Posts Tagged ‘2012 elections’
This crazy blue football field is home to as many national championships as Republican nominations that Rick Santorum will win.
Mitt Romney lost two more states yesterday, finishing third in both Alabama and Mississippi. Rick Santorum won both states, which were seen as Newt Gingrich’s last chance at relevance; he’s apparently pressing on regardless, though it certainly seems that doing so hurts Santorum much more than it does Romney. Despite lackluster performances in strongly conservative states, Romney’s still basically on track to secure the nomination at some point, but it’s probably going to take winning some of the big, winner-take-all states later in the calendar. That means there’s theoretically still time for a Santorum miracle — he needs to win a significant majority of remaining delegates to actually secure the nomination before the convention — or that we could be heading for the ultimate Washington press corps fantasy, the brokered convention.
As Ed Kilgore notes, relaying comments from Jonathan Bernstein, party elites retain considerable power in the nominating process. They want Romney, and they have for a long time. Whatever happens in traditional primary states, there are enough delegates chosen at county- and state-level conventions (that is, the later parts of the caucuses that actually matter) to keep things slouching toward Romney if the voters don’t come through. But what happens if the party bigwigs change their minds? What might make Santorum suddenly palatable?
Romney’s big selling point has always been electability, and it’s been especially prominent since he’s had to focus on an opponent whose last election was a 17-point loss. But the more he tries to balance appeals to the far-right of the GOP primary electorate and general-election moderation, the tougher it becomes to secure his own base going into the general election. With the economy picking up and Barack Obama looking like more of a favorite, GOP elites might start thinking not just about who they want as President (it’s still Romney, and will continue to be), but also about damage-mitigation in the event of a loss. I don’t think there’s any question that a Santorum loss to Obama is better than a Romney loss for the future of the Republican Party; frankly, a Romney loss could lead to the kind of intra-partisan shake-up we haven’t seen since the Dixiecrats switched sides. That he wasn’t conservative enough to win would be the rallying cry of the right going into Obama’s second term and the 2014 and 2016 campaigns. A Santorum loss wouldn’t necessarily push the party back toward the center, but it would provide leverage for those trying to pull it there.
But let’s be clear: A flood of elite abandoning Romney for Santorum is the only way Santorum wins the nomination. Romney might not win it cleanly or anytime soon, but if the party chiefs want him, they’ll find a way to get him before the convention. The brokered convention dream is an illusion in modern politics, in much the same way the small-conference national college football champion dream is an illusion pursued by so many sports reporters and pundits. Like the Boise State Broncos, Rick Santorum can only win if the system wants him to win, and right now it doesn’t.
Jon Huntsman isn’t going to win the presidency next year. He’s also not going to win the Republican presidential nomination, and he probably won’t even win the primary in his home state of Utah — a July poll gives Mitt Romney 63% to Huntsman’s 10%. He was Barack Obama’s ambassador to China, and he’s spent most of his time in the campaign first meekly and then aggressively declaring his moderate bona fides. So why is he in the race? Some have speculated that he’s just trying to raise name-recognition for a 2016 run, likely against a crowd of lower-profile opponents. Others suggest he’s running for the VP nomination in 2012. Presumably conventional wisdom doesn’t find him cynical enough to think he’s running just to land a book deal in 2013.
As it happens, I don’t really care why he’s running. When his campaign ends, it’ll just be another data-point in the history of failed presidential runs. What I’m really interested in is the question of who Huntsman will endorse. It’s clear that Huntsman is not happy with where his party and most of its presidential candidates are at policy-wise. He’s recently come out of the science closet with strong, counter-partisan statements of belief in both evolution and anthropomorphic climate change. The Republican most like him is Mitt Romney, who’s been running hard to the right of late, but Huntsman has recently gone after him for both his lack of any coherent belief structure and his terrible record on job creation.
Assume Huntsman wins few delegates and Romney cleanly secures the nomination. Romney’s core technocratic self is probably not that different from Huntsman’s, but a President Romney would be seriously indebted to the GOP fringes that Huntsman is trying to reassert the center-right’s dominance over. On the other hand, the next most Huntsman-like candidate will also be on the general election ballot in 2012 — Barack Obama. Huntsman went after Obama recently, as well, but it was a fairly tepid assault, claiming that he should’ve taken to the bully pulpit earlier, that he’s “too far left” and that he ought to quit using teleprompters. That’s some tired, easy stuff, with none of the oomph found in what he’s said recently about Romney, Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry. So what’s the likelihood that he endorses Obama? “President Obama and I have our differences, but he is the only candidate taking our dire economic situation seriously, blah blah blah.” Huntsman’s main constituency is the Washington press corps, and he must know that this is the kind of thing that would make a big splash with them, both at the time and when he does whatever he does next.
Now, to be clear, I don’t think Huntsman’s endorsement will matter, but as the Republican party continues its rightward march, I do think it’s interesting to watch what its few remaining moderates might do to try to regain control. Elite signalling that even a technocratic nominee is too beholden to the fringe would only be a first step, but it’s a step.
