Jonathan Bernstein makes an interesting comparison between Tim Pawlenty and Michael Dukakis (via Andrew), and he doesn’t intend it as an insult. On the contrary, Bernstein sees Pawlenty as the Republican candidate doing all of the necessary things to win the nomination, and he thinks the polling is as misleading for Pawlenty as it was for Dukakis at this stage. I don’t find this terribly persuasive.

What Bernstein doesn’t address in his post is that several Democratic nominees have come out of that party’s very different modern nominating process after starting their campaigns with very weak polling. According to the data Bernstein cites, Jimmy Carter was polling about as well at this point in 1975 as Herman Cain is right now. While they both happen to be from Georgia, I would not be willing to argue that Herman Cain is the Jimmy Carter of 2012. More important, according to the same data, no early polling on the Republican side has ever found an eventual nominee in the single digits at this point. Indeed, the only time in the last several open races that the eventual nominee wasn’t in first place in early polling was in 2007 when the absurd, media-driven candidacy of Rudi Giuliani was still taken seriously. Republicans have no habit of nominating candidates with poor name recognition on their first attempt in the modern primary process. Put another way, if someone polling as poorly as Dukakis in 1987 had been running on the Republican side at any time in the last forty years, he would never have won the nomination.

The Dukakis comparison has its limits for another reason. Pawlenty isn’t polling nearly as well relative to the field as Dukakis was at this point in 1987. By mid-1987, Dukakis was polling among the top four Democrats. Pawlenty has consistently been seventh or eighth, and in some polls he has been tied for ninth. Excluding Trump, Palin and Huckabee from the field because they are not going to be candidates, Pawlenty is at best in fourth position, and for a Republican that is a recipe for being a runner-up.

At this point in 2007, Romney was polling an average of 8%, and we know he didn’t prevail. Right now, Pawlenty is polling an average of 3.6% What leads anyone to believe that he is going to surge out of nowhere to become the nominee? He most likely will become a competitive candidate, but there is nothing here that suggests he is going to win.

P.S. Comparing to Pawlenty’s poll numbers to other Republicans in past cycles with similarly weak polling is instructive. Pawlenty is currently polling as well as former A.G. Elliot Richardson (1976) and Gen. Alexander Haig (1988). Pawlenty will probably have more success and become a Lamar Alexander-like figure in the 2012 race.

The president of the United States is supposed to describe the world as it should be. That’s one of the jobs of the No. 1 honcho in the No. 1 country. He has to denounce repression and violence by a regime against its own people. Small-d democrats in the Levant need to hear that the United States supports their aspirations and sympathizes with their predicament. Whether such words will change anything in a practical sense is beside the point. If they give democrats and protesters encouragement, that is, for now, good enough. ~Michael Tomasky

In fact, the President is under no obligation to describe the world as it should be. It would be welcome and an interesting change of pace if we could simply get the President to see the world as it is. Properly speaking, he is the chief magistrate of a federal republic. He is not a cheerleader or motivational speaker for the world’s dissidents. Giving protesters encouragement without any intention of lending them real support is a good way to keep getting protesters killed.

“Speaking out” in support of protesters is a phony pledge of solidarity that America is with them, when they know full well that America is not with them. For all we know, some of the Syrians who rose up against Assad may have been under the mistaken impression that the intervention in Libya was proof that an outgunned, oppressed opposition could win outside support and aid if it faced a brutal crackdown. It’s also possible that Libya had nothing to do with it, but that doesn’t make empty rhetorical support any better. Lending false hope to opposition movements in Syria and elsewhere is not admirable or principled. It is much more like a cruel trick.

It hasn’t even been two months since the Libyan war started, and already we have people agitating for starting the same process all over again. When it seemed that Obama had no intention of ordering military attacks on Libya, critics argued that he had to back up his demand that Gaddafi “must go” with action. Soon enough, Obama opted for intervention, and continues to insist that Gaddafi “must go.” If Obama addresses the Syrian crackdown in his speech on Thursday, will he refrain from making grandiose statements about the regime’s legitimacy, or will he issue another demand for an end to the current regime? All signs currently point to the administration’s unwillingness to make that demand, which is why it may be better if Obama says nothing or as little as possible about Syria.

