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Title: With McCain’s retreat, some turn to Romney to carry his torch
Source:
WAPO
URL Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/powe ... ry.html?utm_term=.f78f38fcc034
Published: Feb 15, 2018
Author: Paul Kane
Post Date: 2018-02-16 05:21:21 by Gatlin
Keywords: None
Views: 1745
Comments: 21
In more ways than one, followers of traditional Republican orthodoxy are facing an emotional inflection point this week. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), at home battling an aggressive form of brain cancer, will not attend this weekend’s Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of foreign policy leaders from NATO nations that has become a central clearinghouse for global security matters and a celebration of Western values and democratic institutions. McCain, an avatar of all of the above, has been a regular attendee for decades. Last year, less than a month after President Trump took office, he stole the show with a speech that denounced the new president’s refusal to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Our fellow citizens seem to be flirting with authoritarianism and romanticizing it as our moral equivalent,” McCain said there last February. But with McCain’s retreat comes the reemergence of another man: Mitt Romney, his political rival for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. Romney had been scheduled to begin his campaign for senator from Utah on Thursday, but he delayed the announcement Wednesday “out of respect for the victims and their families” of a shooting at a South Florida high school. It’s not clear how Romney, a heavy favorite to win, would approach his role as a senator, particularly in the era of Trump. His aides say that on the campaign trail he will avoid the role of chief foil to the president. But at times, Romney has sounded like just that — and a defender of Western values, and a deep antagonist of Putin and a free-market globalist. Romney took to Twitter, for instance, to lash out at Trump last month after The Washington Post reported that the president, in a meeting with senators, said that he did not want more immigrants from countries such as Haiti or in Africa, using an obscenity to describe such nations. “The poverty of an aspiring immigrant’s nation of origin is as irrelevant as their race,” Romney tweeted. “The sentiment attributed to POTUS is inconsistent [with] America’s history and antithetical to American values.” Friends of both Romney and McCain say Romney’s willingness to jump back into the political arena provides them with another high-profile antagonist to Trump’s America-first worldview. Is Romney’s timing important? “Yeah, it is,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). Plenty of other Republicans on Capitol Hill maintain those traditional Republican values of global dominance and free trade, but most of their voices have been quieted in the era of Trump. “He’ll have a big impact. He comes with immediate gravitas, credibility and stature, and it will be a whole new power structure, I think, in the Senate, as people gravitate to him,” Flake said of Romney. The anti-Trump Republicans need all the help they can get. McCain returned to Arizona before Christmas and has not appeared in the Senate since. Flake is retiring at the end of this year. Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.), after a public dispute with Trump about his behavior related to race riots in Charlottesville, announced that he, too, would retire. Corker is reconsidering whether to run for reelection, but he probably would do so only if Trump supports his bid — a move that might make criticism of the president more difficult. In the House, most Republicans have embraced much of Trump’s agenda and have worked to protect him from an investigation of Russian efforts to tip the 2016 election in his favor. Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who initially refused to endorse Trump in 2016, sided against the FBI and the Justice Department in favor of Republicans on the intelligence committee in releasing a memo that attempted to undermine portions of the Trump investigation. A decade ago, in February 2008, Romney withdrew from the Republican presidential primary after a bitter and sometimes personal campaign against McCain. But four years later they put that behind them and, early in the 2012 primary, McCain threw his support to Romney. Both Republicans would go on to lose to Barack Obama in their respective general- election contests, but they have both retained some level of prominence as elder statesmen in their party, particularly on foreign-policy matters. Senators in both parties say that in world travels, gravitas matters. World leaders take McCain far more seriously than any other senator traveling abroad. “When John McCain speaks, the world listens,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), McCain’s longtime travel partner, said Wednesday. “He’s got respect from all over the world in terms of foreign policy.”
(1 image) 
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), right, appears with Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, in January 2012.
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