Rudy, the GOP, and Spending: The Binge-and-Purge Mentality

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

The notion that the GOP lost in 2006 because of spending is absurd. It's not just absurd; it's verging on insane. While it may be true that ridiculous earmarks like Don Young's "bridge to nowhere" helped contribute to the general air of corruption surrounding the Republican party, spending per se had nothing to do with the GOP's midterm defeat.

But, for reasons I'll get to in a minute, Republicans themselves like very much to tell themselves that the defeat had everything to do with spending. And Rudy Giuliani is indulging them. He may actually believe what he's saying -- when it comes to economics, Giuliani believes in a lot of very silly things, like the notion that cutting taxes always leads to an increase in tax revenue. Or he may simply be saying it to curry favor with the Club for Growth crowd (if so, it's working). In either case, Rudy insists that he's the only one who can restore the GOP's mythical fiscal discipline. Again, this assertion is logically incompatible with his embrace of supply-side ideas. But neither is it supported by his record as mayor of NYC.

While Giuliani likes to take credit for "23 tax cuts" during his time at City Hall, FactCheck.org has documented that the truth is quite different:

A new radio ad boasts that Rudy Giuliani "cut or eliminated 23 taxes" while mayor of New York City, a boast he and his supporters have repeated many times on the campaign trail. We find that to be an overstatement. Giuliani can properly claim credit for initiating only 14 of those cuts.

In fact, he strongly opposed one of the largest cuts for which he claims credit, reversing himself only after a five-month standoff with the city council. In addition, the ad's claim that Giuliani turned the budget deficit he inherited into a surplus, while true enough, ignores the fact that he also left a multibillion-dollar deficit for his successor, not including costs associated with 9/11.

As CNBC reports:

[A] closer look at the numbers show he's claiming credit for some tax cuts that weren't his idea to begin with. And others that he actively opposed.

For instance, seven tax cuts that he says were his were actually initiated by New York State. Giuliani may have supported the measures, but they were never floated by his office. That's according to the Independent Budget Office, a publicly funded watchdog group.

Then there's the granddaddy of New York tax cuts -- the ending of a 12.5% surcharge on personal income tax. Giuliani cites it as his No. 1 achievement on taxes -- and he did initially propose it, but then later dropped his support for the measure, even fighting it before finally giving in to the city council. It was the largest New York City tax cut in history.

Of course, even if we do give Giuliani credit as a tax-cutter, that has little to do with fiscal discipline, while that multibillion dollar deficit is a good indicator of his lack of it.

In an era where Republican politicians have gone over to the supply side en masse, does it even make sense to associate the GOP with "fiscal discipline" anymore? Giuliani's right about the breakdown in that reputation, but for entirely the wrong reasons.

Ultimately all this conservative self-flagellation over spending serves a particular purpose -- by a strange kind of alchemy, it transforms the GOP's well-earned reputation for corruption into a reaffirmation of conservative principle. Spending itself becomes corruption. The answer to government corruption, we're told, is to cut government spending. Personally, if there's a party that can't tell the difference between government and corruption, I don't want that party in government.

The modern Republican party has a very strange relationship to spending. It's almost like an eating disorder -- the party binges on wars, tax cuts, pork, and ill-conceived efforts to win voters away from the Democrats on issues like Medicare. Then it rhetorically purges, denouncing universal health care as "socialism" and promising to drown its own ugly governing body in the bathtub. It all seems very unhealthy to me.

Labels: 2008, Presidential election, Rudy Giuliani, supply-side

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:47 AM 0 comments

  Dobson's Choice

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

First things first: can we please stop referring to the Council for National Policy as "secretive"? The CNP is the most publicity-seeking "secret" organization on the planet. It's made up of prima-donna religious right leaders who enjoy their public positions of political influence; if it were truly clandestine it wouldn't be alerting the national media every time it has a significant meeting.

So the CNP is considering backing a third party candidate if Rudy Giuliani wins the nomination. Again, it's no secret that the group has been casting around for candidates for some time now: back in February, for instance, it was deliberating over whether to throw its support behind a Christian conservative in the GOP primary -- Huckabee, or Brownback, or South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. Christian Right heavyweight Paul Weyrich described the Council as "split 50-50" over whether to unite behind a second-tier candidate, or to just split up according to individual dictates of conscience and calculation. The discussions ended without consensus, and the CNP's main movers have mostly sat out the primary race since then, which should tell us something about how much all this talk really means.

The problem was with the notion of backing a horse that couldn't win. And if the Council wasn't willing to support a second tier candidate in the primary, why would it be willing to take the much longer odds of organizing behind a third party candidate in the general?

There's no denying the seriousness of the dilemma facing Christian conservatives. Their influence within the GOP is fading fast; they've never been much more than cheap foot soldiers to a party run by a business lobby with little interest in social issues either way. If they allow the Republicans to nominate a pro-choice candidate, and fail to challenge the decision, they stand to lose much of what remains of their political credibility. But at the same time, they hardly seem to be spoiling for a fight. It's true that they could throw the election to the Democrats by winning only a couple of percentage points next November. But what will that win them? Do they really want proof that all they can draw is a couple points? It could make them look every bit as marginal as Ralph Nader.

This is indeed a dangerous moment for the Republican party. It seems that the party is calculating that its mass support, once built on the backs of the anti-abortion movement, can now be drawn from the legend of perpetual war. Over the long run, I suspect that's not likely to be a winning strategy. But in the very short term, understand that, for the "secretive" CNP, the decision to support a third-party candidacy will not come easily, and it very well might not come at all.

