Jim Antle concludes:

If Mitt Romney can’t prosper with Thompson out of the race, there are no conditions under which he could win the nomination.

Let me be the first, then, to affirm that there are no conditions under which he could win the nomination.

You’ve waited for it, and now here it is: First Principles, ISI’s web journal, is online.

Here’s something that keeps puzzling me.  Some people say that Democrats are afraid of McCain as the GOP nominee, and some people say that Republicans are afraid of Obama as the Dem nominee.  No doubt, this is an accurate portrayal of attitudes within both parties.  One party or the other may be right to be afraid, but I’m pretty sure that both sides can’t be right in their assessment of the danger.  The more I think about it, though, the less it makes sense to me that Democrats fear McCain and Republicans fear Obama.  It seems to me that there are at least two things that explain this fear: admiration for the opposing party’s candidate and contempt for that candidate’s rivals.  Contempt blinds both sides to the political strengths of the other candidates, while their admiration exaggerates the abilities and appeal of the one candidate, whose exaggerated abilities and appeal then make them fear for their party’s success in the fall.  Another factor seems to be that the candidate whom each side fears the most seems to represent something, whether in style or substance, that exposes what each party sees as a glaring weakness in itself.  Republicans have built up an entire mythology about the importance of optimism as central to the appeal of Reagan, and if there is one thing Obama has in spades it is optimism, while the modern GOP traffics in the most blatant fearmongering and doomsaying, so perhaps Republicans fear that Obama’s comparison of himself to Reagan isn’t merely self-important bluster.  Meanwhile, Democrats fear McCain because he represents unvarnished militarism and appears to Democrats, conditioned for decades to be constantly on the defensive on military and national security matters, to have an insurmountable advantage on foreign affairs and national security.  What neither side seems to grasp is how completely wrong its assessment is: one of the last things Americans want after seven years of Bush is more starry-eyed optimism, and probably the last thing they want is more of the same confrontational, aggressive meddling overseas.  What each side fears about the other’s possible nominee is actually the candidate’s weakness, and what each party believes to be its weakness is actually one of its best electoral assets in the current cycle.

It would probably be best for John [McCain] if there were still three potentially viable opponents splitting up the Florida pie. ~John Weaver

But even if that vote were split just two ways, Thompson wasn’t drawing that much support in Florida anyway, so the gain for either candidate would be minimal.  If Thompson supporters in Florida are anything like his supporters in South Carolina, more will break for McCain and Huckabee than for Romney.  Working even more to McCain’s advantage, Huckabee is reducing his presence in Florida, which may not bode ill for his campaign if he can hang on for two more weeks to those strong leads in Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma and the like.  But whatever happens to Huckabee later, some of his supporters in Florida will probably drift to McCain, while only a few will go to Romney.  Romney seems to have a marginal advantage among Thompson supporters, and no advantage among Huckabee supporters.  McCain stands to expand his lead over the field during the next week, and there is every reason to assume that weak Giuliani supporters will decide to back a similar candidate who already has won a couple of primaries.  Romney will gain strength, but he won’t be able to gain as much as quickly as McCain.  The remarkable thing about all of this is that reporters and pundits have assumed, as have I, that Thompson’s supporters were obvious Romney voters, but nearly two-thirds (at least in South Carolina) were apparently more interested in other candidates.  That doesn’t just reflect Romney’s last-minute retreat from the state, but hints at a deeper resistance to Romney’s candidacy. 

Of course, based on my track record of making predictions about this race, you can almost certainly ignore all of that.

P.S. Nationally, if I’m reading this right, Thompson supporters seem most likely to favour McCain and Giuliani, but they have the profile of a Huckabee voter.  (Don’t ask me to explain it!)

Fred Thompson has withdrawn from the presidential race.  I have had my criticisms of his views and his campaign, and I never understood the movement to draft him into the race in the first place, but he always inspired more feelings of pity than indignation, which is more than I could say for any of the other one-time leading candidates.

His [Brooks’] position doesn’t stray much from the neo-conservative position, in which foreign policy rules supreme, and limited government is of little concern. ~Mark Levin

As opposed to all the great constitutionalist champions who fill the movement to overflowing these days, for whom limited government is a top priority and foreign policy is an afterthought?  This criticism would be much more telling against Brooks if it weren’t also applicable to a huge number of conservative columnists.  If mainstream conservatives want to complain about the rise of McCain, they probably ought to consider how they have empowered or acquiesced to “the neo-conservative position, in which foreign policy rules supreme, and limited government is of little concern” over the past ten years and more.  If you allow your movement and your party to be made over in the image of Bush, don’t be terribly surprised when his natural ideological heirs receive a lot of votes from those who call themselves conservative.        

