If you have
been following Reason.com’s coverage of the Republican National
Convention this week, you know that Tampa was the scene of a pretty
ugly fight over the party’s nominating process.

In a departure from a pattern going back to 2008, the struggle
this time was not just between Ron Paul supporters and the party
establishment. In Tampa, the party manhandled a wide range of
grassroots activists, including social conservatives and
harder-right members. 

For more about the struggle, click
here,
here,
here,
here and
here. Although television coverage of the convention largely
seems to have followed the GOP’s preferred narrative, the story of
the delegate fight did get picked up in mainstream
newspapers. 

At
FreedomWorks, Michael Duncan gives more detail on how the party
leadership kiboshed dissent: 

To placate the grassroots, the establishment pushed a
“compromise” on Rule 15, which conservative commentator Erick
Erickson called a “red
herring“, and simply shifted even more unsettling changes into
Rule 12. The Romney camp then launched a misdirection
campaign to
placate and confuse grassroots activists. 

The Romney camp even went as far as preemptively
removing Rules Committee members and replacing them with
Romney-appointed delegates, a move one can only imagine was done to
secure passage of the rule changes. 

A grassroots insurrection against the changes led
by Morton
Blackwell, FreedomWorks, Rush
Limbaugh, Michelle
Malkin, Ron
Paul supporters and countless others, encouraged full
Minority Reports on the Rules when the RNC convened to adopt the
rules. 

This is where the establishment got even more
brazen. When Speaker John Boehner asked for the
“ayes” and “noes” on the adoption of the rules, the “noes” were at
the very least just as loud as the “ayes”, and yet in the opinion
of Speaker Boehner the “ayes” had it. Gavel. 

Judge for yourself whether the ayes really had it:

Grassroots activists have objected that the rule changes are
tyrannical and likely to corrupt the process. (I am agnostic on
internal party governance, and I don’t know that it’s necessarily
wrong to require delegates to vote in a way that reflects how
voters actually cast their ballots.) But the decision to centralize
decision-making in a party establishment headed (for now) by Mitt
Romney could have more important consequences in November, by
further cooling the already lukewarm popular support Romney
has.

For many reasons, Romney is viewed with great suspicion by a
broad cross-section of the GOP base, including fiscal
conservatives, social conservatives, and above all the mass of
Americans who have risen up in revulsion at Obamacare’s individual
mandate (which Romney pioneered as governor of
Massachusetts). 

Romney’s popular vote tallies throughout the primary campaign do
not suggest that he has substantially improved on his ability to
bring voters out to the polls since 2008 (when he was defeated in
the primary by John McCain, who went on to lose to Barack Obama).
This is one of the reasons I believe Obama will
ultimately win in November, despite a first term that has been
stunning in its failures and even more disastrous in its
successes. 

Romney and the party leadership did not alienate grassroots
activists unintentionally. In many cases they appear  to have
gone out of their way to antagonize dissenters. This may have been
an easy decision to make when the grassroots consisted only of Paul
supporters (whom many Republicans would like to see leave the party
anyway). It’s another thing when you piss off the lineup of pundits
and conservative stalwarts Duncan names above. It’s also
unnecessary: Despite the claims of many Paul diehards, there was no
scenario under which Romney was not going to get the
nomination. 

The GOP is fabled for its party discipline, embodied in
Ronald Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment. But Republicans can still
weaken their candidate without speaking ill of him. They can decide
not to work for him, not to show any enthusiasm for him among their
undecided friends and family members, and not to bother voting at
all. Obama, the former community organizer, showed in 2008 that he
had the ability to motivate loyalists to get out to the polls, and
its unlikely that skill (which is even more important in an
election that is expected to get a mediocre turnout) has deserted
him completely.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, just doesn’t excite people. You
can win an election without exciting people, especially against an
incumbent whose four-year tenure has been so miserable for so many.
But it’s hard to see how producing a new cohort of disgruntled
Republicans will help Romney get past his natural limitations as a
politican.