The day you’ve all been waiting for is here: Mike Huckabee…has announced the opening of his exploratory committee!  Try not to get too excited.  From CQPolitics:

Huckabee is launching his presidential exploratory effort upon completion of a tour promoting his book “From Hope to Higher Ground: 12 Stops to Restoring America’s Greatness,” which focuses on his gubernatorial policies.

The “Hope” in the title refers to his rise from humble beginnings in the town of that name, which also is the boyhood home of a former Arkansas governor-turned-president, Democrat Bill Clinton. Huckabee has a political action committee named Hope for America.

Still, the once portly Huckabee is far better known nationally for his 2005 book, “Quit Digging Your Grave With A Knife And Fork,” that focused on his successful efforts to shed about 100 pounds through diet and exercise — prompted by being diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes.

I can already hear the words of Huckabee’s formal announcement: “America is a great nation, because it is a hopeful nation.  If we ever lose our hope, then we shall surely regain the weight that we have shed using my deficit-reducing diet budget plan.”

The heartland of America, under the pressure of a mismanaged war, has been slowly turning on this president. There is anger out there — as we found out in November’s elections.  When the most socially conservative Republican candidate for president, Sam Brownback, opposes the surge in Iraq, you know change is real. ~Andrew Sullivan

Think about that statement for a minute and ask yourself: of what possible relevance is it to changing attitudes about the war that Brownback is the “most socially conservative candidate for president”?  (That’s a claim Duncan Hunter might dispute!)  Brownback remains a hawk.  This is the same old Sam “kill ’em with the kindness of unprovoked invasion” Brownback who voted for the authorisation of the war and has been a reliable defender of it ever since.  His opposition to the “surge” has obscured this, and earned him hatred on the right and a place of honour, so to speak, as one of Hugh Hewitt’s special targets for punishment.  Yet in the announcement of his candidacy, Brownback could not have sounded a more conventional rah-rah note on the war:

We are a nation at war. I just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Our troops–the finest, most courageous people our nation has to offer–are fighting for the cause of liberty in places that have never known her. It is a long fight. We will win. We cannot lose our will to win! We must win to redeem our troops’ sacrifice. Let us resolve to have a bipartisan strategy for the war. We need unity here to win over there. This is not the time for partisanship on any side. Lives–and our future–are at stake. 

If Brownback is channeling Middle American anger, he is doing it in a very oddly optimistic and cheery way.  If he is a real agent of change on Iraq war policy, I will eat my hat.  He wants a “bipartisan strategy” on the war, and perhaps he thinks that’s what he’s helping to craft in supporting the language of Warner’s resolution, but whatever it is he’s doing he is not the blaring horn of heartland frustration with the war. 

So why does Sullivan keep prattling on in his dreary “Vive La Resistance” tone about Brownback’s opposition to the proposed “surge”?  Sullivan is deeply enamoured of two myths he has been weaving around Brownback’s increasingly half-hearted, qualifier-ridden opposition to the “surge”: the first is that Brownback’s rejection of the “surge” is deeply significant because it portends a great GOP backlash against the war (here I believe he is completely wrong—inside the GOP support for the war remains stunningly strong); the second is that there is some kind of necessary connection between Brownback’s social conservatism and the war that makes Brownback’s dissent particularly meaningful (hint: it doesn’t). 

The latter myth is more understandable given Sullivan’s bizarre view of the state of the modern GOP: according to him, it is a “religious party” dominated by “fundamentalism,” which is a phenomenon that somehow obviously leads to support for big government and the Iraq war.  In other words, Sullivan has come to dislike or criticise religious conservatism, big spending and the war, and therefore they must all be linked in some overarching “fundamentalist” takeover.  Therefore, if a religious conservative now criticises the new “surge” plan (even if he actually supports a smaller, Warneresque surge into Anbar and has no fundamental objections to continuing the war) this is proof that big changes are happening.  Big changes may be happening, but Brownback–an odd duck in GOP politics if ever there was one–does not represent them.  Big changes may be happening, but the social conservatives whom Brownback does represent are not part of them.  Indeed, Brownback’s social conservatism is almost entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand.  The degree of his social conservatism is really neither here nor there.  Many longtime antiwar conservatives are no less socially conservative than Brownback, and some may even advance a social conservative rationale against the war (e.g., one cannot be for aggressive war and also for the sanctity of life at the same time), but that is not what is happening here. 

