While his [Perlstein’s] specific examples remain off the mark — it is bizarre to assert without evidence that Romney launched his campaign at the Henry Ford Museum so he could be attacked by the liberal media — maybe there is something to the idea of winning over conservatives by railing against the right bogeymen. ~Jim Antle

Bogey, as some may know, derives from the Bulgarian bogomil, which was the name attributed to the supposed founder of a dualist sect described by various Byzantine sources and thereafter became the name of the sect.  The historical question of Bogomilism is vexed, and some people today are not at all persuaded that there were any dualists in Bulgaria or Byzantium at all, but that Bogomil became a name (along with the much older Syrian ascetic sect of the Messalians) that was associated with the religious practices of certain people who seemed to be noted for their asceticism.  I have my own thoughts about all that, which I won’t go into here, but I am more interested in talking about the anxiety about Bogomils.  This anxiety was so great that it entered into the cultural consciousness of Europeans by way of the Cathars in Italy and France and eventually became synonymous with the scary and frightening monster in your closet and any sort of monster that a demagogue or propagandist might use to frighten you into supporting him and his cause. 

It was this anxiety that, in twelfth century Byzantium, led to a series of heresy trials of various clergy and laymen who seem to have been guilty of certain canonical irregularities, idiorhythmic asceticism or idiosyncratic spiritual practices, but who did not actually subscribe to the doctrines enunciated in the Synodikon as the essence of Bogomilism.  That is, they may have been heterodox or disobedient, but they were not dualists in any meaningful sense.  The point here is that the portrayal of bogeys has no necessary, substantial connection to the real things being referred to as the bogey and it doesn’t need to have one.  Today people will invoke a political bogey, such as France (screams of terror erupt in the distance), because of what they think it means to vilify France in a certain way and not necessarily because of much to do with France itself. 

When Romney’s ridiculous strategy proposes bumper stickers that say, “First, not France,” the other country might as well be Morocco or Bhutan for all that anyone in this country actually knows about France.  The statement is about American supremacy, and he might have chosen any other country for his contrast.   In Romney’s imagination of what conservative voters believe (and he may be right about many of them), France evokes first of all ideas of arrogance, pomposity, stupidity and venality (incidentally, the French anti-American view of Americans is almost identical and has just as much merit).  But it doesn’t matter whether these things do apply to France or not–what matters is that Romney sets himself against arrogance, stupidity, etc. 

For the slightly better informed, France evokes the idea of a fairly heavily socialised economy and disenchanted Muslim immigrants, which would not really be frightening to Americans except to the extent that Romney can convince people that the Democrats would like to replicate the French model (and there is just enough plausibility to this that it might be an effective message).  But fundamentally the reason why these ideas resonate with some conservative voters, to the extent that they do, is not that they are well-acquainted with the details of French society and politics, but because they have an image of an economically sclerotic society that is collapsing from within and they know that they don’t want to live in that sort of society.  (Of course, if they didn’t vote for a party that dismantles domestic manufacturing, indebts us to our chief future rivals and invites mass immigration, there might be less reason for them to fear any of these things, but leave that for another time.)  Invoking France here has far less to do with France, which is simply a foil here, than it has to do with reinforcing Romney’s own rhetoric of American dynamism, innovation and success.  Romney’s stupid anti-Europeanism, like many other prejudices, has to do mainly with showing the virtues of the person invoking the prejudice.  He wants to show that, while he may be (recently) from the strangely more Europhiliac Northeast, he nonetheless shares the same ignorant and presumptuous disdain for the home countries of our civilisation that many of his countrymen do.  If John Kerry could be mocked for “looking French” and belittled for having French cousins, Romney will make sure that he makes a point of deriding France in particular (even though Spain and Germany have had relatively far more sluggish economies in the last decade).  Since he is even more of a flip-flopper than Kerry ever was, he must work extra hard to distance himself from anything that might associate him with Kerry’s French connection.  Attacking France may actually have less to do with rallying conservatives against a bogey (Francophobia may be widespread, but it is pretty shallow) and more to do with rallying them to Romney as the embodiment of everything that the bogey is not. 

