Now that the idea of an anti-Romney McCain-Huckabee alliance is fast becoming conventional wisdom, it is worth noting that many of the institutional movement conservatives and party leaders shot themselves in the foot with their intense hostility to Huckabee and everything he represented.  When the GOP establishment needed to rally evangelicals and social conservatives to stop McCain, they could not throw their weight behind Huckabee, whom they had already denounced in the harshest terms, and they could not expect the favourite candidate of many movement conservatives to peel off supporters from Huckabee after he had tried to discredit Huckabee.  Incredibly, the same movement that just six months ago was powerfully opposed to McCain because of the immigration bill has, as I said earlier, spent much of its time for the past month vilifying the one candidate who could have checked McCain’s ambitions.  Now that they need to rebuild an alliance between the Republican center and right to replicate the success of Bush in 2000 to thwart McCain, they find that they have instead surprisingly driven many voters on the right into a tactical alliance with McCain and his “moderates.”  The (mostly baseless) antipathy to Huckabee on trade and economics–the opposition to his insubstantial “populism”–and the exaggerated complaints about his fiscal liberalism when compared to the largely kid-glove treatment of Romney’s equally undesirable interventionist record helped to drive a wedge between large parts of the social and economic conservative factions that made it unlikely that Romney voters would vote tactically for Huckabee.  Furthermore, because the GOP has wedded itself so fully and blindly to the war in Iraq and McCain is on the side of a majority of Republicans on this question, a McCain candidacy protected by a tacit alliance with Huckabee becomes very hard to stop.

Prof. Bainbridge preaches ashes and sackcloth:

Coupled with losing Congress in 2006, losing the presidency in 2008 will provide a pair of defeats that surely will prompt “attentiveness” on the part of the GOP leadership and the intellectual base of think tanks and academics who helped lay the foundation for the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions.

But attentiveness to what?  There is something frustratingly vague about Bainbridge’s complaint, just as there was always something frustratingly vague about Thompson’s campaign message.  Going back to first principles is a fine idea (assuming that you have sound first principles), but Thompson never made clear how he would differ from the current administration in those areas where it was most ruinous for the reputation of the party and the name of conservatism.  There is reason to think, given what he has said and who is advising him, that Thompson would have been worse and more prone to the same mistakes of this administration on foreign policy than would Romney or Huckabee.  In other words, in the one area where a return to first principles seems most necessary, Thompson plainly failed to deliver.    

2006 should have been a deafening wake-up call to the GOP that most of the country was not with them on Iraq, but that wasn’t the lesson they learned at all.  They decided to hang it all on corruption and overspending, as if Indiana ousted three Republican incumbents and New Hampshire turned into a Democratic state because of Abramoff and earmarks.  Depending on the nominee, the aftermath of an ’08 defeat will result in slightly different conclusions, but whatever explanation “the intellectual base” gives to account for the defeat they will remain oblivious to the party’s blind spots on the war and foreign policy, and so will be unable to fix what is wrong.  Remarkably, many of the same people who have winked and nodded at executive usurpation and infringement on civil liberties, the ones who mock Paul’s constitutionalism as hopelessly antiquated, are all the more rigidly, inflexibly adhering to the memory of “the Reagan coalition,” as if conservatism existed for the sake of the coalition rather than the other way around.

I am endorsing Ron Paul for the Republican nomination for President because of his commitment to less government, greater liberty, and lasting prosperity for America. We are at a point in this country where we need to reduce our dependency on government and regain control of our future. To this end, Ron Paul will bring back troops, end the War in Iraq, and will strengthen the U.S. dollar and the economy. For these reasons and more, Ron Paul has my support, respect, and vote. ~Fmr. New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson

Mr. McCain was the target of Mr. Norris’s apparent frustration over Mr. Huckabee’s loss and he went for a McCain sore spot, his age. Mr. McCain is 71, the oldest candidate in the field.

“I really don’t believe he’ll have the stamina to run the country for four years,” Mr. Norris said at a news conference. Mr. Norris is 67. ~The Caucus

Well, this may be the beginning of the end of this anti-Romney pact idea.  Perhaps Huckabee still has the odd idea that he can win the whole thing.  That would certainly liven things up a bit.

Last week I wrote about McCain as the candidate who had replaced Giuliani, and this seems to be holding true.  This will have an effect on Florida voting, since there is little incentive to take a chance on a broke, untested Giuliani campaign when you can back McCain, and you can get pretty much the same combination of crazy foreign policy and immigration liberalism but with none of the weird and creepy baggage that goes with supporting Giuliani.  What occurred to me tonight as I thought about the South Carolina result is how much McCain’s campaign has matched up in practice with Giuliani’s alleged “strategy” of exploiting a divided field on the right to propel himself to the frontrunner position.  The assumption of the Giuliani “plan” was that multiple winners in the early contest prevented consolidation around any one candidate, which then allowed Giuliani to sneak in through the back door.  The only problem with this was that he was supposed to retain a prohibitive advantage in February 5 big states where his New York Republicanism would not offend nearly so many.  In the event, his support in almost all the big states has started to collapse, even in New York and New Jersey, because he failed to consider that his candidacy was redundant and irrelevant the moment McCain’s campaign revived. 