This brings us back to the first myth about Brownback that Sullivan has been pushing.  Sullivan gives the impression that it is a Big Deal that Brownback opposes the surge, seeing it as a sign of an impending GOP turn against the war.  I think this is because Sullivan seems to mistakenly see all opponents of the surge as holding a view similar to his, which has gradually evolved to a pro-withdrawal position.  Here he could not be more wrong.  Brownback is opposed to the “surge” plan because he believes it is an inferior plan and does not bring us closer to the victory he believes to be imperative.  He has repeatedly objected to the “surge” because he is skeptical of the possibility of a “military solution,” and he said numerous times that we need a “political solution” in Iraq, which is rather like saying that the decapitated man needs a head.  It is undoubtedly true at some level, and yet it is not a meaningful answer to the more significant problem.  In the case of Iraq, that problem is apparent impossibility for a unified country to continue to exist without communal bloodshed.  For this, there is no “political solution” consistent with current U.S. policy that makes a unitary Iraq non-negotiable.  That policy must be fundamentally changed to allow for partition, which is the only “political solution” anyone has come up with that will “succeed.”  Partition, however, would obviously be even more destabilising in the long term to the wider region than withdrawing and watching Iraq collapse into frenzied violence. 

In any case, Brownback is not anti-surge because he has somehow morphed into an “antiwar evangelical,” to use Sullivan’s completely inaccurate designation for evangelicals who oppose the surge, but is against the Bush version of the surge because he thinks there is a “political solution” to be found, which simply duplicates the central error of Mr. Bush’s plan.  This error is to regard Maliki and his government as trustworthy actors.  Mr. Bush’s military plan presupposes Maliki’s good faith and independence to make the security side of the plan work; Brownback’s “political solution” chimera is completely dependent on the notion that Maliki is something other than Sadr’s handpuppet.  In this way, it is possible to view Brownback‘s opposition to the surge as being even more unwise than Mr. Bush’s plan because it proceeds from the same key false assumption about political reality in Iraq.  All in all, the more we learn about why Brownback opposes the surge, the more antiwar conservatives have less and less reason to view him kindly.  Needless to say, that Brownback has decided to separate himself from the rest of the ’08 field with his “surge” position likely does not indicate anything about the views of social conservatives generally with respect to the Iraq war. 

The Republican Senators whose names have been associated with these resolutions have been, almost to the last man, incumbents who will be running in closely competitive races in ’08 or who are finding themselves in increasingly Democratic states.  I don’t assume they are being purely cynical, but they are covering their flank against charges of being Mr. Bush’s flunkeys (charges of which they have been very guilty in the past) to be able to compete in states where the war is probably far less popular than the national average.  That is where change is coming from.  Sadly, it is not coming from the rebellion of hitherto loyal, war-supporting conservatives, but from the increasing revulsion of every other part of the country at a war that most self-styled conservatives still refuse to bring to an end.

Matt Yglesias has latelystartedtrying to clear a path through the impenetrable bramble that is the foreign policy non-debate about American-Israel relations and the influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups and pro-Israel hawks on the shape of American Near Eastern policy.  Predictably, he has received a lot of grief for making some observations that seem controversial mostly to those who foreign policy and pro-Israel views are more or less implicated in what he writes.  Ezra Klein has a little more on this point.   

It was therefore inevitable that someone should call forth the memory of Charles Lindbergh, every internationalist’s favourite American pinata and hate-figure from the 1930s.  Lindbergh is their target primarily because of his 1941 Des Moines speech for the America First Committee.  Yglesias replies here to the Lindbergh comparison.  In his response, Yglesias easily sees why Goldberg reached so very deep into his bag of tricks for this comparison (what with comparisons between foreign policy debates of today and the 1930s being so rare and unusual at NRO):

I’ll cop to not actually knowing anything about the real historical record of Lindberg [sic], but I take the point of the reference to be a not-so-thinly veiled effort to once again call Wesley Clark and myself anti-semites.