For the well-informed, France has no really scary or worrisome connotations, because it refers to a medium-sized western European country with its share of serious problems and at least a few virtues.  But then Romney isn’t trying to appeal to the latter, now, is he?

Jonathan Chait has suggested that Obama make this his campaign song (warning: lame 1980s video after link).  It’s not that bad of a suggestion as these things go, but a word of caution: several of the clips of dive-bombers appear to be from film of German Stuka attacks from WWII, which might send a slightly mixed message to Obama’s target audiences. 

Obama: We’ve had enough policies and plans.  What we need are fighter-bombers! 

It creates an unfortunate association with Nazis that just doesn’t seem likely to help Obama unless, following from Rick Perlstein’s argument about Romney at the Henry Ford Museum, Obama wanted to send subtle, coded signals that he really isn’t the dovish left-winger that you think he is, but that he is, in reality, a sneaky admirer of Goering and the Luftwaffe. 

Obama: The enemy is not the other party–the enemy is Poland!

One other problem: the song refers to smoking, when everyone knows that Obama is trying to quit.  At the very least, that will not make his wife very happy.

I don’t like the implication that there is a flow of things and that it goes in the direction of increasing agglomeration. Why isn’t greater independence and individualism among bloggers a good thing? ~Ann Althouse

I wouldn’t dispute Prof. Althouse’s view that greater independence and individualism among bloggers are good things.  As I have said before, there is something bizarre about the way blogging has tended to replicate the fairly predictable and partisan conformity of other kinds of media.  Rather than serving as a healthy corrective to the other echo chambers, blogging tends to reinforce the ideological patterns that can prove so stifling to interesting discourse everywhere else.  It is almost unavoidable that a blog becomes much less interesting as it becomes a vehicle for political activism, because at that point the blogger stops offering his take and begins repeating someone’s official line.  This may be why campaign bloggers are such strange, delicate hybrids that cannot do very well in harsh climates: there is a certain contradiction in being an independent writer of potentially interesting, irreverent and (let’s hope) incisive commentary and being a campaign functionary, whose job it is to write uninteresting, fairly staid and predictable posts that boost the candidate’s tax plan.  Whether or not bloggers are actually hired by campaigns, they usually become terribly dreary and sometimes even unreadable once they have started relentlessly pushing a cause.  It is possible to advocate for a certain policy without ceasing to be witty, amusing and insightful (indeed, good political satire would not work without all of these qualities), and sometimes these things will help the cause in question.  However, it is much harder to maintain the right balance between doing good blogging and staying on message.  Happy is the blogger who does not even try to stay “on message.”       

I also happen to agree that, as she comments on part of my post, “general outrage about the state of the world is pretty uninteresting too.” The argument I was trying to advance in the post that Ross cited is not that this outrage is terribly attractive or interesting, but that it helps explain what makes blogs on the left relatively more successful as political activist operations–it also helps explain why some of these blogs, such as Daily Kos, came into existence in the first place.  Perpetually outraged people who believe that politics can fix most anything will be more motivated to become activists and they will be more inclined to pursue political activism through any and all means available.  In my view, this activist mentality is a kind of impairment or flaw and not something that conservatives should want to imitate.  Unfortunately, if Hewitt’s Victory Caucus is any indication, there are many on the blog right who would very much like to try their hand at successfully imitating it.  

Prof. Althouse prefers “what Larison seems to mean by “celebrity-blogging.” And I’m quite happy to see that bloggers have trouble succeeding in their collective activities.”  As it happens, I don’t like collective blogs and would normally rather read the “celebrity blogs” than wade through reams of Kossack drivel.  My point was that “celebrity bloggers” on the right should not be surprised when their attempts to translate their style of blogging to political activism (e.g., Hewitt’s Victory Caucus) fail miserably because they lack the qualities or motivations that make political activist blogs successful.

The plan, for instance, indicates that Romney will define himself in part by focusing on and highlighting enemies and adversaries, such common political targets as “jihadism,” the “Washington establishment,” and taxes, but also Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, “European-style socialism,” and, specifically, France. Even Massachusetts, where Romney has lived for almost 40 years, is listed as one of those “bogeymen,” alongside liberalism and Hollywood values.

