Romney running scared? Playing expectation games

November 29, 2007 – 4:34 pm

The day after a debate in which Mitt Romney does …. not so well, it seems that there might be a concerted effort to lower expectations. Jen Rubin had been noticing it for a while.

It seems that that strategy now includes raising Mike Huckabee’s expectations too. But I was struck by the crassness with which Dean Barnett, Romney’s former driver and self-described "Romney shill", did precisely this:

So was this a seismic night? I’ll give that one a big yes. Tonight heralded the arrival of Mike Huckabee as a force in this race. Not a spoiler, not a wildcard, but a force. Huckamania is still running wild. …

Not say, when he actually tied Romney in Iowa polling?

A personal note to all my sophisticated East Coast friends: Don’t wait for the Christmas rush - stop underestimating Huckabee now. Unless the other guys can be a lot more effective at landing some leather on him than they were last night, he may win Iowa by 20 points.

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Huckabee, affluents, and the future of the GOP

November 26, 2007 – 5:16 pm

Seemingly every day, there is a new piece by a high-profile Republican/conservative attacking Mike Huckabee for being some sort of "big government" conservative or even liberal. Today, it was Bob Novak. I’m not going to quibble on the points, although I would point out that in Northern Virginia, where I sit, raising taxes to fund education and roads is pretty popular among Republicans and the local Chamber of Commerce.

Is Mike Huckabee going to be President? No. Does he represent something about the future of the GOP? I think so. Recall what David Brooks said about George Bush and his compassionate conservative agenda:

while some Republicans argue that big government conservatism started under George W. Bush and that the G.O.P. was in decent shape until Bush ruined it, this is a total myth. In fact, it was Bush in 1999 who single-handedly (though temporarily) rescued the Republican Party. He did it not by courting Republican interest groups, but by coming up with something new. On July 22, he delivered a speech in Indianapolis in which he explicitly distanced himself from Washington Republicans and laid the groundwork for compassionate conservatism.

The point here was that Bush could pick up working class voters. It is now a truism that he succeeded in spades here. The Bush-Rove plan for domination was to split Hispanics and African-American voting blocs, with immigration reform and religious outreach, respectively. Note that this is a rehash of what the Reagan campaign tried in 1980. (How many WASPs were on Reagan’s Connecticut Committee in 1980?) The possibility of success was demonstrated by "Angela Williams" in John Harwood’s recent WSJ piece on the changing demographics of party identification.

Patrick Ruffini sees a slightly different side to this:

Bush’s message was at least coherent. It was a savvy tactical response to Republicans constantly getting cut up by the rhetorical meatgrinder of the Clinton presidency. In time, people would come to appreciate the President’s plainspoken and direct approach to politics, in contrast to Clinton’s prevarication. And he was remarkably successful at doing what he set out to do. Eight years later, no one thinks of the Republican Party as stingy Scrooges eager to starve grandma. …

What Bush did in domestic policy was redefine a wayward party by triangulating in a sort of Clinton-Blair “Third Way” mold.

As a comparative point, there was more going on than a Clinton-Blair phenomenon. The Anglosphere left all have no made the same jump. In Canada, the Liberals went center-right on economics. The Australian Labour Party just won an election by trying to blur economic issues. In some sense, with the collapse of global socialism and communism, all the parties have moved to the right. Also, as these societies have grown wealthier, the issue mix has changed.

Harwood’s piece illustrates the flip-side of the problem, and gets to our broader point. Where do we go for adding more votes? One option is to try to get back some of the affluents that Harwood describes us losing and yesterday’s Washington Times describes the Dems picking up.  As Ross Douthat points out, "[t]he socially-liberal upper-middle class is large and growing larger." However, I think he makes a compelling argument that these people are lost to us, ultimately:

[M]ost of the northeastern and West Coast suburbanites the GOP has lost aren’t just social liberals – they’ve become liberals, flat-out, as issues like crime and taxes have lost their salience and the Democratic Party has moved to the middle on economics.

Big business will suck up to Democrats. The hedge funds and private equity are getting all the love out of Chuck Schumer that they need. And, as David Ignatius points out, Hillary is no leftist, even though Hillary is no Bill. And, as Greg Mankiw pointed out, even the Rangel "Mother of all Tax Hikes" is no class-warfare dream.