In fact, it isn’t veiled at all.  On the right today, flinging the name Lindbergh (even while pointing to posts where you acknowledge that the person being referred isn’t really nearly as dreadful as everyone would normally take him to be) at anyone has a very simple purpose: to impute on the one hand horrible anti-Jewish prejudice (of which Lindbergh was supposedly guilty) and to imply that the person’s foreign policy views are profoundly immoral (because they are like pre-WWII “isolationism” in some way).  Goldberg makes whatever qualifications about Lindbergh that he does in order to show that he seems to possess some more detailed understanding of the man than the “cartoonish demonization” of him allows, but essentially accepts the fruits of that demonization and relies on the “cartoonish demonization” to do most of the work in his anti-Yglesias post.  He takes it for granted that his audience will read the name Lindbergh and summon to mind the “cartoonish demonization” that generations of New Dealers, internationalists and jingoes have cultivated and made into a conventional part of the narrative of American history.  In this way, he endorses that demonisation and confirms that he is employing the comparison primarily for the purposes of demonising Yglesias. 

It’s a pretty effective, if unethical, rhetorical move, not entirely unlike the well-known Ciceronian ploy of vicious character assassination dressed up as a sort of concession to the accused, “I’m not going to talk about the man’s despicable nature and how he has betrayed his wife and friends…I am going to talk about the matter at hand.”  Thus Goldberg effectively says: “Have you noticed the similarities between Yglesias and Lindbergh, whom I despise?  They’re not entirely similar–they’re just similar in all of the worst possible, anti-Semitic ways.  But don’t take this as an insult, Matt, because I have relatively less contempt for Lindbergh than most people who use these sorts of shoddy attacks.”   

In the exceedingly simple calculations of certain interventionists who use these attacks, if Lindbergh was an anti-Semite and he opposed entry into WWII, it was probably from bad motives and sneaking sympathy with the Axis–both which have been pretty unfairly imputed to Col. Lindbergh.  You can read the Des Moines speech and see for yourself how well-deserved these charges of prejudice and sympathy with the Axis are.  I think it is fair to say that they are essentially untrue.  Those charges represent one of the more famous examples of disgusting lies being deployed against a sincere patriot trying to keep his country from needless war. 

It also somehow follows for such interventionists that whatever held “true” for Lindbergh could be applied in broadbrush fashion to pretty much anyone in the America First Committee and, later, to anyone who looks back at the AFC with anything other than mocking derision.  The demonised caricature of Lindbergh can be readily used against those modern-day non-interventionists who happen to be opposed to the foreign policy views of these very interventionists and pro-Israel hawks, especially when more than a few of these hawks are Jewish.  I’m not saying that any of the connections interventionist make along the way really make any sense, but it is what interventionists and internationalists today often do whenever they fear that a new crop of “isolationists” (i.e., conservatives who think American interests are not served by hyperactive foreign policy and at least one major military adventure per decade) is on the rise.   

Yglesias also catches Goldberg in one of his attempts to read in a message to his opponents’ views that isn’t there.  Goldberg wrote:

Regardless, Lindbergh believed Jews were pushing American foreign policy in an unhealthy direction, and so does Yglesias and, more significantly, so does Wes Clark.

That isn’t what Yglesias or Clark said.  They weren’t speaking about “Jews” as a whole or abstractly as some single-minded entity, as the criticism implies, since everyone understands that these claims are bound to be riddled with exceptions and it can be questionable even to make such sweeping claims.  Come to think of it, essentially no one makes such claims about “Jews” generally.  (This is why it is so crucial for interventionists to circulate the lie that neocon is a “code word” for Jew, so that they can pretend that opponents of these hypernationalist, pro-Israel militarists of all backgrounds are saying outlandish things about “the Jews” when they are not.) 

