NRO’s Jim Geraghty:

I’m told the exit polls indicate voters didn’t like Mitt Romney’s ads, thought he went too negative. New Hampshire didn’t have the “play nice” attitude that Iowa had, but I wonder if Romney stood out a little too much with his contrast ads, compared to everyone else.

Meanwhile, Romney says he’s “gotten two silvers and one gold…. thank you Wyoming.” He seems remarkably chipper, considering.

Update: Romney plays the change card - his first point: voters “have heard Washington say they’re going to change immigration, but they haven’t.” Wonder who that was aimed at?

New Hampshire, John McCain, Mitt Romney | 3 Comments »

Josh Marshall wonders if Romney might have regained a touch of momentum just before the polls open. Either way, he suggests that, when you consider the bigger picture, it would be more than premature to suppose that a victory in New Hampshire would vault John McCain to the nomination:

The next big fight is in South Carolina. And two new polls out today (Rasmussen and SurveyUSA) show Huckabee in a dominant position in the state. So Huckabee looks likely to take Secessionville with either McCain or Romney coming in second.

At that point you’ll have to say that Huckabee, who the GOP establishment is roundly against, is the frontrunner in the campaign. And the others are going to coalesce around an anti-Huckabee candidate. It’s not clear to me that McCain is a shoe-in for that role.

McCain is, for the most part, just another right-wing Republican. But his tentative heresies on issues like campaign finance, global warming, and immigration are still a problem in his relationship with the GOP establishment. That establishment, while hardly united behind any single candidate, has generally expressed a good deal more interest in candidates like Romney, Giuliani, and even Fred Thompson. There may be voter movement behind McCain right now - but the whole point of being an establishment is that you don’t want the voters to ruin everything by deciding these things for themselves.

It may or may not be in the GOP establishment’s power to make the decision, at this late date, as to who will be the anti-Huckabee. But they’ll try, and there’s no particular reason to believe that they’ll try to make it McCain.

South Carolina, Fred Thompson, Michael Bloomberg, New Hampshire, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney | No Comments »

I’m enjoying the GOP freak-out over Mike Huckabee as much as everyone else, but let me add a word of caution — given realities on the ground in Iowa and other states, the whole Huckabee bubble could wind up bursting pretty quickly.

I spent some time a while ago insisting that Huckabee wasn’t a frontrunner. Now he is one, but only in certain respects. If you’ve read today’s NYT piece on Huckabee and the Republican race, you will have been reminded of one of the key disparities between Huckabee’s campaign and that of his major rival: organization. Mitt Romney has been building his Iowa machine with great steadiness and care over the past year. Romney’s organization, in Iowa and in general, is what has made a frontrunner out of a man who would otherwise be no more apparent a choice for the nomination than the already-forgotten Tommy Thompson. And a key part of that organization will come into play on January 3.

As the Times notes:

Mr. Huckabee has been ramping up his organization in Iowa, but it still remains far behind Mr. Romney’s. The campaign recently doubled the office space at its headquarters in downtown Des Moines; it now has 17 paid employees in Iowa, up from 3 over the summer. The campaign is broadcasting commercials in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and is preparing its first mailing in Iowa.

But the campaign remains bare bones in many ways. It has not had the money to do any polling. The campaign predicts that it will have precinct captains in the major caucus precincts, but not in all of them. Mr. Huckabee’s Iowa state director, Eric Woolson, got a BlackBerry only about a month ago.

Jonathan Martin has explained what Huckabee’s organizational deficiencies mean in terms of his key constituency:

The caucuses are still “an organizational exercise when you get right down to it,” Woolson adds, dropping the bar another notch. “And Romney has been here for a long time with a lot of people and a lot of money.”

Spin aside, every Iowa Republican contacted for this story cites Huckabee’s utter lack of a campaign structure as his most formidable obstacle to win.

“There’s no such thing as any Huckabee ground game that I see at all,” observes Failor.

Televangelist Pat Robertson maximized the Christian community in Iowa to finish a surprise second in 1988, Failor notes, but he did so with a 99-county organization that had been built over many months.

“The church community is excitable, energizable and movable, but if you don’t have apparatus to move those people on caucus night it doesn’t matter,” Failor says. “It’s all about organization – always has been and always will be.’

It’s instructive to compare Martin’s analysis of Huckabee’s Iowa organization with his piece on Romney’s.

Huckabee’s surge may be coming just late enough in the game to hit the polls at its peak. But everything now rides on the expectations game. If the enthusiasm cools just a little over the next two weeks, if the churches Huckabee’s counting on for his ground game can’t quite deliver, if Romney’s disciplined organization really is worth a few extra points on caucus day, then the story of January 3 could be of Romney surging and Huckabee fading.

