Alex Massie notes Obama’s relatively more sane approach to Cuba policy and Steve Clemons’ enthusiasm for any candidate who gets Cuba policy right.  (Clemons reiterated his preference for Obama’s Cuba position over that of Clinton just this week.)  Any candidate, that is, except for the one who has been calling for a complete end to the embargo for years and years, and the same one who generally opposes counterproductive and ineffective sanction regimes.

Incidentally, Cuba policy stands out as one of the more obvious examples of where Ron Paul favours engagement and Washington has preferred futile isolation.

Here’s another Ron Paul puzzle.  While the top five GOP candidates are translating 50-70% or more of their “very favourable” rating into support, according to the latest Rasmussen survey of N.H. likely GOP voters, Ron Paul has a 13% very favourable rating and manages to get only 4% in the polls, noticeably underperforming the field in turning a favourable impression into an expression of support.  Overall, he has ratings of 33 fav/51 unfav, which gives him the largest (and only) net negative favourability result of any of the candidates listed in the survey.  Even so, out of that 33% he ought to be able to get at least 9-10% who will cast a vote for him.  Obviously, to have a major impact on the primary and on the race he needs to do a lot better.  If he could somehow manage to get 20-25%, that would be a major breakthrough and might be enough to win in such a divided field (Buchanan won in ’96 with 27%).  As of right now, we’re obviously a long way from that happening.

Another call to council members came from Inez Tenenbaum, the state’s former superintendent of education, who supports Mr. Obama. Ms. Tenenbaum said she wanted the state to be taken seriously, particularly because it is the first in the South to vote. “I can’t imagine Iowa and New Hampshire letting a comedian on the ballot,” she said. ~The Caucus

Ms. Tenenbaum must have a very poor imagination, since the New Hampshire ballotisroutinelyloadedwitheverykindofpresidential candidate, running the gamut from absurd to serious (notice that I haven’t said which campaigns embody absurdity). 

Now I don’t know about you, but I think “O. Savior” is going to make a late surge, unless he suffers from the strong local support for “Vermin Supreme.”  The real question is whether voters are going to go for the obvious religious appeal of Savior, or whether they will embrace the message of greatness offered by Supreme. 

Yes, goodness knows we wouldn’t want South Carolina to abandon the high standards for presidential ballot access they have up in New Hampshire–just imagine what might happen!

Some interesting crosstab data from a recent Rasmussen poll on the question of withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq.  59% of all Americans favour withdrawal either immediately or within a year, including 39% of Republicans.  How is it possible that almost four out of every ten Republicans want out of Iraq, and yet the one candidate who promises to do just that receives virtually no support in polling?

Other remarkable numbers were these: strongest support for “staying until the mission is complete” comes from married people (42%), investors (43%) and those earning between $40-60K (48%).  Support for continuing the war weakens on either side of that income level, being weakest among those earning less than $20K (18%) and relatively weak among both the $20-40K earners and the 100K+ earners.

Which casts into stark relief claims by modern-day “conservatives” like the hacks at Redstate.com that Ron Paul supporters are “a bunch of liberals pretending to be Republicans.” Seven years ago, no one would have disputed that Ron Paul was a conservative Republican in the Buckley/Goldwater/Reagan mold. But nowadays, the primary criteria for membership in the conservative coalition seem to be loyalty to the president’s agenda and a general suspicion of foreigners. ~Tim Lee

Tim is right.  It still surprises me a little that the same people who continually prattle on about finding the “new Reagan” are so thoroughly hostile to the man who was among the first to endorse Ronald Reagan for President (in the 1976 cycle, before it was trendy).  I have already commented on how strange and absurd it is that Ron Paul’s ideas are now seen as being wildly out of step with most conservatives.  Ron Paul obviously hasn’t changed, so that says a lot about the transient and malleable character of conservatism for a lot of people that they literally cannot recognise a political position many of them used to treat with respect less than ten years ago.  It is also remarkable how more than a few libertarians regularly belittle someone who takes a hard line on having a gold-backed currency, a view endorsed by no less than Murray Rothbard.    

Or, what Dave Weigel said.