What Tomasky doesn’t address here is that ill-considered policies always begin with “taking a stand” rhetorically in public against another government. Denunciations change nothing, so soon enough there will be agitation for “actions, not words,” and then there will be calls for “more decisive action” until people begin promoting the unthinkable and ridiculous option of launching attacks on government forces. As pressure builds, the government eventually adopts increasingly aggressive and confrontational policies. What everyone acknowledged to be “madness” yesterday soon becomes an unavoidable matter of preserving our “credibility.”

More than any transactional process of concession-based “reset” between the U.S. and Russia, what is most likely to improve Russia’s behavior and relationship with the West is the success of these countries (in part because it would also serve as a powerful and inspiring example to the Russian people). ~Sens, Kyl, Johnson, Sessions, and Crapo

This gets things backward. The “reset” was meant to improve U.S.-Russian relations, and it has largely done that. It was not intended to improve Russian behavior toward its neighbors, but improved relations between Russia and many of its neighbors have been a fortunate result of the reduced tensions between the U.S. and Russia. If we would like to see a return to extremely poor relations and heightened tensions between Russia and many of its neighbors, we should follow the Senators’ recommendations.

If the U.S. keeps trying to use the small states on Russia’s border as front-line states to put pressure on Russia, Russia is likely to treat those states worse than it otherwise would. If the “success of these countries” is seen as an effort to diminish Russian influence on its borders, Russia will probably conclude that it has a reason to sabotage that success. These Senators seem to be suggesting is that the U.S. should use these small states to goad and provoke Russia in the strange hope that this will make Russia more cooperative with those states and with the U.S. This is like so much misguided U.S. policy towards Russia and the former Soviet republics over the last two decades.

In practice for policy towards Georgia, ensuring the “success” of these countries is focused to a much greater degree on military support and cooperation:

Despite the 2008 Russian invasion into South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Georgian prospects are more hopeful. The dynamic leadership of Mikheil Saakashvili is modeled on the economic principles of Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman. With Russian troops still occupying one-fifth of this country and nearly 1,000 Georgian troops fighting alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Georgia has requested and should be allowed to buy defensive weapons from the United States. Likewise, Georgia, as a future NATO member, is an excellent site to support missile defense of the U.S. and Europe. Economic cooperation in the form of a free-trade agreement with the U.S. and admission into the European Union would also help ensure Georgia’s long-term success.

Part of this is misleading. The main problem most pro-Georgian hawks had with the August 2008 war wasn’t that Russia moved forces into South Ossetia to expel a Georgian attack, though they weren’t happy about that, but that Russian forces then went beyond South Ossetia to attack targets in the rest of Georgia. The authors can’t acknowledge that Saakashvili escalated the conflict in the beginning, and so they invent a story of the Russian “invasion” of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Georgia is not going to be a member of NATO in the future, and I can imagine few things more likely to irritate Moscow than a missile defense proposal based in Georgia. Aside from the trade proposal, which may or may not be advisable, these are all truly terrible ideas.

On the question of selling any weapons to Georgia, Joshua Kucera had a recent article in The Atlantic on why this would be a mistake:

Even if Georgia were armed to the teeth, however, it’s not clear how much good it would do them. Russia’s military is so much stronger than Georgia’s that additional weapons would be a moot point. Or worse: Though Georgia repeatedly emphasizes that it is only seeking “defensive” weapons, any defensive weapon makes aggression easier by improving defense against a counterattack. Georgia touts the threat of a Russian attack, but it was in fact Georgia which fired the first shots that precipitated the 2008 war with Russia, in an apparent belief that Russia would stand idly by.