Labels: 2008, Council for National Policy, fundamentalists, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:38 AM 2 comments

  Details Aren't the Devil

Cross-posted at Alien The Right's Field.

Democratic candidates offer a wealth of ideas, explained in rich detail. Republicans offer a few vague platitudes and promise to get back to us after the election.

Steve Benen says that, infuriating as it may be, the Republican approach may be savvier:

I’m not sure Republicans are wrong about this. When a GOP candidates says, “Vote for me — and I’ll work out the details later,” I’d love for there to be consequences. There never are. In 2000, Bush’s vague and ambiguous tax plan didn’t make any sense. Al Gore tried to make it a campaign issue, but the media ignored it and voters didn’t care. In 2004, Bush said more than once that he could privatize Social Security without raising taxes, raising the deficit, cutting benefits, or raising the retirement age. How did he propose to pull that off? He didn’t — he just mentioned ideas and goals without any details. There were no political consequences.

In fact, American voters don’t seem to care all that much about the details in advance. A candidate talks about what he or she finds important, and how he or she would approach the issue if elected. Voters either agree or disagree. If a candidate were to make some kind of outlandish campaign promise — free ice cream for everyone, every day, for four years — there would probably be a higher expectation to explain how that might work, but a more general policy prescription needs a lot fewer support materials.

One of the neat tricks Republicans managed to pull off during much of the past decade or two was to earn a reputation as both the party of principles and the party of ideas. Logically, those two things may be connected, but as Benen's analysis suggests, in a practical sense it can be difficult to wear both hats at the same time. When you spend a lot of time on wonky policy details, it can be hard to express basic foundational principles in a clear way. At the same time, when all you talk about are principles, your rhetoric can be so divorced from reality that it becomes meaningless.

This is just an impression, but I think that Republicans, having achieved a reasonable sense of balance between principles and ideas for quite some time, are tilting over into meaningless abstractness at this point. Much of this has to do with the exhaustion of the Goldwater conservative movement, which seems finally to have reached its Waterloo in the era of Bush the Lesser. Movement conservative ideas simply came to their logical and practical limits -- if the ideas worked, Bush would have implemented them successfully. They didn't and he couldn't, and all the rest of what conservatives say about it is just excuse-making. Does anybody really think there's a future in social security privatization or "health savings accounts"? Honestly?

Bush knew that conservatives couldn't simply slash away the social insurance state, but the price of a politically-feasible transition was too much for the right's ideology to bear -- as the Part D debacle proved. And that was just a preview of the costs that would be associated with any privatization of social security. There just isn't any way to remake America along Goldwater-conservative ideological lines. You can't go back again. There are new, young conservatives out there with some interesting (if embryonic) ideas of their own, but they aren't influential enough yet to have much impact on the presidential race, so what we're left with is a field of candidates repeating the rhetoric of conservative years past, even as that rhetoric has lost its relevance to the details of governance.

Republicans are usually the party that attracts those who crave transcendence and the appeal of pure ideology. Democrats are usually the party of pragmatism, ideological muddle, and practical government. There's nothing wrong with that basic dichotomy. A party gains an advantage when it is able to reach beyond its basic mode and do a little bit of what its opponent can do -- a strong GOP has at least some good, wonky ideas, and a strong Democratic party has at least some ability to appeal to the voters' civic-spiritual side.

My point is that Benen may be right, but he's thinking of a Republican party that was able to achieve that balance more effectively. Even just in the past couple of years it has lost the balance. Both its domestic agenda and its foreign-policy credibility have come undone. I'd like Democrats to talk about principles more, but let's let them be the party of details, too. In the end, details do matter.

Labels: 2008, Democrats, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:35 AM 233 comments

  GOP Frontrunners Snubbing Minorities Again

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

MyDD's Melissa Ryan wrote about this yesterday: Giuliani, Romney, and McCain have all turned down invitations to participate in Tavis Smiley's All American Presidential Forum on September 27. She cites Jack and Jill Politics:

Tavis did a 'Shout out' to his fellow Black Republicans, asking them why they were so silent on this matter. They keep on yapping that the GOP is a valid alternative for Black America, yet, when a nationally televised forum is put together so that GOP Candidates can present what they believe are GOP answers to concerns of the Black community, three of their Major Candidates don't even bother to respect Black Americans with their presence.

Melissa adds:

I don't know about you but I'm begining to get the impression that much of the Republican field just doesn't care for debates and forums. If it's not a choreographed staging of tightly scripted interactions with supporters enthusiastically waving campaign paraphernalia they're just not interested.

I agree, and it certainly has something to do with why the GOP candidates have been so leery of the YouTube debate. But the snub to nonwhite voters is worthy of notice over and above any general reluctance to debate. As president, George W. Bush has done little but damage to minority interests. But as a politician, he has been unusually keen -- for a Republican -- to win minority support (no, it doesn't add up, but that's par for his incompetent course). Right from the 2000 campaign, Bush and his advisors have made it a point to reach out symbolically to African-American and Hispanic voters (who can forget the demographics onstage during the RNC in Philly?), while his surrogates in the conservative movement work to convince their compatriots of the importance of gaining votes among those constituencies. Such efforts were not fueled by the Bushies' personal hunger to improve race relations, but by cold hard electoral math.

But so far in this 2008 cycle the GOP has presented nonwhite voters not with a friendly face, but with a series of cold shoulders. While it's clear to anyone who keeps up with intra-conservative debate that any candidate hoping to win the nomination will have to distance himself from a good number of Bush's perceived sins against the right -- not least of them his embrace of so-called "big-government conservatism" -- it's remarkable to think that the effort to expand the GOP beyond its white Christian base may be considered one of those sins. Perhaps it's because, in the end, the administration's effort failed. But that doesn't change the math. Bush tried and failed. The current Republican contenders aren't even going to try.

