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Looking Ahead

Speaking of Palin, her numbers have plummeted in our poll. For the first time, she has a net-negative fav/unfav rating (38%-47%), the only principal to carry that distinction. What’s more, 55% think she’s unqualified to serve as president if the need arises, which is a troublesome number given McCain’s age. ~First Read It’s strange to […]

Speaking of Palin, her numbers have plummeted in our poll. For the first time, she has a net-negative fav/unfav rating (38%-47%), the only principal to carry that distinction. What’s more, 55% think she’s unqualified to serve as president if the need arises, which is a troublesome number given McCain’s age. ~First Read

It’s strange to think that it was just a little more than two weeks ago that there was still some reason to question the claim that Palin was a very unpopular figure.  Now we see that she has become exactly that.  Then again, the last two weeks have been marked by some of Palin’s most polarizing and inflammatory statements.  As I had guessed earlier in the month, Palin’s role as the attack dog of the campaign was sure to drive up her negatives. 

Presumably, all talk of Palin ’12 will cease, and Republicans should certainly hope that it ceases.  Palin will go back to Alaska with both a poor national reputation among much of the public and a lack of support from the GOP establishment, which makes her an unlikely heir apparent.  The old rationale used to quiet establishmentarian complaints was that she was an exciting, popular figure who would buoy the campaign, and for about the first week this was true, but now that claim does not have enough credibility. 

She still has intense support from rank-and-file partisans, and there is going to be a temptation to run to the opposite extreme after failing with McCain.  The failure of the campaign is likely to be misread as proof that it was McCain the deviationist could not articulate a coherent alternative to Obama, and so there will be a strong temptation to pursue an intensified base mobilization strategy in the next several cycles.  There will be strong resistance to the idea that ’06 and ’08 represented the decisive failure of that approach, and so it may be tried again.  This will be a misinterpretation because McCain’s inability to articulate a coherent message is the result of McCain’s own lack of policy knowledge and visceral policymaking style.  Just as the campaign was primarily defined by biography and character, its failures were to a large extent the result of McCain’s personality and character flaws.    

It seems to me that Huckabee now starts to look much better to the conservative elites who were ridiculing him as Huckleberry just half a year ago; he becomes the relatively safe governing choice who can also generate tremendous grassroots enthusiasm.  Many of his former critics may come to recognize the missed opportunity of running with Huckabee’s pseudo-populism on economics this year, and going forward he may be able to develop a policy agenda that is not limited to praising the wonders of the Fair Tax.  Not having been a critic of Palin, Huckabee will not have alienated her supporters, and he will probably carefully avoid doing so over the next few years in the same way that he stayed on good terms with McCain voters.  Provided that he never, ever again tells the ridiculous story about how foreign wars make it possible for children to have schooldesks, and provided that he could get someone to give him some money, he could become the presumptive frontrunner.  Having spoken out against the bailout early on, he will be well-positioned to satisfy libertarians and populists alike.  Given the deterioration of the McCain campaign since it went to war with journalists, the value of favorable free media coverage, which Huckabee was able to attract so effectively during the primaries, cannot be underestimated.

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