Here’s a startling fact:\u00a0 In a nation where the Republican Party’s brand is shifting toward its rural, conservative, tea-party-Protestant base, the two candidates with the most momentum are northern moderates.<\/p>\n
This week, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour bagged his potential presidential bid.\u00a0 That leaves former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as the odds-on favorites.<\/p>\n
Pawlenty is a guy who embraced cap-and-trade as a way to curb greenhouse gas emissions; Romney, famously, helped to create a version of “Obamacare” in his state before Obama arrived on the national stage.<\/p>\n
The other possible front-runner, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, has embraced tax cuts as one necessary strategy for balancing budgets.<\/p>\n
All these men have deep ties to the Republican Party as it exists in parts of the country that are less fervently conservative, especially on social issues.<\/p>\n
They have also been forced to actually govern large and complicated states.\u00a0 That has meant compromises and gray-zone decisions that some core activists will view as impure.<\/p>\n
Even the conservative movement’s latest sideshow favorite, Donald Trump, is a New York City socialite, whose positions over the years on most issues — to the extent that they’ve been coherent at all– have been moderate-to-liberal.<\/p>\n
These days, of course, all of these candidates are tacking to the right in an effort to secure the party nomination.<\/p>\n
They know that for modern Republicans the road to victory leads through the South and the Bible belt and through party committees now dominated by tea partiers and evangelicals.<\/p>\n
But they can’t erase their histories, or their long-established political records, and the GOP’s conservative base knows it.<\/p>\n