——————

Enmity toward France, where Romney did his Mormon mission during college, is a recurring theme of the document. The European Union, it says at one point, wants to “drag America down to Europe’s standards,” adding: “That’s where Hillary and Dems would take us. Hillary = France.” The plan even envisions “First, not France” bumper stickers. ~The Boston Globe

The innovative and transformative candidate is going to run on a bunch of old retread scare tactics from the last 12 years?  He’s going to run against France?  France?!  That’s the plan?  What does he think those people did to him when he was on his mission? 

No wonder his campaign is floundering.

Good CEOs don’t simply stake out public positions and stick to them for 20 years. They devise new business strategies and business plans to cope with changing market conditions. ~Daniel Gross

Mr. Gross offers an interesting take on the flip-flopper, arguing that Romney’s background in business explains his, er, flexibility with the issues.  I think his business background does explain a lot, but if Gross’ argument is right it is absolutely clear that Romney really is just saying whatever he thinks will win him votes.  Romney has been trying to sell himself as someone who has had a genuine awakening to the moral problems of our time (and the campaign finance reform problems and tax policy problems and gun regulation problems…), so it hardly helps that Mr. Gross can make such a plausible case that it is just another turnaround act.  The troubling thing is that he may not even realise that there’s something unethical about that.  He may even think that he’s simply solving another problem: “How do I rebrand myself to get maximal return?” 

Incidentally, I would like to point out that I suggested the Romney as corporate executive/rebranding explanation several days ago:

The one thing I do believe is that Romney really is a big believer in “innovation and transformation”: on this point, he literally practices what he preaches.  He believes in trying out new things, such as core beliefs and deeply personal reasons for believing these core beliefs, and adapting to changing circumstances (such as preparing to run for President) and transforming himself to be more competitive.  It’s not dishonesty–it’s more like improving fuel economy, just like his old dad did back when.  In his own way, he probably doesn’t think of his flip-flopping as an attempt trick or deceive the public.  He probably thinks that he is just responding to market demand and maximising vote-gathering efficiency.  This is a man who likes to cut out unnecessary waste, after all, and nothing would be more wasteful than to deprive his ambition and big hair from a shot at the White House.  In a sense, it is the ultimate challenge for the “turnaround” artist that Romney genuinely is.  He wants to show that he can not only bring faltering enterprises out of the red and save the Olympics from embarrassing failure, but that he can do blatant turnarounds on every issue in the book and somehow make a successful campaign out of it. 

Just remember: if something negative has been said about Romney, I have probably said it first.

Of course, the flip side, so to speak, of the good CEO who copes with market conditions is the very bad CEO who keeps talking up the company’s profits, even as he knows that the company is doomed, as a way of inflating his own stock before disaster strikes.  I guess it’s a strength in business to be able to reinvent yourself as whatever your client needs and then deliver the goods.  I can grasp the idea, but I don’t think I can fully sympathise with the mentality of the man who is able to do this.  (As my father has told me many times, I would make a lousy salesman, and he’s right, so perhaps I don’t quite understand this mentality.  Perhaps that’s why when I read old aristocratic writers saying derogatory things about commerce and merchants, I understand their sentiments much better instead.) 

The trouble is that reinvention in politics invites derision and skepticism (ask Al Gore) and there is the assumption that reinvention means that there will be no deliveries forthcoming.  Politics isn’t business, which is why people who talk about running government as if it were a business, while they probably mean well (they mean that they want to get rid of wasteful spending and reduce costs, etc.), are likely to end up bigger failures than the people who think of government as what it is: concentrated power and force in formal structures. 

By the way, if one of Romney’s selling points is that he isn’t a “professional politician” (despite his best efforts to become one!), it is strange that these virtues from his work in the corporate world–his adaptability and flexibility–are clearly liabilities in the political world.  The things that made him successful in business make him a terrible politician and make him embody all the worst flaws a politician can have.  Because of his background as a good businessman, ironically enough, he winds up appearing shifty, unscrupulous, and ambitious as a politician.  So why, then, is it worthwhile having someone like Romney as our non-politician President?