Giuliani hoped, and probably still hopes, that the divided field would work to his advantage, but with his failed under-the-radar direct mail Iowa campaigning following his pre-Ames retreat, his on-again, off-again New Hampshire effort (which was, as Michael correctly said at the time, mostly an anti-Romney effort based on the reasonable assumption that Romney was his principal rival), his belated abandonment of Michigan and his simply miserable organisation in Nevada he ensured that the natural home for his voters would be with McCain.  McCain has shown that you can either exploit a divided field from the beginning or you cede the ground to someone else who can.  You do not get to wait for the  others to tear each other apart and expect to sweep in like a conquering hero.  McCain’s implosion last summer will now be seen as a blessing in disguise, since it made him hone his message, trim his operating costs and husband his resources carefully, while Giuliani took his reasonably successful fundraising and started throwing money around with little concern for long-term funding, when his supposed “strategy” relied on precisely the kind of close control over funds that McCain’s campaign had to practice out of necessity.

The flaw with Giuliani’s campaign was also the central flaw with Fred Thompson’s campaign, which the Fred Hysteria exacerbated severely: anointing a candidate as the “obvious” or “necessary” candidate to fill a void or assume a leadership role removes all incentive for the candidate to exert himself and do the necessary persuading that he is the best candidate, when has already received that title by acclamation before he got started.  When you treat a politician as if he is the answer to some woe, he becomes very pleased with himself, a little too pleased, in fact, and then he becomes resentful when you do not immediately provide him with the laurel crown.  Having no business in the race, but propelled there because of the official narrative that 9/11 qualified him for a completely different job with utterly different responsibilities from those he had in New York, Giuliani went with the official narrative and played it for all it was worth.  When that didn’t work, he had little else to offer.  Likewise, having no business in the race, but propelled there by the idea that he was the “consistent conservative” alternative to a field of squishes and heretics, Fred Thompson stuck to that “consistent conservative” message, as if to say, “Okay, Reaganites, I have arrived–now flock to me!”  When voters did not respond to this fairly weak appeal, Fred became rather surly and kept reiterating how very serious he was, and he wasn’t in the campaign to act like some game show contestant who had to buzz in with an answer in the form of a queston.  He had policy papers!  He even called them “white papers”!  Haven’t you read them all?  As with Fred, Giuliani’s was a celebrity candidacy, but one also premised on having the charisma and command to unify a disillusioned, confused party.  In the end, the candidates reputed to have charisma and command possessed neither, and their absence from the early contests (with the exception of Fred’s very belated Iowa push) reminded voters that the two candidates who were supposed to drive all before them had fled several of those states out of a very reasonable fear of defeat.  

P.S.  Earlier, I argued that, while satisfying to antiwar conservatives, the demise of Giuliani was a victory for hegemonists, whose goals will not be burdened any longer by Giuliani’s personal history and social liberalism.  No longer will social conservatives have to hold their noses to keep the perpetual war going.  In a strange way, Giuliani’s failure is a very good thing for the War Party.

He is the stiff technocrat chastised by the media for his awkward style and for his many changes of public persona.  He is the son of a politician, born to privilege and capable of tremendously detailed policy wonkery that bores most other people silly.  He is frequently compared to a robot or some other passionless humanoid, for which he then overcompensates with public displays of emotion.  This was the media image of Al Gore, but it is now the image of Mitt Romney.  Presumably someone has drawn this comparison before (it seems so obvious to me today that I wonder why I’d never thought of it before), but I think it is helpful in explaining why Romney has been such a weak candidate.  Both have switched positions on abortion in their ambitions for national office in their respective parties, in which they are hardly alone, but Romney has shown an even more plastic flexibility with his positions on a range of issues.  Most strikingly, like Gore’s later crusade against the evils of tobacco, Romney’s changed view on immigration has been startling…and also thoroughly unconvincing to many restrictionist voters.  Huckabee’s flip-flop on immigration has been even more dramatic, obvious and opportunistic, but he has somehow pulled it off with a lot of restrictionist voters because I suspect they are more willing to trust the avuncular preacher than the blow-dried robot.    

