Okay, I didn’t get flattened by a truck, so it could have been worse. Here’s to a much better year.

My last thoughts about all of this: I’m sorry it didn’t work out, but there will be another family arriving soon for the good jobs and the low cost of living.

 

Republican rats scrabble to take over the sinking ship

Gerard Baker

Among the numerous curiosities of the 2008 US presidential election campaign is the role reversal that has been executed by the two main parties.

Usually, when there is no incumbent president running for re-election (and even occasionally when there is) the Democrats, being a rowdy bunch, manage to produce an open, competitive race, a chaotic rolling maul of a contest from which a winner eventually emerges.

Republicans, meanwhile, are generally orderly and disciplined, dutifully falling into line behind a front-runner designated by their “establishment”, who gets into a brief knuckle fight with some upstart outsider and then cruises comfortably to the nomination.

This year it’s different. While the Democratic race is, as I noted last week, turning into an extended coronation for the Sun Queen, the Republican contest is a fog of competitive chaos. This is all the more striking because the polls suggest that the party is on course for a soaking next year on a scale not seen since the 1970s. Yet the number of plausible Republicans who want to be the party’s candidate is actually multiplying as they get closer to that election. It may, in fact, be the first known case in political history of rats auditioning to take the helm of a sinking ship.

It gets better. Mr. Baker has this year’s election completely nailed, and I don’t mean nailed in the sense of an outcome, just a perfect identification of the elements that will converge to make for a splendid cliff hanger of an evening next November. I did catch a comment to this article that suggests using the Virginia, and I’ll toss in Jersey, legislative races as a potential bellwether for 2008.

However it works out, I am fairly sure some sage political neophytes are waiting to announce their intentions sometime in mid November; no need to dust it up if the signs aren’t pointing in the right direction.

What’s to make of the leading fundraisers, Clinton and Romney, finding some of their support dwindling in Iowa? In a recent Newsweek Poll, Obama leads Clinton by a few percentage points, while Romney is seeing a slight dip in his ubber strong Iowa lead. Is it a tell for what to expect in the fall or simply an anomaly of a poll? I think it might be both.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see both Clinton and Romney struggle to keep their Iowa supporters in line during the next few months of the campaign. It’s a consequence of familiarity. Iowa voters have a baseline opinion about Clinton and Romney that’s been shaped over the last year or more. And as the less well known candidates come in and out of Iowa, Iowans who plan to attend the caucuses will tune in more acutely and really do their final shopping.

In that regard, Clinton and Romney have the less than enviable position of being considered the standard that all other candidates will need to measure up to. They may hold up just fine under the final comparison or for some reason caucus goers might change their minds. For these primary leaders it’s probably the most difficult point of the campaign to survive; they need to keep their supporters confident in their choice by not creating problems that might give their weak supporters pause to jump.

In Clinton’s case, a number of editorial writers have been noting her less than forthright habit in spelling out her positions. Much like her husband, she seems comfortable practicing the skills of lawyerly equivocating, and it’s not an especially attractive quality in a candidate.

Romney, on the other hand, has the potential for crafting a great message on the turnaround theme, but the campaign seems to move all over the place. The most recent being the “change” theme rolled out in TV, memo and campaign speak. It might have been the campaign’s effort to blunt a Newt campaign, which they really didn’t need to do, or it could be they’re spending too much time on the focus group language. I don’t know, but one thing is certain: a Romney campaign theme that jumps around too much manages to leave him open to more of the flip-flop perception.

For now, money counts. Hillary has plenty in the bank and more big donors are signing on with the recent addition of Howard Dean’s California connection, Rob Reiner, joining the team. And Romney can self-fund his way to the nomination if the campaign can keep the ground together.

It’ll be fun to watch, even from Florida.

We’re moving to Florida in less than a month and the level of work required to get a house ready to move across country is daunting. It’s particularly tough because you can’t keep too many memories, especially memories that have no real purpose in your life at this point in time.