Besides, as Mr. Gross notes, Romney has decided to change “markets” at a particularly inauspicious moment.  Since Romney likes cars so much, let’s use an automotive metaphor.  It’s as if he’s trying to bring out a line of conventional, gas-guzzling SUVs at a time when CAFE standards (which he was for when he was making hybrids, but is now against) are about to be raised and after he spent years deriding SUVs and expressing deep offense at the suggestion that he would ever drive one.

So a friend of mine here at Chicago recently recommended that I see Fanaa, the 2006 Kajol-Aamir Khan vehicle that saw the stunning Bengali actress return to the screen as if no time had passed since her last appearance in 2001.  Two days ago I did happen to watch it, and I was impressed.  Once you allow for the melodrama and improbable plot devices, which are inevitable, it is possible to appreciate it as a quite decent telling of a tragic love story.  The story is one that our 24-obsessed nation could enjoy: will love win out over jihad?  One of the songs has a line that is striking, and quite in keeping with what I understand to be part of a long tradition in Islamic and Indian religious and love poetry:

tere pyaar me.n ho jaa’uu.n fanaa

May your love annihilate me!

Apparently, as I discovered recently, the state of Gujarat banned the film in response to Aamir Khan’s comments on the state of some farmers displaced by a dam project.  So, while I was up tonight at the local Dunkin’ Donuts, I got to talking to the man behind the counter there, and it turned out that he was from Gujarat.  That reminded me of the story about Fanaa.  From there we launched into a discussion of the movie and Kajol (the cousin of everyone’s favourite, Rani Mukherjee), pictured just below. 

We then came around to the latest Bollywood news about the engagement of Abishek Bachchan and Aishwariya Rai, which everyone seems intent on bringing up each time I talk about Indian movies.  If the Indian popular press is as unimaginative as ours, they will have already coined some hideous name like Abishwariya or Aishshek to describe their relationship. 

It’s odd the sorts of conversations you will have in this neighbourhood, but then I suppose it is rather odd that I would have known enough about Fanaa to use it to start a conversation.

Pelosi’s piece [Friends of God] is like a Bush supporter making a documentary on the anti-war movement by going to rallies and interviewing geriatric Trotskyites, dudes in dirty dreadlocks carrying signs equating Israel to the Third Reich and transgendered Scientologists. ~Don Feder

So it’s basically just like 95% of pro-war commentary for the last four and a half years? 

Seriously, though, other accounts of Pelosi’s documentary give an entirely different picture than one put forward by Feder.  Take Michael Linton’s account at First Things:

Black, Hispanic, and Asian Evangelicals are also largely ignored. But Pelosi is also generous with her omissions. She makes no mention of our various financial scandals, the tendency of some of our organizations to become multigenerational family businesses, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, or Ralph Reed.

Although incomplete, it’s a fair picture. Pelosi simply drives around with her camcorder and asks us questions, letting us speak for ourselves. And the portrait she assembles is put together kindly and without malice. I think her documentary is a gift. We all need to see it. It’s a gift from the Lord.

Whether or not Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary has a providential purpose, Linton goes on to say that the documentary was not made with an aim to discredit or mock:

Pelosi isn’t a liberal out to get us. Although from a branch of Catholicism that is incomprehensible to many of us (she describes herself as coming from a religious Catholic family where everyone went to Catholic school but “we were never told gay was wrong, or abortion was wrong, or evolution was wrong”), she told the Advocate, the country’s leading LGBT news outlet, that she has nothing but admiration and respect for Evangelicals [bold mine-DL]. Although part of that admiration comes from her sense of Evangelical leaders’ ability to mobilize large numbers of people for political purposes (I think she still sees us as rather like Bolshevik cells), much of her admiration comes from her growing sense of the importance of faith in her own life.

Rebecca Cusey, in her rather more negative review for National Review, wrote something similar:

Haggard aside, the documentary is as interesting for what it didn’t do as for what it did. Pelosi makes no mention of fundraising, budgets, or requests for offerings, often a method used to criticize the church. She doesn’t film anyone speaking in tongues, being “slain in the spirit,” or any of the other more charismatic expressions of evangelical belief. A gentle swaying and a few tears are as extreme as the worship gets. She asks fair, difficult questions. When the pick-up truck driving evangelist declares, “With Jesus, you’re a winner,” Pelosi asks, “Does that mean that if you don’t believe in Jesus, you’re a loser?” Turns out his answer is yes. She doesn’t do a lot of commentary in voice over, letting the people talk for themselves. Fair and balanced?  Perhaps not entirely, but the film gives the impression that Pelosi is genuinely puzzled by the evangelical sub-species and genuinely trying to figure it out. 