Josh Marshall notes that Mitt Romney has given a thumbs-up to Paul Ryan’s plan to end Medicare:
Two contenders, Pawlenty and Daniels, haven’t done more than say kind things in general. But most have said they’re down with it. And Mitt Romney in particular has signed on for the whole thing — which means he’ll go into the 2012 primary and possibly the general election as supporting the abolition of Medicare. And that’s a tough thing to carry, as it should be.
I’m going to be really curious to see what sort of follow-up questions he gets on that position and if anybody is able to get a clearer statement out of Pawlenty on this critical issue.
My guess? No follow-up questions of any sort, unless the impossible happens and Ryan’s flight of fancy becomes a real bill. We’re presently about eight and a half months from the first ballots being cast in the 2012 primaries, and probably six months from the general public paying much attention. Anything that a candidates says now, but doesn’t want to revisit later, about an early-2011 proposal that goes nowhere will simply disappear.
But still, Romney makes an interesting case to watch in this context. He has famously held every position on many issues, and gained favor among elites for his technocratic seriousness. My own view of the 2012 race is that a Romney nomination requires him to consolidate the remaining “serious” Republican technocrats, while the other candidates fight over the far right. There are a lot of voters on the far right, but if even two strong candidates persevere over there, Romney can likely win what he needs for the nomination. And my supposition is that, for the technocrats that make up Romney’s base, what he says doesn’t really matter. They know his political operation based on its personnel, not his public statements, and they know how he’ll govern because he’s just like them — the new H.W. Bush that we the party and the country so desperately need. If he has to say he likes the idea of killing Medicare, or that Ryan’s near-future projection of 3% unemployment is reasonable, well, what candidate hasn’t had to say some silly things to get elected? This could actually be a benefit for Romney, because due to his past flip-floppery, nobody is likely to believe he actually supports the Ryan plan anyway. Once he secures the nomination, he can get the party in line and we’ll just quit talking about such ridiculous things.
There’s a question going around the blogosphere today of whether John Boehner’s quick-hit Affordable Care Act repeal bill — a largely symbolic measure that will go nowhere in the Senate — will be enough to appease the Tea Party activists who made rabid ACA opposition one of their litmus tests in 2010. The bill is scheduled for a vote two weeks before the State of the Union address, with no debate or CBO scoring, so it will likely not become an ongoing news story, but will be checked off the GOP’s list of campaign promises and will continue to be used as a fundraising and turnout tool in 2012.
While Jonathan Bernstein takes this move as evidence that Boehner sees the Tea Party as “a fairly easy bunch to manage,” Matthew Yglesias points to conservative messengers’ power in this process:
Suppose there’s some sellout that John Boehner wants to implement. Boehner recognizes that he needs to pair this with a symbolic but meaningless gesture. Now suppose he sits down in a room with Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Donohue, and David Koch and persuades all three of those people that this is the right way to proceed. Then the next day, Boehner unleashes his symbolic gesture and his compromise, and the coverage of it on Fox News, The Rush Limbaugh Show, and the fox-affiliated radio shows is all positive. That alone gets you the three most popular talk radio shows, the television network, The Weekly Standard, a dose of influence at every single conservative think tank in America, and the important organizing efforts of Americans For Prosperity.
I think this misses a couple layers of complexity. First, any discussion of the Tea Party needs to keep in mind that there really isn’t a Tea Party, per se, whether or not you buy the formulation of the movement as largely elite-created. You may recall that the whole thing seemed to kick off when CNBC barker Rick Santelli delivered a rant against foreclosed homeowners who didn’t deserve the same consideration as the banks who’d lent to them. Then it turned into a traveling health care town hall freak show. Then it became about the UN’s plot to make us all ride bikes and Michelle Obama’s War on Dessert. This is why it’s so easy to find large numbers of people claiming Tea Party membership — every angry conservative in the country can find something within the “movement” to latch on to.
Given that, it’s easy to see major conservative media as the organizing loci of the Tea Party, because that’s where these ideas can all come together and be passed around. But suggesting, as Yglesias does, that nobody will be willing to cross Rush on these matters, and thus potentially split the ideaspace, doesn’t quite make sense to me. First, while the dominance of institutional media in the Tea Party is certainly one of the key factors in its growth, we shouldn’t ignore the role played by social media. For every birther flirtation by a respectable conservative pundit on Fox, there are a dozen images of Obama as a Kenyan tribal chief being distributed through social networks online. The woman who interrupted today’s partial reading of the Constitution in the House may have gotten the birtherism idea from some recognizable source, but I’m sure wasn’t Limbaugh and Hannity supporting her at her blog or her Facebook page. Social media makes it much easier to tell that when someone’s pissing on your head, it’s not actually raining.
The other factor here is the likely make-up of the 2012 GOP field. Some candidates will be in no position to be too aggressive with Rush (i.e., Mitt Romney) and will have to show their fealty at every opportunity. But some — Palin, Huckabee — are conservative media figures in their own right. Given that there will probably be several candidates vying for the hardcore Tea Party vote, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for someone like Palin to pick a fight with the established bigwigs, both to try to differentiate herself as a candidate and, more importantly, to try to leapfrog Limbaugh as the biggest of big names in conservative media going forward.