Today, I spent the morning tossing old papers and research that will never turn into a dissertation. I also tossed papers and documents connected to all sorts of people and places I’ve worked with over the last fifteen years. We’re really starting over and none of the things I have saved will mean anything in our new home.

It’s starting life almost all over again; of course, the dreaded online search engines follow you everywhere, but everything else will change. The people, the places and most likely the type of projects I end up working on will be different, and although change is unnerving, I am hopeful that in the next part of my life I’ll take a simpler approach to what defines a good day.

GLENN: Right. But isn’t illegal immigration a crime in and of itself?

GIULIANI: No.

GLENN: Aren’t you saying –

GIULIANI: Glenn –

GLENN: You’re protecting criminals by saying that being treated as a criminal is unfair.

GIULIANI: Glenn, it’s not a crime. I know that’s very hard for people to understand, but it’s not a federal crime.

GLENN: It’s a misdemeanor but if you’ve been nailed, it is a crime. If you’ve been nailed, ship back and come back, it is a crime.

GIULIANI: Glenn, being an illegal immigrant, the 400,000 were not prosecuted for crimes by the federal government, nor could they be. I was U.S. attorney in the southern district of New York. So believe me, I know this. In fact, when you throw an immigrant out of the country, it’s not a criminal proceeding. It’s a civil proceeding.

GLENN: Is it –

GIULIANI: One of the things that congress wanted to do a year ago is to make it a crime, which indicates that it isn’t.

GLENN: Should it be?

GIULIANI: Should it be? No, it shouldn’t be because the government wouldn’t be able to prosecute it. We couldn’t prosecute 12 million people. We have only 2 million people in jail right now for all the crimes that are committed in the country, 2.5 million. If you were to make it a crime, you would have to take the resources of the criminal justice system and increase it by about 6. In other words, you’d have to take all the 800,000 police, and who knows how many police we would have to have.

GLENN: So what’s your solution?

GIULIANI: My solution is close the border to illegal immigration.

The blogs have been all over this one, indicating it’s a doomsday sort of comment to make. But I don’t think so. People care about stopping illegal immigration. They want the borders contained, which is a priority of the Giuliani campaign, but they don’t necessarily care about how we define what type of laws illegal immigrants are transgressing. Upshot: Giuliani survives this one.

The other not so obvious flub came when Presidential contender Mitt Romney made the assertion that Huckabee and Thompson need to raise at least 20 million dollars to be considered “top tier” candidates. The quote from the AP interview.

Feeling the heat of his rivals, the former Massachusetts governor dismissed the notion that a late-entering Thompson and an up-and-coming Huckabee were poised to squeeze into the GOP top tier now occupied by Romney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

“I think you’re going to have to see what level of ground support that they have and what level of fundraising they have,” Romney said in an interview with The Associated Press. “If Huckabee raises $20 million this quarter, like we did in the (first) quarter, then he’ll become a front-tier candidate.”

“And I think from Thompson’s standpoint, I think he certainly has to look at $20 million as sort of the — this is, if you will, the low hanging-fruit quarter for him,” Romney said, adding that it’s easier to raise money in the first weeks of a race when friends, family and allies are tapped.

Hard to see how this is a flub, outside of the obvious “my bank is bigger” not thinking involved in the comment. But really, Romney is attempting, once again, to telegraph to leading conservatives in Iowa and NH, who are still uncomfortable with his recent conversion to all things conservative, that there is no choice. Romney wants conservative activists to believe that he will be the only viable conservative alternative by the time the calendar arrives at Super Tuesday. Romney wants to make it a Romney versus Giuliani race right now, encouraging voters to forget the other conservatives in the race because they’re not bankable.

It’s a good throw down, but voters in New Hampshire and Iowa are a little too sophisticated and understand that no matter who the nominee is money will come, and that their job is to vet each candidate up close to make sure the Nation gets a real deal. I think this is the point where the truly conservative Romney needs to let early state voters peel the onion. The other guys may need twenty million, but Romney needs to allow his brand to be pulled apart a little bit more.