It may say something for some conservatives’ capacity for reflection and “self-awareness” that the first response of many to a documentary that shows the absurd and silly aspects of evangelical culture is to denounce it as an attack.  They might, as Linton does, note that the now-famous scene with the now-disgraced Rev. Haggard reveals something deeply wrong with certain evangelical attitudes:

Of course, Haggard wasn’t thinking. He was feeling. And he was feeling great. And so were the guys with him. And that’s the problem. We, “us,” the Evangelicals with the capital E, have become thoughtless, sensualistic braggarts. For some time, we’ve been accused of being simply thoughtless–an unfair charge (Jonathan Edwards was an evangelical after all) but a charge with some truth to it. But what doctrinal rigor we might have had has been progressively smothered by sensuality draped with arrogant irresponsibility. We don’t think; we feel. If it feels right, it’s the Lord’s working, and if it’s the Lord’s working, we can be proud of it. Pelosi lays it all out for us to see.

And again:

And then there’s Pastor Ted, who thinks (or at least thought) that one of the clearest proofs of the Lord’s blessing is a great sex life. The possibility that it might be deeply indecent for a Christian minister ever to ask a man to reveal the most intimate nature of his relationship with his wife in front of anyone else–let alone in front of a camera–is apparently not within his ken. And the idea that these men should protect their wives’ privacy and refuse to answer isn’t in their ken either. They boast about their . . . well, you fill in the blank (we’ve all been in locker rooms). It feels so great. It’s all for the Lord. High fives, everybody.

Of course, it is possible that Feder could also dismiss the members of Haggard’s church as fringe, unrepresentative types, but then we could be even more sure that he was just objecting to the documentary because the filmmaker had the wrong surname.

What is really remarkable is that Ms. Pelosi, even after having seen some of the more extraordinary and bizarre elements of evangelical culture in this country, says that she admires and respects them.  Don Feder can barely contain his contempt for the people he sees in the documentary, which tells you something about his low opinion of a lot of real evangelicals.  For instance:

Instead of fear and loathing, Pelosi uses the comically absurd to stigmatize evangelicals. Among other oddities, she presents the home-schooling family with 10 children, where the girls are identically attired in calico dresses — The Stepford Wives meets Little House On The Prairie.

For the urban pundit, I suppose Little House On The Prairie is already comically absurd.  You can tell that the problem here is not Pelosi’s depiction of evangelicals, but the reality that many evangelicals really do live very differently from the largely secularised pundit class that presumes to speak on behalf of religious conservatives on the national stage, and when these pundits encounter some of these people they run screaming in the other direction. 

Incidentally, I presume the dresses in this case are identical because, I would guess, it is easier to make similar clothes for so many children than to make a different kind for each one.  Since homeschooling families often do not have the financial means available to two-income households, they cannot afford to pamper their kids with individual styles and the latest fashions (not that they would put much stock in either of these things in any case).  Of the homeschooling mother in question, Linton wrote:

And there’s the Mennonite mother with ten children in Tennessee who speaks honestly of being frazzled by the work but still uplifted by the Lord. But in Pelosi’s film, as in our culture, those folks are being pressed to the margins by the other Evangelicals–the big churches, the big programs, the big visions.

In other words, the people Feder regards as “comically absurd” represent for Linton, an evangelical, the decent, normal evangelicals who are getting pushed to the side by the world of megachurches and celebrity pastors. 

Ms. Cusey writes later in her review:

The biggest lesson of the film is that normalcy is in the eye of the beholder. When Pelosi shows thousands of people singing “I am a friend of God,” a club of skateboarders “skating for Christ,” or even an impassioned sermon, those familiar with evangelicalism see nothing odd. However, your average New Yorker or San Franciscan, or even your suburban neighbor who has never walked through the door of a church, sees something very strange indeed.  