Labels: 2008, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:45 AM 2 comments

  Being Fred Thompson

Hoover Institution fellow and former Reagan advisor Richard Allen has a rambling endorsement of Fred Thompson at the National Review. The point of the piece is to validate the Thompson-as-Reagan idea, but it mainly consists of nostalgic anecdotes about the political genius of the Gipper. Allen says little of substance about Thompson (despite mentioning that he's known him "for many years"), and the whole thing comes off as illustrative of precisely the mindset Thompson must be counting on among conservatives: a willingness to suspend disbelief, fueled by ever-fuzzier and ever-fonder memories of That Other Actor.

Says Allen:

It is undoubtedly too early to attribute the same comprehensive and plain-spoken vision to Fred Thompson, although his out-of-the gates speeches and remarks are very reminiscent of Reagan. But if they are there in Thompson they will reveal themselves; the Reagan qualities cannot be feigned or sustained for very long. Deep conviction will always be apparent as a campaign wears on, and the scarcity of it thus far in the wildly early presidential race has been conspicuous by its absence.

I've talked about the performativity of modern conservatism a great deal, but what's particularly interesting is how that acting is linked to a sense of conviction. The latter is seen as superior to knowledge, experience, discretion, or skepticism; it's a quality to be treasured in a leader and emulated in practice. But because it trumps knowledge, experience, discretion, and skepticism, because it triumphs over them, conservative conviction ends up being fixed to nothing, really, beyond a self-referential concept of abstract principles. I believe in individual freedom; the meaning and consequences of that statement of belief have nothing to do with testable results and everything to do with how well I project my conviction in that belief.

That's why, when we talk about conservative performativity, about conservatives as actors, it doesn't mean we're calling them phonies (except for those, like Mitt Romney, who really are phonies). They genuinely believe in their act, and they act to maintain their belief in their beliefs.

I know this is both abstract and probably well across the line into pop psychology. But I think it also has a lot to do with why Fred Thompson, despite his dismal resume and his disorganized campaign, has such purchase on the conservative imagination.

Labels: 2008, Fred Thompson, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:50 PM 39 comments

  Huckabee Would Abolish Birthright Citizenship

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

Soren Dayton observes that Mike Huckabee seems to have flip-flopped on immigration. Whereas at one time Huckabee endorsed comprehensive immigration reform and said that opposition to such reform was "driven by just sheer racism," now he has indicated that he would abolish a core American principle: birthright citizenship:

" ‘I would support changing that. I think there is reason to revisit that, just because a person, through sheer chance of geography, happened to be physically here at the point of birth, doesn’t necessarily constitute citizenship,’ he said. ‘I think that’s a very reasonable thing to do, to revisit that.’ "

This is a naked appeal to the sheer racism of the kind of people who rant about "anchor babies," and while Huckabee may see an immediate political advantage in it -- as Dayton notes, it's just the kind of thing that'll help him pull in the Paul/Tancredo crowd -- it undermines his core utility to the GOP.

The reason I've long considered Huckabee so dangerous to Democrats, besides his personal charm and speaking skills, is that his politics represent the best chance for Republicans to rebuild an enduring majority coalition. As a Baptist minister who speaks the social justice language of the emerging constituency of liberal and moderate evangelicals, he's in a position to secure and expand the evangelical vote for Republicans just when the party is in danger of losing its advantage there. And his "Main Street over Wall Street" rhetoric, combined with his defense of government and his willingness to talk (somewhat) honestly about taxes (FairTax aside), is perfectly in tune with the American mainstream, who remain uninterested in the fiscal conservative orthodoxy to which most Republican candidates feel they have to chain themselves. If Barack Obama is trying to run to the center and move it left, Mike Huckabee is trying to run to the center and move it right.

But if Huckabee is going to violate his own religious beliefs and sell himself out to the nativist crowd, he risks surrendering all these advantages. Anti-immigrationism, as intoxicating as Republicans find it, is the route to a long-term GOP minority, not a majority. Maybe Huckabee is eager to consolidate whatever gains he achieved in Ames by going after cheap support. But that support will come at a dear long-term cost for Huckabee and his party.

Labels: 2008, immigration, Mike Huckabee, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:36 AM 0 comments

  Aping the Surrender Monkeys?

MyDD's Todd Beeton examines whether it will be possible for any Republican to run as a "change candidate" this cycle, noting that many in the beleagured party of George W. Bush have been looking to French President Nicolas Sarkozy as an example of how to do it. As Todd points out, it's Newt Gingrich -- framing expert, nutty futurist, and current "none of the above" candidate -- who seems most fixated on le chemin Sarkozien:

So Sarkozy comes along and he's brilliant and he understands that [the French] are in a crisis of their culture. And he's in, in terms of the current politics of where we are in Washington, he is in the second term of a 12-year presidency, which has been decaying. Chirac was unpopular. So if you set up the normal political science equation, the left is going to win because after 12 years of the center right they've run out of energy and he manages to put together this magic formula of arguing that the greatness of France requires real change. So even though he is in Chirac's cabinet, he is the candidate of real change and Royale is the candidate of reactionary bureaucracy.

Speaking Tuesday at the National Press Club, Gingrich elaborated on what Sarkozian strategy might mean for the GOP:

Sarkozy, he said, did two important things.