Iowa, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney | 4 Comments »

Many of us who have been watching Mike Huckabee for a while have let ourselves be a little bit charmed by his underdog status and his political skills. But there’s pretty good evidence that he is in fact a nasty, ignorant man:

Mike Huckabee once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could “pose a dangerous public health risk.”

As a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 1992, Huckabee answered 229 questions submitted to him by The Associated Press. Besides a quarantine, Huckabee suggested that Hollywood celebrities fund AIDS research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies.

“If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague,” Huckabee wrote.

Via NRO’s Jonathan Adler. The National Review has been a key organ in the economic royalists’ civil war against the theocrats. And Adler’s comment illustrates that Huckabee’s statement was grotesque even for the party of Reagan, not known for its enlightened AIDS policy:

Assuming the survey response excerpts reported by the AP are representative, and not taken out of a mitigating context, this is a pretty outrageous position for Huckabee to have held at the time. This was not the early 1980s, when the threat posed by the HIV virus was poorly understood. Rather it was 1992, long after it was understood that AIDS could not be transmitted through casual contact. So either Huckabee was woefully ignorant about the nature of AIDS, or he supported a quarantine despite the lack of a threat of communicability. Neither interpretation speaks well of him.

The quarantine suggestion is disgusting. And yet I think I’m even more offended by his contemptuous dismissal of the AIDS crisis as something for those nuts in Hollywood to deal with.

Kinda undermines the persuasiveness of the Huckster’s Christian act, doesn’t it?

Mike Huckabee | 7 Comments »

You’ve got to give them credit. Ron Paul’s supporters decided they wanted a blimp, and they went out and got themselves a damn blimp. The flight plan has the airship hovering over the East Coast for as long as the money holds out, but if they can pick up another dirigible, they just might take it to the big show:

While it would be quite difficult to get the first blimp all the way across the country to the Super Bowl, we could get another blimp in Arizona for the Super Bowl, if Ron Paul supporters sponsor it. The owner of an airfield nearby has agreed to host us for free. Then we could keep this one East coast focused until Super Tuesday.

The zeppelin may be a gigantic political ad, but its backers are doing an end run around campaign finance laws, financing the gasbag through a private, for-profit advertising company:

We will not be forming a PAC (Political Action Committee) as discussed originally. Under a PAC donations to the blimp would count towards donations to the official campaign. For example, if a person contributed $100 towards the PAC then they would only be able to contribute $2,200 of the $2,300 maximum to the official campaign. Forming a PAC would also be a FEC legal nightmare due to regulations and restrictions.

We created a business plan that allows any US citizen to buy as much blimp as they want without having it count towards their current campaign contributions. Former chairman of the FEC, Brad Smith, one of the top U.S. election lawyers, has been retained as our lawyer. This updated legal arrangement offers the best of both worlds, no limits and virtually no regulations.

So, we formed a for profit company called Liberty Political Advertising, LLC. which allows a US citizen to “sponsor” a pre-selected political message.

No better way to send a political message than by renting a massive flying bladder. They’ll give this whole son-of-a-bitchin’ country something to remember Ron Paul by.

Ron Paul | No Comments »

Mitt Romney, the candidate who himself is forced to deal with popular prejudice toward his religion, is now trying to deny that he categorically ruled out the possibility of including a Muslim in his cabinet. Speaking in Florida yesterday, he put a different spin on the initial controversy:

“[Mansoor Ijaz’s] question was did I need to have a Muslim in my Cabinet to be able to confront radical jihad and would it be important to have a Muslim in my Cabinet,” said Romney, “and I said, ‘No I don’t think you need to have a Muslim in the Cabinet to take on radical jihad any more than during the second world war we needed to have a Japanese American to help us understand the threat that was coming from Japan.

“The people who would be part of my cabinet is something that I really haven’t given a lot of thought to at this point, but I don’t have boxes I check off as to their ethnicity…instead I would choose people based upon their merits and their capabilities,” he added.

It’s true that Ijaz’s question did seem to be premised on the notion that having a Muslim in the Cabinet would be useful for countering jihadism, but it’s pretty clear that a critical part of Romney’s answer was based on a different premise. Romney said (emphasis mine):

“…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration.”

That’s not saying “it isn’t necessary to hire Muslims to help counter jihadism.” That’s saying that American Muslims simply aren’t important enough to merit representation in his government. Romney’s later claim that he doesn’t have “boxes I check off as to their ethnicity” is strange, because the existence of such demographic boxes is exactly what he implied when he made the statement to Ijaz.