So, I think, that the other option is to try to dig deeper into the working class. Huckabee’s overt populism is one approach. John McCain’s slightly more low-key populism, on economic issues, combined with a more rabid anti-Washington populism is another strategy and, perhaps, a more likely endpoint than Huckabee’s approach. However, Huckabee does open a window to that future.

In any case, I suspect that the continual attacks on Huckabee aren’t going to be so threatening. First, his voters probably don’t care. As Richard Land said about Duncan Hunter, "A lot of evangelicals are probably sympathetic to his protectionist arguments."  Second, his response that he spent money on school and roads can be pretty compelling to a bunch of Iowa farmers, if he manages to get his message out. And third, I wonder how many of the super-rich Club for Growthers are left? How many i-bankers participate in Iowa caucuses anyways?

Now, this has focused on Huckabee’s economic message. There is an interesting question about Huckabee’s message on moral issues. My gut is that Huckabee follows the breezes in the evangelical community.

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NRLC goes with Fred Thompson

November 12, 2007 – 4:00 pm

This is a shocker to me. Apparently tomorrow the National Right to Life Committee will endorse Fred Thompson. I have confirmation from a member of the committee. And, apparently, they are moving quickly to try to stop Rudy Giuliani.

There are several frames to look at this through:

  • What this means for the pro-life movement in the US.
  • The politics of the conservative movement.
  • The mechanics of implementing the endorsement

Last week, Fred Thompson appeared to have messed up pretty-badly with the pro-life movement. He came out in opposition to the Human Life Amendment. He didn’t score any of the big social conservative/religious right endorsements last week. But tomorrow, he gets NRLC. My understanding is that the internal debate revolved around (1) stopping Rudy and (2) whether Mike Huckabee was an acceptable endorsement either together or separately. My understanding is, additionally, that John McCain and Mitt Romney were deemed not acceptable because of their positions on stem cell research. But it is news in its own right that an anti-HLA candidate is NRLC material.

There are several very important things to realize about a NRLC endorsement: First, it comes with juice. They have money. They have bodies. They do mail. They do phones. They do election-day volunteers. They will electioneer, and they will electioneer to win. If they are endorsing Fred Thompson, it means that they actually intend him to win the nomination.

To win, they have a problem. Fred is in 3rd or 4th or 5th in Iowa. He is in single-digits in New Hampshire. NRLC is going to have to rip through a whole bunch of people above him. And, unlike most conservative, groups, they don’t just attack on their issue. In 2000, they attacked McCain over campaign finance, even though he was, arguably, more pro-life than George Bush.

It has been conventional wisdom for a while that Romney and Thompson are fighting over the same voters. You can expect the mailboxes and phones of those voters to light up with detailed explanations of why Mitt Romney is not the right man to be president, or at least our nominee. From a very credible outside group. I have long asked who is actually going to attack Romney. We have our answer. In the end, this will move numbers.

On a deeper level, though, one wonders if this is a split in the conservative movement. With so many people going so many different ways, a shatter seems inevitable. There are a number of endorsements left, but you almost wonder if this is a direct challenge to James Dobson. Does Dobson dare to come out now, challenging NRLC and setting up a deep split? After all, Dobson actually can move votes and money, as can NRLC. But if the ultimate goal is to stop Rudy, then perhaps they need, at least, implicit agreement.

The other question is what happens if Romney really fights for this turf. Can he undermine the interest groups? Can he go back to his pragmatic self after his strange rightward lurch.

How this plays out will be interesting.

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Huckabee consolidates the religious right

November 11, 2007 – 4:33 pm

This morning on Tucker, Charmaine Yoest said, approximately:

People are talking about endorsements from the Christian movement. and if they are not reporting at all that Don Wildeman, the founder of the American Family Association, a heavyweight on the Christian right that he came out this week for Huckabee. and people are not talking about that.

Well. Let me talk about it and put it in some context. Wildeman is also the founder and leader of the Arlington Group. A phenomenal get. But not the only one.

Friday, a bunch of Southern Baptist leaders endorsed Mike Huckabee. Now, Huckabee is a Southern Baptist pastor, so this might not seem surprising, but Huckabee is on the moderate side of the SBC world. As one friend put it, "this is the SBC version of Brad Smith endorsing John McCain." This is about people who have historical grievances with Huckabee lining up behind him.