Goldberg often inserts such a gross overgeneralisation in someone else’s argument.  Here is one example that comes to mind immediately.  When someone makes a specific accusation about a certain faction or interest group, if any one of the accused is a Jewish person Goldberg will declare that the accuser has made outrageous generalisations about “the Jews.”  This allows him to dismiss the charge as absurd on its face and proof of the accuser’s bias, when the only one who has made outrageous generalisations and absurd claims has been Goldberg.  But Yglesias has some fun with this:

Look back through this current controversy and you’ll see that I don’t accuse “the Jews” of having a pernicious influence on anything. If you do want to talk about “the Jews” as a class, we’ve had a beneficial impact on US foreign policy lately, voting in overwhelming numbers for congressional Democrats, putting Nancy Pelosi in the Speaker’s Chair and thereby somewhat restraining Bush’s poor national security policies. 

In his 30 minute speech, Guliani recited a long list of things he did as mayor of New York and applied them successfully to the city in a speech with long stretches without applause or laughter. The New Hampshire crowd, eager for some lift after suffering historic losses at every level in November was stirred only when Giuliani made odes to freedom, low taxes, and New York’s firefighters. His obligatory nod to the state’s “Live Free or Die” motto early on was rarely matched again in the laugh-free adress. The Upper East Side Republican made no mention of social issues. 

New Hampshire supporters for candidates Tom Tancredo, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Duncan Hunter mingled among the crowd of state party regulars with signs and stickers. Few activists sported “Team Rudy” stickers. Operatives for the campaigns were seeking commitments from crucial locals.

——————

The crowd was capable of traditional political tub-thumping enthusiasm. It roared with approval shortly after Giuliani left when former Congressman Jeb Bradley announced that he will seek to recpature the seat he narrowly lost in November after 2 terms. ~Hotline

I spent Saturday in Manchester, NH where Rudy Giuliani was the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Republican State Committee. I plan to write a longer piece on this for our main website on Monday, so I don’t want to go into too much detail here. But the bottom line is that the speech was very well received, and after speaking extensively to NH Republican activists, it became clear to me that the primary is very much in play for Rudy, and social issues, while an obstacle, will not be a deal breaker for him here. The closest thing I found to a consensus view was that it’s very early, voters want to get to know each of the candidates a lot better before making a decision, but the door is definitely open for Giuliani. ~Philip Klein

The door may be open, but if Hotline is to be trusted (and it usually is) it sounds as Giuliani didn’t do terribly well.  It doesn’t sound as if his speech was all that well-received, unless silence is the new measure of approval of politicians’ public speaking.  It sounds as if Giuliani’s ground game in N.H. lags behind a number of other campaigns, and it seems that few are very excited about him–and he has to be the most nationally well-known candidate in the field, which makes his relative unpopularity at this stage worse than it would be for anyone else. 

The primary may be in play for him, but he doesn’t seem to be playing very well in the primary state.  Obligatory qualifiers: it’s early, there’s still a lot of time for Giuliani to gain ground, etc.  However, if this coming primary season is going to be significantly altered by the onslaught of states moving their primaries to early February and if N.H. goes so far as to move their primary back into ’07 to retain their place as “first in the nation, the clock is already ticking down.  Giuliani may only have a little over ten months to get his act together, and for the last two months he has dithered.  Right now, he is technically still not an announced candidate for President.  He is frittering away time he doesn’t have and losing opportunities to snatch up the politicos in the early primary states, all of which contributes to uncertainty about his campaign and gives his competitors every advantage.  Before long, he may slip behind Brownback in National Journal‘s race rankings.

Hewitt is certainly within his rights to try to influence the Senators of his party, and 25,000 names is hardly political chicken feed. Larison may well be right that if the war is not resolved quickly, it will divide the GOP (which has hardly covered itself with glory on other issues). I still don’t know, however why he is so excited about this particular issue. ~Grumpy Old Man

It’s true that I have been giving Hugh Hewitt a lotofgrieffor his pledge drive this week.  For me, I don’t know that five posts constitutes a “great deal of time,” since when I really get on a tear about something the posts dedicated to it number in the dozens (for instance, my focus on Romney & Mormonism), but the reason why I have dedicated this much “space” and time to the subject is to illustrate a number of grave problems with Hewitt and the mentality that he represents.  He is within his rights to draw up petitions and speak his mind, but when his petition is ridiculous and his speech obnoxious it is only fair that others point this out. 

