Palin and Mondale
To understand why Democrats ever picked Mondale, you have to understand where the party — and where the country — was in 1982 and 1983, when the nation’s verdict on Reagan and his policies was far less positive. In those days, with unemployment surging over 10 percent and the president’s popularity slipping to sub-Carter levels, Democrats mistakenly assumed that the ’80 election had been a mirage. The electorate, they figured, had acted in haste and was rapidly returning to its senses. The results of the 1982 midterms, when Republicans (who had begun the cycle with claims that they’d win back the House) lost 26 House seats, only encouraged this thinking. To these Democrats, putting up Mondale made all the sense in the world. ~Steve Kornacki
I appreciated Kornacki’s argument. He makes several good points explaining how a party recovering from a presidential election defeat could so badly misread the political landscape and choose such a poor nominee. It could be that I am underestimating the effect that most Republicans’ sheer contempt for Obama will have on the next nomination contest. When it comes to channeling and expressing this contempt there are quite a few willing to do it, but there aren’t any prominent Republicans that take more delight in it than Palin. If Republicans choose to believe that 2008 was just a fluke and that a re-match of sorts would have a different outcome, Palin would become a very appealing candidate for them. Kornacki is right when he says:
In nominating her, Republicans would be saying to the country, “We have learned nothing these last four years. We have changed nothing.”
Indeed, they have learned nothing during the last four years, and they haven’t really changed much of anything, so Palin would be a good fit with the party’s leaders and activists for that reason, but I remain skeptical that they are really prepared to go down in flames out of little more than pride and spite. I won’t rehearse all of the reasons I have given before why I doubt the GOP would be so self-destructive as to nominate Palin, but there still seem to be too many structural reasons why someone occupying Palin’s political space cannot succeed in a Republican primary contest. The comparison with Mondale is instructive. Palin and Mondale are alike in that they represent the face of the party as it was when it was defeated, but they are quite different in their sources of support. Mondale was the candidate of the party establishment and important interest groups, and Palin has made a point of aligning herself with every possible anti-establishment, insurgent campaign she can find.
While there are some Washington pundits and journalists on the right that continue to take her seriously, she isn’t likely to have the insider support or backing from party leaders. That space is already being filled by Romney, who also enjoys the status of default frontrunner. Despite her positioning as a “populist” insurgent, she seems uninterested in building an organization to challenge better-funded, better-organized rivals, and she is quite unsuited to running as a party reformer brimming with innovative policy ideas. Her positioning as an insurgent puts her at a particular disadvantage in Republican primaries, which tend to favor runners-up and establishment favorites. Because of their overconfidence and their extremely low opinion of Obama, Republicans may end up nominating a Mondale-like candidate in 2012, but I still have a hard time seeing how Palin gets there. In many ways, Romney has a much easier path to the nomination, and he has just reminded everyone why he would be a spectacularly unsuccessful general election candidate.
“Because of their overconfidence and their extremely low opinion of Obama, Republicans may end up nominating a Mondale-like candidate in 2012, but I still have a hard time seeing how Palin gets there. In many ways, Romney has a much easier path to the nomination, and he has just reminded everyone why he would be a spectacularly unsuccessful general election candidate.”
Daniel, I take the completely opposite view. Romney’s most difficult task is winning the Republican nomination in my opinion. I don’t think that Baptists and other fundamentalist Christians have grown any more tolerant of Mormons since 2008. That still remains Romney’s biggest hurdle. (It is ironic that I, a nonbeliever, actually favored Romney in 2008, while his “fellow Christians” in the Republican Party rejected him.) Should he win the nomination, I think he stands a good chance of defeating Obama in 2012. He certainly comes across as a much more credible candidate than Palin, with superior education, intelligence and experience. I think that, if the economy has not fully recovered by 2012, Obama will be open to attack by a candidate who has a resume of competence which Romney certainly has, notwithstanding the deft criticism you have made of his foreign policy positions. I think people have learned what they get from a community organizer with little real world experience and would be prepared to vote for change once again. I say that while admitting that I voted for Obama in 2008, although I would characterize my vote as more anti-McCain than pro-Obama.
