SUMMARY
The tumultuous Bush years have discredited or otherwise eliminated many potential presidential prospects for the GOP: for the first time in memory they don’t really have a Big Man who is next in line to run, unless you count Romney, and a lot of Republicans don’t. Few of the candidates have credible track records handling national issues. A few have support from one wing of the party, but no one can claim the loyalty of both wings. It is a weak field, many of the potentially stronger prospects have declined to run against a solid incumbent president, and many Republicans are trying to draft new candidates to compete. The tea party is looking at Pawlenty and Bachmann, the fiscal conservatives are looking at Romney and Huntsman, and everyone is weighing the relative merits of political purity and sheer electability, neither of which is in great supply.
DETAILS
Serious signs of trouble for the GOP field.
Qualifications. Here’s another sign of the incredible damage that Bush did to the Republican party. The current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls have almost no credentials in the area of national issues: foreign policy, national security, finance and the economy, etc. Anybody who claimed such credentials in the GOP in the last few decades invariably ended up working for Bush, and thus being tarnished with the Bush legacy. That’s why we will never see presidential campaigns by Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and so forth.
Of the current crop of declared or potential candidates, the only people who have actual experience on the national stage, addressing national issues, are Gingrich who shut down the government, impeached Clinton and resigned in disgrace; Ron Paul who is setting an all-time record for proposing insane House bills that get quashed in committee, seeking to shut down many Cabinet departments, the IRS, FEMA, Medicare and the Federal Reserve; Daniels who was the architect of Bush’s titanic deficit disasters; Bachmann and Santorum who are known mainly for extremist statements on social issues; and Huntsman whose claim to fame is as Obama’s ambassador to Beijing. That’s their A-team.
One of these people will be their pick for dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan, deficits, Medicare, Social Security, the recession, Libya, gay rights, abortion, jobs, the financial sector, the housing market, taking care of the troops, energy, immigration, dealing with China, dealing with the Muslim world, and trade. But that’s okay, the Republicans have never nominated an incompetent to run for president, have they?
Support from Republicans. Even GOP members loathe their current choices. Two GOP strategists moaned “Is this the best we got?” and "We have a shortage of candidates." A Huntsman aide said “this is the weakest Republican field since Wendell Willkie won the nomination on the sixth ballot in 1940." Bill Kristol moaned that the field didn’t exactly represent an overflowing of political talent. A Fox commentator, weirdly and somewhat desperately, claimed that only Cain has the stature, the record, the honesty, the wit to assume the mantle of Reagan. Another Fox man admitted that based on the current polling, whoever wins the nomination will probably go down to defeat in the general election.
Republicans generally like to nominate people who are well-known, and of all the Republicans who have gotten the presidential nomination, none was polling below 24 percent in the spring of the year before the election, 19 months out. Of the Republicans who won the presidency, George W Bush had 42 percent in spring 1999, George HW Bush had 34 in spring 1987, Reagan had 29. Of the guys who won the nomination and lost in November, McCain had 24 in spring 2007, Dole 46, Ford had 31. But this year, the leader is Romney at 16. So no matter who their nominee is, he or she will get off to the weakest start by any Republican in decades.
The Quest for Someone Else. Their field is so weak that people like Sarah Palin and John Thune are seen by some as a step up in stature, from the current candidates. Even the top party prospects only get support from about 70 percent of Republicans: one third of their own party members aren’t sure they support their top candidates. Almost half of Republicans want to see some new faces. Party leaders are pushing the bigger names to announce earlier, but their party is so decimated that no party leader has the stature to herd the process along. Donors are sitting on their wallets until they see someone they like.
The truly striking thing is that fiscal conservatives should be uniting behind someone like Romney or Huntsman, to prevent the tea party from ramming some maniac like Bachmann through to the nomination. Instead, they are openly proclaiming that Romney and Pawlenty are just not spongeworthy, and that they would prefer a crook like Christie, a buffoon like Perry, or the man with one of the most toxic names in politics, Jeb Bush. How do you think that makes Romney feel?
