I’ve seen the former Montreal Expos turn out more people than this.

Oliver Willis hit the nail on the head:

The Mitt Romney campaign is promoting this video of a one-day fundraiser they recently held, trying to communicate energy and enthusiasm for the candidate. As the NYT reported yesterday they generated $1.5 million, a far cry from the $6.5 million they brought in a few months ago at a similar event. But what I noticed is that in order to communicate the “bigness” of the occasion they rented out Boston Garden and Fenway Park. But its empty. If you’re going to hold a big free event at a sports venue, I don’t think you communicate momentum by having an empty stadium.

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Patrick Ruffini responds to Soren Dayton’s concerns with a spirited defense of flip-flopping. Ruffini argues that it’s better to support a panderer who’ll give you what you want than an “authentic” candidate (he has McCain in mind) who’s “authentically” wrong:

But that’s the problem isn’t it? McCain led. He led on BCRA. He led on CIR. He led the fight against the Bush tax cuts. He led the Republicans for the Kyoto treaty. All of Romney’s flip-flops don’t change the fact that McCain is responsible for the abomination that is the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. Whenever McCain leads, it’s usually in the wrong direction. That’s why conservatives don’t trust him.

He also points out that, having flipped, it’s unlikely that Romney et al will flip back again to more “liberal” positions — it would be political suicide to do so in the election, and history tells us that presidents generally govern more or less as they say they will during their campaigns (subject to all kinds of caveats, but let’s concede the point for now).

Lest we drown in a wave of bilious irony, Ruffini assures us that it was totally different when his fellow conservatives attacked John Kerry for being, y’know, a flip-flopper:

But the frame against Kerry was that he was too unsteady and indecisive to win a war. Can McCain credibly make that case against the others? That Rudy Giuliani will wilt against al Qaeda because he moved on CFR? Please.

This is nonsense, of course — an ex post facto attempt to justify a meta-flip flop, a flip-flop on the subject of flip-flopping. And Bush’s “decisiveness” is precisely what got us into a disastrous war, and what is causing us to lose that war. But that’s a tangent.

Ruffini’s a very smart guy, and on one level, despite his hypocrisy, he’s got a case. If you’re devoted to a certain set of principles, you prefer candidates who will endorse those principles to those who will not; authenticity is in that regard a secondary consideration. But I wonder if he has given enough consideration to what he himself is endorsing. Romney, for instance, is not just a politician who has changed his mind, he is the definitive phony — as Josh Marshall put it, he “seems so transparently phony, so willing to say anything that I find him genuinely frightening.” Now you can make a case that such a nonentity might not be so bad, from a technocratic standpoint. But to return to Dayton’s question: what does it say about the movement?

What does it say that in order to embrace the conservative ideological line, candidates are forced to bend so far that the exercise becomes comical? What does it say that conservatives seem to care more about hearing candidates sing the old standards of the right than about hearing creative ideas to get beyond the current crisis (both the national crisis and that of the conservative movement)? What does it say that the preference is for phoniness and rote ideology as opposed to leadership and vision?

They’re open-ended questions, but I can’t help thinking of Rick Perlstein’s recent article in The Nation, where he describes how Ronald Reagan refused to be limited to his pollsters’ advice:

But the more profound lesson is that the greatest politicians create their own issues, ones that no one knew existed. Was the mood in California favorable for Reagan’s conservative message in 1966? Obviously, or else Reagan wouldn’t have won; he wasn’t a magician. But he was–yes–a great communicator, confident of his gifts. By listening and interacting with ordinary people, and sniffing out where his own sense of right and wrong dovetailed with what he heard, he divined a certain inchoate mood….That’s the danger of even the best polling: its power to smother intuitive leaders in the cradle.

One might argue that too much tolerance of poll-driven phoniness will strangle them just as surely.

Cross-posted at Alien & Sedition.