Seeing Palin mentioned in the same sentence with Mondale, much less a blog post title, makes this good Minnesotan lose his lutefisk. I know that the comparison is of historic presidential politics, not of personal qualities, but still. Gag me with a spoon. Just in case anybody’s wondering “Where are they now?”, Fritz is still going strong at 82. He is Norway’s Honorary Consul General in Minneapolis and he’s active in an organization trying to keep Minnesota’s judicial system impartial and non-partisan.
Like Dickens’ Jacob Marely, the Republican elite are “captive, bound and double-ironed” to the wreckage of the Bush administration. The cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses are Bush, Cheney, Rove, Limbaugh and the Republican congressional leadership that conspired to the implement the pathology of years 2001-2009.
Any Republican running with those millstones around their neck is another Mondale – doomed to defeat. Only total repudiation of what Bush had wrought would provide a chance at presidential victory.
But the bombs tossed at Michael Steele by the nitwits at The Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News and by the Cheney Clan show how that could never happen. Because they represent the MSN definition of conservatism. So like it or not, Obama’s back in 2012.
NorwegianShooter, I didn’t vote for Mondale in 1984, but I agree with you that putting him on the same scale as Palin does him a serious disservice. He was, after all, a relatively young (32) attorney general of Minnesota for four years, a Senator for 13 years, and Vice President for four years. Despite the fact that I didn’t agree with his politics, I acknowledged that he was a serious and intelligent public servant, which I certainly can’t say about Palin.
I didn’t make this point as well as I should have, but what I wanted to emphasize in some of my later remarks is that Mondale and Palin really aren’t that comparable in most respects. In addition to the rest of his far longer career, he was a former Vice President and not simply a losing VP nominee. Along with everything else Kornacki was saying, that must have made him seem like a safer choice. She is a half-term governor who quit her job, and that is bound to be held against her in any election she contests. Put another way, Mondale suffered a massive defeat, and Palin would probably do even worse.
As for Romney, let’s remember that he consistently won 25% or more in most of the contests before Super Tuesday, and except for Iowa he tended to outperform in caucuses that required effective organization. Assuming a race between four or five major contenders, Romney is well-positioned to wrap up a plurality with the backing of all the rest of the moderates, mainstream Protestants, Catholics and secular Republicans who split between him and McCain last time. 35% is all he will need in most contests. If the the winner-take-all rules and primary front-loading remain more or less unchanged, he has a good chance to win the nomination.
That doesn’t mean that he won’t have a very real, significant problem in the general election on account of his religion, and it won’t just be limited to evangelicals. Depending on which poll you wanted to look at last cycle, anywhere between 25 and 40% say they won’t vote for a Mormon for President, and it is pretty evenly distributed across almost every demographic.
Speaking of Romney’s difficulty with evangelicals, it seems that his campaign has already written off pursuing their votes:
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/joannabrooks/2929/romney_campaign_to_surrender_evangelicals_in_2012/
Daniel,
Instead of nitpicking others, why not provide a list of possible Republicans nominees that would show that the Republicans have learned their lesson and are not serious.
Someone I doubt that you can do it since it would show the left that you actually care about the Republican Party instead of just wanting to nitpick the Republicans in order to build up your credibility with the left.
Of course, Palin would be a miserable choice but the Republicans are faced with th eproblem of having no good candidates. So the real question is who will do the least damage in losing in a rout to President Obama. If the Republicans wanted to think outside the box they would either not nominate anyone and save the money to compete in House and Senate races.
I didn’t really think Mondale and Palin (oh, noe, now I’ve done it again!) were being placed on the same scale. I got it, my complaint was tongue in cheek, but I appreciate the agreement.
As for 2012, Petraeus is still the dark-horse-but-the-favorite-in-a-weak-field right now. This guy gets it totally wrong (imagine that, he’s a former WSJ editor!”
Pawlenty and Daniels seem like decent, competent guys. Of course, they haven’t said much that I’ve heard about foreign policy and are no doubt at risk of neoconification. Chris Christie seems interesting but says he wants to make money when he’s done.
I don’t see Palin wanting it. She’s having too much fun as a celebrity, for which she’s well-suited. Too much in thrall to Ralph Scheunemann and dispensationalist zionism for my taste.