And who is this Yoest person praising Huckabee and telling people about his great get? She is the communications director for the Family Research Council, the advocacy arm of the James Dobson media empire.

Oh yeah. And the American Spectator and Jonathan Martin are reporting that Dobson is going to endorse Huckabee. And one of his communications underlings is praising Huckabee. And independent sources at FRC confirmed the story to me, but say that the Mitt Romney supporters at FRC are fighting it. Indeed, Paul Weyrich and some others are denying it.

That sounds like a consolidation of the religious right in a way that could be worth a good 5-10% in places like Iowa and South Carolina. And in Iowa, Huckabee is in 2nd, and this kind of thing could include votes coming out of Romney’s hide.  In South Carolina, it is less clear, but it seems likely that it would come out of the hides of both Romney and Fred Thompson.

Earlier on, I said that it seemed that the religious right had dated Mitt Romney, but decided to marry Fred Thompson. It appears that I spoke to soon. It seems that Fred might have jilted them at the altar, and they found a new person.

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Christian right endorsements flow

November 7, 2007 – 9:04 pm

It has been a pretty remarkable two days in terms of endorsements:

Where is the Fred Thompson endorsement?

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How anti-tax are IA GOP caucus goers?

October 30, 2007 – 3:04 pm

I am curious. If, as David Yepsen notes, Mike Huckabee is doing well in Iowa, it might be because Iowa caucus-goers are relatively strange. We already know that Iowa GOP caucus-goers are much more anti-war than the national party. We also know that Iowa caucus-goers are more religious than the national primary electorate.

I number of people, including Richard Land, have noted that less conservative positions on economic issues, especially trade, could play well with religious voters. He said this in the context of Duncan Hunter a long time ago, but it could equally apply to Huckabee.

Huckabee clearly has winning contrasts on social issues with Mitt Romney. (and now there is an incentive for the big money candidates to make the contrast… A Huckabee win probably devastates Romney.) And Romney’s foreign policy credentials are no better than Huckabee’s. And if taxes don’t really matter… It would be hard to see how Yepsen wouldn’t be right.

Any good polling information on taxes or the priorities of Iowa caucus-goers?

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What coulda been

October 22, 2007 – 2:36 pm

Justin Hart of Race42008 wrote a post that is 95% correct. He said:

You don’t try to win straw polls as proof of your national success among a group of voters. You don’t try to win straw polls as proof of momentum. You don’t try to win straw polls as solid proof of your chances at victory.

You DO try to win straw polls to gain free press to accomplish all three of the above. In other words: straw polls are a means to an end and not the end itself.

One of the lessons that I learned early on in my political career, was that the vote was the 2nd most interesting thing that happens at a political event like a convention. There is always horse-trading before, but there is also horse-trading afterwards. People frame, spin, and negotiate what happened. And that is the most interesting thing. I speculated:

When the social conservative leaders meet tomorrow for their post-mortem, they will not be able to push people into supporting Romney.

At this point, I think that people like Tony Perkins want to get behind Mitt Romney. I have no doubt in my mind. He tried and tried and tried to spin the straw poll results to be more positive for Romney. But they don’t know if they can get away with it. Why? Look what is happening to Bob Jones:

The Bob Jones University family has never followed Bob Jones III in lockstep fashion, school officials will tell you.

But Jones’ surprise endorsement of Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential primary has sparked a sharp division of opinion in this stronghold of Christian fundamentalism.

Within an hour of the story hitting the Internet on Greenville-Online.com last Tuesday, e-mails and chat began to come in from BJU people who felt "Dr. Bob" had abandoned his religious principles in the name of political pragmatism by supporting a Mormon.

Is this bigotry? Sure. Is it real? That too. Is it excusable? Nope, but it is still real. (I remember my grandpa, a life-long pastor in small, rural, evangelical churches, telling me, in his 70s, that he was surprised to find out recently that Catholics could be — not "are", but "could be" — Christians) I am still convinced that some of the language that Mike Huckabee used on Saturday was pointed directly at this problem. And he hit it dead on.