In a paper published earlier this year, two scholars of the region, Cory Welt and Samuel Charap, argue that providing Georgia with weapons would perpetuate a “Berlin Wall mentality” of eternal conflict, and block the path that Georgia really needs to take with regard to its lost territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. That, Welt and Charap write, is the slow, painstaking process of “conflict transformation that reduces tensions, brings people together across the conflict lines, creates trust, builds trade links, and normalizes contacts among authorities.”

But subtlety is not Saakashvili’s strong suit. While American weapons may not make any difference on the ground, they would be a tangible sign of hard support from the West, which Saakashvili clearly craves.

It’s important to remember that Saakashvili took it for granted that the U.S. would support Georgia in any conflict after Georgia received what he interpreted as a tangible sign of support from the West at the NATO summit in Bucharest. Giving or selling Georgia any weapons would repeat that mistake, and it could contribute to a new crisis. At the very least, as Charap and Welt have explained, it is not going to help settle outstanding disputes with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and it is definitely going to do nothing to improve relations between Russia and the U.S. or Russia and Georgia.

For the Baltics, the Senators have come up with a new, unusually bad recommendation: have the Baltic states host tactical nuclear weapons that other European states no longer want. Remember that several of the authors of this op-ed complained bitterly that tactical nuclear weapons were not part of a strategic arms reduction treaty that they desperately tried to derail. Reducing or eliminating the threat of tactical nuclear weapons doesn’t seem to be their priority here. Instead, they want to alarm and antagonize Russia by moving these tactical weapons to Russia’s doorstep. Considering how badly missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic went over with Moscow, it is easy to see why this is a disastrous recommendation if the goal is to improve relations between Russia and its neighbors.

Ross:

That being said, I do think Daniels will get in, which will reduce Romney’s odds considerably [bold mine-DL]. But at this point, the Indiana governor has every reason to wait another six months or so to declare his candidacy — because at the rate we’re going, all of his prospective rivals will have either bowed out or self-destructed by then.

While no one was watching, Daniels just engaged in a bit more self-destruction of his own. Thanks to one of my commenters, I came across this report that Daniels had floated Condi Rice’s name as a hypothetical VP nominee. Rice is not pro-life, and that is just one of the problems with Daniels’ hypothetical suggestion.

If Daniels weren’t already under fire for his “truce” proposal, this wouldn’t amount to much, but it reinforces all of the doubts that social conservatives have about Daniels despite his obvious credentials as a social conservative. For some hawks, mentioning Rice is another strike against Daniels, because they perceive Rice as one of the people in the second Bush term responsible for charting a somewhat less disastrous foreign policy course. For others, it is proof that Daniels is willing to revive the foreign policy errors of the Bush years, which doesn’t hurt Daniels in the primaries, but it should cause everyone else to flee a Daniels candidacy as quickly as possible.

Frankly, floating Condi Rice’s name as a VP choice suggests poor political judgment and ignorance of how poorly Rice performed in her Bush administration posts. When no one knew what then-Gov. George W. Bush thought about foreign policy, we were reassured that Condi Rice, a Brent Scowcroft protege, was advising him. Bush the candidate gave the impression that he was inclined towards something more like a Republican realist foreign policy, and almost immediately once he was in office all of that went out the window. No one interested in such a foreign policy is likely to fall for that trick again, especially not when the same personnel are going to be involved.

As National Security Advisor, Rice did a terrible job. As Secretary of State, she didn’t do much better. Hers was the disastrous tenure at State that facilitated the election of Hamas in Gaza, the recognition of Kosovo’s independence, the push for missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and the dangerous, foolish push to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia. The last three of these contributed significantly to the escalation of tensions that led to the August 2008 war in Georgia. These were the results of administration decisions in which Rice was very much involved, and they were all clearly mistakes at the time. Under Bush’s direction, she helped drive the U.S.-Russian relationship to its lowest point in the last twenty years. She memorably commented on the 2006 bombardment of Lebanon as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” If Daniels hopes that he is reassuring realists by mentioning Rice, he is mistaken. If he expects interventionists to be satisfied with the watered-down version of their foreign policy that Rice represents, he will be disappointed.