Which does lead us back to the execrable Romney, with the twin monkeys of Mass. health care and the LDS church on his back. God preserve the Republic, because the GOP isn’t.
GOM,
Pawlenty would not even deliver Minnesota and has already been deemed a failure. Daniel and Chrsitie as too new and need at least another decade of experience and need to show that they can deliver more than spin.
The Republicans should have learend after electing a guy who had been governor for six years with nothing to show for it. Unless a Repulbican candidate has more than a decade of real performance, then they are not qualified to run.
First, many evangelicals do not believe that Mormons are Christian. Although I am Catholic and a left-winger, I agree with them:
1) Mormons have a different scripture than Christians. For Christians, the Bible is scripture. For Mormons, it is the Book of Mormon.
2) Orthodox Christians (Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Protestants) believe that Jesus was always God, even before he became man. Mormons do not. Instead, Mormons believe that Jesus was a man who became God.
There are many Republicans who could mount a very credible challenge to Obama. Fortunately for him, most of them have already been written off as RINOs by the GOP base. Of the current field, I would say Huckabee is the best positioned though I expect a try by Jim DeMint (which will be quite amusing). Every single candidate will obviously have to run far, far right to placate the primary voters…..I don’t think they will/can leave themselves enough room to skip back to the center.
GOM, T-Paw is an empty suit. If that’s enough to get nominated, and it could be, then he’s got a shot. However, he’s been on the national circuit and moving right for a couple of years, yet doesn’t seem to have any major GOP group’s mojo. It doesn’t look good.
SD, “then they are not qualified to run.” What has qualification got to do with it? Besides being a proven fundraiser, of course.
Daniel Larison:
Depending on which poll you wanted to look at last cycle, anywhere between 25 and 40% say they won’t vote for a Mormon for President . . .
That’s opposing a generic Mormon to a generic non-Mormon. I doubt those polls tell us anything about real voting, when a voter must choose between a Mormon candidate he likes for other reasons, and a non-Mormon candidate he dislikes, perhaps strongly.
Have you seen any polls asking people if they can imagine voting for a Mormon under any circumstances? Those results might be more pertinent.
Speaking of Romney’s difficulty with evangelicals, it seems that his campaign has already written off pursuing their votes . . .
That’s a silly misinterpretation of the (final) linked article.
Romney did quite well among evangelicals in 2008. Throwing those votes away would be throwing away the nomination.
tbraton:
I don’t think that Baptists and other fundamentalist Christians have grown any more tolerant of Mormons since 2008. That still remains Romney’s biggest hurdle.
I think the seriously anti-Mormon evangelicals would have voted for Huckabee anyway, and in 2012 would vote for Huckabee or Palin (unless neither run). If that’s true, then Romney’s Mormonism is of little consequence for Republican primaries.
Daniel Larison:
Palin and Mondale are alike in that they represent the face of the party as it was when it was defeated . . .
If Palin was the ‘face’ (whatever that means) of any part of the Republican Party, it was the part that lost the primaries, and got the VP nomination as a consolation prize.
Daniel Larison:
Romney . . . has just reminded everyone why he would be a spectacularly unsuccessful general election candidate.
I don’t understand. Are you suggesting that swing voters care about the finer points of wonkery?
In the op-ed, Romney manages to sound like he knows what he’s talking about. That’s the hurdle that Sarah Palin rarely clears.
“I think the seriously anti-Mormon evangelicals would have voted for Huckabee anyway, and in 2012 would vote for Huckabee or Palin (unless neither run). If that’s true, then Romney’s Mormonism is of little consequence for Republican primaries.”
David Tomlin, I believe you minimize the substantial anti-Mormon feeling that is out there, especially among Baptists and other fundamentalist Christians. My view is supported by the poll results Larison cited and by the apparent decision of the Romney campaign not to pursue the evangelical vote in 2012 (per Larison’s linked article which merely buttresses something similar I read many months ago). My view is also consistent with the many disparaging comments made by evangelicals on Yahoo message boards in 2008 (“cultists,” “not Christians,” etc.). Part of the animosity stems in part from the competition between Mormons and Baptists for the souls (and wallets) for true believers. I guess Southern Baptists would have a soul-wrenching decision to make if they were forced to choose between the Mormon Romney and the black Obama in 2012 and would surely require divine guidance in making that decision.
