Yesterday, Barack Obama said there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between he and Senator McCain [bold mine-DL] on illegal immigration. ~Mitt Romney

I’m sorry, this may seem small and unimportant, but this butchering of a basic element of the English language is just awful.  It’s one thing when idiot sports announcers and actors can’t put pronouns into their proper cases, but when you have someone who is often praised for his education and intelligence it is the final straw.  This is more annoying than Obama’s habit of speaking about the “amount of troops” lost in Iraq, as if there were some undifferentiated mass of Troop to which members of the armed forces belong.

Some people are put off by this drippy effort at putting Obama’s words to music, but far more worrisome is Obama’s ad that apparently ran in some markets during the Super Bowl (we were fast forwarding through many of the ads with Tivo, so I cannot say whether it appeared in the Chicago market).  The song is just silly (its silliness is underscored by the fierce intensity of so many of the assembled B-list actors as they are singing it), but the condensed message in that ad should make people think twice about this candidate.  “We can change the world” is a completely commonplace claim, but frankly we have had quite enough of Presidents on a mission to “change the world.”  We don’t need planet-savers and world-changers.  We need some minimally competent executive who can occasionally veto an oversized budget and not start wars.  As the candidate with the largest spending pledges and a hyper-ambitious foreign policy, Obama is not going to be that executive.  We have had quite enough of the candidates of Big, Sweeping Ideas–they have a bad habit of getting us embroiled in Big, Destructive Conflicts.  It’s enough to make you long for the days when utterly small-bore trivia dominated election campaigns.

Given all these procedural oddities from state to state, it’s unlikely any single candidate will deliver a knockout blow on Feb. 5. We still have a ways to go, and it’s hard to know at this point whether the preacher, the prisoner, the woman or the ethnic minority will win. ~Steven Hill

It struck me as odd how Romney managed to disappear from the list of potential winners somewhere between the beginning and ending of this column.  While that may not have been Hill’s intent, this is probably an accurate assessment: there are only four candidates with a chance at nomination right now, and Romney is not really one of them.  This is all the more remarkable when you consider that the coverage has been almost incessantly repeating a McCain v. Romney theme.  There is a very outside chance of a McCain v. Huckabee splitting of states on Tuesday and again in the weeks to come, but not much chance that Romney picks up any states besides his two natural bases of support in Massachusetts and Utah.

On the day of the South Carolina primary, I wrote:

Because Huckabee has decided to lay off of McCain, and prior to tonight still had strong polling in a number of Feb. 5 states, Romney faces the daunting prospect of an anti-Romney pact between the two of them, effectively shutting him out of the South on Feb. 5 and then having Huckabee drop out and endorse McCain soon thereafter.  As McCain and Huckabee divide up the spoils of February 5 and work in concert to keep Romney down, Huckabee’s withdrawal and endorsement then throw his supporters and the race to McCain. 

As you have probably all heard ad nauseam over the last few days, this is exactly what has been happening.  One thing that I didn’t foresee was the extent to which Huckabee and McCain are competing for supporters, and that Huckabee isn’t so much sapping Romney’s strength in the South as he is showing his rival a mirage of victory, giving him a tantalising chance to stay in the race that then vanishes into thin air.  Whichever target Romney chooses in his advertisements in several of the Southern states, the voters he drives away from one will likely just go to the other candidate.

There are plenty of reasons that might explain the former Massachusetts governor’s surprisingly weak support among his former colleagues. But one of them stands out: He appears to have inadvertently alienated a good many of his fellow governors as RGA chairman.

“Right or wrong, the general impression was that he spent way too much time on himself and building his presidential organization,” said a top Republican strategist who has worked closely with the RGA in recent years. “I don’t think anyone ever questioned Romney’s commitment to the organization or the work he put in. They questioned his goals or his motives. Was it to elect Republican governors, or to tee up his presidential campaign?”

A campaign manager for an unsuccessful 2006 Republican gubernatorial campaign echoed the sentiments. “We definitely got the vibe from the staff that our state was never a national player when it came to the strategy that the RGA was putting together,” he said. “Everything they were telling me was about Michigan. They were dumping everything into Michigan.” ~The Politico

Long-time Eunomia readers will remember that I was talking about this in the wake of the 2006 debacle.  The RGA under Romney directed a lot of its funding to gubernatorial races in three crucial early states (Florida, Iowa, Michigan) for the nomination in 2008, including a hopeless Michigan race in which Dick DeVos ended up being blown out by 18 points.  The Michigan case was the most transparent example of Romney using the RGA as his own springboard, since Granholm’s re-election was never really in doubt and Romney’s personal and political interest in Michigan was obvious.  We didn’t know at the time, but Romney’s penchant for throwing money at lost causes prefigured his own presidential campaign only too well.

This WSJ poll is about six weeks out of date, so it is pretty useless for tracking the presidential race.  There are some other results that have more lasting relevance.  58% say that the globalisation of the American economy has been on the whole “bad,” with just 28% saying the opposite and 11% declaring it a wash.  That is pretty clearly bad news for the party most closely identified with globalisation at present.  The number for those saying globalisation has generally benefited “the American economy” has dropped 14 points from a poll 10 years ago.  There are as many dissatisfied with their financial circumstances (33%) as there have been since the wake of the ’01-’02 recession.  52% said that immigration “hurts more than it helps” the United States, up eight points from last summer and back at the same levels two years earlier.  As of mid-December when the poll was taken, 56% said that victory in Iraq was not still possible.  All of the pro-“surge” talk affected the respondents over the course of 2007, but as of last December 44% said it had made no difference and 14% said that it had made things worse.  57% agreed with the statement that most American soldiers should be withdrawn from Iraq by the start of 2009.  Except for immigration, obviously, the Republicans are on the unpopular side of every one of these questions.    

The poll also has two interesting figures on anti-Mormonism.  59% could correctly identify that Romney was a Mormon, and 26% “felt uncomfortable” about Romney’s  Mormonism and its possible effect on his presidential decisions (this was how the question was phrased), which was slightly higher than the percentage “uncomfortable” about his religion in the abstract.

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.