If Daniels has been doing this badly before he has announced a presidential bid, what does Romney really have to fear from him?

Ross:

He’ll be missed because he embodied a political persuasion that’s common in American life but rare in America’s political class. This worldview mixes cultural conservatism with economic populism: it’s tax-sensitive without being stridently antigovernment, skeptical of Wall Street as well as Washington, and as concerned about immigration, family breakdown and public morals as it is about the debt ceiling.

This combination of views represents one of the plausible middle grounds in American politics. You can find it in the Republican Party, among the evangelicals and Catholics whose votes made the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush possible. You can find it among independent voters, particularly in what a recent Pew report calls the “disaffected” demographic, whose hostility to big government coexists with anxieties about corporate power and support for redistribution of wealth. And you find it in the Democratic Party as well — from the dwindling ranks of pro-life Catholic liberals to the “Bill Cosby conservatives” in the African-American middle class.

———————

Of course, his 2008 campaign also reflected populism’s inevitable flaw: a desperate lack of policy substance. Huckabee won votes by talking about issues that the other Republican candidates wouldn’t touch, but his actual agenda was a grab bag of gimmicks and crank ideas.

There are some elements of truth to Ross’ claims about what Huckabee represented and lacked, but these descriptions miss a few important things. When Huckabee’s campaign began, he did lack many specific policy proposals, and the proposals that he did endorse, including the Fair Tax scheme, had no obvious relationship to the economic concerns of the people he claimed to be representing. That is far from the worst failing of the Huckabee campaign. The worst thing about the old Huckabee campaign is that it was mainly an exercise in pseudo-populism based on cultural cues and identity politics that masked Huckabee’s adherence to the main economic policies of the Bush Era.

Huckabee indulged in phony economic populism that was based solely in his class background, and it was this dabbling in working-class identity politics that scared Republican elites as much as anything he had ever done as governor. There was no danger that Huckabee was going to link this identity politics up with any new policies, which was why the hysteria his candidacy provoked was so unfounded, but the slightest hint that an era of Republican political dominance had not much benefited working- and middle-class Americans was so scandalous that it had to be shut down as soon as possible. Huckabee presented himself as someone with a chip on his shoulder, and happily contrasted his biography with that of his more privileged, loathed opponent in Mitt Romney. Huckabee had mastered the art of Republican class and education-based resentment politics well before Palin ever came on the national scene, but he forgot that this sort of resentment politics was not supposed to be used against other Republicans.

He largely ran as a “compassionate” conservative with the occasional nod to voters’ economic anxiety, but on key major policy issues Huckabee did line up with the Bush Era consensus in favor of mass immigration and free trade. He did dramatically change his immigration views and rhetoric overnight once he became a more competitive candidate, but this was not credible. For much of the campaign, Huckabee’s “actual agenda” at was in many respects indistinguishable in substance from Bushism, but he saw the political opportunity for tapping into dissatisfaction with the results of Bushism. Pawlenty seems eager to repeat Huckabee’s identity politics act, but unlike Huckabee he doesn’t seem eager to attack elites on the Republican side. “Sam’s Club Republican” rhetoric notwithstanding, Pawlenty seems to have no intention of appealing to this middle ground.

Update: Weigel goes so far as to say that Huckabee’s announcement signals the end of “compassionate” conservatism. We may hope.

So, the most recent available polling has Romney with more support than Pawlenty, Daniels, and Bachmann combined–with a Bachmann to spare. The notion that we “know with reasonable certainty” that either Pawlenty or Daniels will win is nonsense–unless Will figures that no other nominee has a shot against Obama. But there’s no reason to think Pawlenty and Daniels have more national appeal than Romney. ~James Joyner

George Will identified Pawlenty and Daniels as the two Republicans most likely to prevail in the nominating contest because they are the only two of the five “plausible” candidates that Will previously named that he still believes are viable. This has nothing to do with their actual viability, and everything to do with what George Will hopes will happen. Several of the “plausible” candidates that Will identified earlier were not very plausible at all, but they are all acceptable to Beltway Republicans. I suspect that Will would like to see the Republican nominee be someone he would not be too embarrassed to support, and as of right now his list of acceptable candidates has been reduced to two.