BTW I agree with you that Larison places too much emphasis on “the finer points of wonkery.” I don’t think that many voters will even be aware of what the Start treaty is. After all, this is America, where 40% of Americans between the ages of 19 and 29 can’t even identify which country the U.S.A. obtained its independence from.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/this-sunday-a-quarter-of-americans-will-be-sadly-mistaken-about-what-theyre-celebrating/
Let me clarify why I think Romney’s ridiculous arguments against START show that he will be an awful candidate. We can all agree that very few people know remotely enough about arms control to care about the ins and outs of arms reduction treaties, and even fewer can spot when a politician is lying about such things. So I don’t think he will be an awful general election candidate *because* the voters will recoil in disgust at his ignorance about arms control. When Romney discusses foreign policy, he projects his usual insufferable arrogance and an obviously forced, disingenuous aggressiveness. He acts as a know-it-all when he doesn’t understand the subject, which Obama could probably point out fairly easily, and he engages in the most transparent pandering to some of the most extreme elements in his party.
It would take Obama or the DNC all of five minutes to use Romney’s position on START and his other foreign policy positions to create one of their main lines of attack. It will go something like this: “Here is someone so desperate to become President that he adopts positions more extreme and dangerous than even those held by the Bush administration, and what is worse is that he is only doing it to curry favor with the people who gave you the Iraq war.” They might reduce it to something simple: “If you thought George Bush was a disaster for America’s standing in the world, you haven’t met Mitt Romney.” And so on. It has nothing to do with the wonkish details he doesn’t understand and everything to do with the image of reckless hawkishness Romney is presenting.
Could Romney possibly recover from his behavior of the last couple of years? I mean, I get the impression that Romney looked and sounded like a completely different sort of guy and candidate before running for President and that the desperate phoniness is something Romney’s adopted because he’s trying to be things that he isn’t. If he abandoned efforts to be Mr. Conservative and reclaimed the mantle of competent technocrat…would he be a better candidate all the way around?
Mike
in case you missed this,… from today’s wapo // the cable
Sarah Palin is waging a battle inside the “tea party” movement to exempt defense spending from the group’s small-government, anti-deficit fervor.
There’s growing concern among Republicans — and especially among the pro-defense neoconservative wing of the party — that national security spending, which is under a level of scrutiny and pressure not seen since the end of the Cold War, could fall victim to the tea party’s anti-establishment, anti-spending agenda. The former Alaska governor, as the unofficial leader of the movement and its most prominent celebrity, is moving to carve out such funding from any drives to cut overall government expenditures.
Palin’s drive to lead the charge against defense cuts was on display in a June 27 speech at “Freedom Fest,” a conservative gathering in Norfolk where she sent a clear message to Republicans that deficit reduction can’t come at the military’s expense.
Palin also took on Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Republican, challenging his drive to rein in procurement spending and reevaluate the need for certain huge weapons systems.
“Secretary Gates recently spoke about the future of the U.S. Navy [and he] went on to ask, ‘Do we really need . . . more strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?’ ” Palin said. “Well, my answer is pretty simple: Yes, we can and yes, we do, because we must.”
Re: Romney and evangelicals, here is a relevant quote from an article in The Boston Globe:
Now what could I have been thinking with my silly misinterpretation?
“Could Romney possibly recover from his behavior of the last couple of years? I mean, I get the impression that Romney looked and sounded like a completely different sort of guy and candidate before running for President and that the desperate phoniness is something Romney’s adopted because he’s trying to be things that he isn’t. If he abandoned efforts to be Mr. Conservative and reclaimed the mantle of competent technocrat…would he be a better candidate all the way around?”
In my eyes, Romney would have been a better candidate had he not changed his positions, but, unfortunately, the “flip flopping” on abortion was necessary for him to have a chance of succeeding in today’s knee-jerk, brain-dead Republican Party. After all, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush both performed the very same flip-flops, and I voted for each of them twice. I have personally supported a woman’s right to choose since I was a teenager (before it became a political issue) and consider my views as much more consistent with the Republican Party’s traditional view that government should stay out of peoples’ lives as much as possible. Having said that, I am firmly convinced that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, a position which gets me in hot water with many of my women friends (not speaking hot tubs either).