John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani | 6 Comments »

Election Geek notes that yesterday’s speech at Regent University, in which Rudy Giuliani blamed Bill Clinton for not responding forcefully enough to terror attacks prior to 9/11, directly contradicted what America’s Mayor himself was saying just last September. With the campaign in full gear, it seems Rudy has abandoned honest national security analysis in favor of simple propaganda.

Which reminds me of Andrew Sullivan’s (yes, Andrew Sullivan’s) astute commentary (apropos Hugh Hewitt specifically, but GOP war-and-terror-mongers generally) about just how dangerous Republican political strategies are to the national interest:

When you see how evidence-resistant a propagandist like Hewitt can be, you begin to realize how important it is to keep these people away from power. They are much less interested in defeating al Qaeda than they are in using al Qaeda to defeat Democrats. This is what Hewitt really cares about: the GOP. Look what damage his ilk have done to the West’s security since 9/11 because of their pathological partisanship. Look at how their refusal or inability to see any nuance, complexity or variety in the many threats we face makes our defeat more likely. We just cannot afford to tolerate these Republican propagandists any longer. There is a war on. And they simply aren’t serious about fighting it.

Sullivan’s post is titled “The Unseriousness of the ‘Pro-War’ Right.” Now it seems Rudy Giuliani has joined the ranks of the unserious.

Rudy Giuliani | 5 Comments »

Newt Gingrich’s para-campaign organization, American Solutions for Winning the Future, has made sure to secure some prime territory at the August 11 Ames Straw Poll in Iowa. According to the AP (scroll down), the organization donated $17,500 to the Iowa Republican Party, enough to ensure that Gingrich will be well — if unofficially — represented at the event.

The move isn’t a surprise — even when Gingrich gave “4-1 odds” against making a run, he told the media that he would be attending the straw poll, as well as holding workshops across the state. Gingrich said that he would officially decide whether or not to run at the end of September. In a March article at the Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti described Newt’s plan:

There is, believe it or not, a path by which Newt Gingrich could conceivably arrive at the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. The path starts where we are now, with Gingrich not declaring any sort of candidacy and refusing to shed light on his plans. What he has done instead is create a nonpartisan political organization, American Solutions for Winning the Future, that can spend unlimited sums of money under section 527 of the U.S. tax code. American Solutions, Gingrich says, will hold national workshops this September 27–the thirteenth anniversary of the Contract With America–and September 29. Then, on September 30–call it G-Day–Gingrich will “decide” whether to run for president. At which point there still will be about three and a half months before the first actual caucuses and primaries.

Fred Thompson’s robust poll numbers may put a crimp in Newt’s plan to play the late-arriving conservative hero; on the other hand, Gingrich can reasonably claim to have the better organization (so far) and a more dogged approach to campaigning.

Newt Gingrich | 1 Comment »

Yet more from the AP on Thompson’s lobbyist exploits (h/t: Democrats.org):

Fred Thompson, a likely Republican presidential candidate, on Tuesday defended his work as a Washington lobbyist, telling The Associated Press that lobbying is an important part of life because “government’s got their hands in everything.”

The actor and former U.S. senator from Tennessee added, “Nobody yet has pointed out any of my clients that didn’t deserve representation.”

Thompson, who likes to cast himself as a political outsider, earned more than $1 million lobbying the federal government for more than 20 years. He lobbied for a savings-and-loan deregulation bill that helped hasten the industry’s collapse and a failed nuclear energy project that cost taxpayers more than a billion dollars.

He also was a lobbyist for deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was widely criticized for endorsing “necklacing,” the gruesome practice of execution where gasoline-soaked tires are thrown over a person’s neck and set ablaze.

In September 1991, Aristide said: “The burning tire, what a beautiful tool! … It smells good. And wherever you go, you want to smell it.”

Aristide became president in Haiti’s first democratic elections in 1990, but he was deposed in a military coup a few months later in 1991.

Thompson’s pretty breezy about the prospect of his opponents using his lobbyist background against him — it hasn’t stopped him in previous elections. But the Presidency of the United States is a whole lot different than being a senator from Tennessee.