Will’s original list also included Huntsman, Barbour, and Romney. Barbour is out of the running, Will has evidently accepted the conventional wisdom that Romney’s health care liability is ruinous, and he has no particular interest in boosting Huntsman. Of course, anything could happen, but the way that he treats Pawlenty and Daniels as the obvious default choices doesn’t seem to rest on an analysis of their strengths. Instead, it relies entirely on the assumption that ideologically impure, populist, libertarian, and Tea Party-aligned candidates are all so badly flawed that none of them will outperform these two. Let’s remember that Will is talking about one of the least popular “major” candidates and an undeclared governor few outside Indiana and Washington have ever heard of, and somehow he has concluded that these two have the inside track to the nomination.

As James says, “there’s no reason to think Pawlenty and Daniels have more national appeal than Romney,” and we can state with some certainty that neither of them has half the name recognition that Romney has. Daniels can make the excuse that he isn’t a candidate yet and hasn’t been trying to promote himself very much. Pawlenty has been actively campaigning, and he has been working for the better part of the last two years to raise his national profile ahead of the 2012 cycle, and so far there doesn’t seem to be that much interest in what he’s offering.

Update: According to a late April Rasmussen survey of likely Republican voters, Pawlenty and Daniels didn’t score all that well when the respondents were asked about candidates they would vote for or vote against. Adding together definitely/probably figures, we find that just 28% said they would vote for Daniels, and 36% said they would vote against him. Pawlenty does a little better with 41% for and 33% against, but that doesn’t compare very well to Romney’s 57/31% figures. As news about his inclination to choose Condi Rice as a running mate circulates more widely, Daniels’ support is likely to shrink.

The immediate beneficiary of this is former Pawlenty, whose prospects in Iowa just increased ten-fold. There is no other solid social conservative in the race, he’s from a neighboring state and he’s got a ground game up and running. ~Jennifer Rubin

This is an odd claim. Obviously, Santorum is already in the race, and he is at least as much of a “solid social conservative” as Pawlenty. Pawlenty is from a neighboring state, so Huckabee’s absence raises expectations for him in Iowa even more, and despite having one of the more developed campaign organizations he continues to run even with Santorum and trails in polls behind one undeclared candidate who will harm Pawlenty’s chances considerably if she actually runs. That would be Michele Bachmann. In many respects, she would be the natural candidate to fill the gap left by Huckabee in Iowa. Like Huckabee in 2008, Bachmann has no realistic chance of winning of the nomination, but she could disrupt the race enough to help Romney as Huckabee helped McCain.

One reason that Pawlenty continues to struggle is that there is no demand out there for yet another blue-state governor to play the part of the cardboard cut-out “three legs of the stool” conservative. Pawlenty is auditioning to be the new Romney or Romney’s more acceptable replacement, but so far he hasn’t been persuading very many people that he should be taken seriously. Reports that he “battled to a draw” with an absent Romney in the first debate can hardly be striking terror in the hearts of Romney’s supporters. On the whole, Pawlenty has been arbitrarily granted the status of a first-tier candidate despite many indications that he does not yet deserve that status.

One thing that has been lost in all of the discussion of Romney’s health care liability is his past support for the TARP. This is one issue that could create problems for Romney with many primary voters, and it is a vulnerability that Pawlenty cannot exploit. Pawlenty also supported the bailout. Despite his later claims of opposition to bailouts, Pawlenty was a “reluctant” supporter of the TARP. Romney has absurdly claimed to be for the Paulson TARP, but against the Geithner TARP, but even Romney has not abandoned his previous support for bailouts quite as blatantly as Pawlenty.