First, Sarkozy established 16 Internet channels that were like YouTube and rigorously avoided trying to communicate through the French media, which Gingrich defined as hostile to conservatives.

"What (Sarkozy) said is, 'If I can communicate with you, then the news media can watch our conversation,' which is very different than having a conversation with the news media which (average people) watch," Gingrich said.

"The second thing is he made a very important speech where he said we must have a clean break" from Chirac, Gingrich said. "And I would say to (Republican) candidates, there is a lot of parallel there."

Gingrich used education as an example, asserting Republicans can win by advocating bold changes and framing failing schools as economic and national security issues. Gingrich said Democrats are too beholden to teachers' unions to match that argument.

Gringrich also spoke about the threat of economic competition from China and India, particularly in light of lagging American education standards, the usual terrorist stuff, and the evils of "government bureacracy."

A couple of points:

1) Gringrich's Sarkozian strategy seems to involve perpetuating the conservative impulse toward counterculture. Why do Republicans need to circumvent the media through internet channels? Don't they have Fox News? AM Radio? Over the past few decades, conservatives have built an entire parallel communications apparatus, one they use to talk amongst themselves while studiously ingoring the experiences and opinions of the American mainstream. This looks like little more than a Gingrichian pseudo-futurist twist on traditional conservative paranoia.

2) The United States, it turns out, is not France. The structural problems we face are nothing like those facing the French. There's an argument to be had over whether France needs a dose of Thatcherism; Sarkozy's election should be understood in that context -- this is the France of the 35-hour work week, powerful unions, and rather astonishing job security laws. The problems in the United States are entirely the opposite -- after decades of conservative ascendancy, our public investment and social insurance fall woefully short, leaving both our physical and social infrastructure crumbling. After Katrina, how can anyone credibly make the argument that the US needs more Thatcherism, more conservative economics? Conservatives want to use their own failures in government to discredit the notion of government itself; the only "change" they represent is an accelerated degradation of the ability of government to do what Americans expect it to do.

In the end, as always, Gingrich's rhetoric is mostly for show. He dresses up old conservative hobbyhorses as something fresh and futurist, but he offers nothing genuinely new or original. Much of what he says directly contradicts itself -- for instance, he raises the specter of economic and educational competition from China and India, only to use it as an opportunity to launch into yet another denunciation of teachers and yet another argument for undermining the funding and accountability of our schools through vouchers and "school choice." This is astonishing -- he uses the rise of our competitors to insist on the very things that would further damage our competitiveness!

You can't blame Republicans for looking wistfully across the Atlantic to the country they so recently demonized. They understand how deeply unpopular they have become after a catastrophic era of conservative government, and naturally they look to the one example they can find of conservatives finding a way to win despite their own unpopularity. Unfortunately for the Republicans, though, the similarities are only superficial. Again, and as these same patriots were at such pains to remind us only a few short years ago, the United States of America is not France.

Labels: 2008, conservatives, Newt Gingrich, Nicolas Sarkozy, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:46 AM 0 comments

  So What's Happening Here?

What does it mean that Barack Obama is currently the third choice of Iowa Republican voters in the general election -- after Romney and Giuliani but before Thompson and McCain? What does it mean that, as the campaign goes on, abortion apostate Rudy Giuliani is losing strength not among conservative voters, but among Republican-leading independents?

Of course it's far too little data to draw any real conclusions. But for the sake of positing a theory, let's go back to the Fabrizio poll we discussed about a month ago. As you may recall, the poll described, among other things, the emergence of two very interesting constituencies within the GOP coalition: "Heartland Republicans" and "Government Knows Best Republicans." My capsule description:

The former, constituting 8% of the GOP electorate, are "more pragmatic and less ideological," worried about gas prices but supportive of government action on economic issues and climate change, and somewhat Midwestern. The latter group are 13% of the party, the "strongest supporters of government intervention to solve social and environmental problems," as well as being "skeptical of the Patriot Act" and of military spending generally, heavily female, and "more likely to be found on the coasts."

So here you have a good 21% of 2000 Republican voters with distinctly moderate -- we might even say progressive -- politics. And who, in the current crop of GOP presidential candidates, represents them? McCain has glued himself to Bush on the war. And Giuliani's standing with R-leaning independents has sunk precisely during the time in which he has run away from his previous reputation as a moderate and made a name for himself as one of the most belligerent, partisan candidates in the race.

There's at least a fifth of the Republican party up for grabs if the GOP's own candidates continue to amp up the partisanship and crowd each other on the right side of the spectrum. One data point -- that Iowa poll -- suggests that Barack Obama, with his "post-partisan" rhetoric, might be the Democrat best positioned to peel their support away from the GOP. But all the Democratic candidates might be well advised to take note of them. I'm not saying they should flee the Democratic base -- far from it. Rather the point is that candidates should be confident that in making the case for progressive values, they're actually taking the fight to the Republicans.

Labels: 2008, Democrats, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:25 PM 1 comments

  On Rudy Giuliani, Frontrunner

The latest NBC/WSJ poll suggests Rudy Giuliani has stablized a bit after losing support earlier in the summer; the results indicate that Giuliani has expanded his lead over Fred Thompson from 9 to 13% since June. Some of this may have to do with Thompson's own troubles, as the lobbyist/actor looks to be losing momentum in advance of his official declaration. There's plenty of time for the dynamics of the race to change, but meanwhile it's interesting to watch conservatives mull the implications of Giuliani's frontrunner status.