As I recall, Romney started out relatively constrained on foreign policy issues until he got slammed by McCain in one of the debates for referring to the “apparent success” of the Iraq Surge. McCain snapped at Romney and declared there was nothing “apparent” about the success of the Surge and that the Surge was indisbutably a “success.” Of course, we all know that Romney went on to lose the nomination to McCain.
The first sign I saw that Romney had decided to become a favorite of the war crowd was the speech he delivered at the Republican National Convention. http://www.clipsandcomment.com/2008/09/03/full-text-mitt-romney-speech-republican-national-convention-2008/ It was so over the top that I began to question my choice, as he signed on to the Axis of Evil formulation of GWB, lambasted the “liberal” Supreme Court, and bemoaned the vast increase in federal spending between 1980 and 2008 (overlooking the fact that Republicans occupied the White House for 20 of those 28 years and the Congress for a good part of that period).
This transformation is eerily reminiscent of George Wallace, who was rather mild in his racial views when he ran for his first political office and was defeated by a rabid racist. “That’s the last time I get out-segged by my opponent,” Wallace supposedly said, and, needless to say, he never was..
So I gather that Romney is very determined to be President of the U.S. (imagine the first Mormon President succeeding the first black President—very ironic when you think about it), but to become President he has to first obtain the Republican nomination. I think he first thought that to obtain the nomination, he had to flip on all the domestic issues (abortion, immigration) and that would be sufficient. But he concluded after losing the nomination to McCain that further work had to be done. Sadly, his conclusion is probably right. This was brought home this past Tuesday on Morning Joe when Pat Buchanan was debating Dan Senor about Michael Steele’s remarks concerning Afghanistan. While I totally agreed with Pat’s position that we should withdraw from Afghanistan, I had to admit the creepy, true believer Senor had the facts on his side when it came to Afghanistan: that Republican office holders almost unanimously support a continued war effort in Afghanistan. (Hell, even Rand Paul supports the war in Afghanistan, as I recall.) Unfortunately, that is the same party whose nomination Romney will be seeking.
Daniel, the article from the Boston Globe you linked sounded eerily familiar, but, for some reason, I remember reading it months earlier, rather than a few days ago (July 3 being the date of the article). I tried searching and came up with the following from the Boston Phoenix (an alternative paper) dated February 12, 2010:
“Skipping the South
But if the populist conservatives are a tough crowd for Romney, they’re nothing compared with the Christian conservatives. After courting them doggedly without success throughout the 2008 cycle, it appears that, in 2012, Romney is going to try to win without them. That, in effect, means skipping the South.
You can hardly blame him. Of the 28 caucuses and primaries Romney competed in two years ago, he finished worse than second in only six — which also happened to be six of the seven Southern states in which he ran. (He managed to finish second in Florida, a less culturally Southern state that he had hoped to win.)
It hardly seems possible to win the GOP nomination without the South, which holds tremendous weight in the process. Forty percent of the pledged delegates to the 2012 Republican convention will come from 13 Southern states (the 11 seceding “Dixie” states, plus Kentucky and Oklahoma).
“I just can’t fathom the South not playing a role in picking the GOP nominee,” says LaRaja, adding that, if Romney were to win without the South, “It would be a phenomenal strategic success story.”
And yet, that seems to be the strategy. He has distanced himself in more ways than just retreating from the social issues critical to success with Southern Republicans.
Notably, Romney’s PAC has started ignoring Southern pols. It contributed to not a single politician in Florida or Georgia last year, where it showered more than $30,000 over the previous four years. And in the crucial early-primary state of South Carolina, where Romney’s PAC had doled out tens of thousands by 2006, it has written just one check in this cycle — to potential presidential foe Senator Jim DeMint.”
Read more: http://thephoenix.com/Boston/news/96976-new-and-improved-romney/?page=4#TOPCONTENT#ixzz0t8JAeu6r
I remember reading the Phoenix article back in February, but, for some reason, I also remember your Globe article earlier than July 3.
Jetan,
After your post saying that there are many competent Republicans with leadership ability who could run for president, you nor anyone after you posted a single name that represented possible candidates.