Federal prosecutors are scheduled to seek a grand jury indictment on Thursday of Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York police commissioner, on a list of charges that include tax fraud, corruption and conspiracy, according to people who have been briefed on the case. ~The Caucus

Since Giuliani just two days was crowing about what a good job Bernie Kerik did for him when he was mayor and the “ultimate results” achieved despite Kerik’s “mistakes,” this news is liable to cancel out whatever advantage Giuliani received from this Robertson endorsement.  It will revive the “Giuliani has terrible judgement in choosing personnel” meme and introduce a “Giualiani associates with criminals” meme.  Anything that dispels or obscures his aura of supposedly great leadership and executive experience is a serious problem for his campaign.

Yglesias responds to my Scene colleague Tim Lee‘s comments on Greenwald’s Ron Paul post (ah, blogging):

Meanwhille, from where I sit it’s Tim’s reading of the Fifth Amendment that seems tortured to me — why shouldn’t urban planning count as a public use?

I am going to guess that Tim was referring here to a reading of the 5th Amendment such as Kelo, which was a deeply flawed and, yes, tortured reading of the Constitution.  Kelo redefined public use as private use for alleged “public benefit,” which strikes me as the essence of bad constitutional law and bad policy.  This ruling opened the door to abusing the property rights of citizens for the benefit of development corporations.  It is the very antithesis of the assumption behind maintaining a public commons–instead of preserving the public commons for public use, Kelo attacks the public interest.  It is actually the inversion of the rationale for eminent domain.

Well, so much for this prediction.  (I suppose if there was any chance of Thompson getting Brownback’s support, it definitely went out the window with that MTP interview this week.)  Brownback will apparently endorse McCain.  Given the McCain campaign’s revenant-like return from the dead (he now runs in second in some national polls and still has decent numbers in the early states), it made a lot more sense for Brownback to support the candidate who has been bending over backwards in the last year to accommodate pander to religious conservatives.  Once McCain appeared to be realistically competitive again, he would have been the clear choice for Brownback on account of Thompson’s underwhelming campaign style and perceived unreliability on life issues. 

The Caucus has more of the inside story:

Mr. Brownback said that Mr. Giuliani made a very aggressive pitch in trying to win his support and delivered a message on abortion privately that was different from what he says publicly.

“Giuliani pitched a much more pro-life message,” he said. Mr. Giuliani emphasized his support of “strict constructionist judges,” which he does often in public. But Mr. Brownback said he was more explicit. “I come at it in a different angle but I get to the same position you do.”

In other words, he started saying whatever he thought Brownback wanted to hear.  Wisely, Brownback went with someone who has actually backed up his convenient election-year rhetoric deeply-held principles with action.

Incidentally, Giuliani winning Pat Robertson’s endorsement actually seems much less electorally significant to me.  (It makes for a good headline for Giuliani, and will cause a lot of pundits to declare prematurely that the “litmus test” really is as dead as some jingoes hoped it was.)  The endorsements of Brownback and Robertson represent two distinct kinds of religious conservatism, one of which is, for good or ill, on the rise and the other which is in decline.  Brownback, whatever else I might say about him, represents a new generation of religious conservative political leadership, and he adopts many “non-traditional” policies as part of his broader Christian reform vision.  Robertson is one of the last of the old guard whose political influence has actually been on the wane for some time.  The endorsement of Giuliani seems to me to be a rather sad cry for attention, a last attempt to be relevant in presidential politics by doing something “surprising.”  It seems to me that the calculation of the move will undermine the symbolic value Giuliani was hoping to derive from it.  Of course, any leading campaign would still want to be able to have such an endorsement, but in most of the primaries I am guessing that it isn’t as valuable as Brownback’s. 

Via Ross

Dave Weigel makes a point that I have been making afewtimes:

Are Republicans flying so high that they can just amputate a wing of their party? Obviously not. So why are they doing it?

Dave Weigel sets David Frum straight:

The “Paulites=Naderites” bit is too silly to address, but comparing $8m over one year with $4.3m in one day—that’s not apples and oranges, it’s apples and nuclear submarines.

For the comparison to be at all meaningful, you would have to tally up all of Paul’s fundraising this year to date, which I believe is north of $15 million (Weigel says 15.5).  Looked at this way, he has almost doubled the fundraising of Nader’s campaign, the year isn’t over yet and he’s just getting warmed up.