January 18, 2008
Can This Brand Be Saved?
It's been one year since the unofficial kickoff of the 2008 presidential campaigns, and the state of play for the Republican nomination contest is remarkable both for what has changed and what hasn't.
Most obviously different are the front-runners. Mike Huckabee, nationally unknown this time in 2007, now rides comfortably in the top tier. He's always had the goods to do well in this campaign but faced long odds against better-funded celebrity candidates.
Both he and John McCain have smashed pundits' expectations and are now enjoying the attention and funding that front-runner status guarantees. But in many ways, the game for the Republicans hasn't changed one bit. This field still lacks a candidate who is all things to all GOP voters. The party isn't coalescing around one or two choices, as is happening in the Democratic race. Rather, the party is being divvied up like a pie, with each candidate representing just a slice of the big-picture GOP platform.
The primary vote is so fractured, in fact, that a brokered convention actually seems a distinct possibility. Yeah, yeah, we hear that every other cycle. Only, the longer you examine the differences among Huckabee, McCain, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, the more completely, utterly irreconcilable those differences seem. MSNBC's Chris Matthews is taking even more heat this week for a comparison he made between the GOP and Iraq's warring factions. Matthews may have stumbled through that analogy rather inelegantly, but he is on to something.
McCain is more of a social conservative than he is given credit for, albeit of the Barry Goldwater/George H.W. Bush variety. His presidential bid faltered early last year in part because of his awkward overtures to the religious right. That approach wasn't such a good fit for him. Now that he's back to his idiosyncratic, "straight-talking" campaign style, the moderate and independent supporters who abandoned him half a year ago are flocking back.
McCain's comeback is serendipitous, because where else would those voters go? Not to Huckabee, the evangelical Baptist preacher who, until very recently, backed a federal smoking ban. Nor to Romney, who fails the authenticity test with so many -- perhaps too many -- GOP voters.
Giuliani? Maybe. He led in national polling last year mostly because of name recognition. The polling didn't mean anything then, but as the campaigns rev up, so does familiarity with the rest of the slate. His nosedive in national polling in just November and December alone indicates that the more voters get to know Giuliani and his rivals, the less likely they are to stick with the former mayor. As New Yorkers predicted long ago, Giuliani's secretive business dealings and tabloid-ready family life are hurting perceptions about his long-term viability. Looking at the trend data compiled by Pollster.com, one sees a pretty neat inverse correlation between Giuliani's and McCain's respective stars.
Lucky for Giuliani, the disparate wins in the early contests so far mean everybody goes on to live until Feb. 5's Super Tuesday contests, where his campaign's hopes hang. And no one should forget that Giuliani is also running on his successful record as mayor. He's still got substantial support from voters who cite his strength after the 9/11 attacks and his seemingly miraculous transformation of New York City.
What about Fred Thompson, you ask? What about him indeed. Thompson may just be this cycle's Crystal Pepsi. His immediate base, Southern conservatives, now see a more attractive option in Huckabee. Defense-minded Republicans are casting their lot with McCain. Thompson trails McCain by 16 points and Huckabee by 9 points in South Carolina, according to a FOX News survey [PDF] released today. A loss there would be an existential blow for Thompson's campaign, to be sure.
Painfully for many Republicans, Romney is the perfect GOP candidate -- on paper. That may be good enough for the National Review, but many Republican voters remain too suspicious of the former Massachusetts governor. Again, because of the way this primary contest is playing out, Romney still has as good a shot at the nomination as anyone else here.
To understand what's happening in the presidential race, turn your attention away from the scrum in South Carolina to the guy currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. George W. Bush's tenure hasn't just divided this country, it's divided his own party. Some conservatives were relieved when the GOP lost Congress last November, because it gave the party an opportunity to shut down and reboot.
Unfortunately for them, the extra-long 2008 campaign cycle gave Republicans no time to step back and have a dialogue about their future. Now that discussion is playing out on the trail in real time, and the fact that it's even happening appears to be going unnoticed. Is this the party of national security or personal liberty? Fiscal restraint or compassionate conservatism? Free trade or hermetically sealed borders? Cultural preservation or big-tent inclusiveness?
For now, just check all of the above. In many ways, the GOP is a party at war with itself -- that's why long-shot, angry-at-the-establishment candidates Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter have been able to have such an outsized impact on how the front-runners behave.
"None of our candidates seem to be able to break through. And if you look at the candidates, all have serious problems," former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., told FOX News last week. "It's my prediction... we're headed for a brokered convention. I don't think we're going to get a nominee."
Maybe the September convention will afford Republicans an opportunity to get the fighting and crying out of the way before the general election, but don't count on it. Reconciliation between the torture/anti-torture, religious/secularist, anti-tax/fiscal conservative, anti-immigration/pro-compromise factions of the party will take time, and in some cases may not even be possible. It's a near-certainty that the GOP nominee will be someone not highly regarded by Establishment Republicans.
Republicans know the general-election field is tilted against them. The mood at the Republican National Committee's Winter Meeting in Washington this week was largely upbeat, but that's to be expected from the grassroots party faithful.
Pete Ricketts, the party's Nebraska Senate candidate in 2006 and now an RNC committeeman in that state, took a glass-half-full approach to the fractured presidential field.
"You've got a lot of really strong candidates out there and a lot of really great choices for Republican voters," he said, following House Minority Leader John Boehner's address yesterday. "If you look at the candidates we have versus the other side, we've got tremendous experience, both in the legislative and executive branches.... I think that's a strength, not a weakness."
But isn't the relatively weak support each candidate is attracting a sign of weakness for the party's ultimate prospects?
"Certainly, what we're looking for from whoever the eventual nominee is, is to pull the party together, to build the coalitions. That's the challenge for every leader," Ricketts said.
The challenge for the GOP is going nationwide with a candidate who couldn't sell himself to a simple majority of his own party. That doesn't mean the Republican nominee can't win the White House. He can -- if he does enough damage to the Democratic nominee.
In opening remarks to the Executive Directors' Meeting on Wednesday, Karl Rove devoted the bulk of his 20 minutes to what the Democratic contenders had going against them, rather than to what the GOP contenders had going for them.
"She says, quote, 'I have a million ideas and the country can't afford them all.' For once, I agree with Senator [Hillary Rodham] Clinton," Rove said. Boehner would repeat that quote in his address the following day.
And Rove strongly hinted that the GOP would seek to use Barack Obama's scant experience in the Senate against him. "Exactly what kind of change is he proposing? It's not clear," Rove said.
The "Boy Genius" was essentially laying out what the GOP's anti-Dem talking points would be later this year. Even if the Republicans keep the White House, the party will still need to have a serious talk about where it is heading. If it loses in November, that discussion could happen sooner than anyone expected.
Posted at 3:25 PM
Posted to:
Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Campaigns, Democrats, Duncan Hunter, Fred Thompson, Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, Karl Rove, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, President Bush, Republicans, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, Tom Tancredo, WH 2008
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