The Fight for the Right

January 6, 2007 – 1:00 pm

I woke up and saw this article at the Christian Broadcasting Network (recall, Pat Robertson’s operation). They report that Jerry Zandstra, President of the Michigan Pro-life League and a member of Sam Brownback’s Exploratory Committee, attacked Romney for flip-flopping on taxes:

If this were the only flip in Gov. Romney’s budding candidacy, fiscal conservatives could attribute it to him seeing the light and, echoing Churchill, gaining a brain. Perhaps he has learned that new taxation only leads to a decline in jobs and the overall economy. But this is not Gov. Romney’s first flip nor is it likely to be his last in his run for the White House.

Also note that Brownback’s latest pro-life IA hire came out of the gate with an attack on Romney. And then I saw Duncan Hunter attack on Romney about needing all that money to look like a conservative:

Hunter said he wouldn’t need to raise that kind of money because "most of that money goes to pay for consultants that help them look like they are conservative and I am conservative already."

Gilmore has also gone after Romney.

Why is everyone piling on Romney? First, they probably detect a little blood and they are sharks. Second, Romney is positioning himself as the "winnable conservative". Romney will have more money than anyone else who is positioning himself on the right. Romney (and Democrats) will attack McCain because McCain is the front-runner. But everyone else in the field, with the exception of Giuliani, has to go through Romney for votes. No one is going to say, "I can’t support McCain, so I’m for Jim Gilmore." They might say, "Romney is not conservative enough for me, so I’m supporting Brownback." And that is what everyone else, especially Brownback.

In other words, McCain is convincing people he "right enough and right for today", while Romney is going to be occupied convincing people that he’s "righter than John McCain and everyone else, or at least good enough." And everyone else just has to do "righter than Romney."

Very hard for Romney. He has to thread this carefully.

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Brownback hires IA pro-life activist

January 4, 2007 – 1:48 pm

Update: TPM’s Election Central notes that Lehman’s statement included an attack against the other candidates and speculates that that means Mitt Romney more than anyone else.

Sam Brownback announced an important hire:

Republican presidential prospect Sen. Sam Brownback said today he has received the support of Kim Lehman, executive director of Iowa Right to Life.

Remember that the Iowa caucuses tend to be dominated by the activists. RTL is one of those groups. Krusty discussed this the other day as part of his discussion of Romney’s announcement:

Romney lacks a social konservative grassroots organizer on his Iowa Team. The problem for Romney is there is not an abundance of them in the state, so they are difficult to get. There are basically three of these people who carry significant weight with Iowa social konservatives: Marlys Popma, Steve Scheffler, and Chuck Laudner.

Popma signed on with McCain which has given heartburn to some social konservatives in the state. Scheffler was kourted hard by both McCain and Romney, but he refused their offers and will instead kontinue to run the Iowa Christian Alliance. Laudner is available but it seems that he is more interested in helping turn around the state party than working for a 08er. This is an area where Romney will have to be kreative and find someone with the right konnections to make inroads with Iowa’s social konservatives. Romney will have to aggressively kourt them if he wants to win the caucus.

Interesting. Brownback is working on a breakout in Iowa. As Chuck Todd said:

Thanks in part to the lack of attention on outgoing Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback’s bandwagon appears to be one worth jumping on for social conservatives. His schtick is tailor-made for the Iowa caucuses, and while it’s hard to imagine a scenario that puts Brownback on top in Iowa or New Hampshire, it’s fairly easy to see how he could become the surprising second- or third-place finisher in one of the two early states, guaranteeing him some role in the determination of who gets the nomination. Look for Brownback to be treated very kindly by all three GOP front-runners, because McCain, Romney and Giuliani will not want to alienate someone who could become a kingmaker.

Interesting.

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What does Romney’s problem mean for Brownback?