All of this does turn on a military plan that I, in my admittedly amateur estimation, regard as being insufficient because of its excessive reliance on a government known to be essentially Sadr’s puppet.  It is because of this same central fact, essentially unacknowledged by the administration (and ignored by the Hewitts of the world, even when it leads to the abandonment of an American soldier in enemy hands), that I assume no good will come from this plan and that the better alternative is to begin considering how to get Americans out of Iraq rather than find new ways to send more there.  If someone proposed a plan for Afghanistan saying that we would improve security for the Karzai regime by relying heavily on the forces of the Iran-backed and inveterately hostile Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, I would be similarly unenthusiastic and regard supporters of this plan as holding the wrong view.  I would take an even more dim view of someone who insists that those who object to this pretty obviously bad plan are encouraging the enemy, when to the eyes of the critics the plan is a plan premised on effectively handing over immense responsibility to a government effectively held hostage by one of the enemies of American forces in the country.  I would be even more annoyed if that same person took his mistaken view to be the self-evident moral truth of the moment and demanded, on pain of political punishment, that elected members of Congress toe the line in support of this bad plan.  I would find this mistaken view to be fairly disgusting if it stands in complete contradiction to the view the person held in the previous year when it was considered the pro-administration and anti-Democrat thing to be against reinforcements.  I would be even more appalled by the person’s political agitation if the basis for his ridicule of dissenting Republican Senators was that the President and the commanding general said the resolutions would send the wrong message, as if that settled the issue.  A sudden deference to military judgement is passing strange for the crowd that has never cared a whit for the opinion of any military officer, active or retired, no matter how distinguished or decorated, if he has said something that does not match exactly the signals coming from Mr. Bush.  I regard the pledge drive as an act of prostration at the feet of Mr. Bush.  To put it bluntly, I loathe people who would prostrate themselves at his feet in this way on a matter of no small importance.  

There appears to be no thought as to whether the claim made by Gen. Petraeus is actually true, and there seems to be no consideration for the possibility that a non-binding resolution is the pathetic Senate’s way of avoiding a real constitutional confrontation with Mr. Bush that may well come if fools like Hewitt get their way and intimidate a sufficient number of Republicans to prevent consideration of any resolution.  No, as far as Hewitt and friends are concerned, support for one of these resolutions is equivalent to desiring defeat and cannot be motivated by anything other than narrow political considerations.  Of course, it’s true that many of the dissenting Senators from the GOP are concerned about their political future–because the war is widely unpopular and the public does not support the “surge”–but in their dissent they are trying to reflect the beliefs of their constituents.  Representative government of this kind evidently offends Hewitt, and he seeks to mobilise the forces of a pro-war faction to stop it from working as it otherwise would. 

The entire episode is a perfect example of every bad trait frequently exhibited by die-hard Iraq war supporters: unthinking adherence to the President’s line, contempt for any dissent, no matter how serious and no matter the immensely strong pro-military records of some of those (such as Sen. Warner) who are proposing resolutions against the plan, and the reflexive accusation of something very much like treason for failing to possess the wisdom of a lackey to just shut up and accept whatever he is told.  Top that off with an underlying contempt for the procedures of our own representative government, and you have a very nasty phenomenon on your hands.  It is a glorified exercise in bad citizenship that holds itself out as a true-blue defense of patriotic loyalty.  We have seen all of this before, in late 2002 and early 2003, and the results of allowing this sort of mass abdication from serious thought are what have brought us to this sorry state today. 

I reacted as strongly against all this as I have because I find the entire attitude behind it inherently offensive and all together too similar to the fairly mindless endorsement of presidential claims that helped pave the way for the war itself.  The nation listened to the very poor guidance of men such as Hewitt in the past, and we have been paying for their ignorance and servility ever since.  Most Americans have learned to ignore people like this, but the idea that these same people will be able to pull off another political victory, albeit an ultimately Pyrrhic one (because Hewitt will help to wreck the GOP’s ’08 chances if he ties these Senators to the “surge”), through the usual fear-and-smear tactics that helped start this war greatly troubles me.

