Coulter on McCain again: Ready, set, crazy!

A winning slogan: “Four rotten years!”

Joe Lieberman’s old flack communications director appears in the pages of The Wall Street Journal today to declare victory for the “politics of hope” over the “politics of Kos.”  (Supposedly, the Connecticut Senate election from 2006 represented the triumph of hope over netroots–Joe Lieberman, hopemonger!)  How ridiculous is this?  Let me count the ways.  Kossacks are above all interested in Democratic electoral victory.  Ideologically, they tend to be more progressive, but Kos himself has seen the advantage of promoting the most electable candidates in marginal districts.  Unlike the Hewitts on the other side, they are typically interested in actually growing the size of their political coalition and increasing Democratic numbers in Congress, rather than engaging in masochistic purgings for the sake of purging.  There is nothing fundamentally inconsistent between the two “kinds” of politics.  Obama’s public rhetoric is that of a politician trying to win an election, while netroots progressives are venting their tremendous frustration with the administration on a regular basis–the same frustration and hostility, incidentally, that Obama clearly shares.  That Obama uses “uplifting” rhetoric, rather than the “depressing” and combative rhetoric of Edwards, masks that he is advancing almost exactly the same agenda and regards the administration almost every bit as poorly as do netroots progressives.  The difference, and the thing that seems to scare Republicans, is that he doesn’t yell about it, and he doesn’t answer every question, Patricia Madrid-like, with complaints about the evils of Bush.  In calm, measured tones he denounces administration policy and the Democrats who accommodated the administration, but he is still denouncing them, no different in substance from anything Lamont said about Lieberman and Bush.    

The Kossacks went after Lieberman in much the same way that conservatives are now going after McCain, because they saw him as unreliable and deeply wrong on at least one major issue of the day.  Within the Democratic primary electorate, the Kossacks were successful.  Lieberman lost the primary, as Gerstein must remember.  Lieberman was able to draw on Republicans and independents in the general election to save his seat, and has since proceeded to confirm progressives’ doubts about his reliability.  In a more normal state with a viable Republican candidate, Lieberman’s victory would have been very unlikely.  Hillary Clinton can’t like what the comparison portends for her campaign, since the more progressive “wine-track” candidate won the primary in Connecticut.  Whatever else happens on Tuesday, it appears that this is about to happen again in Connecticut.  Unlike Lieberman, Clinton isn’t going to get a second chance to foist herself on the voters if she loses to Obama.  

That brings us to the Democratic nominating contest this year.  Gerstein sees Obama’s success and Edwards’ failure as proof that the “politics of Kos” has failed.  It isn’t just, as Gerstein allows, that Obama has “co-opted” the Kossacks’ views.  He and Clinton were pulled in that direction by the netroots’ favourite, whose candidacy soon lost its rationale once the more cautious leading candidates occupied the same ideological space.  As numerous observers on the left have been keen to point out recently, Edwards’ combative progressivism compelled the other two leading candidates to adopt policy plans that imitated his.  I think the case could be made that Edwards did a lot of Obama’s dirty work in hitting Clinton on her inconsistencies and her war vote back when Obama was still being overly cautious about attacking his rivals, and that Edwards helped to soften Clinton up and made Obama’s rise easier.  

Many have observed that many progressive activists have responded coolly to Obama, because he has seemed too accommodating and conciliatory towards Republicans (he said something marginally positive about Reagan!), but this is the same Obama who has received the endorsement of MoveOn.org and who will be receiving the vote, if not exactly the enthusiastic support, of Kos himself.  This is a recognition, however belated, that the goals of the netroots and Obama’s goals are mostly the same.  In fact, this opposition between “the politics of hope” and “politics of Kos” is one more illusion that works to obscure Obama’s progressivism and adds to the myth that he is some great uniter of opposites.  In terms of policy, Obama has embraced a large part of Edwards’ agenda and weaves the same anti-corporate and anti-lobbyist themes into his speeches in between references to bringing America together.  So, as a matter of substance, the “politics of Kos,” or more accurately the netroots-backed progressivism championed by Edwards, has become the agenda that Obama will attempt to sell by way of his “hope and unity” rhetoric.  In other words, Obama has accepted the diagnosis that Edwards has made, and he basically agrees with Edwards’ prescription (with a few changes of detail here or there), but he wants to sugar-coat the prescribed “medicine” to make it go down easier with a lot of talk about cooperation. 