Fred Thompson | 1 Comment »

Thomas Edsall gives us some of the numbers and the clients — and observes that “no campaign has been so dominated by staffers and advisers who have worked on behalf of Philip Morris, one of the world’s leading tobacco conglomerates and a leading force in promoting cigarette smoking.” As Edsall explains, Thompson’s lobbying career really took off after Republicans took over the Senate in 1981, making Thompson’s friend and mentor Howard Baker the new Majority Leader. All told, Thompson has taken in about $1 million in lobbying fees.

Ana Marie Cox points out that $1 million is not really a lot in lobbying terms. But, she suggests, it still may be a bad idea to elect a lobbyist to the Presidency:

But it all is untoward, of course. Not the fees so much as the act of providing access for cash. As Edsall points out, “If Fred Thompson is elected president, he will be the first federally registered lobbyist to become Commander in Chief.” That he didn’t earn that much money from doing it only suggests he either didn’t need the money or wasn’t very good at the job.

Meanwhile, the AP picks up on the story, noting that Thompson’s clients included “a British reinsurance company that wanted to limit its liability from asbestos lawsuits,” and “the Tennessee Savings and Loan League, on whose behalf Thompson lobbied for a bill to deregulate the industry” (thus helping to enable one of the most massive, scandalous financial disasters in modern American history). The article also points out that Thompson’s history as a lobbyist belies his attempt to position himself as an “outsider” in the race.

It doesn’t mention that stupid red truck, though.

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Mitt Romney had a slick line at the National Right to Life Convention: “I know that it is not time but conviction that unites us.” Some speechwriter deserves a fat bonus for that gem, which almost manages to make a virtue of naked flip-flopping. The really great thing about it is how it forces you into the realm of the unmeasurable: how can you prove that Romney doesn’t really, really believe something now, even if he didn’t believe it yesterday?

That unmeasurability seems to be just enough to trigger conservative activists’ willing suspension of disbelief. And not just with regard to Romney (though he exemplifies the process). There’s a Kabuki quality to the Republican candidates’ ritual performance of conversion to whatever it is the base wants them to think, and the base seems happy enough to play along. But Soren Dayton, spoiling Romney’s speechwriter’s careful work, has another way of expressing what’s happening: everyone has been pretending that “pandering [is] better than authenticity.”

For instance, Jennifer Rubin’s report on the SCOTUS decision overturning restrictions on third-party campaign ads suggested that conservative activists, responding to statements in support of the decision by Romney and Rudy Giuliani — both of whom had previously supported such restrictions* — “seem[ed] less concerned with consistency than with vocal support for their favored positions.” It’s a pattern that has held on issue after issue, involving each candidate in the GOP field.

Candidates in primary elections will bend with the wishes of the base: that’s understood. But what seems to be happening this time around is an almost total abandonment of principle — yet the conservative base seems only to care about hearing the words, not about whether anybody actually means them. Dayton considers the implications:

So the pattern is clear. Run on some positions your whole life, then change them to win the nomination. Then what?

Is that a healthy way for a political party or a political movement to behave? What does this say about our intellectual class?

It speaks to the mediocrity of this group of candidates. This election is a chance for Republican leaders to step forward and present well-considered ideas as to how the right’s coalition can move beyond its current crisis. Instead the candidates seem content to mouth the stale catechism of years gone by.

*See comments

Mitt Romney | 5 Comments »

At NRO, Jim Geraghty picks up on the McCain deathwatch story, and wonders about the role of the immigration issue in his campaign’s downward spiral. In an article fueled by quotes from anonymous strategists in opposing Republican camps, Geraghty reveals how McCain’s sponsorship of the immigration bill is causing problems not just for the Arizona Senator himself, but for the rest of the Republican field. While rival Republican candidates can use the issue to flog McCain, at least some of their advisors are smart enough to wish the whole issue would just go away:

“I don’t know how much shelf-life this issue has for Republicans,” the rival strategist says. “This was Karl Rove’s brilliant idea to permanently cement the Hispanic vote to the Republican base. Well, so far, all we’ve seen it do is aggravate Hispanics and divide our base. The longer we’re talking about this issue, the deeper we’re digging this hole. And where the hell is McCain? He threw our party into this briar patch. He makes the deal with Kennedy, creating this mess, and then he’s out on the campaign trail raising money.”