Now no onecanpossibly confusemewitha David Brooks fan or with someone friendly to the policy agenda of neoconservatives or their preferred candidates, and obviously I don’t endorse Brooks’ meliorism or “reform” agenda, but there is something distinctly odd about the degree of hostility shown to these two candidates relative to that shown to Giuliani or Romney.  Besides their capacity to send talk radio hosts into seizures, Huckabee and McCain have something else in common: they come from those parts of the country where the core constituencies of the party actually live and work, while Romney and Giuliani come from places where conservative Republicans are something of a rare, exotic species and Republicans of any kind are a dying breed.  I can’t help but think that this has something to do with the antipathy towards the former and the leniency shown to the latter.   

If anyone represents the tradition of the “Nixon-Ford domestic agenda — i.e., a muck of compromises and government expansion that surrenders the ideological playing field to the Left or, if you will, an incremental socialism which Brooks sets forth as a new way,” it would probably have to be the man who gave you MassCare, just promised a boatload of subsidies to the auto industry and has been pro-life for less time than I have been in graduate school.  Romney grew up in a Rockefeller Republican family and belonged to that tradition until it became convenient for him to discover the virtues of Reaganism.  By the standards that these people condemn McCain, they would have to throw Romney overboard as well, but they simply don’t spend the time or energy doing this.  Their general indifference to the obvious frauds Romney perpetrates against the public in his campaign shows the hollowness of their complaints against the other two.  McCain is, of course, well to the left of me, he is deeply, amazingly wrong on immigration and foreign policy, and I will oppose his candidacy as much as I possibly can, but he has actually been to the right of Giuliani and Romney (which isn’t saying that much, but there it is) for decades.  The mind that can accept the turnaround artist who has turned himself 180 degrees on virtually everything as acceptable, but regards flawed but consistent candidates as beyond the pale, is a very confused one.  There was simply nothing like the intense attacks against McCain when Giuliani was the putative frontrunner, and by comparison Romney has been given a very easy time of it from conservative media, all of which points to the cynicism of at least some of those who protest against McCain and Huckabee’s deviations. 

P.S.  Just on an empirical point, Brooks’ claim that conservative voters have not followed conservative leaders is basically accurate.  In total votes, Huckabee/McCain have received 849,956 votes (per TownHall’s count, which apparently doesn’t include Wyoming) and Romney/Thompson have received 633,715 votes.  If you add in Ron Paul’s numbers to the total of voters not following conservative leaders, the margin obviously grows.  Even when you acknowledge that McCain has led among conservative voters only once this year (South Carolina) and independents have been an important source of support for McCain, Huckabee and Paul, it remains the case that most conservatives chose candidates other than Romney and Thompson in every contested race.  Given the choice between the vilified deviants and the approved candidates, most people voting in the Republican primaries and caucuses opted for the former.  That is significant, and these results are also generally in line with national surveys that ask Republicans which candidate “shares their values.”

Along lines similar to this, Brooks observes:

Yet a funny thing has happened this primary season. Conservative voters have not followed their conservative leaders. Conservative voters are much more diverse than the image you’d get from conservative officialdom.

The intense reaction against Huckabee in particular seems to show an inability among movement leaders to accommodate the diversity of the political coalition with which they have allied themselves.  Dissident conservatives from the right have long complained of the tendency to over-identify the conservative movement and the GOP, and in this election cycle we have seen a continuation of this, albeit somewhat in reverse.  The identification between the party and the movement institutions has become so complete that the institutional movement leaders react against candidates in the GOP primaries as if the eventual Republican nominee were the de facto leader of the movement as well.  A fairly strict, meaningful definition of conservatism would not be a problem if it were not considered an absolute requirement that every major elected Republican describe himself as a conservative.  Currently the GOP voting coalition is arguably much less conservative, by the standards of what that term meant in 1980, than it was just ten years ago, and yet far more Republicans describe themselves with this term than was the case just a decade ago.  This does not represent the triumph of conservative principles so much as it represents the dilution of the term’s meaning.  The name has become a marker and proof of your right to belong, but it has consequently become much less significant.  We are currently experiencing the confusion that inevitably follows the overuse of a term that empties it of all meaning.     

Movement leaders have some significant, legitimate objections to the records of Huckabee and McCain, many of which I happen to share, but they have opted to treat them as they have treated rightist dissident conservatives in the past: they do not simply reject this or that policy position for certain reasons, but take the departure from an official line as proof that a person is not just possibly mistaken on policy but must also be excluded from the realm of conservatism all together for raising the question in the first place.  At the very least, this response makes a mockery of the pretensions that Republicans and establishment conservatives entertain and value intellectual diversity.  Very little creative or valuable thinking can be done if conservatives are constantly made to feel as if any unconventional proposal threatens to dynamite the entire movement and endangers the proposal’s author with exclusion.  If the conservative movement is not going to be an appendage of the GOP in the future, its leaders will need to recognise that the outcome of the Republican nomination contest does not have to define the future of the movement, and that the movement’s support for a given Republican administration is not foreordained or guaranteed.  That, in turn, may yield some better results on policu, since it makes it harder for the party to take movement support or acquiescence for granted. 