It is a very bizarre kind of analysis that sees the current two-person Democratic field, which has become almost completely dominated by the policy agenda of the netroots’ candidate, as proof that the politics of the netroots has somehow failed to catch on.  On domestic and foreign policy, Edwards carried the netroots’ flag and dragged the entire field to the left.  If his own campaign did not succeed, you can attribute that as much to his own radical makeover from Southern Democratic centrist to populist firebrand in a matter of a few years.  Unlike Romney, who underwent the same metamorphosis in a different direction, Edwards defined his party’s policy agenda for this cycle.  The Democratic shift to the left in the last four years has been pretty dramatic, and it owes a good deal to the netroots, and this shift is reflected in the near-unanimity of the remaining candidates on policy (such that they have to quibble over the relative universality of their health care plans).  In fact, the “politics of hope,” so called, did not exist until last year, and it has gotten as far as it has because of the groundwork laid by the netroots and other progressive activists in the last decade.  Meanwhile, if progressives are becoming less angry, it is because they are slowly winning within their own party and in many parts of the country.

Ronald Reagan knew what he believed in for thirty years.  He read Burke and consulted Buckley and Freedman [sic]. ~Matt Lewis

Is this misspelling of Friedman‘s name some new requirement that is gaining currency?

So it’s four days until Super Tuesday, the big name Romney endorsements have been pouring in (Ingraham, Hannity, Santorum, etc.) and, in Romney’s own words, the “world of conservatism is considerably behind my effort.”  If so, it is a small world after all. 

Consider, to take two of the states where the GOP will be voting on Tuesday, Alabama and New York.  In Alabama, Romney gets 21% and in New York he gets…21%.  Nationally, according to FoxNews, Romney gets about 20%.  So, about one out of five Republicans agree that Mitt Romney is the right candidate.  If Huckabee’s limitations as the “evangelical candidate” have been revealed, Romney seems to have hit something of a similar ceiling (though it may vary some from state to state) in all those states where he has not campaigned intensively.

More interesting yet is the breakdown of the preferences.  In Alabama, Romney finishes third among conservatives with McCain and Huckabee pulling in a third each while he gets just 24%.  23% of Alabama Republicans support him–fewer than support Huckabee and McCain.  According to SurveyUSA, he trails McCain by 19 points in the state and he trails Huckabee by ten.  He finishes third among pro-lifers.  There is not a single issue that he dominates, and he finishes third among those who say the economy is their top issue.  Meanwhile, in New York, you might expect Romney to do significantly better (though New Yorkers do have this thing about people from Massachusetts…) and he simply doesn’t.  27% of conservatives and 24% of pro-lifers back him.  Unlike in Alabama, he finishes in second in all these categories, but he trails by much larger margins and trails McCain overall by 34 points (55-21).  Again, he dominates no single issue, and loses among those who think the economy is the top issue 62-19.  The Northeastern states are providing the proof: even where Huckabee isn’t a factor, Romney just isn’t competitive.  He loses upstate New York by 23, loses in the city by 33 and gets destroyed in the city suburbs, losing by 46.  New York may be a special case, but that seems to throw into doubt the “Romney as suburban candidate” idea.

You’ll say, “What about other states?  You probably picked those because he is doing so badly there.”  Fair enough.  Let’s see a few more.  He does lead in Massachusetts, but while his lead of 23 ahead of McCain seems secure it is interesting that he can get just 59% of Republicans in his own state.  Somewhat surprisingly, he is down four in Missouri, but is just two ahead of Huckabee, who is still quite competitive there.  Missouri is one of the few states where Romney narrowly leads among conservative voters, and he ties Huckabee for the lead among pro-lifers.  Central Missouri appears to be Romney’s life-preserver in that state.  So one of his best states is also a virtual three-way tie and could conceivably go for any one of them. 

With that exception in mind, once you move beyond his power base, however, his problems re-emerge.  Romney trails by 23 in New Jersey, and by 22 in Connecticut.  He loses conservatives to McCain in Connecticut, and just barely wins them in New Jersey.  The same story is repeated in Oklahoma, narrowly losing conservatives to both McCain and Huckabee, and receiving just 19% overall and trailing McCain by almost 20 points.  If he were the obvious conservative alternative, it would never be this close among conservatives, and he would be leading in some of these states.  Conservatives represent pluralities or even majorities in all of these polls, which should give Romney an edge…if he were credible.  A Minnesota poll released on the day of the Florida primary showed McCain ahead of Romney, who was in third place, by 24 points.  The poll still included 6% for Giuliani, most of whom probably have since gone for McCain.  Huckabee was in second at 22%.  McCain and Huckabee both lead Romney among “economy and jobs the most important problem” voters, of whom 8% supported him.     