As everyone has been saying, Iowa and South Carolina are now much more wide-open contests than they otherwise would have been if Huckabee had been in the race. Huckabee had won many of the post-Florida Southern primaries in 2008 as well, and those states will now be entirely up for grabs. The Huckabee vote is likely going to be split up among several social conservative candidates, and his absence from the race means that Romney won’t have to worry about the most significant and obvious anti-Romney candidate. Huckabee could still have some impact on the race if he chooses to endorse one of the non-Romney candidates, but he might not want to alienate any portion of his audience by playing favorites. Pawlenty, Bachmann, and Santorum all stand to benefit significantly, but their competition will likely prevent any one of them from breaking away from the pack.

The only thing worse than doctrinal [Iranian] theocracy might be a kind of lay theocracy done on the fly – there’s a predictable awfulness to the current Iranian regime that could potentially worsen were it subject to interpretive awfulness. ~Kevin Sullivan

The latest reported clashes between Ahmadinejad’s circle and the Iranian clerical establishment have provoked some interesting reactions in the West. Somewhat like Geneive Abdo, Kevin is more inclined to see Khamenei and the clerics prevail in this feud for the reason he gives above. If Ahmadinejad’s faction actually supports an end to clerical rule, they would be opposed to theocracy as such, so the choice would seem to be between a more secular authoritarianism and the status quo, but Kevin’s point remains valid. On the other side, Prof. Jamsheed Choksy sees the anti-clerical faction aligned with Ahmadinejad as preferable:

So the struggle for Iran’s future is being forcefully joined by factions on both sides of the secular and clerical divide. The secularists, led by Ahmadinejad and his heir apparent, Mashaei, recognize the pressing need for Iran to rejoin the community of nations — even at the expense of the Islamic Revolution. The fundamentalists, led by Khamenei, remain xenophobic and hostile to the West. They see the Islamic Revolution as the only means to keep themselves in power and their society under religious rule.

Prof. Choksy cites an article by Reza Aslan from earlier in the year in which Aslan challenges the conventional view of Ahmadinejad:

Is it possible that Iran’s blustering president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, long thought to be a leading force behind some of Iran’s most hard-line and repressive policies, is actually a reformer whose attempts to liberalize, secularize, and even “Persianize” Iran have been repeatedly stymied by the country’s more conservative factions? That is the surprising impression one gets reading the latest WikiLeaks revelations, which portray Ahmadinejad as open to making concessions on Iran’s nuclear program and far more accommodating to Iranians’ demands for greater freedoms than anyone would have thought.

Abdo, Choksy and Aslan all agree that the anti-clericals would have an effect on Iranian foreign policy if they prevailed over the clerical establishment. Here is Abdo:

Not only would Ahmadinejad and Mashaie’s vision lead to the marginalization of Iran’s clerics, but it would also make it far less likely that Iran could exert influence in Egypt, Bahrain, Lebanon, Palestine and continue to call the shots in Iraq.

However, because Ahmadinejad represents a “wild card,” and his allies would be less inclined to use “soft power,” Abdo considers his anti-clerical nationalist faction to be more dangerous. Abdo writes:

Many high-ranking officers and the rank and file of the IRGC share Ahmadinejad’s radical views and political ideology and have greatly benefited from his government’s policies in the past six years. They will stop at little to provoke Israel and empower Iran’s regional proxies, which include Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

For Choksy and Aslan, it is because Ahmadinejad and his circle “recognize the pressing need for Iran to rejoin the community of nations” and because they might end clerical rule that they seem to hope that the secularists come out on top. Their interpretation of the foreign policy implications doesn’t seem to mesh very well with Abdo’s, but their assessment of the Iranian secularists around Ahmadinejad seems to make more sense. What makes me somewhat skeptical of these broad claims is that Abdo, Choksy, and Aslan are all describing the two factions in such a way as to make the one that they prefer seem less threatening and more amenable to Western policy goals. This was the mistake that many analysts made when discussing the Green movement as well. No matter which regime faction prevails inside Iran, we shouldn’t expect major improvement or deterioration in Iran’s foreign policy. Just as was the case during the 2009 protests, we are looking at factions struggling over the internal nature of the Iranian government. Western claims that one faction or the other would be “good for us” almost seems like a later justification for picking one side or another in a political conflict that may not have any effect on how Iran relates to other states.