Erick, over at Redstate, concurs with my instinct that this is what was going to happen:

Second, I’m told that people in the room tabulating the votes were stunned by Huckabee’s showing. Stunned, for some of them, is an understatement. It seems clear to me that this was an opportunity for the leaders of the social conservative movement to sigh, shrug, and embrace Romney. They intended to. …

Now, you can call me partisan or biased or whatever you want, but all I’m doing here is reporting. The leaders of the social conservative movement who were present, the Arlington Group members you hear so much about, were ready and willing to get on board Romney’s campaign on Saturday morning. Then Huckabee spoke. Then the straw vote was tabulated. Then they realized that were they to do so, it would put them completely out of step with their members.

(Incidentally, you should read the rest of Erick’s post. It is about the shake up to the party that a Mike Huckabee nomination would create. I don’t think I really disagree)

The upshot is that Mitt Romney went into the weekend and got a great success. The headlines were phenomenal for him, although the stories were more mixed. But he wanted more. And the interest group leaders were prepared to deliver. But Huckabee’s stellar performance illustrated the disconnect between the interest group leaders and the members.

And that disconnect left a continued split in the social conservative groups. And a slightly less bumpy road for Rudy Guiliani.

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Huckabee at FRC

October 20, 2007 – 11:49 am

Mike Huckabee has a great crowd here. Certainly a much stronger reception at the beginning than either Romney or Giuliani. Way bigger.

Starts with jokes about the baby boomers collecting social security. "If you that’s bad economic news, just wait until you hear about all the old graying hippies getting free drugs."

The meat of this is about what is non-negotiable to the room. "What is non-negotiable when we got to vote." … And he is getting some "Amen"s.

  • The value of freedom
  • The value of family
  • The value of faith

His immigration talk gets a standing ovation… Strange. "No to amnesty, and no to sanctuary cities. … I blame our government for sitting on his hands." Of course, he doesn’t really believe this. I am disappointed that Christians get so excited about this issue.

There is way more energy in this room than there was for anyone else I’ve seen.

Big applause lines:

  • Companies moving to China.
  • "Stop the muzzling of ministers who are told they can’t say things by the IRS." (the room explodes)
  • He has a big applause line about international law.
  • "we shouldn’t move God’s standards to meet the cultural norms, but move the cultural norms to meet God’s standards."

But then, he gets less applause on some real red meat:

  • Tired of hearing about "people not being willing to rewrite the constitution, but they are willing to rewrite the word of God." 
  • he went on to abortion. And, again, people were enthusiastic, but it was different.

I am hearing more applause on the "faith under siege" narrative than the issues. If that is the case, Mitt Romney is in profound trouble.

And then he goes full bore into the other candidates:

  • "It is important that people sing from the hearts and don’t merely lip-sync. It is important that people speak the language of Zion, not merely as a second language." (is this anti-Romney?)
  • "Never sacrifice our principles for anyone’s politics. Not now. Not ever." (Not so much applause for that)
  • "Most of you grew up like me, tutored in Sunday school. I haven’t outgrown that. Not any of it. Better to be with David than Goliath… Better to be Elijah … than it was to be 800 prophets of Baal…" (is this Baal language anti-Romney?)
  • "There was never an end to the supply of what God could do, if the people have faith."
  • "I don’t want ever for us let expediency or electability replace our values." … And the crowd goes wild…
  • "I sign here to have a little seat at the table and tossed the King’s crumbs every once in a while."
  • "It is time for those of us who call ourselves values voters to pledge our lives, our family, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to that which is true, right, and eternal."

And the crowd goes wild again.

Does this stuff work? It might work here. Does it win the straw poll? Does he have the organization?

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Why the religious right hasn’t found a candidate

October 13, 2007 – 9:54 am

A number of people have asked me why I think that the religious right hasn’t found a candidate. The supposition is that if the religious right came around and supported someone like Mike Huckabee or Sam Brownback, they could be the nominee. Here is my attempt to answer that question.