If conservatives allow their priorities to be dictated by transient political needs of the GOP, they will find themselves increasingly dissatisfied with the direction of their movement and will also find themselves incapable of having an independent voice that will have credibility when it speaks out against Republican follies and failures.  Without that independence, they will find themselves, as they do today, complicit in the errors of the party and unable to do much about them.  This independence from the party cannot simply be rhetorical or a scapegoating tactic when things go wrong, but must be a consistent strategy of keeping a healthy distance from a party organisation that may have common goals in certain cases but which has its own interests that do not always align with those of conservatives.  If conservatives took that path, there would be much less anxiety every four years about the dangers of “redefining conservatism” for political ends.  An important step in the direction of independence would be the decentralisation of conservative movement institutions away from Washington and the East Coast.  As with every kind of decentralist approach, this would make conservative institutions better aware of different conditions around the country, it would reintroduce them to local and regional perspectives and would remove them to some degree from the proximity to and influence from party leadership.  Perhaps most importantly, instead of developing think tanks and institutes focused on national policy there would be a greater focus on local and regional concerns, which would of necessity eschew the sort of homogenised, uniform responses on matters of policy, and it would allow the kind of flexibility and ability to challenge assumptions.  This decentralisation of the movement would then also give the movement greater incentives to pursue and defend actual political and economic decentralisation, so that they would have a practical reason to advocate devolution of power back to states and localities.  When movement institutions have no concrete interest in devolution and localism, they will tend towards acquiescing in centralist policies that are ostensibly pursued for “conservative ends,” but which everything we know about consolidated power tells us will not achieve those ends and will actively subvert the natural affinities and remaining local institutions that are actually much more fundamental to realising those “conservative ends.”

I guess I’m sorry that I missed this debate.  As a matter of informing voters, it seems to have been the same waste of time that debates always are, but as political theater it will be remembered for a long time to come.  Clinton stated (correctly, as it happens) that Obama’s claim of continuous, unbroken opposition to the war was false.  Obama insisted, as some of us argued earlier, that his remarks about Reagan were not meant as an endorsement of Reagan’s policies, which should have been obvious to everyone.  Then there was loose talk of corporate lawyering and slumlords.  Then Edwards hit Obama on his numerous “present” votes.  Despite the much more conventional one-on-one nomination fight that is developing on their side, the Democrats seem poised to commit self-immolation than the GOP if they keep doing what they’ve been doing the last few weeks.

Okay, he isn’t saying that exactly, but he does seem to be one of the few columnists or radio hosts who recognises that there is something awry with the persistent demonisation of Huckabee and McCain when compared to the much more friendly treatment meted out to Romney and Giuliani, who are, by any fair standard judging by their records, far less conservative than the two receving the third degree from pundits, activists and talk radio hosts.  If the phrase “pro-war liberal” applies to anyone in the race, it is Giuliani, yet he typically gets a pass from the people who would try to persuade you that Huckabee wants something like “socialism in one nation under God.”  There is no doubt, as I have noted before, that the majority view of Huckabee in particular is that of someone who is seriously conservative, and Republicans likewise identify with Huckabee and McCain as people who “share their values” far more than Romney or Giuliani.  That Huckabee has not been noticeably more conservative than the President over the years and yet receives the highest rating as a conservative by Republicans should tell you something about cognitive dissonance among GOP voters, who claim in poll after poll around the country that they want someone like Reagan and not like Bush and are, according to national and Feb. 5 state polling, nonetheless happily embracing the two candidates who seem like natural heirs to a Bush-dominated GOP. 

Now by the standards of what I would recognise as conservatism, all of the four are badly wanting, none can really be trusted and all are deeply in the wrong on foreign policy to different degrees, but I am keenly aware that the standards I use are definitely not the prevailing ones in the GOP today and haven’t been for some time.  It was simply impossible for the GOP and the movement to tie themselves so closely to Bush, to rally core constituencies to his side time after time and to identify many of his worst policies (e.g., “the freedom agenda”) as their guiding principles and then suddenly reverse the effects of the last seven years on the attitudes of the voters who had been stampeded into the Bush corral.  The Republicans who say they want a Reagan-like leader and don’t think Bush is cut from the same cloth nonetheless approve of the President’s performance in approximately the same percentages as embrace Huckabee and McCain.  There may not be complete identification between Bush supporters and Huckabee/McCain supporters (McCain seems to have the backing of a remarkable number of anti-Bush voters), but if two-thirds of the GOP still back Bush how is it so remarkable that two-thirds would also back Huckabee and/or McCain?   

It seems more certain than ever that Ross was right when he wrote:

If you consider how the nation’s most ambitious Republicans are positioning themselves for 2008, Bushism looks like it could have surprising staying power.