Strangely, I find myself agreeing with this Fred Siegel statement:

Only Clinton derangement syndrome can explain the alliance of so many otherwise thoughtful people of both parties who speak well of the candidacy of a man with scant knowledge of the world who has never been tested and has never run anything larger than a senatorial office.

If Obama were somehow able to win the nomination, which I still think unlikely, an Obama v. McCain contest would pit two proud non-managers against each other.  Where McCain talks of leadership (“I can hire managers,” he dismissively said to the Super-Manager Romney at the last debate), Obama prattles on about his vision for America, and both of them seem to take some satisfaction in eschewing detailed knowledge about major areas of policy.  “We’ve had plenty of plans, what we need is hope,” Obama said in an early DNC speech last year.  Where Obama drops hope into every other sentence, McCain uses the word victory.  For some reason, there are millions of people who hear this and don’t realise that this repetition of key words is an effort to cover up for lack of preparedness and lack of any idea how to accomplish the things on the candidate’s agenda (to the extent that he even has a clear agenda).  If we have an Obama v. McCain election, it will be one of the first times in recent memory that we have had two candidates vying for the leadership of a managerial state with little or no interest in managing.  Since people instinctively recoil from such a state, it is understandable why they would be drawn to candidates who appear to be different the usual staple of pols, but what they see as boldness or “maverick” instincts is really the result of people who are just making it up as they go along, always looking for the main chance to advance themselves.

Perhaps, but having a trioof “philosopher–bloggers” talk about the fortunes and future of the conservative intellectual movement is not blogging.  I will be at CPAC for an ISI-sponsored Friday panel from 1:00-3:00 in Congressional Room A.

P.S. It appears that the President will also be coming to CPAC on Friday.  That should be an interesting sight.

Several weeks ago, these forces decided to rally ’round Romney as their alternative. They picked the wrong horse. Had the movement conservatives gone with Mike Huckabee or Fred Thompson, they would have had a better chance of derailing McCain. ~Jonathan Last

This is mostly right, and since the flaws of the Thompson campaign are legion and well-known it seems clear that rallying around Huckabee would have been the only conceivable way to halt McCain.  The problem, of course, is that the anti-Huckabee campaign made that impossible and it wasted precious time that could have been used in building up a specifically anti-McCain candidate.  As I have said before:

For those now fretting about the Return of McCain, I would note simply that it was the conservative establishment that managed to subvert Huckabee with their relentless campaign against him over the past six to eight weeks, and and it was the vanity campaign of Fred Thompson, which must now come to an end, that paved the way for McCain to win in South Carolina and so propel him towards the nomination.   

Many leading figures in the movement have declared themselves opposed to two candidacies, and these are the two that will probably win most of the delegates on Tuesday.  The one these people have backed–in some part because of his alleged “viability”–is failing.  The Huckabacklash effectively made it impossible to stop McCain, since the anti-Huckabee forces had already ruled him out as an instrument of their anti-McCainism.  Since many anti-McCain conservatives evidently loathe Huckabee even more, they will not be too upset by this.  Nonetheless, when you hear a great wailing and gnashing of teeth about McCain from these mainstream figures who mocked, belittled and rejected Huckabee (sometimes for legitimate reasons, sometimes out of dread that actual Southerners and evangelicals rising to positions of importance), bear in mind that they had a chance to throw their weight behind Huckabee a month ago.  They chose a different path, and now they–and we–are reaping the fruits of that decision.

Yesterday, Barack Obama said there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between he and Senator McCain [bold mine-DL] on illegal immigration. ~Mitt Romney

I’m sorry, this may seem small and unimportant, but this butchering of a basic element of the English language is just awful.  It’s one thing when idiot sports announcers and actors can’t put pronouns into their proper cases, but when you have someone who is often praised for his education and intelligence it is the final straw.  This is more annoying than Obama’s habit of speaking about the “amount of troops” lost in Iraq, as if there were some undifferentiated mass of Troop to which members of the armed forces belong.

Some people are put off by this drippy effort at putting Obama’s words to music, but far more worrisome is Obama’s ad that apparently ran in some markets during the Super Bowl (we were fast forwarding through many of the ads with Tivo, so I cannot say whether it appeared in the Chicago market).  The song is just silly (its silliness is underscored by the fierce intensity of so many of the assembled B-list actors as they are singing it), but the condensed message in that ad should make people think twice about this candidate.  “We can change the world” is a completely commonplace claim, but frankly we have had quite enough of Presidents on a mission to “change the world.”  We don’t need planet-savers and world-changers.  We need some minimally competent executive who can occasionally veto an oversized budget and not start wars.  As the candidate with the largest spending pledges and a hyper-ambitious foreign policy, Obama is not going to be that executive.  We have had quite enough of the candidates of Big, Sweeping Ideas–they have a bad habit of getting us embroiled in Big, Destructive Conflicts.  It’s enough to make you long for the days when utterly small-bore trivia dominated election campaigns.