First, the process starts with natural selection. Only very recently has there been a solid case for Huckabee being the obvious candidate of the religious right. In Q1 and Q2 Brownback outraised Huckabee and was about tied in the polls. Until Ames, the argument for preferring Huckabee was hard to ground in solid facts. (Now it is a lot easier)

Second, I think that there is a degree of sectarianism. This has been at its most explicit in the whole absurd media debate about Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. But really. Nearly everyone I know who is a strong Huckabee advocate is an evangelical Christian. Nearly everyone I know who is a strong Brownback advocate is a conservative Catholic. It was a great feat of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition to get these people working together. If the leaders were to intervene in this fight, then they might threaten the foundation of their coalition. Furthermore, Brownback could have argued, Catholics are a swing vote, while Baptists are not. Many swing states are also Catholic states. (Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc.) Not so far Baptists. (Note that JFK’s campaign viewed their candidate’s Catholicism as an asset in a general election. In a deep sense, being able to win a primary in a Baptist state, the example was West Virginia, was when the deluge broke in the 1960 Democratic primary) In other words, Brownback could have argued that picking him would expand the size of the coalition.

Third, the leaders of the movement have a clear hierarchy of preferences:

  1. Support the candidate who wins the White House. Call this the George W. Bush case. Might be the Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney case.
  2. Support the candidate who wins the primary but loses the general. Call this the Hillary Clinton case or the Mike Huckabee case. It may also be the Thompson or Mitt Romney case also.
  3. Oppose the candidate who wins the primary, but then be forced to support the candidate in the general. (But probably get no love from the White House if the candidate wins) Call this the John McCain case.
  4. Oppose the (GOP) candidate in the primary and the general who wins the White House. Call this the Rudy Giuliani case.

Clearly the last two are unacceptable to any interest group leader. They simply lose access when, eventually, their followers will, to some extent, rally around whoever is in the White House. The leader is marginalized over time.

The other two cases are the interesting parts. I don’t know anyone who thinks that Brownback and Huckabee could really win a general election, although that is shifting for Huckabee to some extent. Huckabee would face his own problems; in some sense, Mike Huckabee is to the Club for Growth what Rudy Giuliani is to James Dobson. So conservative Christian leaders are sitting down and asking themselves:

  1. Can Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney win the nomination?
  2. Can they win the general?

If the answer to (2) is "no", then the right strategy is to back whoever allows them to build the strongest organization. Perhaps you could call this the Bob Dole strategy? But if the answer to (2) is "yes", then they have to figure out which pony to pick, or, at least, which pony not to kill. And, again, there are reasons, in both candidates, for the followers not to follow. In the case of Mitt Romney, it is his religion. (note that I am not defending that, just saying that it is a reality) Increasingly, Fred Thompson has disappointed religious right leaders on gay marriage. And these are echoes of a past that is even more problematic for them.

So you get a hodgepodge. Some people pick the purists. These people seem to be state level family group type of people. Some people make compromises. For example, yesterday Gary Bauer endorsed Fred Thompson. (not the first time that Bauer has done this. He also endorsed McCain in 2000) A friend on the religious left but political center talked to Richard Land the other day about Thompson, and Land was not so happy with his earlier statements of such strong support. Others, like Lou Sheldon, pick Romney. (although, again, the word on the street is that Sheldon is getting some money. To quote a friend of Sheldon, "Lou doesn’t do anything if money isn’t involved.")

So, back to the original question. There are interest-group internal reasons for not picking a candidate. There are also questions of how the interest groups maintain power. These combine to make it very, very hard on interest group leaders. That’s just politics.

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Huckabee against the robber barrons?

October 10, 2007 – 10:31 am

Last night, I was really struck by Mike Huckabee’s language on economics. Let’s go to the transcript for a moment:

Mr. Huckabee: The real fact is, unions are going to take a more prominent role in the future for one simple reason: A lot of American workers are finding that their wages continue to get strapped lower and lower while CEO salaries are higher and higher.

And the reality is that when you have the average CEO salary 500 times the average worker, and you have the hedge fund manager making 2,200 times that of the average worker, you’re going to create a level of discontent that’s going to create a huge appetite for unions.

So unions are the natural result of workers finally saying, "Look, I can’t go from a $70,000 year job to a $15,000 a year job and feed my family of four." That’s when unions are going to come back in roaring form.

Does Mike Huckabee think that the financial services industry is today’s robber barrons? Is he right? Certainly in a post-industrial economy, there’s an analogy between railroads and financial services, even if it is somewhat strained.

I contrast this with John Edwards. He targets the rich. Huckabee may be targeting Wall Street. That’s a difference. Perhaps an important one. What would Huckabee have to say about the housing crisis?

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