Opinion: Leading conservative magazine makes its pick

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This may not have an immediate impact in Iowa, where Mike Huckabee has gotten hotter as the weather has gotten colder, but Mitt Romney rightfully will revel in an embrace today from a tried-and-true conservative voice: the National Review.

In its endorsement editorial, the magazine offers powerful phrasing that Romney’s presidential campaign can -- and probably will -- use to rebut those on the right still disturbed by his conversion from liberal positions on several social issues. The editorial terms him ‘a full-spectrum conservative: a supporter of free-market economics and limited government, moral causes such as the right to life and the preservation of marriage, and a foreign policy based on the national interest.’

As recently as last month, one of the magazine’s best-known staffers, Kate O’Beirne, wrote a piece touting John McCain as well worth a ‘second look’ from Republicans who have rebuffed him. And the endorsement editorial praises him as ‘a hero with a record that is far more good than bad.’

But it zings him, as well as Fred Thompson, for running poor campaigns. Rudy Giuliani and Huckabee, meanwhile, are rejected because, the magazine opines, they would rend the conservative coalition ‘from opposite ends: Giuliani alienating the social conservatives, and Huckabee the economic (and foreign-policy) conservatives.’

Romney, in other words, is the last viable Republican standing, in the view of the those now running the biweekly publication that William F. Buckley Jr. started in 1955.

-- Don Frederick