Of course, Romney may simply be using semantics to try to weasel around some of the implications of his (and his party’s) general appeal to anti-Muslim bigotry. As far as the GOP primary is concerned, this controversy probably just helps him.

Mitt Romney | No Comments »

The greatest catastrophe in modern American foreign policy history? The disaster that has cost thousands of lives, billions of dollars, destablized the Middle East, and dangerously weakened American standing in the world?

Rudy’d do it all over again!

Rudy Giuliani said yesterday he “never had any doubt” that if he were President four years ago, he would have invaded Iraq. He said he is now “even more certain” that it was the correct national security move.

“I actually believe that Democrats are going to agree with me on that by the time we get to the general election,” the Republican former New York City mayor said. Giuliani addressed a wide range of issues in an hour-long meeting with editors of the New Hampshire Union Leader.

The definition of insanity.

(Say what you will about NCLB, btw, but at least their PR people got the quote right.)

Rudy Giuliani | No Comments »

I just…. I can’t really…. I’ll just let them speak for themselves:

A blimp? A blimp!

Imagine.. the mainstream media is mesmerized as the image of the Ron Paul blimp is shown to tens of millions of Americans throughout the day (and throughout the month). Wolf Blizter, stunned and as if in a trance, repeats the words “Amazing, Amazing”.

As GPS co-ordinates stream to the website a map shows the Ron Paul blimp’s location in real time. The local Television stations broadcast its every move. The curious flock together and make a trip to see history in the making. Emails with pictures are sent, then forwarded, then forwarded again. Youtube videos go viral and reach tens of millions of views. Ron Paul becomes the first presidential candidate in history to have his very own blimp. The PR stunt generates millions upon millions of dollars worth in free publicity, and captures the imagination of America.

Please join us in our goal to raise $350,000 to make and fly the first ever Presidential Blimp in history.

It might be the first ever Presidential Blimp, but it wouldn’t be the first blimp to get into politics:

Ron Paul | 3 Comments »

Whether you’re a turkey or a member of the Detroit Lions (or both), there are some for whom Thanksgiving is about facing up to a lost cause. In that spirit, I leave you with the inimitable Wonkette’s latest gambit in the War on Paultards. What to do when the war effort is flagging? Find a new general to save you. General Farr seems to fit the bill quite nicely.

We may never win the war on Paultards, but it won’t be for General Farr’s lack of trying.

The Right’s Field will probably be slow for the next few days, but we’ll have some great news on Monday. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and happy Thanksgiving. Even to you, lower-case matt.

Ron Paul | 3 Comments »

The Romney push-poll scandal continues to roil the right — and still nobody can figure out who, exactly, was behind the whole thing. Here’s a rundown of what’s happened so far this week:

Monday: NRO’s Matt Hemingway writes a piece examining the possibility that Romney’s campaign was indeed responsible for the calls. Hemingway finds that Western Wats, the company making the calls, has had ties (including, apparently, a common phone number) to Target Point, a consulting firm that Romney’s campaign employed to the tune of $720,000. He also expands on the story that Western Wats dialer Amanda Earnshaw had maxed out to Romney, reporting that three members of Earnshaw’s immediate family have also donated the maximum to Romney’s campaign. Hemingway interviews Republican operatives (including scumbag Roger Stone), who all find the notion of Romney push-polling himself perfectly plausible. Hemingway notes a number of possible mitigating factors: after all, Western Wats has a lot of employees who presumably donate to a variety of candidates, and a lot of campaigns have employed Target Point. Still, he says:

The Romney campaign, ultimately, has the power to clarify any misconceptions. If there is a relationship between the two firms, then [Target Point president] Alex Gage and Target Point should immediately clarify the extent and nature of the work that it has contracted out to Western Wats to end speculation and exonerate Romney.

The Romney campaign responds through NRO’s house Mitt sympathizer, Kathryn Lopez. A spokesperson denies that the Romney camp had anything to do with the calls. Meanwhile, Gage responds in a letter to NRO:

To set the record straight: TargetPoint Consulting has absolutely nothing to do with the calls in question. To be even clearer: TargetPoint Consulting has NEVER and will NEVER conduct a push-poll. TargetPoint is in the business of promoting Governor Romney, not manufacturing fantasy plots that involve smearing him.

NRO’s Jim Geraghty is unimpressed, even resorting to the C-word:

(more…)

Iowa, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney | 2 Comments »