The whole point of the video and the posting, however, was that it illustrated how almost exclusively Shiite forces are beating Sunni residents, and clearing Sunni neighborhoods, with tacit U.S. support. ~Andrew Sullivan

This comes in response to Mickey Kaus, who called Sullivan on what I also consider to be multiple inaccuracies in his posting about a video.  About the video, Sullivan writes:

Here’s a disturbing video showing U.S soldiers watching as their Iraqi Army colleagues – Shia – brutally beat Sunni civilians to near-death, as U.S. soldiers hoop and holler in support. 

It is true that it shows Shia Iraqi Army soldiers beating on captured Sunnis.  They are civilians in that they are not members of a military.  They are, however, apparently irregular fighters who are carrying around mortars.  They are not being beaten to “near-death” from what we can see.  They are being gratuitously beaten, since they have already been subdued and captured, so there is good reason to be less than impressed, to put it mildly, with Iraqi Army discipline.  The video gives the impression that the Shias in the Iraqi Army are failing in the effort to win “hearts and minds,” which I suppose is true and is the far more relevant point to be taken from the video.  However, the clear misrepresentation of the video from Sullivan was designed to give the impression that these soldiers were caught on camera engaging in something close to murder of prisoners and that our soldiers sat there and cheered it on.  That claim, which Sullivan quite clearly made, is false. 

It wouldn’t surprise me if Iraqi security forces have been and still are engaged in the murder of their sectarian rivals, but I assume they aren’t doing it in joint operations with our soldiers.  The video also shows the mutual sectarian cleansing of formerly mixed neighbourhoods, and does not primarily show the “clearing” of Sunni neighbourhoods.  The “clearing” of Sunni neighbourhoods is at best implied. 

Not surprisingly, Kaus is right and Sullivan isn’t.

Update: The distinction Sullivan is fumbling for in his Dershowitzian confusion about what constitutes a civilian is that between combatant and non-combatant.  By anybody’s fair estimation, someone driving around with mortars is going to be considered a combatant because he obviously intends to deliver and/or use that mortar to attack and, if possible, kill in war.  If they were engaged in the beating of random men off the street just because they happened to be from a different sect, Sullivan would have had more of a point.  But, since he got the facts of what the video showed basically wrong, he doesn’t have much of a point at all.

A top GOP staffer says more than 70 senators would oppose the surge if their vote matched their comments in private meetings. “The White House is trying to but they really don’t know how to handle this,” said a senior GOP aide involved in the talks.

White House officials are pleading with GOP senators to oppose any congressional resolution that specifically condemns Bush’s effort to escalate the war effort in coming months, congressional sources said Friday morning. In private conversations, the officials are telling senators that the resolution would demoralize U.S. troops and hurt the GOP politically for years to come. ~The Politico  

That figure of “more than 70” presumably means more than 20 Republicans reject the “surge” as a plan, but only about six of them appear willing to consider actually voting that way.  (These would be the Senators Hewitt’s Hordes are targeting for retribution.)  I would say that it is the 14+ other Republican Senators who seem to be engaged in the worst political cowardice, supporting something they don’t believe will work because they are too afraid of breaking with Mr. Bush. 

The thing that will hurt the GOP politically for years to come is the image of the senseless Republican perpetuation of a war the American people have not wanted to be in for over a year and now wish to see concluded in short order.  That image is being burned into the public mind by these last two years of Mr. Bush’s presidency, and each time the Republicans bind themselves to Mr. Bush on Iraq the more they ensure that they will go down along with his approval ratings.  Mr. Bush has said that the Republican position is that they want to win in Iraq–so why does he pursue a plan that even almost half of the Senators from his own party do not, in fact, believe will achieve that victory?  How long does he expect the public to endure his hectoring that we are demoralising the soldiers by inflicting on him some slight political embarrassment of congressional repudiation?  Imagine how much greater the embarrassment would be for Mr. Bush if not even a non-binding resolution reached the floor of the Senate, thanks to his browbeating, and the “surge” went exactly according to plan and still achieved essentially nothing.  Is Mr. Bush really more prepared to definitely expose additional soldiers to death and injury in Baghdad operations than he is willing to see a potential dip in their morale?

