scientist at Columbia, said of those findings. But he added that “it is now pretty clear that Democrats want to enact measures that make voter registration easier, and Republicans fear that would be an invitation to fraud.”
The Pew report compared state voter registration lists with a database maintained by Catalist [ http://catalist.us/ ], a company that collects and sells information about voting-age Americans based on data from public and commercial sources.
The United States differs from most other modern democracies in relying on a decentralized election administration system that places the burden of registration on voters rather than treating registration as a government responsibility.
“Part of the problem is that it is difficult for us to be proactive,” said Linda H. Lamone, Maryland’s administrator of elections. “We have to rely on the voters.”
In Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Germany, Peru and Sweden, by contrast, the national government maintains its own registries of citizens eligible to vote, according to a 2009 report from the Brennan Center for Justice [ http://brennan.3cdn.net/3234b49c4234d92bf3_3km6i2ifu.pdf ].
Professor Gerken said difference between American and international practice helps explain many of Pew’s findings. “Everyone else in a modern democracy does it better,” she said, adding that the American system “is a silly way to run a railroad.”
It is also expensive. In 2008, for instance, Oregon spent $4.11 per active voter to process registrations. A 2001 study [ http://vote.caltech.edu/drupal/files/report/voting_what_is_what_could_be.pdf ] from the voting project found that local election offices spent a third of their budgets on registering voters.
Canada, by contrast, spent less than 35 cents per voter to process registrations — and 93 percent of eligible voters there are registered.
The registration process in the United States often involves handwritten forms, some collected by third parties. Those forms are then manually entered into an electronic system, a process bound to introduce flaws.
People who move, moreover, often take no steps to inform administrators at their old addresses, and a new registration does not typically result in a notification to cancel the previous one. Yet a quarter of all voters assume that their registrations automatically move with them, the report found.
As a consequence, active registrations in two states are common. Some 70,000 people are registered to vote in three or more states.
One possible response, employed in Arizona and Washington State, is to allow online registration, which is cheaper, more accurate and more convenient but may raise security concerns. Ms. Lamone, the Maryland election official, said her state for now “is completely paper based” but would allow online registration starting in July for people with a valid state driver’s license or military identification.
The Pew report urged administrators to make greater use of data-matching technologies commonly used by private businesses and to look to government resources like motor vehicle records, Social Security death records and the Postal Service’s change-of-address database.
In an interview, Professor Persily proposed what he called an easy fix to many of the problems identified in the new report. The Postal Service’s change-of-address form, he said, could include a box that, when checked, would generate a cancellation notice directed to the old voting place and a registration request to the new one.
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