This is one of the more bizarre turns of events I’ve ever heard of. So Mike Huckabee schedules a press conference designed to unveil an attack ad against Mitt Romney. The ubiquitous banner behind him says “Enough Is Enough” and includes all kinds of statements from the ad. Then Huckabee comes out and says “we’re not running a negative campaign” and announces he’s pulled the ads from the media. But then he goes ahead and shows the ad to the press anyway!

“We prepared it, sent it to the stations, supposed to start running at noon today. This morning, I ordered my staff to pull the ad; I told them I do not want it to be run. If it was run at all, it would be until the stations pulled it off their schedules. And we are now committed, from now through the rest of the caucuses, that we will run only the ads that talk about why I should be president, and not why Mitt Romney should not. I know that some of are up saying, well did you really have an ad? Well, I’m going to show you the ad. You’ll get the chance to find out.”

Then his staff HANDS OUT COPIES of the ad to the media, in the hopes that they’ll run them for free on their shows, I guess.

Maybe Huckabee is so cash-strapped that he realized he couldn’t run these ads, but tried to spin it into a principled positive, while also hoping that the press would do his dirty work for him. I don’t know if it worked. Here’s video of the grilling Huckabee took in the press conference.

I know that the Republicans were slinging all kinds of mud at one another, including this fake holiday greeting card that looks like it’s from Mitt Romney with Mormon passages all over it, but… wow. Talk about dealing from both sides of the deck. Huckabee’s really not experienced at the way these attacks are supposed to work, is he? You’re supposed to find a surrogate, not BE the surrogate handing out the ads to the media! It kind of ruins the whole “plausible deniability” thing when you’re doing the denying yourself.

Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney | 1 Comment »

Rudy has an intervention at the Drake Diner:

Perhaps not coincidentally, Rudy will skip caucus night, hoping that the firefighters don’t look for him in Florida, and that nobody will take notice of his potential 6th-place finish in the Hawkeye State.

But don’t worry! They have a great plan to win the nomination, based on not imitating those other losers who… won their nominations and the Presidency…

As voting nears in the Republican nomination process, our campaign remains convinced that our strategy we have long had in place is right – bold, innovative and designed to deal with the radically different election calendar. While many of the beltway insiders seem to remain committed to the old “Carter/Clinton” approach and have questioned the adjustments we have made to our strategic thinking based on the new calendar, we clearly have a winning plan to secure the nomination in an election cycle unlike any other. History will prove us right.

President Carter? President Clinton? What do they know about becoming President?

Election 2008 | 1 Comment »

Fox News is afraid of Ron Paul, keeping him out of their next debate. It used to be that a station like this would love to have Paul on as a whipping boy. But since their pathetic set of candidates are so weak, Paul looks like a giant among Lilliputians. Odd that Paul doesn’t make the debate stage, but the guy who this week said he’s not particularly interested in running for President does, huh?

Fred Thompson, Ron Paul | 2 Comments »

I guess the Law and Order money dried up.

When I got a generic fundraising e-mail “from” Fred Thompson campaign manager Bill Lacy last night offering “a quick update” on the effort to get “on the air statewide in Iowa,” I didn’t take it literally.

I should have.

Fred has gone dark in Iowa.

With not enough cash to buy ads, he’s doing all the free media he can on his bus tour. But it’s a remarkable indicator of just how topsy-turvy the GOP race has been that the man once viewed as the party’s savior cannot even afford to buy TV time in the final days before Iowa.

It’s probably for the best, since the TV spots were 20 seconds of Grandpa Freddie dozing in a chair, until a staff aide puts a mirror under his nose to ensure that he’s still breathing.

It’s not a scintillating message.

Fred Thompson | No Comments »

(cross-posted from Hullabaloo)

It always is. And now they’re getting specific. Apparently the death of Pakistan’s opposition leader is good news for Rudy Giuliani.