That sounds right to me. Aside from the obvious fact that Democrats are hungrier than Republicans because they’ve been out of office since 2000, the Republican field is remarkably weak this cycle. Compared to Democrats, who have half a dozen genuinely strong contenders, John McCain is really the only high-profile candidate they’ve got, and even he’s hardly setting the world on fire. It’s pretty amazing, really. From being on top of the world a mere two years ago, Republicans are having trouble just treading water these days. ~Kevin Drum

I often disagree with Kevin Drum, but his analysis here on the strength of the field seems right.  The field is pretty pathetic any which way you look at it.  Certainly from the conservative perspective, it is appalling, but simply as a matter of putting up your A List people as potential nominees this field is simply a joke.  Can it be true that the presumptive leaders of the pack are John McCain, a former New York mayor and some guy from Massachusetts? 

Then again, come to think of it, 2000 was a pathetically weak field for Republicans, too.  Few people from either party wanted to take on Gore, whose advantages many assumed were too formidable to overcome.  1996 wasn’t that much better.  It was considered Dole’s “turn,” and few wanted to try to unseat an incumbent President.  The resulting GOP coronation and Democratic landslide showed the basic flaws in the GOP method of picking nominees and confirmed the great difficulty of throwing out an incumbent President.  The tendency towards coronations of presumptive frontrunners, from which we may be spared this time (perhaps yielding a Carter-like nominee out of the chaos of a tumultuous primary season!), has been a blight on Republicann politics for a long time.  Sometimes the presumed favourite stumbles, but normally Republicans are embarrassingly good about pre-selecting their leader and then getting behind him to win the election.  This has worked out well, as far as electoral success goes, since Republicans will have held the White House for 36 of the last 56 years at the start of 2009.  As a method of picking the best leaders and the most competitive candidates in every election, it is far less successful.

Still, the weakness of Republicans heading into ’08 is striking considering how confident and arrogant they had become after ’04.  The weakness of the field is stunning in another way, since there are probably at least three Republican governors running around out there who would be natural candidates for ’08 in a less disastrous cycle who are almost certainly not running.  Jeb Bush would obviously be one, Mississippi’s Haley Barbour is another and Alabama’s Bob Riley is the third.  As it is, all of the conventional wisdom about ’06 has said that the GOP relied too much on its “Southern” wing and disparaged its “Western” wing, all of which is tied into deeply questionable and (I think) very wrong assessments of what Western Republicans represent in the party.  The repudiation of Bush and the GOP in ’06 was supposed to be a rebuke to Southern Republicans, which has never made a lot of sense to me, but there it is.  That probably contributed to Barbour and Riley assuming that they had no chance in an ’08 competition.  Bush has obvious reasons to not make the attempt this time. 

The disaster of ’06, brought on by horrible GOP misrule, helped make sure that Minnesota’s Pawlenty squeaked through rather than romp to a big win, thus potentially setting him for a bid of his own (as Richardson’s effortless re-election did for him in New Mexico).  Now he has signed on as McCain’s right-hand man.  Very poor decisionmaking and leadership by Mitt Romney at the RGA helped to make sure that Bob Ehrlich would not be back in Annapolis because the RGA wasted valuable and limited resources on ridiculously lopsided, Democratically-favoured races in Michigan, Iowa and New Mexico, and that in turn ensured that Ehrlich would never even have the chance to consider a run.  Mitch Daniels’ self-inflicted implosion in Indiana can be separated from the woes of the national GOP, but that also explains why he is suddenly on the political fast-track to nowhere.  Republican governors considered capable, effective and smart were once found in abundant numbers.  Now the best they have to offer is…Mitt Romney?  Good grief. 