Perhaps it is strange, but what is remarkable about Feder’s reaction is just how bilious and hostile his response to these things is.  What would strike many evangelicals as “nothing odd” seems to him “comically absurd,” and therein he reveals that he has even less sympathy for evangelicals than the liberal daughter of the Speaker of the House. 

Call me crazy, but I’ll take the Tennessean evangelical’s assessment of the supposed attack on his kind of Christians over the disgust-filled “defense” of evangelicals penned by Feder.  With friends like Feder, evangelicals don’t need to worry about hostile liberal documentary-makers–their own “allies” hate them enough as it is.

Good grief. Note to John McCain’s campaign: if you’re looking to mend fences and try to become the choice of conservative Republican primary voters, it’s best not to go around trumpeting news of an endorsement by Senator John Warner of Virginia – especially after Warner just finished spearheading an effort in the Senate to rebuke the President and undermine his Iraq policy. ~Tom Bevan

Good grief.  Note to Tom Bevan: when mocking a presidential candidate’s actions, it’s best if you mock the endorsements that will actually hurt the candidate.  Let me explain.  John Warner is assuredly opposed to the “surge” and worked to bring his own anti-“surge” resolution to the floor, while everyone and his brother knows that McCain is vehemently in favour of it and has been in favour of escalating the war for years.  Edwards dubbed the plan the “McCain Doctrine” for a good reason.  The war is the one thing on which McCain has absolutely solid credibility with pro-war GOP voters, so he has no need to reassure them that he is their man on foreign policy.  If he needs to convince them that he is supportive of the war effort, when he has been the biggest booster of this war in the Senate, he may as well quit now.   

The Warner endorsement is a way to show moderate, realist and otherwise sane voters that even fairly level-headed people such as John Warner support McCain despite all of the many reasons why you would think he wouldn’t.  It proves McCain’s supposedly broader appeal.  Of course, Warner and McCain aren’t terribly far apart in foreign policy views in reality, and their disagreement about the “surge” is one of prudential judgement about the likelihood of the plan’s success and not fundamentally over the war itself (which Warner has always supported and will continue to support as long as he is in office).  Warner’s endorsement is a huge plus and only appears as a liability to people who think that the “surge” plan was handed down by God and is therefore unquestionable.  Since Republican bloggers have made the “surge” the litmus test for all members of the party, they have come to see any opponent of the “surge” as some sort of subversive who deserves to be thrown into a deep pit, but this is, as usual for these folks, impressively unrelated to the real world.  In fact, Warner is the ultimate representative of conventional Republican foreign policy thinking and therefore his endorsement serves as a great symbol that McCain is the GOP establishment’s preferred leader on foreign policy.

But this Bevan post provides an opportunity to explain how endorsements work to those who don’t seem to get it: you get different endorsements for different target audiences, even during the primaries, as a way of building a larger base of support.  The more endorsements from a wide variety of groups that you can get, and the more varied they are, the better this is for your campaign, because it shows that you are capable not simply of being the guy likely to win the intra-party fight but also someone who can bring together the entire party after the nomination has been won.  If the only endorsements McCain was receiving were from Neocons For Greater Belligerence And More Torture and the American Association Against Free Speech, he might appear to be a fringe or factional figure with no support from other parts of the party but his own.  That would make him appear to be a less effective party leader and therefore a potentially less compelling general election candidate.  A Warner endorsement not only plays well to anti-“surge” Republican voters (there are a few) but it also plays well to the general electorate.  Because Warner is (wrongly) perceived as being somehow less than the robust internationalist-interventionist that he is, his endorsement helps McCain by making him appear more reasonable and responsible than he actually is.  If the old Pentagon-connected war horse Warner likes him, that confers GOP establishment respectability on the old “maverick” and shows that even those who disagree with him over the “surge” believe him to be the best qualified candidate. 

In short, McCain’s campaign is apparently being run by pretty smart people, and Tom Bevan will not be getting hired as a campaign consultant anytime soon.