The thing is, it’s a briar patch of the right’s own making. Geraghty cites an anti-Hispanic “comedy” bit on a recent edition of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, but Linda Chavez’s recent complaints tell the story more graphically — the more that Republicans talk about immigration, the more nastiness they bring out in their own base. And that’s not going to be good for them in the long run. Geraghty’s source understands the ramifications:

“Symbolism of this bill may be more important than substance,” says the rival strategist. He laments that the debate on the Republican side is turning into who can most vehemently denounce illegal immigrants, and to Hispanic ears, it may sound hostile to all immigrants, regardless of their legal status. “Sometimes it’s not the words that people hear, but the theme music in the background.”

Immigration may be the most natural issue for McCain’s GOP rivals to use against him — since it’s the area in which he is most clearly at odds with the party’s base — but using it that way is ultimately self-destructive for Republicans. No wonder they’re all so eager to see John McCain disappear.

Cross-posted at Alien & Sedition.

John McCain | 1 Comment »

cross-posted at Iowa Independent

The latest scuffle between Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney concerned negative comments about Romney’s Mormon faith made by McCain’s Warren County, Iowa chairman, Chad Workman. The McCain camp apologized, which the Romney camp accepted. But Tamara Scott, director of the Iowa chapter of Concerned Women for America and a prominent Iowa social conservative, said that Romney’s faith is fair game in the race for the GOP nomination and declined to say whether she thought Mormons were Christians.

“Is it fair to bring up someone’s faith? Absolutely,” she said by phone. “It’s not discriminatory … whether it’s Romney’s, McCain’s, or Obama’s.” She said that she wanted to see how a candidate’s faith “falls in line with the principles that I believe in.” Scott declined to comment on the specific issue since she was not familiar with all of the information.

In his comments, Workman questioned whether Mormons could be considered Christians. Asked if she thought Mormons were Christians, Scott demurred. “Whether someone is a Christian is not up to me,” but to God she said; she then added, “I think you have to ask the Mormons whether they think they’re Christians.”

This comment comes after Scott warned that Iowa social conservatives, frustrated with the GOP front-runners, would consider leaving the GOP in the 2008 general election:

“We’re told that in a two-party system to vote for the lesser of two evils,” she said. “What I’m hearing from the grassroots is, ‘I’d rather throw away a vote on a candidate with integrity than vote in more evil, no matter how much less it is.‘”

Go read the whole post.

John McCain, Mitt Romney | 2 Comments »

According to the The British Sunday Times, the end for McCain’s campaign may be sooner rather than later. Citing “Republican insiders” (including McCain’s 2000 communications director), the article reports on speculation — denied by campaign sources — that the former front-runner might not even make it to the first primaries.

Conservative writer Ryan Sager has read the tea leaves and is ready to launch the “McCain Death Watch.” Sager observes that the Senator is headed toward fourth place in the polls, has been awful at raising funds, and — perhaps most damningly — cannot not even offer any particular logic for his candidacy:

He’s neither a straight-shooting maverick (the logic of his 2000 run) nor the true conservative (the supposed logic of this run) nor the fall-back consensus candidate (the Dole ‘96 model — which is hardly operational in such a strong primary field).

Add to that the fact that he is, by all appearances, old, tired, and increasingly cranky. But Sager’s last point is particularly interesting. This is a cycle in which the “logic” of the various Republican candidates may matter more than in seasons past — mainly because, with the Republican/conservative coalition plunged into such a crisis of confidence and identity, the candidates have the opportunity to clarify options for the way forward. That McCain has been unable to find a role in this process suggests that he really is on the verge of total irrelevance.

John McCain | 1 Comment »