In Illinois, in a pre-Florida poll that included Giuliani, he trails among conservatives by 2 and he is behind overall by 8.  He loses every income group and every religious group (Huckabee, naturally, wins evangelicals).  He wins with immigration voters, but loses to McCain with economy, Iraq and security voters.  In California, Romney seems to have the best chance of any of the big states to win overall and score some delegates regardless.  A post-Florida Rasmussen poll that still includes Giuliani had him within four of the lead.  Romney wins among conservatives, but does not outperform McCain and Giuliani together.  He wins one income group ($75K-100K earners) and none of the religious affiliations.  Again, he carries immigration voters, and loses the rest.  Remarkably, the one issue on which he is probably least credible is the one that he is dominating more or less consistently these days.

Huckabee states the obvious:

To say that you’ve never thought about the origins of human life until you were nearly 60 years old — I find that hard to believe even for somebody who hasn’t run for office before, but certainly for somebody who had.

In a new FoxNews poll, McCain leads Romney nationally 48-20 with Huckabee at 19 and Paul at 5, along with 5% not knowing and 2% refusing to vote.  If you reduce it to a two-man McCain v. Romney race, the result among Republicans is McCain 62, Romney 29, 6% not knowing and 3% refusing to vote.  These numbers are almost the reverse of Bush v. McCain at this stage in 2000.  Granted, this is a national poll and is not terribly reliable for predicting actual voting, but what this seems to show is that most of the Huckabee and Paul voters simply will not go for Romney.  You do have to assume that anti-Mormonism has something to do with this, particularly among Huckabee supporters, but it is also hard to miss that Huckabee supporters have made clear in state after state that their second choice is McCain.  Perhaps these are the voters who are drawn to candidates on the basis of personality and biography and are not issues voters, in which case they align with the candidates who have received the most favourable media coverage and who appear through that coverage to be the most appealing characters. 

Romney appears to have picked up most of the hard-core anti-McCain vote by default: two months ago with the same question about a two-way race, 23% said they would not vote.  Over half of those since went to Romney, and McCain has gained only a few points.  This seems to mean that more than half of Romney’s current supporters nationwide are only coming to his side grudgingly because the McCain v. Romney match-up has now become the reality, and their preferred candidates are no longer likely to win.  That implies that Romney has a very weak base of support that has settled for him for lack of other competitive options.  Romney has managed to end up in an almost unheard-of bind: he is getting trounced nationally in a three- or four-way race, and he then actually loses ground in the two-man race his campaign is trumpeting in its latest communications.  Strangely, Huckabee’s persistence in the race, while slowly but surely killing Romney’s campaign, is also preventing McCain from delivering the fatal blow right away.  This means that a vote for Huckabee is not so much a vote for McCain as it is potentially a vote for chaos.  Indeed, at this point chaos may be the anti-McCain forces’ best and only real friend.

I understand what Rod is saying here, but I think he and Gerard Baker are making the same mistake when they describe the rise of McCain in terms of change and revolution respectively.  McCain is the essential status quo candidate, and represents continuity with the current administration on a range of questions.  Some would argue, correctly, that the current administration has not governed  conservatively using any reasonable definition of that word, and those who have opposed the administration from the right since the beginning know this better than anyone, but where McCain’s critics have embraced, indeed celebrated, the administration for the most part they have determined that McCain is apostate, anti-conservative, and so on.  In this bizarre universe, where Giuliani can be seen as one of the last of the Reaganites but Huckabee and McCain are political lepers, the people who have the most to gain by emphasising the idea of a McCain nomination representing a radical departure from conservatism are the very people who have apologised and flacked for the administration that did most of the actual damage that they fear McCain might do in the future. 

