Fourth, bone up on stem cells. You’ve managed to avoid taking a detailed position on the issue. And it’s not a top-tier issue. But the issue can get pretty complicated, and you’ll buy yourself trouble if your first remarks on the question have to be modified or elaborated later. I hope that you’ll agree with the president’s position on the issue: against human cloning, and against federal funding for research that involves the destruction of human embryos. If that is your position, it will be advantageous in the primaries, putting you to the right of John McCain and (one assumes) Rudy Giuliani while leaving Mitt Romney no room to your right. And it won’t hurt you in the general election. Very few people vote for candidates based on their position on stem cells, and the pro-life position can be explained in a way that sounds reasonable to most voters within Republican reach, even if they do not themselves share that position.
I would suggest saying something like the following: “I strongly support stem-cell research, including federal funding for stem-cell research. Adult stem-cell research has already led to benefits for some patients. Additional exciting research is being done on stem cells taken from umbilical cord blood and amniotic fluid, and a few researchers are looking at cutting-edge methods of stem-cell research that were hardly imaginable a few years ago. All of us, however, want this research to proceed with ethical guidelines. My own view is that those lines should be drawn in a way that protects human life in all its stages. Human embryos should not be created for research, and taxpayer money should not be spent on destroying them for research either.”
Fifth,
don’t feel pressured to flip-flop on campaign-finance reform. You supported it. So did all the top-tier candidates: McCain, Giuliani, and Romney.
More recently, you have said that it might be wiser to remove the limits on contributions and just have full disclosure. This isn’t as contradictory as it may sound to some people, since you were for raising the contribution limits all the way through the process. (And McCain-Feingold did indeed raise them.) I think the line-up of candidates gives you more or less complete freedom to say whatever you want to say on this topic. While I myself favor the libertarian line on it, you shouldn’t feel any need to reverse yourself in some dramatic way to win conservatives’ favor.
Sixth,
don’t (just) run on a conventional conservative platform. Right now, a big chunk of your appeal to the Right — aside from your celebrity and sober, no-nonsense manner — is that you have been more consistently conservative than McCain, Giuliani, or Romney. I don’t think that means you would be a weaker general-election candidate than them: Neither McCain’s heterodoxies nor Giuliani’s seem likely to win over independent voters, as Ross Douthat has
pointed out, and Romney’s record of flip-flops won’t either.
But a lot of conservatives have been telling themselves that Republicans lost the election because they were insufficiently committed to conservative orthodoxy: that if they had just eschewed pork and prescription-drug benefits, the voters would have been kinder to them. It is a comforting theory with almost no basis in fact.
Running on a strictly conservative platform has not won Republicans the presidency since at least 1988. Since that campaign was heavy on flag-waving, it might be more accurate to say “since 1980.” Even in 1980, moreover, Reagan made some innovations to conservatism: adding supply-side tax cuts to the mix, and backing away from opposition to entitlement programs. More to the point, Reagan succeeded not because his platform conformed to a philosophy, but because it applied that philosophy, creatively, to the problems of the day. If you end up being a successful candidate, you’ll have done that too.
But as with most of this advice, I suspect you already know that.
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