November 28, 2007
Debate Night: The GOP & The Snowman
Looking ahead to tonight's highly anticipated CNN/YouTube debate, we find ourselves pondering a few weighty matters.
How much representation will CNN give to questions about Iraq, now that coverage of the war has dropped off steeply on that network and elsewhere?
Will the format of tonight's debate prove more hostile to the Republican candidates than to the Democrats, as we suspected in July?
And finally: What are the chances Mitt Romney won't be asked to take a question from that Snowman?
These and other issues will be resolved starting at 8 p.m. EST tonight on CNN; The Gate will be liveblogging the action starting at 7:45. But first, some prognostication, after the jump.
By many accounts, we've finally got us a real race here, and just in time for the pushed-up primaries in a month and change. Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani have been lobbing broadsides at each other for the past couple of weeks with a ferocity we haven't seen yet in this elongated campaign cycle. Meanwhile, the MSM has finally woken up to the fact that former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee could really scramble the dynamics of the nomination race.
Let's get some business out of the way first. You're hearing a lot about two polls this week, one from Rasmussen that has Huckabee at No. 1 in Iowa and one from Zogby Interactive that has Hillary Rodham Clinton losing to all the GOP front-runners. We haven't touched either survey in our Poll Track column because they are especially unreliable. Rasmussen conducts robopolls in which respondents are contacted via telephone but using computers, not people. The Zogby poll was conducted online. Pollsters consider neither method as capable of collecting sufficiently random samples. (The New York Times reported on the unreliability of online polling in May.)
On top of all that, all Iowa polling has to be viewed with deep skepticism because 10 percent or fewer Iowa voters actually participate in the caucuses. And the caucusing process has less to do with how much actual support a candidate has in that state than with how deftly a candidate's team is able to negotiate caucus-goers. (See Dan Balz's explanation from earlier this month, and please, Hawkeye Staters, direct your ire at him instead of us.)
All that said, no one should be surprised that Huckabee is getting his turn in the spotlight, for all the reasons we've listed previously. ABC News/Washington Post [PDF] has him in a dead heat with Romney in Iowa, which -- everything we've just said about polling aside -- is absolutely significant.
The reason: $$$. Romney has spent millions in Iowa and New Hampshire since his first ad went up in February, and Huckabee only just started spending what little he has last week with the first of two ads (he raised about $1 million in the third quarter). Rival campaigns scoff that Huckabee's new status as media darling got him to the front of the pack in Iowa, and there's something to that. But in a climate of near-pathological concern about the economy, Huckabee's brand of straight-laced moral conservatism combined with his streak of economic populism could win him plenty more converts elsewhere in the country.
That said, the prospect that Huckabee could actually win this thing is still a far-off dream. The reason: $$$ again. That populist streak almost ensures the man anti-tax conservatives call Huckananny won't get the backing of big business, which historically is a must to win the GOP nod.
The ground is ripe for attacks in this field, yet because of tonight's interactive debate format, we may not see much bang-bang here. This debate, remember, was originally scheduled for Sept. 17 but had to be pushed back because Giuliani and Romney were cool to the format. Jim Geraghty at National Review thinks the time for redneck humor and baby snowmen is long past in this race, especially as we're finally getting into truly substantive debates on fiscal policy, immigration and diplomacy in this field. We wouldn't be surprised if other uncommitted Republican voters agreed.
Let's hope CNN's producers keep all this in mind as they whittle down the video questions that will be asked tonight. See you in a few hours.
Photo Illustration: Reuben Dalke
Posted at 4:16 PM
Posted to:
Campaigns, Democrats, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Republicans, Rudy Giuliani, WH 2008
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