Flubs are part of the game and it’ll be telling how much the over talk in the blogs will either kill a candidate or kill off a flub. And my bet goes to blogs being more likely to kill off the flubs. We’ve reached a saturation point with too many choices and too much information coming out of the blogosphere, which will lead to blog information declining in relevance during this election cycle. Presidential campaigns will still revolve around the ad buys.

Next, I’d like to get your feelings toward some people who have been in the news.

4. I’ll read the name of a person and I’d like you to rate that person using something called the feeling thermometer. You can choose any number between 0 and 100. The higher the number, the warmer or more favorable you feel toward that person; the lower the number, the colder or less favorable. You would rate the person at the 50-degree mark if you feel neither warm nor cold toward them. If we come to a person whose name YOU DON’T RECOGNIZE, you don’t need to rate that person. Just tell me and we’ll move on to the next one. How about — [RANDOM ORDER]?

	Total		Republicans		Independents		Democrats
2007 Aug 23-26 (based by Mean)	Very warm	Mean	Very warm	Mean	Very warm	Mean	Very warm	Mean
	%		%		%		%
Barack Obama	29	55.6	10	40.6	27	56.6	49	69.1
Rudy Giuliani	24	53.1	37	64.4	23	51.1	13	44.6
Fred Thompson	16	52.0	32	66.3	14	48.8	4	41.0
John McCain	16	51.2	24	59.0	16	48.7	10	46.8
John Edwards	23	50.9	5	35.7	21	51.7	42	64.3
Mike Huckabee	7	49.8	15	62.5	5	44.9	3	42.2
Hillary Clinton	31	48.7	6	25.2	27	48.5	59	71.6
Bill Richardson	7	48.7	2	43.2	6	49.9	12	53.1
Mitt Romney	14	48.0	25	60.2	11	45.2	5	39.4
Joe Biden	9	46.6	3	37.7	8	46.8	16	54.0
Sam Brownback	3	44.7	7	53.0	2	43.3	*	38.3

Not too much of a surprise in the numbers: Clinton, Obama and Edwards are in with Democrats; Thompson, Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney are the Republican favorites; Independent voters are more inclined to feel something approaching warmth for Obama, Edwards and Giuliani. As always, polling data is snap shot of that particular time and much can change, although historically Democrats are more likely to nominate a come from behind candidate while Republicans tend to stick with a candidate leading in the polls.

But this year might be different. Clinton is running a good campaign and has consistently held the lead in Democratic polls through this year making it difficult to see anyone else as the Democrats’ choice. Republicans, on the other hand, have had a leader in Giuliani, but that lead is not across-the-board and we’re seeing significant state by state lead changes.

Could this be the year that Republicans nominate a come from behind candidate to take on the Democrats version of the status quo? I don’t know, but I’m inclined to doubt that Republicans will suspend their normal habits over some fresh face.

HT: Pollster.com

WALLACE: Governor, if that’s the best we can hope, should we continue the surge?

HUCKABEE: We have to continue the surge, and let me explain why, Chris. When I was a little kid, if I went into a store with my mother, she had a simple rule for me: If I picked something off the shelf at the store and I broke it, I bought it. I learned I don’t pick something off the shelf I can’t afford to buy.

Well, what we did in Iraq, we essentially broke it. It’s our responsibility to do the best we can to try to fix it before we just turn away. Because something is a stake.

HUCKABEE: Senator McCain made a great point — and let me make this clear: If there’s anybody on this stage that understands the word honor, I’ve got to say Senator McCain understands that word…

(APPLAUSE)

… because he has given his country a sacrifice the rest of us don’t even comprehend.

And on this issue, when he says we can’t leave until we’ve left with honor, I 100 percent agree with him because, Congressman, whether or not we should have gone to Iraq is a discussion the historians can have, but we’re there.

We bought it because we broke it. We’ve got a responsibility to the honor of this country and to the honor of every man and woman who has served in Iraq and ever served in our military to not leave them with anything less than the honor that they deserve.