As with Gore, Romney’s personal associates insist that he is nothing like the public persona most of us have encountered through the media, and it’s fair to say that journalists have been even less forgiving to Romney than they were to Gore, but the public’s perception of both men was that they “did not know who they were” and were also fond of telling easily disproved whoppers about things from their past.  In fairness, Gore seems to have had a few more of these, but whether it’s his claim about his father marching with MLK or his lifelong love of the hunt Romney seems to have the same propensity to tell stories that lend him a certain authority or distinction out of the keen awareness of a political vulnerability.  Where Huckabee, like Clinton, responds to the awareness of his own weaknesses with jokes, Romney covers up for his liabilities with stories that don’t pass the laugh test, whether it is varmint-related or whether it concerns one of his serious policy shifts of recent years.  Not only has this chameleon act been transparent and insulting to the intelligence of informed voters, but it reflects a basic contempt for the public and reflects a belief that is probably widely shared in the business and political worlds that people can be made to buy anything if it is repackaged and promoted with the properly-tested marketing.  Considering our recent political history, this belief may be well-founded, but when the promotion of a candidate reeks of focus groups and consultants a great many voters will look elsewhere (I know this is hardly a novel or remarkable insight), and if there’s one thing that Romney’s chameleon approach tells voters it is that he is afraid to speak his own mind. 

Also, taking that Hayes piece into account, it’s easy to see why voters, especially late-deciding voters, frequently go against Romney and go for his rivals: these voters apparently do not decide their votes based on issues in any sense of the word, but emphasise character and those always slippery “values.”  Romney’s entire campaign has been, at least until recently, focused almost exclusively on issues and his “three-legged stool” of conservatisms, which satisfies pundits, activists and various other list-checking gnomes, and so keeps falling flat with these sorts of voters.  Until, that is, he made an appeal in Michigan that was much more politically savvy and consequently full of dubious policy promises.  For a change, he put away Mitt the Consultant to some extent (though at the same time actually emphasising his business credentials more than in previous contests), and he related to Michiganders in terms of sentiment, nostalgia and a sense of solidarity with them (as well as through his extensive campaign network and wodges of advertising cash).  The promise of federal research funding was beside the point–what mattered was that he said that he would “bring Michigan back,” a phrase as popular as it was almost certainly disingenuous.  The tagline from his ads in Michigan was “Michigan is personal for me,” which implied that he somehow intuitively understood Michigan’s problems in a way that someone with no direct connection to the state could.  When he cannot summon this combination of personal and emotional appeals, he wins a certain segment of the electorate that focuses and votes on issues, and this has usually not been enough in genuinely contested races.  Against him are ranged the master of bathos and the alleged “straight talker,” who win over voters in spite of their policy views and even, in Huckabee’s case, in the absence of them.  No wonder Romney keeps losing to them.          

P.S.  For the pedants, let me add that I am not literally arguing that Romney = Gore in all respects.  They are very comparable in the ways I have described.

It will be the obvious headline of many columns and posts for the next two weeks, so let me be one of the first to remark on the obvious: a Patriots-Giants rematch in the Super Bowl to determine whether the Pats go undefeated this year, after the Giants nearly stopped the winning streak at the end of the regular season, presents one of the most intriguing match-ups of the last twenty years.

I have two new posts up over there this week–one on Huckabee and the other on Romney.

One of the more remarkable results of South Carolina exit polling is the support Huckabee received from conservatives, especially from “very conservative” voters who made up 34% of the electorate.  Overall, he led among conservatives generally (35%) and among the “very conservative” he did better (41%).  In the eyes of a large number of these voters, he was the logical “conservative” alternative to McCain, just as Bush became that alternative eight years ago as he discovered that he needed to come at McCain from the right and played up to S.C. conservatives.  (In the same bizarre  way that conservatives bonded with Bush after this, the grateful anti-McCain forces might have started to see some virtue in the New Huckabee.)  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. 

The Great Conservative Hope, as Thompson has been treated and as he portrayed himself, facilitated the success of McCain, whom some sizeable proportion of the party and a huge part of the elite regard as unacceptable and more than a few see as not conservative.  Well, in their rejection of Huckabee they repudiated the person who, like Bush, could have halted McCain’s advance and possibly crippled his campaign.  Rather than rallying around someone who just pledged to be against amnesty, the Republicans of South Carolina (apparently half of whom favour deportation) who accepted the criticisms of Huckabee from Thompson and others have just empowered the one man most ardently committed to amnesty.  Either this was the goal of tearing down Huckabee all along, or the vendetta against the Arkansan has just come back to bite the people who have regarded him as little more than a “pro-life Democrat.”  Unwilling to tolerate the one who was probably the least objectionable, the GOP may have saddled itself with someone large numbers of Republicans will not be able to stand and who still supports amnesty in spite of everything.  The Bob Dole campaign mark II is getting ready for launch.   

Remarkably, those who voted for Romney in South Carolina have probably just ensured that their candidate loses sooner than if they had voted tactically for Thompson (or, somewhat more improbably, for Huckabee).  Romney’s “delegate strategy” relies on the same divided field coming out of South Carolina that went into it.  Rapid consolidation of the race around one or two main rivals makes that strategy less likely to succeed.  Having recognised their failure to gain ground in South Carolina, the Romney campaign nonetheless did not foresee the danger that would come from their remaining supporters there splitting the opposition to the other two.