Let’s start by remarking how pathetic it is to veer from an international incident into the horse race. Joe Scarborough probably can’t locate Pakistan on a map, yet he knows implicitly which Presidential candidate chaos there would reward. And why Giuliani? Because he happened to be coincidentally in the city of record on 9/11, while he proved himself a fool in emergency management by placing the command center in the same building hit by terrorists eight years earlier and providing faulty radios to firefighters?

I think it’d take about a minute and a half to come up with a reasonable (for cable news) argument for any candidate to benefit from the assassination of Bhutto. “It’ll help McCain because of his foreign policy experience!” “It’ll help Ron Paul because he wants to isolate us from a dangerous world!” “It’ll help Mitt Romney because of his managerial steady hand in a time of crisis!” “It’ll help Mike Huckabee because he can appeal to a higher power in these dangerous times!” “It’ll help Fred Thompson because he’ll sleep through it!”

None of these statements have much basis in fact. That’s why they are reasonable cable news opinions.

P.S. Just in case you think this kind of instantly insipid analysis is confined to cable news, Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post wrote pretty much the same thing.

UPDATE: It should be noted that Giuliani sent a press release out to this effect before the palace courtiers started reporting on it as if it were fact. So this wasn’t only a stupid thought, it was an UNORIGINAL stupid thought.

Rudy Giuliani | No Comments »

The New Hampshire Union-Leader joins in on the fun.

THERE IS A reason Mitt Romney has not received a single newspaper endorsement in New Hampshire. It’s the same reason his poll numbers are dropping. He has not been able to convince the people of this state that he’s the conservative he says he is.

Like a lot of people in New Hampshire, we wanted to believe Romney. We gave him the benefit of the doubt. We listened very carefully to his expertly rehearsed sales pitch. But in the end he didn’t close the deal for us. Now, two weeks before the primary, the same is happening with voters.

In a sense, this is self-serving for the Union-Leader, who has endorsed McCain and has an interest in being right. But it’s amusing to me that the establishment elites were so keen on lining up behind Romney because he could keep the fragile coalition together, but any actual voter who takes a look at him can smell the inauthenticity.

Mitt Romney has not. He has spoken his lines well, but the people can sense that the words are memorized, not heartfelt.

Last week Romney was reduced to debating what the meaning of “saw” is. It was only the latest in a string of demonstrably false claims — he’d been a hunter “pretty much” all his life, he’d had the NRA’s endorsement, he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. — that call into question the veracity of his justifications for switching sides on immigration, abortion, taxes and his affection for Ronald Reagan.

In this primary, the more Mitt Romney speaks, the less believable he becomes.

Tagg Romney reportedly responded by saying, “Oh yeah? Well,… um… you too!”

John McCain, Mitt Romney | No Comments »

The funny thing about all this freaking out over Huckabee is that they wouldn’t care at all about his religious fervor if he had the “right” positions on economic and foreign policy. But he talks like a populist (even though his policies would be worse for the poor) and he thinks the Bushies have an arrogant bunker mentality abroad. So all of a sudden, his severe Jesusitude is a problem, where before the establishment would likely see it as an asset. E.J. Dionne explains this nicely.

Huckabee is no William Jennings Bryan, the great fundamentalist scourge of big business a century ago. But Bryan would have appreciated Huckabee’s attack on politics as a mere extension of economics. “If it was all about the money,” Huckabee said recently, “then we might as well put the presidency up on eBay.”

The former Arkansas governor has exposed a fault line within the Republican coalition. The old religious right is dying because it subordinated the views of its followers to short-term political calculations. The white evangelical electorate is tired of taking orders from politicians who care more about protecting the wealthy than ending abortion, more about deregulation than family values.

That’s why Washington-focused religious operatives tied to old GOP strategies are being outdone by new leaders with authentic grass-roots followings — people such as Michael Farris, who chairs the Home School Legal Defense Association and supports Huckabee.