PAUL: Can I respond…

(APPLAUSE)

HUME (?): Go ahead. You wanted to respond. He just addressed you. You go ahead and respond.

PAUL: The American people didn’t go in. A few people advising this administration, a small number of people called the neoconservatives hijacked our foreign policy. They’re responsible, not the American people. They’re not responsible. We shouldn’t punish them.

(APPLAUSE)

HUCKABEE: Congressman, we are one nation. We can’t be divided. We have to be one nation, under god. That means if we make a mistake, we make it as a single country: the United States of America, not the divided states of America.

(APPLAUSE)

PAUL: No, when we make a mistake — when we make a mistake, it is the obligation of the people, through their representatives, to correct the mistake, not to continue the mistake.

(APPLAUSE)

HUCKABEE: And that’s what we do on the floor of the Senate.

PAUL: No, we’ve dug a hole for ourselves and we’ve dug a hole for our party. We’re losing elections and we’re going down next year if we don’t change it, and it has all to do with foreign policy and we have to wake up to this fact.

HUCKABEE: Even if we lose elections, we should not lose our honor, and that is more important (inaudible) the Republican Party.

(APPLAUSE)

PAUL: We have lost over 5,000 Americans killed in — we’ve lost over 5,000 Americans over there in Afghanistan, in Iraq and plus the civilians killed. How many more you want to lose? How long are you going to be there?

How long — what do we have to pay to save face? That’s all we’re doing, is saving face. It’s time we came home.

(APPLAUSE)

HUME: Gentleman, thank you. (link)

The war does overshadow everything. Presidential candidates rarely get off the topic and yet the rhetoric sounds pat, almost nothing new came out of the debate in terms of the war.

What I found most disturbing is that not one candidate in discussing the war and our military brought up the German government’s arrest of Islamic terrorists planning a catastrophic attack on military installations in Germany. The candidates attempt to make the point that we are in a war against terror and yet everything revolves around our troops on the ground in Iraq, and a perfect example of why we need to keep fighting a global war on terror was ignored.

Overall, I didn’t learn much of anything from this debate: I still think Giuliani is a bit thugy; Romney seems disengaged; Ron Paul is curious or crazy or both; McCain is still an old salt; Huckabee can be tangentially preachy; Tancredo, Brownback and Hunter are taking up space; and Thompson is MIA — nothing new. We’ll try this again in a couple weeks.

I did start this more or less to control my name in a Google search and to keep my writing somewhat sharp; this blog has a limited purpose. However, on some days, like today, that motivation starts to wane as it doesn’t feel particularly purposeful. I won’t go into it in much detail, suffice to say that when you start to wonder about a big question like purpose it makes for a long day of painful introspection.

Anyway, blogging will resume when the purpose thing is figured out.

UPDATE: I spent the day working on purpose and came up with a good mission statement: To become unstuck through Grace, a Grace that allows me to accept where I am and who I am and find the path that walks through the world with faith, hope and love.

The survey goes on to ask respondents about their preferences in the Democrat and Republican primary field where Clinton and Giuliani outshine their primary opponents by significant numbers, no one comes within ten points of Hillary or Rudy on either question. (Link to the ABC News PDF document)

We’re still a long way off from the first round of votes, but everyone is starting to consider that this might be it. A year from now we could realistically be looking at a Clinton/Giuliani match-up. And I don’t like it, not so much the candidates but the fact that we might have to spend 14 plus months with these two characters invading our living rooms.

Campaigns have become less time specific and more of a constant presence in our daily lives, particularly true if you live in Iowa or some other early state. Our press covers it non-stop and the blogs talk presidential politics to the exclusion of almost any other issue. This wealth of candidate coverage could end up tamping down voter interest for the general election; the information saturated voter might opt out to avoid sorting too much information pushed in campaigns that are obviously too long.

It’s ironic that ABC picked a question about a hypothetical long car ride given this long slog of a campaign. And I wonder if the ABC pollsters were thinking about how those long car rides often end with people barely able to tolerate one another.