The cover story in the current Weekly Standard suggests that the reasons why conservatives haven't fully thought through the ramifications of a Rudy nomination are the same reasons why Republican voters have responded so well to the former mayor in polls: they're swept up in the assumption that Rudy is the best candidate both to claim the war-and-terror mantle, and to beat Hillary Clinton. But the article's author, Matthew Continetti, points out that such preoccupations may come with a price to the GOP coalition:

Giuliani doesn't talk about a new GOP. Indeed, he and his campaign go to great lengths to emphasize his similarities with the conservatives who make up the single largest Republican voting bloc. His policy initiatives and public statements are designed to assuage conservatives. He says he would not attempt to rewrite the Republican platform. Still, a Giuliani candidacy would alter the Republican party. For one, it would de-link the Republican presidential nominee from opposition to Roe v. Wade for the first time in decades. And it would divorce the Republican presidential nominee from much of the conservative movement for the first time since 2000.

This would be a considerable transformation. Pro-life voters compose a significant portion of the GOP's volunteer corps. There's a chance that they will sit out 2008 if the Republican candidate doesn't share their views on abortion. If that happened, writes the Republican political operative Soren Dayton, "the GOP, out of necessity, would need to recruit a whole new set of volunteers," shattering "the grip that social conservative activists have on the grassroots of the party." There's also a chance that fears of a Clinton restoration and the overall importance of the war on jihadism will subsume party differences over abortion. The conservative grassroots will remain more or less intact. But what if that's not the case? [...]

Many people, including most of his competitors for the Republican nomination, don't seem to have thought through the consequences of Giuliani's ascendance. They haven't arrived at a compelling argument for why his candidacy would be harmful. The only candidate really to go after Giuliani in the Republican debates was former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, and he recently dropped out of the race. Romney spends most of his time attacking McCain, and Kansas senator Sam Brownback spends most of his time attacking Romney.

Thomas Edsall, writing for the New Republic, has argued that Giuliani represents the future of the GOP -- a future that will only arrive after a fairly radical transformation of the coalition as we've come to know it over the past several decades. This gives rise to a number of questions. Are conservative movement elites ready for such a transformation, and are they willing to allow the party to detach itself from the movement they've built? Assuming that not all the elites view the question the same way, what is the relative strength of the different factions as they jostle for influence, and will the Giuliani campaign provide a focal point for a serious internal struggle within the movement? Is there a new conservative movement in the offing? Is a hybrid of war-and-terror nationalism and doctrinaire supply-side-ism really the best way forward for the GOP in the long run?

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

Labels: 2008, conservatives, Presidential election, Rudy Giuliani

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:37 AM 0 comments

  The Path to a Brokered Convention?

Gary Andres explains how it isn't just Democrats who are looking at a real possibility of winding up in a brokered convention next year. Republicans may find that none of their candidates will be able to take a majority of delegates into St. Paul, though for different reasons.

The wild cards in the GOP process are the "winner take all" primaries, used by Republicans in 20 states. Andres observes that Giuliani is well positioned to work around poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire by winning key early WTA states like Florida, California, New York, and New Jersey. Still, other frontrunners may be able to counter:

But Fred Thompson and Mr. Romney may also do well in other early WTA states like South Carolina, (47 delegates), Georgia (72 delegates), Missouri (52 delegates) and Tennessee (55 delegates), which all take place on or before February 5. And Mr. Romney's current lead in New Hampshire and Iowa could bode well for generating momentum going into the WTA primaries. This all has the makings of a topsy-turvy end-game.

A brokered GOP convention would be a fascinating exercise in testing the relative strengths of different parts of the conservative coalition. Is it likely? Maybe not. But it's perhaps a stronger possibility this cycle than it has been in quite a while.

Labels: 2008, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:15 AM 3 comments

  Rudy Hearts Right-Wing Judges

Rudy Giuliani spent yesterday stumping in Iowa -- not his usual territory. Along the way, he made it quite clear that he intends to govern from the far right. Besides his continued support for a disastrous and deeply unpopular war, besides his opposition to the kind of universal health care favored by a huge majority of Americans, there's his commitment to nominating extremist judges.

That commitment was his primary message yesterday, as he heaped praise on the current Supreme Court's right wing, and insisted that while "the abortion question is not a litmus test," he would only name "strict constructionists" to the Court.

In the speech, he went out of his way to praise the four most conservative members of the current U.S. Supreme Court - Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and two nominees of President Bush, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

"These are the kinds of judges I would appoint," he said, calling them "strict constructionists" who interpret, rather than rewrite, the U.S. Constitution.

The term "strict constructionists" is often used by religious conservatives who say they want judges who will overturn, among other past decisions, the landmark abortion rights ruling Roe vs. Wade.

Religious conservatives may or may not find Rudy's words convincing. But ordinary Americans should be alarmed by it. Following his appointment of a group of hard-right judicial policy advisors, Giuliani's rhetoric in Iowa suggests that he is putting his promise to appoint ultra-conservative judges at the center of his campaign. PFAW's Right Wing Watch sees what's happening:

Giuliani may not be the Right’s favorite candidate, but with no clear front-runner emerging, he appears to be seeking to position himself as the candidate most committed to fundamentally and lastingly shifting the balance on the Supreme Court in favor of the Right – a temptation he hopes just might be enough to weaken the resolve of even his most hardened right-wing foes.

There is no such thing as Rudy Giuliani the moderate.

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

Labels: 2008, Presidential election, Rudy Giuliani, Supreme Court

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:40 AM 0 comments

  The Huckabee Menace

Ben Weyl at the Iowa Independent has an excellent post on the not-quite-forgotten Mike Huckabee. As I've written before at this blog, and discussed recently at The Right's Field, Huckabee has enormous talents and is probably the conservative candidate best poised to thrive in a liberal era (to thrive as a conservative, not as a Schwarzenegger-style centrist).