What’s bizarre beyond belief, however, is that Dionne winds around to saying that a Huckabee win in Iowa could help Romney. I’ve also heard that a Huckabee win could help Giuliani, and a Huckabee win could help McCain. Nobody seems to want to admit that a Huckabee win would help Huckabee.

Mike Huckabee | 6 Comments »

I haven’t seen a newspaper editorial this scathing about a Presidential candidate, maybe ever. That it’s the Concord (N.H.) Monitor and the candidate is leading the race for the Republican nomination in the state shows you what a mess the GOP primaries are.

Romney’s main business experience is as a management consultant, a field in which smart, fast-moving specialists often advise corporations on how to reinvent themselves. His memoir is called Turnaround - the story of his successful rescue of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City - but the most stunning turnaround he has engineered is his own political career.

If you followed only his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, you might imagine Romney as a pragmatic moderate with liberal positions on numerous social issues and an ability to work well with Democrats. If you followed only his campaign for president, you’d swear he was a red-meat conservative, pandering to the religious right, whatever the cost. Pay attention to both, and you’re left to wonder if there’s anything at all at his core.

As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1994, he boasted that he would be a stronger advocate of gay rights than his opponent, Ted Kennedy. These days, he makes a point of his opposition to gay marriage and adoption.

There was a time that he said he wanted to make contraception more available - and a time that he vetoed a bill to sell it over-the-counter.

The old Romney assured voters he was pro-choice on abortion. “You will not see me wavering on that,” he said in 1994, and he cited the tragedy of a relative’s botched illegal abortion as the reason to keep abortions safe and legal. These days, he describes himself as pro-life.

There was a time that he supported stem-cell research and cited his own wife’s multiple sclerosis in explaining his thinking; such research, he reasoned, could help families like his. These days, he largely opposes it. As a candidate for governor, Romney dismissed an anti-tax pledge as a gimmick. In this race, he was the first to sign.

People can change, and intransigence is not necessarily a virtue. But Romney has yet to explain this particular set of turnarounds in a way that convinces voters they are based on anything other than his own ambition.

This has been well-known for quite some time, but in the last moments before voting, Mitt the Robo-candidate is sputtering gears. John Kerry was a fairly consistent candidate who by the conventions of the Senate made a few votes that, if you contorted yourself enough, may have been inconsistent. He was pilloried for nine long months. Romney has almost no policy position on which he did not take all possible stands. That includes whether or not his dad marched with Martin Luther King, the continuing incident whose Romney campaign-picked “eyewitnesses” have now been debunked. (Of course, there’s a missing element to that story. Just because George Romney marched for civil rights doesn’t mean that there’s anything in Mitt Romney’s current profile that would suggest HE would take any kind of positive position on that issue. Just as the sins of the father should be presented upon the son, the same with the glories of the father. Mitt wouldn’t dare march in Jena, or at the commemoration in Selma, and THAT’S what matters.)

But I think we have found the area in which Romney does display perfect rigidity; he’s a very proud royalist. Charlie Savage asked all of the candidates about their views on executive power. Romney’s are amazing.

Romney’s responses — not to some of the questions but to every single one of them — are beyond disturbing. The powers he claims the President possesses are definitively — literally — tyrannical, unrecognizable in the pre-2001 American system of government and, in some meaningful ways, even beyond what the Bush/Cheney cadre of authoritarian legal theorists have claimed.

After reviewing those responses, Marty Lederman concluded: “Romney? Let’s put it this way: If you’ve liked Dick Cheney and David Addington, you’re gonna love Mitt Romney.” Anonymous Liberal similarly observed that his responses reveal that “Romney doesn’t believe the president’s power to be subject to any serious constraints.” To say that the President’s powers are not “subject to any serious constraints” — which is exactly what Romney says — is, of course, to posit the President as tyrant, not metaphorically or with hyperbole, but by definition.

So, you know, that’s SOMETHING nobody can accuse him of being wishy-washy about.