December 14, 2006 – 4:51 am

One reader has gotten sick of watching the Romney car-crash and asks:

Yea, I get it, Romney is toast. OK, I want to hear your thoughts on an alternative to the evangelicals, is it Brownback, Huckabee, or Gingrich? They each seem to have strengths.

And what about Tancredo?

I would make several points. First, I don’t think that Romney is toast. Ross Douthat has made one argument. In the end, Romney has three things going for him which will make him the most important #2 to McCain:

  • Romney may be able to raise as much or more money than McCain.
  • Romney will have all the talent he needs at all levels.
  • He is still the most credible anti-McCain because of 1 and 2.

Simply put, I don’t believe that anyone else can put together a 50-state operation, especially in Iowa, which is what it will take to challenge McCain. Although if Giuliani really cranks out the fundraising and makes more celebrity hires like Mike DuHaime, he might really begin to change my mind, especially with a highly compressed calendar.

A breach here has opened and Sam Brownback is doing everything in his power to fill it. I’ve heard that he’s been on the phone this week contacting leaders who are publicly and privately unhappy with Romney. Right now, conservatives and evangelicals, especially, are looking for a leader who is genuinely with them, not just someone they can rent.

But, in the end, Sam Brownback doesn’t become President, and I don’t think Brownback thinks he will be President. He thinks that either, he becomes VP or he becomes the public spokesman for the conservative Christian movement, in the same way that Pat Robertson’s 1988 race made him the public face. (as a side note, this would be quite a shift. The shift from Robertson to a guy who speaks at Call to Renewal would be dramatic for the evangelical movement)

However, I should note that the rise of a Brownback candidacy does not unite the Conservative Movement as a whole. Matt Lewis, from Human Events, points out that he does not have much to offer small government conservatives who are unhappy with Bush’s "Big Government Conserativism":

In recent years I have become very concerned with the new brand of "purpose driven," mega-government compassionate conservatives (of which Sen. Brownback seems to belong).

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New GOP entrants and the problems that they cause

December 8, 2006 – 2:37 pm

Hotline’s John Mercurio wrote an excellent article on the impact of Sam Brownback’s entrance into the Presidential race. The argument comes down to two points. First:

If he can prove he’s viable, Brownback could force both Romney and Giuliani to recalibrate White House strategies that rely heavily on courting conservative critics of McCain.

And second:

"It’s always struck me that Romney would not emerge as the candidate of the most conservative elements of the party," said Jim Guth, an expert in conservative GOP politics at Furman University in South Carolina. "If Brownback does become a threat on the right, [Romney’s] move has to be to edge toward the middle and carve out a very centrist constituency. He should make some hay out of the 2006 election and say he’s a new kind of candidate who can appeal to conservatives but work on issues, like health care, across the aisle."

If that happens, Romney’s statements like:

“Just like jihadists who are attacking us economically and militarily, just like the challenge we face competitively from Asia, our culture is under attack, only this time from within,” Romney said at a fundraiser for Republican congressional candidate Mike Whalen at Thunder Bay Grille in Davenport.

Hotline’s summary of his statements at an FRC conference:

Romney classified the clash over cultural values as a major crisis on par with the jihadist threat, the emergence of Asia as a super-power, the country’s over-dependence on oil and an overweening federal government.

May make it hard for Romney to pivot back to the middle. And it could become a flip from pro-life to pro-choice to pro-life to more concilliatory. This seems hard to sustain. And that is why the recent attacks on Romney by organization’s like Rightmarch (including their nationwide newspaper ad campaign).

In essence, Brownback is going to try to "pop" in Iowa, slamming Romney for flip-flopping on social conservative issues. After that and likely losses in NH, SC would be do or die, where his Mormonism could be very difficult. (an amusing question: who gets invited to speak at Bob Jones? McCain? The pro-gay, pro-choice Catholic, Giuliani? The Mormon? Or Brownback?)

It will be interesting to see how the fight for social conservatives play out. However, two of the biggest gets in Iowa are already gotten between McCain and Brownback.

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