Ben compares Huckabee's own rhetoric to the "Party of Sam's Club" ideas advocated by Ross Douthat and Reiham Salam, and puts them in the context of this analysis by liberal pollster Stanley Greenberg:

Huge majorities want the government to be more involved in a range of issues including national security, health care, energy, and the environment. To tackle global warming, two-thirds of Americans support stronger regulation of business. When it comes to health care, the results are dramatic. By a two-to-one margin, people opt for a universal health care system rather than separate reforms dealing with problems one at a time.

The Republican field in this cycle's presidential election has been pretty void of ideas so far. But it looks like there's a pretty natural match between what Huckabee is saying and what the conservative movement's smartest intellectuals are saying. Of course, they have the albatross of "big-government conservatism" around their necks, which may sink them, but I remain convinced that this kind of synchronicity is why Huckabee, should he somehow overcome his terrible fundraising and lousy poll numbers, would be a very dangerous candidate for Democrats -- someone who, as Ben says, could "steal much of their message and cut deeply into their natural constituency of working Americans."

Labels: 2008, conservatives, Mike Huckabee, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 9:49 AM 5 comments

  The Advisors: Bill Simon, Jr. (Giuliani Policy Director)

The premise behind this series is simple: if, during the 2000 presidential campaign, more of us had thought more about the significance of George W. Bush's choice of policy advisors -- from Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz to Marvin Olasky and Myron Magnet -- not only would we have heard a lot less about how there was "no difference" between the two major candidates, but we would have also had a pretty good idea just what kind of president Bush would be.

When Rudy Giuliani named William Simon, Jr. to head his policy team, he was undoubtedly guided by strategic calculations, not by faith in the dynamism of Simon's ideas. Simon, a financier and former California gubernatorial candidate (described by one commentator as "the only person less popular than incumbent Gov. Gray Davis back in 2002"), is not a particularly distinguished man. But his selection as policy director says something about how the Giuliani campaign seeks to define itsef.

Simon's father, William Simon, Sr., served as treasury secretary during the Nixon and Ford Administrations. He was a hard-charging financier and movement conservative; the son, by contrast, was apolitical and, according to some accounts, happy enough to lead the comfortable life of a wealthy heir. From 1986-88 Simon worked for Giuliani as an Assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York; following that stint he took up the family business, moving to Los Angeles as an executive of the William E. Simon & Sons investment firm. He has at times shown signs of questionable judgment in his business decisions, as a San Francisco Chronicle article reported:

There have been some noticeable failures, including a savings and loan seized -- unfairly, Simon said -- by the government; a disastrous deal with a former drug lord to invest in Southern California pay phones [in 2002 a California jury found Simon's firm guilty of defrauding the drug trafficker; the judge later overturned the verdict]; and the bankruptcy of two companies that left hundreds out of work.

A 2002 article in The Nation investigated Simon's ties to Enron; as a board member at the Houston company Hanover Compressor, Simon conceived a number of joint-venture ideas through a partnership with Enron called Joint Energy Development Investments. The Nation article also reported on questions raised about Simon's work at Hanover independent of the Enron dealings:

Simon was also involved in Hanover in matters separate from the Enron deals that could raise legal concerns. Hanover said in February that it would have to restate its financial results beginning in January 2000 because of improper accounting for a partnership that--as with Enron--made the company appear more profitable than it was. Over several years during this time, according to the Wall Street Journal, Hanover officers sold millions of shares of stock--again much like Enron, where officers who were allegedly aware of the company's accounting practices were encouraging employees and others to buy shares even as they were selling their own. Hanover is now the target of at least four class-action lawsuits by shareholders who have alleged the company misled investors; and it is also under investigation by the SEC.

Simon wasn't a member of Hanover's board at the time of the improper accounting, but a week before Hanover made the announcement, the company reported that every annual report it has issued since going public in 1997 contained errors. Simon, as a member of Hanover's audit committee, was responsible for approving the company's annual reports. The audit committee, according to Hanover's investor relations department, was held responsible by Hanover for the error.

Simon's challenge to incumbent California Governor Gray Davis in 2002 delighted conservative pundits, who saw the political novice as one of their own. William F. Buckley, Jr. praised him as a sort of "Superman"-in-waiting, poised to rescue the state from Davis's spending; The National Review's John Miller called him "the sort of candidate conservatives can get excited about," someone who had, almost literally, been born into the movement. Davis labelled Simon a "true-blue think-tank conservative;" what was meant as a pejorative sounded like high praise to conservative ears.

Calling himself a "candidate of ideas," Simon ran for governor as both a social conservative -- anti-choice and a supporter of California's Proposition 22, the "Defense of Marriage Act" -- and a tax- and budget-cutter. His proposals for solving the latter equation were vague; he promised cuts in unspecified "new" programs and pledged to "hold the line" on taxes. He also expressed opposition to college tuition and drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants. Despite his opposition to abortion (except in cases of rape or incest), Simon had "no plans," according to the Chronicle, to reduce state funding for reproductive health care. On education, Simon advocated "restoring local control" of schools, but conceded that "the voters have spoken" against tuition vouchers, indicating that he would not press the matter. Simon won the Republican nomination after the Davis campaign trained its fire on LA mayor Richard Riordan; in the general election he earned 42.4% of the vote, losing to Davis by five points.