Mitt Romney | No Comments »

John McCain, who has delusions of Kerry-dom dancing in his head (not entirely delusional with this sorry Republican field, though somebody oughta tell him that John Keery lost), is pushing back dramatically against a rumor of a New York Times story promoted by Drudge. If this doesn’t show how Matt Drudge rules the world of the political class, I don’t know what does. Drudge, whose 15 minutes of fame actually ended in 1998 but nobody told the media, who artificially inflates his own Web stats to deceive his advertisers, has a pathetic amount of reach into the general population. But because his reach into the desks of the Russert-ites is large, and because McCain is essentially running a media campaign based on getting free coverage, any chink in his armor among that class would torpedo him. So he has to push back vigorously against an Internet rumor.

“It is unfortunate that rumor and gossip enter into political campaigns. John McCain has a 24-year record of serving this country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the important issues facing our country.

“Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics. John McCain is the most experienced and prepared to lead as commander and chief, and he will continue to run a positive campaign on the issues.”

Somebody protesting too much? Well how about the fact that he’s not only lobbying the editor of the NYT to deep-six the story, but he’s hired Bill Clinton’s old lawyer:

The Arizona Republican has hired a prominent Washington criminal attorney, Robert Bennett, to deal with the matter. “What is being done to John McCain is an outrage,” Bennett said in an interview.

This doesn’t pass the smell test. You don’t hire a lawyer to rebut a rumor. You hire a lawyer because you’re in legal trouble. So this story must not only be damaging, but reveal some criminal liability that would spark an FBI investigation. There’s no other way to read it.

You actually don’t need a new article to portray John McCain as a complete hypocrite on federal spending. His views on war, not just supporting the Iraq war but all war, provides billions of dollars to his buddies in the defense industry in Arizona. War is good for business in his home state. So his supporters benefit from the bloated defense budget more than practically any other state. So spare me the talk of St. McCain the king of porkbusting.

John McCain | 2 Comments »

Man, this Mitt Romney thing is getting worse and worse:

Romney has repeated the story of his father marching with King in some of his most prominent presidential campaign appearances, including the “Tonight” show with Jay Leno in May, his address on faith and politics Dec. 6 in Texas, and on NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday, when he was questioned about the Mormon Church’s ban on full participation by black members. He said that he had cried in his car in 1978 when he heard the ban had ended, and added, “My father marched with Martin Luther King.”

Mitt Romney went a step further in a 1978 interview with the Boston Herald. Talking about the Mormon Church and racial discrimination, he said: “My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit.”

Yesterday, Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom acknowledged that was not true. “Mitt Romney did not march with Martin Luther King,” he said in an e-mail statement to the Globe.

But only if you mean “march with Martin Luther King” in the sense of being on the same street with Martin Luther King at the same time. And that’s pretty abstract.

I was going to do a series of other things Mitt Romney has done “for the cause of his brothers and sisters” in his life, but TBogg beat me to it:

August 23, 1963: Convinces Martin Luther King to conclude his “I Have A Dream” speech with “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”, instead of “I’m going to Disneyland!”.

December 14, 1966: Tells Ron Karenga that Kwanzaa sounds “less gay” than “First Fruits Festival”.

October 16, 1968: Offers Tommie Smith John Carlos his black socks to wear on their fists on the medal stand at the Olympics.

July 14, 1970; Plays congas on The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

November 19, 1970: Nails Angela Davis. Nine months later, Tagg Romney is born.

June 13, 1982: Convinces Michael Jackson that he thinks he would look “really swell” as a white woman.

March 3, 1991: Forgets that he is Rodney King’s designated driver and King is forced to drive himself home.

March 9, 1997: Kills Biggie Smalls for “disrespecting” him.

May 13, 2005: Double-dog dares Michael Vick to top strapping a dog to the top of a station wagon.

Not the first time I wished I wrote something that TBogg wrote.

Mitt Romney | 1 Comment »