Gage notes that three “small state” governors like Romney — Jimmy Carter of Georgia, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts and Bill Clinton of Arkansas — were all lower in polling at a similar point in their races. In 1975, Carter was at a mere 1 percent in a Gallup survey. Dukakis matched that level of support in 1987. Clinton boasted a whopping 2 percent in 1991. Romney, as Gage points out, is at an “impressive” 5 percent in the most recent Gallup poll. ~Chris Cillizza

Since no Romney-related news can be circulating for long without my negative interpretation, here it is: Romney’s position isn’t so much “impressive” as it is proof that he probably isn’t the candidate who will be coming out of nowhere to snatch the nomination.  Isn’t it rather obvious that, given the Carter-Dukakis-Clinton precedents, Romney’s success in polling higher than 1-2% right now suggests that it will be some other candidate, currently running at 1-2%, that will come from behind and beat out the top three favourites?  These precedents for small-state governors ought to give Huckabee a lot of hope (no pun intended–really!).  In this sense, you might say that Romney is actually performing too well too early, drawing all of the press coverage that is dealing him so many blows before he can really get off the ground. 

Instead of sneaking up on the pack through a focus on organisation and grassroots work (as opposed to the high-profile appearances and interviews he has been doing), he has been striding through open fields telling everyone who will listen that he is the social conservatives’ candidate.  This allows his conservative rivals to snipe at him, while also exposing him to the full scrutiny of the press at a stage when they can still smother his candidacy in its crib.

Update: Via Hotline, Gage’s memo also says:

It’s also useful to remember that John McCain was unknown on the national stage in the spring of 1999, polling at just 3%, and didn’t begin to attract any significant support until late October.

That is useful, because it suggests that Romney’s campaign may most closely resemble the 1999-2000 McCain campaign in terms of its political strength (except, instead of the Straight Talk Express, we are being treated to the Confusing Talk Merry-Go-Round).  That means that Romney might continue to hang on in the top two or three, but will ultimately fail.  However, even this comparison may be inaccurate, since McCain had absurdly good press and he did manage to win in New Hampshire, while Romney gets routinely bad press (because he is a fraud) and will have a lot of problems running in New Hampshire.  People in New Hampshire don’t have to go very far to find out what other people think of Romney’s skills in government (hint: most people living in Massachusetts in the last few years are actually pretty unimpressed), and they have been exposed through local media to Romney’s “evolution” firsthand.  If any state in the nation will punish Romney for being a flip-flopper, it will be the Granite State.

And he [Brownback] says the youngest voters, ages 18 to 25, are the most pro-life cohort. They were born, he says, when abortion rates were highest, so “many of them feel they’re the survivors of a holocaust: one in four of their compatriots are not here.” Actually, almost one in three: the abortion rate peaked in 1983 at 30.4 percent. ~George Will, Newsweek (June 2005)

I came across this old article during a search, and this remark about Americans born just after I was (1979) really struck me.  I am skeptical that my generation is the most pro-life group because we feel we “survived a holocaust,” since most of us would not have been aware of this for most of our lives until very recently at best.  Presumably, the reason why people born in the late ’70s and early ’80s are more pro-life than their elders is that we are the first generation to have grown up during the political reaction against legalised abortion, and it is also because we have no personal experience of the way things were before Roe.  People who can, rightly or wrongly, invoke memories of the “bad old days” when abortion was illegal, potentially unsafe and relatively rare are apparently more likely to sit on the fence or be strongly pro-abortion, while those of us who have grown up knowing the world in which abortion on demand remains, by and large, the reality will unsurprisingly be most inclined to view the status quo as unacceptable.  For us, references to those bad old days of the “back-alley clinics” have no meaning and seem almost irrelevant and they sound like the desperate excuse-making of people defending a despicable established practice because they are complicit in the practice at some level.  

On an ’08 note, it is interesting that Will was already profiling Brownback as a plausible ’08 contender in the summer of 2005.  The big-state shenanigans in the primaries may make it much harder for a Brownback to get traction, but if he does fare well in the early contests the insane February front-loading will benefit him.  He has been laying the groundwork for a successful insurgent campaign, and we will see the fruits of that preparation in the coming year.  It is still five months until Ames and Brownback is already beginning to make his mark in national polls.  I do not like Samnesty, but right now he appears to be the most credible challenger to the Terrible Trio.