As Giuliani's policy director, Simon has so far refused to discuss the specifics of his candidate's domestic policy positions. One of his major roles is simply to reinforce Giuliani's right flank against social conservative attack. He claims to "have an assurance" that Giuliani is in favor the Hyde Amendment (which would forbid "taxpayer-funded abortion") and makes much of a statistic showing a decline in New York's abortion rate during the Giuliani mayoralty.

Simon was reportedly the main author of Giuliani's "12 Commitments" speech. The speech itself, a laundry list of wild, unsupported conservative promises, gives little indication of what Giuliani would actually do as president, though Simon does suggest that a President Rudy would be a free-trader and a supporter of "portable free-market solutions" (possibly "Health Savings Accounts?") to the health care crisis. Despite his fiscal conservative appeal, Giuliani has refused to sign Gover Norquist's "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," a decision Simon has been forced to defend to supply-side fanatic Larry Kudlow.

California is a critical state in Rudy Giuliani's path the the GOP nomination. It's also a state that presents the former mayor with something of a problem: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Pundits have compared Rudy to Arnie, discussing the ways in which each represents a "new" kind of Republicanism -- coastal, pro-choice, "liberal." The political consequences of this kind of talk are very different for Schwarzenegger than they are for Giuliani, and it's hardly a surprise that, in the primary at least, Rudy would want to draw a sharp distinction between himself and the Governator. By making Bill Simon, Jr. his policy director, Giuliani was doing just that. Simon is possibly the most prominent figure in the conservative wing of the California Republican party, which makes him a valuable asset for Rudy. A blue-blood businessman, Simon reinforces Giuliani's fiscal conservative cache; an anti-choice conservative Catholic, he sends a reassuring signal to the social right. And as a "true-blue think-tank conservative," he tells the right that Rudy, far from being a different kind of Republican, wants very much to be anchored to the orthodox conservative movement.

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

Labels: 2008, Advisors, Bill Simon, Presidential election, Rudy Giuliani

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:09 AM 0 comments

  Religious Right Abandoning Mitt for Fred?

Another good post by Dayton, who looks at evidence that religious conservatives (or at least their leaders), after an initial flirtation with Mitt Romney, are beginning to move into Fred Thompson's camp.

Labels: 2008, Fred Thompson, fundamentalists, Mitt Romney, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:30 PM 0 comments

  GOP Candidates Snub Hispanic Forum

While the seven Democratic candidates for president made appearances at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials conference on Saturday, the Republican contenders suffered from a mysterious case of scheduling conflictitis: of all the GOP candidates, only Duncan Hunter managed to make it to Orlando for the event. It was left to Florida Senator and RNC Chair Mel Martinez to make the excuses:

"When you're running a campaign, it is difficult to be everywhere you want to be," he said. He called it "wrong and unacceptable to draw from that the conclusion that the Republican presidential candidates don't care about the Hispanic vote or Latinos in this country. … As this campaign unfolds, I think that will become completely clear."

Asked about the harsh opposition to the immigration bill by several of the GOP candidates, including Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Thompson, he said, "This is a very politically toxic issue, and those that are running for office sometimes run away from tough problems."

While the Republican candidates were running away from a conversation with Hispanic leaders, the Democrats had plenty of time to comment on the nastiness fueling GOP rhetoric on immigration. Barack Obama mentioned the "ugly overtone" to the immigration debate, while Joe Biden suggested that it has become "has become a race to the bottom - who can be the most anti-Hispanic."

According to reports, there was plenty of "buzz" at the conference about the remarks by Fred Thompson seemingly comparing Cuban immigrants to terrorists. Hillary Clinton said the comments "appalled" her, adding: "Apparently he doesn't have a lot of experience in Florida or anywhere else, and doesn't know a lot of Cuban-Americans."

Thompson's comments will be particularly unhelpful to Republicans at a time when Democrats are seeking to expand their Hispanic support, even in Florida, where Cuban exiles have provided a stronghold for the GOP:

In Florida, Republican-leaning, anti-Castro Cubans have long dominated Hispanic politics, and most big-name Hispanic politicians are Republican. But Democrats see hope in the growing proportion of non-Cubans and in the generational erosion of Republican dominance among Cuban immigrants.

While Republicans are "conceding the Latino vote in Florida to Democrats," the Democratic candidates are "fully recognizing the importance of the Latino community in Florida and nationally," trumpeted a state Democratic Party press release about the candidates' forums at the conference.

The no-show on Saturday may only hasten the GOP's demographic doom. They fed the fires of the immigration debate and now they're being held hostage to the rages of their own shrinking base, watching as Democrats move in on the voters they have abandoned.

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

Labels: 2008, Hispanics, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:58 AM 95 comments

  Consequences of Electability

Despite Fred Thompson's dramatic gains on Rudy Giuliani in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Todd points out at MyDD that Rudy still retains considerable leads in all three states. Most signficant, though, are his extraordinarily strong favorability ratings in those states (54/28, for instance, in Florida), which are similar to his favorability numbers nationally. Says Todd:

A lot is made of Clinton's high negatives but not enough is said about Rudy' still high positives, which could end up being the Republicans' secret weapon in the general if he gets the nomination.

The same kind of analysis prompts a couple of conservative observers to declare that Giuliani is "still the frontrunner." At Real Clear Politics, Ross Kaminsky says this is for one simple reason: he's the most electable Republican:

[W]hile it is still VERY early in this process, internals of a recent Quinnipiac University poll show why I believe Rudy is still somewhat more likely to get the nomination than Fred: He is more likely to be able to win the general election.

