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Bad Idea

I’d like to see Giuliani and Clinton square off because she can beat him given how narrowly he is defining his candidacy. And the fact that David Frum, Norman Podhoretz, and Daniel Pipes are advisors to Giuliani makes folks like me salivate. Whether the Republican Party knows it or not, a Romney/Hagel ticket or Romney/Huckabee […]

I’d like to see Giuliani and Clinton square off because she can beat him given how narrowly he is defining his candidacy. And the fact that David Frum, Norman Podhoretz, and Daniel Pipes are advisors to Giuliani makes folks like me salivate.

Whether the Republican Party knows it or not, a Romney/Hagel ticket or Romney/Huckabee ticket would be much harder for Hillary Clinton to tackle.

Steve Clemons here makes the mistake that is always a danger for all observers of the political scene (I have made this mistake myself more than once): confusing the objectively horrible quality of the candidate and his advisors with his electoral viability.  According to this thinking, candidates who are being advised by loopy militarists will never get elected in a presidential election.  What makes me think this is untrue?

If we trust the head-to-head matchup polls as much as we trust the nationwide primary polling, Giuliani is one of the more competitive candidates and more of a threat to the Democrats than most of the others.  I think both sets of polls are probably misleading and are still driven by name recognition, which is why McCain and Giuliani consistently outperform their rivals, but if we are going to grant Giuliani the status of frontrunner on the basis of such polls we have to acknowledge that he is polling as one of the better-performing Republicans vs. Clinton.  According to the current polling, every Democratic matchup against Romney means a Democratic landslide (against Edwards, the margins have gone from an amusing 15 or so to the ridiculous 25+), while Giuliani is supposed to be reasonably competitive against any Democrat.  We really should not trust much of this national polling on the candidates, but given what evidence we have it seems positively crazy for a Democrat to hope for a Giuliani nomination to avoid the terrible threat of Romney.

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