I have a question for all you Republicans out there. Have you ever actually gained anything from a “socially” conservative president being in office?  

Let me explain my question — it seems to me that the problem with Mitt Romney to the Republicans is that he doesn’t seem to have WASP credentials. OK, so he’s white and no one really cares if he’s actually Anglo-Saxon, but he isn’t Protestant and while I also don’t think people care about his Mormonism, they do seem to doubt his anti-abortion cred. You know, because George Bush was able to outlaw abortion and make the whole country abstain from sex before their constitutionally defined man and woman marriage. (And before you say it: The movement to ban same-sex marriage is a national one but has not really been a federal one.)

It doesn’t seem to me that all this noise about how split the Republican Party is is probably a non-issue. While it does seem to me that Mitt Romney is just about the only Republican who could gather a bunch of the moderate vote — despite the fact that, as James Carville confusingly said, he knows how to speak French and he graduated from Harvard — I don’t know if that is going to change much. If the economy rebounds, then Obama will probably win. If it stays stagnant, then it will be something of a toss-up. If the economy somehow declines significantly, I am going to join a random separatist group in Montana and dare the federal government to come and make me repay my student loans.

What you notice, though, is that it doesn’t really seem that Obama’s or Romney’s or Rick Santorum’s position on “social” issues is really going to change the race — unless Obama divorces his wife and marries a man (and even then I think that people would harp on the divorce more than you’d think) or Romney admits he doesn’t practice “traditional” Mormonism and sacrifices a pig on national television. For some reason, though, making a candidate march around the country giving speech after speech saying what everyone expects him to say so that he can win an unofficial vote to pick delegates (or not) so that he can run as a major party candidate in an election and have people vote so that the electoral college has a guide on who to actually make president actually matters. And if this paragraph seems confusing, vague and almost pretentiously digressive it is because both the system and the author describing it are those things.

I’m tempted here to say that all these bogus internal party conflicts largely come from the fact that news websites feel obligated to put up news on their webpages even if it is highly unlikely that there is actually good reason to update it every 20 minutes. I think, though, that there is a far more depressing reason for this. When it comes down to it, there are very few of us who know someone personally who we would want to be president. But I think people generally want the president to be like them. I don’t mean this in the insulting way that people might mean this: I don’t think that country bumpkins demand that their president not know how to speak French anymore than 1860 Americans demanded that their president wear a stove top hat. I simply think that it has become fairly hard for people to see their involvement as a tangible entity. Part of this might be the increasing unimportance of the local and state governments as the federal government begins to assume power (if indirectly, such as through the courts or through funding control) that I think many even 60 years ago would have thought impossible. It could be that large media has taken advantage of a market which rewards coverage of issues which concern the largest number of people. Whatever the reason, though, it seems pretty clear that these social issues have taken on an importance that is far more (or less) than their actual affect on national policy. Right wing Republicans demand that Mitt Romney “prove” that he had a genuine “change of heart” on abortion even though the odds of him actually effecting change are not very great because they want to believe that if given the chance he would do what they would do. I am not so sure that this localization of the national figure works, but I can’t blame the process.

— Gregory Bearringer is a graduate student in medieval studies. He can be reached at gbearrin@utk.edu.