For example, the Quinnipiac Poll shows Giuliani tied with or leading Hillary Clinton in three critical swing states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The analysis in the link above focuses on Giuliani's lead shrinking from prior polls, but that is not the key. The key is that Giuliani far outperforms the other Republican frontrunners.

Gary Matthew Miller agrees:

If enough GOP primary participants are persuaded that only the Mayor could prevail in November of next year, that just might be the fulcrum upon which the Republican nomination may pivot.

Of course, the John Kerry experience demonstrated that "electability" is a tricky concept, but there's plenty of reason to believe that Kaminsky and Miller are correct. Yet there's a puzzle at the heart of the equation. It's one thing for primary voters to make a calculation about electablity; it's another thing for the conservative ideological apparatus itself to use the same calculation to endorse a candidate who rejects key tenents of the longstanding conservative consensus. As broad swathes of the right's intellectual, financial, and media elites use Rudy's "leadership qualities," his fiscal conservatism, and his "electability" as excuses to abandon the socially conservative half of their fusionist coalition, the issue for those social conservatives becomes much starker.

Despite their threats, it's unclear just how prepared they are to break decisively with the GOP -- to endorse a third-party candidate should Rudy win the nomination. But keep in mind that the stakes for social conservatives are bigger than just this election. It isn't just about making sure there's an anti-abortion candidate in 2008. It's about the prospect of losing access to the mighty conservative political machine altogether. If they allow the rest of the conservative establishment to leave them behind, they may never recover their place at the table; they may be permanently marginalized within the movement. For social conservatives -- for the Christian right in particular -- Rudy's "electability" is a very dangerous thing, and there's reason to believe they won't let it go unchallenged.

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

Labels: 2008, Presidential election, Rudy Giuliani, social conservatives

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 8:19 AM 1 comments

  Phoniness Defended

Yesterday, Soren Dayton wondered what it says about conservatives and Republicans that they've become so nonchalant about -- even supportive of -- naked pandering:

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?

Now Patrick Ruffini responds 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 The Right's Field.

Labels: 2008, conservatives, Patrick Ruffini, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:20 AM 0 comments

  GOP to McCain: Look What You Make Us Do

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 The Right's Field.

Labels: 2008, John McCain, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:09 AM 2 comments

  Plus Ca Change...

Soren Dayton notes that, given Congress's abysmal approval ratings, 2008 might not be so bad for Republicans in House races. Certainly the latest polls should serve as a wake-up call for Democratic Congressional leaders. And I agree with Dayton that we're in for an "anti-Washington" election. But the overall picture looks a little bit absurd:

In any case, look for candidates of all sorts to push anti-Washington agendas. That is why Mitt Romney says, "I can’t wait to get my hands on Washington." (Never mind that his campaign is stuffed to the gills with lobbyists. I know what they would do if they got their hands on Washington) And why Thompson says, "After eight years in Washington, I longed for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood."

Yet, on the issue fueling the greatest part of the public's disgust with Washington -- the Iraq war -- the GOP candidates are promising nothing but "Bush - Only Moreso."

And with the top of the ticket so invested in the status quo, how will Republican Congressional candidates manage to portray themselves as agents of change?

Labels: 2008 elections, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:47 PM 0 comments

  The GOP's Idea Drought

Speaking of the Prospect, check out Paul Waldman's piece surveying the bleak intellectual landscape of the 2008 Republican presidential primary. The GOP, as Waldman observes, has become the "party of no ideas." Not a single candidate has proposed a genuine policy innovation of any kind (save for McCain's immigration bill, which Republicans wish had never happened) -- not in the debates, not on their websites, not anywhere. Not even in the area of national security, which is supposed to be party's strong suit (yes, I know -- stop laughing), but which instead has served as a stark example of reverse-evolution:

The national-security discussion coming from the candidates resembles nothing so much as the dominance displays of lower primates ("Ooog! Ooog! Me double Gitmo! Ooog!"). Anyone looking for a serious analysis of our security challenges in the coming years will be sorely disappointed.

While it's true that candidates generally prefer to be coy about policy specifics, the deafening silence on the Republican side is noteworthy, particularly since this is a party that has, in recent decades, been fed a steady diet of policy advice from its network of conservative think tanks.

Waldman points out one major reason for the vacuum:

As with most of the Republicans' problems, this aversion to anything resembling an agenda can be traced in no small part to George W. Bush. Like a Bizarro World King Midas, everything Bush has touched has turned to garbage, with the consequence that the standard Republican agenda is almost irredeemably tainted by its association with the last six years.

Tax cuts? We tried that, and got huge deficits. Gettin' tough with terrorists? Not working out so well. Protecting the family? That song's getting older by the month. Nearly anything a Republican proposes can be answered with, "That's just another version of George W. Bush's plan for [insert issue here]. We don't need more Bush."

This isn't to say that there aren't any ideas on the conservative side. In fact, there are a number of interesting young conservative intellectuals grappling with the policy problems facing their movement. What's notable, though, is how little connection they seem to have to the various presidential campaigns. In part this might be to do with the fact that the most interesting ideas on the right these days look, to establishment conservative eyes, suspiciously like variations on the dreaded "big-government conservatism" of the Bush administration.

Over the next few months I'll explore the ideas put forth by some of these intellectuals in greater depth. I'll also take a look at the policy advisors to the various GOP presidential campaigns, in search of clues as to where their candidates might be inclined to go, should any of them -- God forbid -- actually win next November.

(Cross-posted at The Right's Field.)

Labels: 2008, conservatives, Paul Waldman, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:17 AM 1 comments