Try to wrap your mind around this: 75% of likely Iowa GOP caucus-goers say they would vote for a candidate who is less conservative but can win, and 49% say that they would vote for someone with different social views, but 58% say they want a Republican who is more conservative than Bush, with only a third wanting to continue with Bush or have “less conservative” policies.  In short, many of these voters are saying that they would trade their overall preference for more conservatism for a less conservative winner–no wonder they never get what they want!

The latest CBS News poll puts Paul at 8% in New Hampshire (still just 4% in Iowa), which confirms the result from at least three other polls that I can recall from the last week or two that show him at 7%.  This puts him within eight points of both McCain and Giuliani.  If this is right (and I should note that this poll’s sampling error for N.H. Republicans was 6 points!), second place is an entirely realistic goal at this point, provided that he continues to climb in the polls as he has finally started to do.  If Paul outperforms either of them (especially McCain with guaranteeing a win), the story is unfortunately not going to be, “Why is Ron Paul doing so well?” but instead will be, “Why is X so pathetically weak?”   

Also, Huckabee seems to be moving up in Iowa, now at 21%.  If Huckabee managed somehow to win Iowa (and two-thirds of Romney’s supporters are not yet fully committed to backing Romney), that could badly damage Romney and shake things up, but it would probably to the ultimate advantage of Giuliani.  At the start of the month, Ross explained the perverse (that’s my term, not his) relationship between Huckabee’s surge and Giuliani’s success.  I still don’t think a Giuliani-Huckabee ticket would work at all, nor is it likely to happen, but they do seem to have ended up as very strange natural political allies.

Full results of poll are here.

It’s official: the rationale for the NRLC’s endorsement of Fred Thompson makes no sense.  The NRLC claims that “he is best positioned to top pro-abortion candidate Rudy Giuliani for the Republican nomination,” which I would like to believe (since I stupidly predicted that Thompson would win) but which I also know at this moment to be utter nonsense.  Clearly, from a purely “he can beat Giuliani” perspective you would have to go with Romney, which is horrific but nonetheless it is the reality at the present time. 

It would be one thing to endorse Thompson on the grounds that he has a solid voting record (and they did cite this at the announcement), or that he is more reliable and trustworthy than the other leading candidates.  But this appeal to his potential as the Bane of Giuliani seems as wrong as it gets.  Then you see that they can get it even more wrong:

…and also, looking at polls against the likely Democrats, he is well-positioned, and we believe best positioned, to win the presidency of the United States for unborn children.

What polls have they been looking at?  For months, Thompson has performed worse in head-to-head match-ups with named Democrats than McCain or Giuliani.  Either you dismiss these polls as essentially meaningless and based on the opinions of poorly informed voters, or you have to acknowledge that Thompson’s national electability is worse than it is for these other candidates.  You don’t get to make up entirely new results that suit your endorsement.  I suppose these are the sorts of things that organisations have to say when they make endorsements, but this desperate “pre-buttal” of the obvious criticisms just shows how bizarre the endorsement really is. 

Then this line summed up everything that’s wrong with Thompson’s campaign:

Thompson did not attend the group’s event announcing the endorsement at the National Press Club.

Couldn’t be bothered, I suppose.  You can almost hear him saying, “I’m not saying that I don’t want your endorsement, ‘cuz I kinda do.” (apologies to SNL)

What can be said about Mr. Paul is that he’s not only ahead of Mr. Bernanke but also of his fellow Republicans, and he will eat into their standing until they address the question of the soundness of our currency. ~The New York Sun

That’s pretty high praise for someone who has such allegedly “kooky” ideas on economic policy.  It’s good to see Ron Paul finally getting a little more respect.

Still, if I had to choose between Ron Paul and, say, Rudy Giuliani for president, would I vote for Paul? You bet. There are worse things than being a crank. ~Kevin Drum

For it was not merely predictable that Georgia would somehow go wrong, it was a certainty: Just about all revolutions, even peaceful ones, somehow go wrong. In the decade following 1989, for example, communists were elected to power in pretty much every Central European country. ~Anne Applebaum

Ms. Applebaum notes that it is a “disgrace” that the President has said nothing about Georgia all week.  Well, until she published her column, the Post hadn’t said anything either, and even then it wasn’t much.  Most Western papers have kept shtum on the colossal embarrassment that is their social engineering project gone haywire.  Consider the quote above.  Yes, it’s true that communists, or “ex-communists” and “reformed” communists as they have been called by journalists, took power in many eastern and central European countries after the initial enthusiasm for full-on democratic capitalism, but in most former Warsaw Pact and ex-Soviet countries they didn’t send policemen on baton charges against civilian protesters. 

This sort of excuse-making for Saakashvili is particularly embarrassing, since it reduces what he has done to some inevitable outcome of the revolutionary process, which ignores the fact that many other former communist states have adjusted without anything like Saakashvili’s heavy-handed rule.  Saakashvili’s failure was not determined by geography or geopolitics, but by the nature of his “revolution” from the beginning. 

P.S.  There was no “counter-revolution,” because the “revolution” was a scam all along.  A “revolution” doesn’t become a “counter-revolution” just because it turns ugly.  The ugly government of Saakashvili was there from the start.

Glenn Greenwald has another excellent post on Ron Paul:

And — as the above-cited efforts to compel Congress to actually adhere to the Constitution demonstrate — few people have been as vigorous in defense of Constitutional principles as those principles have been mangled and trampled upon by this administration while most of our establishment stood by meekly. That’s just true.

Paul’s efforts in that regard may be “odd” in the sense that virtually nobody else seemed to care all that much about systematic unconstitutional actions, but that hardly makes him a “weirdo.” Sometimes — as the debate over the Iraq War should have demonstrated once and for all — the actual “fruitcake” positions are the ones that are held by the people who are welcome in our most respectable institutions and magazines, both conservative and liberal [bold mine-DL].

* * * * * *

This whole concept of singling out and labelling as “weirdos” and “fruitcakes” political figures because they espouse views that are held only by a small number of people is nothing more than an attempt to discredit someone without having to do the work to engage their arguments. It’s actually a tactic right out of the seventh grade cafeteria. It’s just a slothful mechanism for enforcing norms.

Alex Massie answers another tactic employed by some liberal critics of Rep. Paul here.

Dave Weigel has a great report on the Philadelphia Ron Paul rally from this weekend.  Here was one section that caught my attention:

After that: Beatlemania. Paul only needed to walk about 10 yards to get from his set-up to his van, but a crush of supporters swarmed off, holding out replicas at the Constitution (available at a gift shop next door) for him to sign, asking him whatever quick questions they could muster (“Doctor Paul, what’s your stance on, uh, intellectual property rights?”) and begging his handlers for hugs. A redheaded undergrad gently asked park police to let her into Paul’s circle: “I really just want to shake his hand, I’ve been waiting for so long to meet him!” When she got to the congressman she wailed, hugged, basked for a photo, hurtled away screaming “Thankyouthankyouthankyou!”

It’s still a little hard to believe that these things are actually happening.  I have known about Ron Paul since I was a kid, my mother voted for him in 1988 and every December we receive one of the Christmas cards that he sends to his supporters around the country.  Even though he wasn’t our Congressman, he spoke for us and what we believed when our own representatives did not.  When the campaign started earlier this year I was pleased, but I never expected to see the day when he would draw this kind of exuberant, positive reaction from thousands and tens of thousands of people.  Whatever happens in January and afterwards, it has already been an amazing campaign.

The next online fundraising drive for Ron Paul is set for December 16 to commemorate the Boston Tea Party.