Rod is right that there are several conservatisms (around which orbit, I would add, many a Republican constituency dressed up as a pseudo-conservatism), and he is right again that these conservatisms are not coterminous with the GOP.  Indeed, one of the problems of conservatives in America today was the persistent effort to identify themselves with the party when it was riding high (“Republicans are winning because they are conservative”) and attempting, rather unsuccessfully, to wash their hands of the party’s mistakes, blunders and disasters when the public turned against the party (“Republicans lost in 2006, not conservatives”).  The horror conservatives are feeling and the loud protests they are registering at the prospect of a McCain nomination all stem from this same confusion.  If you have grown accustomed to identifying the fortunes of conservatism rather closely with the GOP, you begin to treat Republican nominees as representatives of the new direction of conservatism.  McCain could not threaten the movement, except that the movement has welded itself to the GOP in so many ways that what happens to the one affects the other as well. 

So it is a mistake to see McCain’s rise marking a “changing of the guard,” if that “changing of the guard” means “McCain’s rise is eroding the hegemony of the established conservative opinion-makers.”  On the contrary, movement leaders are setting up a gauntlet for McCain, as if they were soldiers demanding a donative for a would-be emperor, and they will finally raise him on their shields only after they have extracted that payment.  Until they receive it, they will continue to serve as the guards, so to speak, and should he come to power they will have left McCain with the unspoken threat that they will unmake him and topple him if he goes against them.  A McCain administration, as unlikely as I think it will be, would be one plagued by having constantly to give assurances to core constituencies and would be a period racked by internecine fighting within the party and movement.  The recent anti-McCain campaign has served to put McCain on notice (perhaps there are still a few true believers who think they can vault Romney to success by tearing McCain down), and perhaps he has once again “gotten the message,” as he says, but more likely the rise of McCain does not amount to a “bloodless coup” (per Baker) or a “changing of the guard,” but the beginnings of “palace” intrigues and plotting among the many factions. 

In fact, the coolness with which leading movement figures are receiving McCain, or rather the heat of their fury against him helps to secure their authority with their audiences, misleadingly give them credit for resisting the corruption of conservatism (even though they did little or nothing to stop that corruption for the past seven years and much to facilitate it) and allows them to portray themselves as oppositional, independent figures when they are nothing of the kind.  This pose of opposition and independence is the same one that many of the leading radio hosts and pundits assumed after the ’06 electoral debacle, having right up until then exhorted their audiences to support the GOP regardless of what it had done or failed to do.  This is the phony independence that permits them to retain some shred of credibility as critics when their influence is in less of a position to drive policy change (i.e., when the GOP is in the minority) after having squandered opportunities to wield influence when it might have mattered.

Since Eunomia was inaccessible on Wednesday night, I was unable to comment on the Republicans’ debate at the time.  For those who haven’t had their fill of debate commentary, I recommend the live-blogging post by Justin Raimondo, who recorded his impressions from the night at Taki’s Top Drawer.  I was watching the debate at CNN’s site and saw most of it alongside their “viewer response” graph.  The striking thing about the comparison was that Romney consistently scored well every time he spoke–it didn’t matter what he was saying–and McCain almost always scored negatively regardless of the content of his statements.  I am a poor judge of these things, since I am annoyed every time I see Romney, but he seems to have come across much better to that particular audience.  Part of this probably had to do with McCain’s foul mood and harping criticism.  If many undecided voters watched this debate, Romney should have won them over easily.  However, being the umpteenth cable network debate it was probably not seen by very many people, and the media commentary on the debate struck me as surprisingly favourable to McCain.  Casting the arguments the two had in a simple “clash of rivals” narrative, most reports did an injustice to Romney, since he did have the better of his exchanges with McCain, who was petulant and obnoxious the entire night.  Ron Paul was absolutely correct, of course, that the two were arguing over inconsequential nonsense and right again that these debates ought to be about major questions of policy.  Unfortunately, serious policy debate does not lend itself to snappy headlines and easily-digested stories, and these are the things that commentators and reporters want.

I’m not sure that it is at all reassuring for Romney’s camp that they have won the endorsement of Rick “The Venezuelans Are Coming!” Santorum.  It is fitting, I suppose, that the former Senator who sided with the incumbent, establishment, pro-choice candidate Specter in that Pennsylvania Senate primary four years ago is similarly supporting the candidate with the far less conservative record.  Things like that make conservatives and pro-lifers eager to back the one whom Santorum has named as a defender of “the conservative principles that we hold dear.”

Santorum said, “Governor Romney has a deep understanding of the important issues confronting our country today…”  Important issues such as preventing Iranian world-mastery and stopping the Venezuelan empire from conquering Argentina.