I don’t have a “rooting” interest in Iranian intra-regime feuds, but it might be useful to use this feud to examine some common assumptions about Iran and other authoritarian regimes. There has been some awareness for a while now that the Iranian regime is not monolithic. However, only very recently has there been an acknowledgment that political actors inside the regime can be ruthless, power-hungry, and also interested in changing the regime’s internal policies.

It has been interesting to see how quickly supporters of engagement with authoritarian regimes abandon the idea of engagement the moment that the regimes engage in crackdowns against internal opposition. The reason for this is not just a political calculation that pursuing engagement with a brutal authoritarian regime seems distasteful. There is another assumption that brutal authoritarian regimes will not make diplomatic deals with other states, because outsiders intentionally confuse internal and external policies. There is also an automatic assumption that “reformers” do not engage in crackdowns. Therefore, if there is a crackdown, there cannot possibly be any interest in internal reform. This is taken for granted in the Syrian case. It may be true of the Syrian regime, but everyone assumed that it was obviously true of Ahmadinejad as well, and that may not have been entirely accurate.

Romney has to defend in principle the individual mandate that has become central to the constitutional challenge against Obamacare, hoping that the federalism argument can make people forget the individual mandate’s Republican pedigree and the fact that Romneycare was inspired in part by people who had advocated the individual mandate at the federal level. How effective were John Kerry and John Edwards at arguing against the Iraq war they voted for during the 2004 campaign? To many people, the distinctions will sound like technicalities. ~Jim Antle

I don’t want to give Romney too much help here, but there is a significant difference between Romney on health care and Kerry/Edwards on the Iraq war. Kerry and Edwards had zero credibility to criticize Bush on Iraq for a few reasons. First, they voted for the authorizing resolution, and in 2004 they both still supported the war. Kerry was reduced to quibbling about the management of the war, and arguing that he would manage the war better than Bush. Of course, an attack on Bush’s competence in managing the war was absolutely warranted, but the public didn’t fully appreciate this at the time, and it reduced the differences between the parties on Iraq as much as they possibly could have been. Romney never had to cast a vote on the federal health care legislation, but it seems likely that he would have voted with his party against the bill if he had been in a position to do so. Romney isn’t quibbling over how to implement the health care legislation. He is openly advocating for its repeal.

Romney’s position on federal health care legislation is more like Howard Dean’s 2003-04 Iraq war position, but unlike Dean he is not competing against even more “centrist” supporters of the incumbent’s major policy initiative. Where Dean’s opposition to the Iraq war was reckoned as a general election liability in 2003-04, no one in the GOP is saying that Romney’s general election chances would be undermined because he is calling for ACA repeal. On the contrary, Republicans assume that the pro-repeal position is a winner, and they are worried that Romney is not the best messenger for what they think is a winning issue. In fact, Romney on health care is even more like Obama in 2007-08 on Iraq than he is like Dean.

In any case, Kerry was far more directly implicated in supporting the Iraq war, he didn’t act as an opponent of the war during the campaign, and he won the nomination anyway, and he very nearly won the general election. Romney is at most implicated in supporting some of the same policy mechanisms that the federal health care legislation also uses, but he opposes the specific legislation in question. This is comparable to saying that he is not against all wars, but he is against rash and dumb wars. The good news for opponents of the health care legislation is that Romney is as opposed to it as Obama was to the Iraq war, and the bad news is that this likewise tells you nothing about his more general view of health care policy. Pro-repeal Republicans shouldn’t trust Romney on health care and domestic policy apart from his support for repeal, just as antiwar Democrats generally shouldn’t have trusted Obama on foreign policy apart from his opposition to the Iraq war, but Romney will probably be able to use his support for repeal to deflect all other health care-related attacks.