Given all these procedural oddities from state to state, it’s unlikely any single candidate will deliver a knockout blow on Feb. 5. We still have a ways to go, and it’s hard to know at this point whether the preacher, the prisoner, the woman or the ethnic minority will win. ~Steven Hill

It struck me as odd how Romney managed to disappear from the list of potential winners somewhere between the beginning and ending of this column.  While that may not have been Hill’s intent, this is probably an accurate assessment: there are only four candidates with a chance at nomination right now, and Romney is not really one of them.  This is all the more remarkable when you consider that the coverage has been almost incessantly repeating a McCain v. Romney theme.  There is a very outside chance of a McCain v. Huckabee splitting of states on Tuesday and again in the weeks to come, but not much chance that Romney picks up any states besides his two natural bases of support in Massachusetts and Utah.

On the day of the South Carolina primary, I wrote:

Because Huckabee has decided to lay off of McCain, and prior to tonight still had strong polling in a number of Feb. 5 states, Romney faces the daunting prospect of an anti-Romney pact between the two of them, effectively shutting him out of the South on Feb. 5 and then having Huckabee drop out and endorse McCain soon thereafter.  As McCain and Huckabee divide up the spoils of February 5 and work in concert to keep Romney down, Huckabee’s withdrawal and endorsement then throw his supporters and the race to McCain. 

As you have probably all heard ad nauseam over the last few days, this is exactly what has been happening.  One thing that I didn’t foresee was the extent to which Huckabee and McCain are competing for supporters, and that Huckabee isn’t so much sapping Romney’s strength in the South as he is showing his rival a mirage of victory, giving him a tantalising chance to stay in the race that then vanishes into thin air.  Whichever target Romney chooses in his advertisements in several of the Southern states, the voters he drives away from one will likely just go to the other candidate.

There are plenty of reasons that might explain the former Massachusetts governor’s surprisingly weak support among his former colleagues. But one of them stands out: He appears to have inadvertently alienated a good many of his fellow governors as RGA chairman.

“Right or wrong, the general impression was that he spent way too much time on himself and building his presidential organization,” said a top Republican strategist who has worked closely with the RGA in recent years. “I don’t think anyone ever questioned Romney’s commitment to the organization or the work he put in. They questioned his goals or his motives. Was it to elect Republican governors, or to tee up his presidential campaign?”

A campaign manager for an unsuccessful 2006 Republican gubernatorial campaign echoed the sentiments. “We definitely got the vibe from the staff that our state was never a national player when it came to the strategy that the RGA was putting together,” he said. “Everything they were telling me was about Michigan. They were dumping everything into Michigan.” ~The Politico

Long-time Eunomia readers will remember that I was talking about this in the wake of the 2006 debacle.  The RGA under Romney directed a lot of its funding to gubernatorial races in three crucial early states (Florida, Iowa, Michigan) for the nomination in 2008, including a hopeless Michigan race in which Dick DeVos ended up being blown out by 18 points.  The Michigan case was the most transparent example of Romney using the RGA as his own springboard, since Granholm’s re-election was never really in doubt and Romney’s personal and political interest in Michigan was obvious.  We didn’t know at the time, but Romney’s penchant for throwing money at lost causes prefigured his own presidential campaign only too well.

This WSJ poll is about six weeks out of date, so it is pretty useless for tracking the presidential race.  There are some other results that have more lasting relevance.  58% say that the globalisation of the American economy has been on the whole “bad,” with just 28% saying the opposite and 11% declaring it a wash.  That is pretty clearly bad news for the party most closely identified with globalisation at present.  The number for those saying globalisation has generally benefited “the American economy” has dropped 14 points from a poll 10 years ago.  There are as many dissatisfied with their financial circumstances (33%) as there have been since the wake of the ’01-’02 recession.  52% said that immigration “hurts more than it helps” the United States, up eight points from last summer and back at the same levels two years earlier.  As of mid-December when the poll was taken, 56% said that victory in Iraq was not still possible.  All of the pro-“surge” talk affected the respondents over the course of 2007, but as of last December 44% said it had made no difference and 14% said that it had made things worse.  57% agreed with the statement that most American soldiers should be withdrawn from Iraq by the start of 2009.  Except for immigration, obviously, the Republicans are on the unpopular side of every one of these questions.    

The poll also has two interesting figures on anti-Mormonism.  59% could correctly identify that Romney was a Mormon, and 26% “felt uncomfortable” about Romney’s  Mormonism and its possible effect on his presidential decisions (this was how the question was phrased), which was slightly higher than the percentage “uncomfortable” about his religion in the abstract.