Daniel even posted another nitpick of the totally irrelevant Romney but could not be bother to list a few candidates that he think would be good candidates.
I guess saying something positive about any Republican could jeopardize Daniel’s future job prospects with the progressive media.
SD, how about you cough up some serious names?
I think that will clinch the point, because the GOP has to dig really, really deep to come up with non-damaged goods.
SD,
Your “future job prospects with the progressive media” comments are the epitome of ad hominem. Please keep them to yourself.
N. Shooter,
Since you posted that, Daniel had made three more anti-Palin posts. Why does someone who writes for American Conservative and who is held up by virtually every left-of-center blogger as a “good conservative” keep posting about irrelevant Republicans like Palin and Romney without ever stating who he believes would be a good, main stream candidate.
Also, if Daniel cares about about anything other than insulting conservatives and promoting Jeffersonian foreign policy, then why does/t he post about it.
Does he really believe that conservative politics consist of isolationist only?
I know responding will just encourage more annoying comments, but the other readers deserve an explanation for what it is I am trying to do here. For the most part, I focus on debates concerning foreign policy and national security, and that has been one of the main subjects I have been discussing for the last six years. I spend more time on it now than I used to, but it was always one of my main interests from the beginning. From time to time when I think I have something to add to a debate over bailouts or immigration or some other domestic policy issue, I will chime in, but I don’t believe I understand those subjects as well and most of the time whatever I would add to the debate would not be all that worthwhile. For that matter, there are quite a few writers and analysts on the right who are already doing good work on developing new domestic policy ideas, but there are relatively fewer who are making arguments for better foreign policy ideas. Maybe I’m doing a lousy job of it, maybe not, but that’s why I write what I do.
As you all know, one of the main reasons TAC was established was to protest against the wayward, destructive and ideological foreign policy then being promoted by the Bush administration and embraced by most conservatives. The magazine was established partly to make clear that traditional conservatives of various stripes were absolutely opposed to the folly and imprudence of the warfare state and domestic power grabs in the name of security. To the best of my ability, I have tried to hold accountable and criticize mainstream Republicans and conservatives when I see them repeating the same errors and indulging in the same ideological blindness that dragged us into Iraq. I focus on them because they were the ones who led and enabled one of the worst presidential administrations in modern history, and because they have refused to learn much of anything from the experience.
On her own as a candidate, Palin is irrelevant, as I have been saying for some time, but the irresponsible, reckless enthusiasm for hegemony and intervention that she expresses is absolutely relevant and very dangerous for this country. Outside the Tea Party movement, the conservative movement and the GOP, Palin doesn’t matter very much, but if there is going to be any chance for a conservatism that is not corporatist, centralist and hegemonist Palin and other figures like her have to be held accountable and subjected to intense scrutiny. Maybe no one on the right will care, and maybe it won’t change anything, but it seems like a better use of my time than echoing complaints about health care legislation (or whatever is “relevant”) that thousands of others are already making.
Romney is anything but irrelevant. He intends to run for a major party nomination to be President of the United States, he has a decent chance of winning that nomination, and he has adopted the same foreign policy views that have done so much damage to our country already. Instead of learning from the mistakes of the last administration and correcting for them, Romney wants to make more of the same, and unfortunately he is far from alone.
If I thought there was a mainstream Republican candidate out there who did not support many or all of the things I am criticizing, I would be only too happy to promote and cheer that person. I don’t see anyone remotely like that at the moment. On fiscal issues, Mitch Daniels has a lot to recommend him, and if he weren’t in China right now Jon Huntsman might offer something more closely resembling sane leadership on foreign policy, but on the whole I don’t see many good candidates.
Daniel, your comment is appreciated, and I think most readers understand what it is you are trying to do here, and I think you are doing a very good job at it. But …
“there are quite a few writers and analysts on the right who are already doing good work on developing new domestic policy ideas” Really? Who?
“if there is going to be any chance for a conservatism that is not corporatist, centralist and hegemonist” There’s not. Although that doesn’t mean give up criticizing the GOP. Just be realistic in your goals, such as avoiding nominating another John “bomb Iran” McCain in 2012.
As for potential candidates, I still say the GOP nominee hasn’t shown his face yet. John Thune?
SD, care to respond in a substantive way?