During the Bush Era, supposedly a time when Mr. Bush was doing such a bang-up job of party-building, the Republican candidate “farm system” of governors in the states dried up or was tapped for the absurd purposes of filling Bush’s first-term Cabinet.  We now laugh at Tommy Thompson’s ’08 bid, but he was once considered a likely prospect for the White House before this administration shunted him off into the political Nowheresville of HHS (what hurts Thompson’s bid this time is the fact that he accepted such a position).  Tom Ridge would have had legions of problems with the social conservatives in the party, but he was once considered a fairly formidable political talent.  Then again, having seen his performance at DHS, perhaps it was a good thing that we were spared a Ridge presidential run.  (Separately, when John Engler failed to deliver Michigan for Mr. Bush in 2000, his hopes of his own bid in the future more or less died.)  The Bush administration leaves in its wake not just a shattered party, but one in which all of the minor princes of the party have been more or less ruined by the mistakes, extravagance and excesses of the emperor.  His idea of party-building was to tie the party to himself so closely that it became dependent on him.  Now that he is visibly faltering and failing, the entire structure is suffering massive withdrawal.  The field this year is so weak because the GOP allowed all of its sinews (and its brain) to atrophy during the high times of the Bush ascendancy.  Apres le Decider, rien.

Eric Kleefeld at TPMCafe notes the Tsongas vote in his post on Gov. Romney’s three donations to Democrats in the ’92 cycle.  There was something rather funny about the phrase “and even voted for Tsongas,” as if voting for a relatively moderate Democrat were such a far-out thing for Romney to have done in a decade when he derided Reagan and Bush and declared that his commitment to securing gay rights was stronger than Teddy Kennedy’s.  By comparison with some of his other decisions in the ’90s, his vote for Tsongas might be one of his redeeming features.  At least he didn’t vote for You Know Who.  That might have been the final dealbreaker.

These new donation revelations are a mixed blessing for Romney.  On the one hand, it blunts the McCainiac attack that he puts his fellow Mormons ahead of the GOP (which would actually have been a mark in his favour, as far as I’m concerned), but it helps advance the purpose of the McCainiac attack, which was that he has not been a reliable supporter of Republicans in the past.  However, this merely confirms something we already knew, so I’m not sure how damaging it really is.  If voters believe that Romney’s views have genuinely changed, they will dismiss all of this as irrelevant.  If they don’t buy his “conversion,” it wouldn’t matter to them if he had donated a million dollars to the RNC every year since 1992. 

The donations hurt him in that, as Mr. Kleefeld showed, his pattern of donations seem to track awfully well with the relative popularity of the two parties.  For the period 1990-92, his donations to the GOP vanish after reliable donations to the state committee throughout the ’80s.  In 1994, he rediscovered enthusiasm for the Republicans in his run against Kennedy (trying, one would assume, to get in on the anti-Clinton backlash that was already evident from the start of the year).  The old pattern suggests somebody who wants to be aligned with the winning side.  Arguably, he has broken that pattern simply by remaining Republican in this horrendous political environment.  Nonetheless, it contributes to a general sense of uncertainty a lot of Republican voters will have about him.

The problem, of course, comes when Brownback insinuates Gov. Romney’s pro-life positions aren’t authentic simply because he’s changed over the years. ~Nancy French, Evangelicals for Mitt

Of course, it isn’t just Brownback who says this.  I don’t think he insinuates it, either–he directly questions Romney’s credentials.  Brownback is perhaps not the best messenger for making accusations of conversion for political convenience.  I have noted Brownback’s 1994 discovery of the importance of the sanctity of life during a tough primary fight.  The important differences are that Brownback has been toiling away in the trenches, so to speak, in the pro-life cause for a good while longer than Gov. Romney on the one hand and never ran as far to the left as Romney did in the past on the other.  This gives Brownback a certain credibility Romney doesn’t yet have and gives us all good reason to doubt Romney’s convictions. 

Romney’s change of mind has come about in exactly the last four years, which happen to have coincided very nicely with the period of time when he was no longer going to be running for statewide office in Massachusetts and had begun looking to the national stage.  It could be the case that the timing was incidental, and it could be that his change of mind was completely sincere (or at least as sincere as one can expect in a politician).  However, the timing together with his past record of holding essentially opposite views give voters every reason to suspect that Gov. Romney is trying to play them (more than the average politician).  One of the questions Romneyites need to be able to answer is this: on the issues that matter deeply to them, why should social conservatives gamble on Romney when they know they have a reliable representative in Brownback?