The tumultuous Bush years have discredited or otherwise eliminated many potential presidential prospects for the GOP: for the first time in memory they don’t really have a Big Man who is next in line to run, unless you count Romney, and a lot of Republicans don’t. Few of the candidates have credible track records handling national issues. A few have support from one wing of the party, but no one can claim the loyalty of both wings. It is a weak field, many of the potentially stronger prospects have declined to run against a solid incumbent president, and many Republicans are trying to draft new candidates to compete. The tea party is looking at Pawlenty and Bachmann, the fiscal conservatives are looking at Romney and Huntsman, and everyone is weighing the relative merits of political purity and sheer electability, neither of which is in great supply.
DETAILS
Serious signs of trouble for the GOP field.
Qualifications. Here’s another sign of the incredible damage that Bush did to the Republican party. The current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls have almost no credentials in the area of national issues: foreign policy, national security, finance and the economy, etc. Anybody who claimed such credentials in the GOP in the last few decades invariably ended up working for Bush, and thus being tarnished with the Bush legacy. That’s why we will never see presidential campaigns by Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and so forth.
Of the current crop of declared or potential candidates, the only people who have actual experience on the national stage, addressing national issues, are Gingrich who shut down the government, impeached Clinton and resigned in disgrace; Ron Paul who is setting an all-time record for proposing insane House bills that get quashed in committee, seeking to shut down many Cabinet departments, the IRS, FEMA, Medicare and the Federal Reserve; Daniels who was the architect of Bush’s titanic deficit disasters; Bachmann and Santorum who are known mainly for extremist statements on social issues; and Huntsman whose claim to fame is as Obama’s ambassador to Beijing. That’s their A-team.
One of these people will be their pick for dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan, deficits, Medicare, Social Security, the recession, Libya, gay rights, abortion, jobs, the financial sector, the housing market, taking care of the troops, energy, immigration, dealing with China, dealing with the Muslim world, and trade. But that’s okay, the Republicans have never nominated an incompetent to run for president, have they?
Support from Republicans. Even GOP members loathe their current choices. Two GOP strategists moaned “Is this the best we got?” and "We have a shortage of candidates." A Huntsman aide said “this is the weakest Republican field since Wendell Willkie won the nomination on the sixth ballot in 1940." Bill Kristol moaned that the field didn’t exactly represent an overflowing of political talent. A Fox commentator, weirdly and somewhat desperately, claimed that only Cain has the stature, the record, the honesty, the wit to assume the mantle of Reagan. Another Fox man admitted that based on the current polling, whoever wins the nomination will probably go down to defeat in the general election.
Republicans generally like to nominate people who are well-known, and of all the Republicans who have gotten the presidential nomination, none was polling below 24 percent in the spring of the year before the election, 19 months out. Of the Republicans who won the presidency, George W Bush had 42 percent in spring 1999, George HW Bush had 34 in spring 1987, Reagan had 29. Of the guys who won the nomination and lost in November, McCain had 24 in spring 2007, Dole 46, Ford had 31. But this year, the leader is Romney at 16. So no matter who their nominee is, he or she will get off to the weakest start by any Republican in decades.
The Quest for Someone Else. Their field is so weak that people like Sarah Palin and John Thune are seen by some as a step up in stature, from the current candidates. Even the top party prospects only get support from about 70 percent of Republicans: one third of their own party members aren’t sure they support their top candidates. Almost half of Republicans want to see some new faces. Party leaders are pushing the bigger names to announce earlier, but their party is so decimated that no party leader has the stature to herd the process along. Donors are sitting on their wallets until they see someone they like.
The truly striking thing is that fiscal conservatives should be uniting behind someone like Romney or Huntsman, to prevent the tea party from ramming some maniac like Bachmann through to the nomination. Instead, they are openly proclaiming that Romney and Pawlenty are just not spongeworthy, and that they would prefer a crook like Christie, a buffoon like Perry, or the man with one of the most toxic names in politics, Jeb Bush. How do you think that makes Romney feel?
Anyone who expects a white knight to ride in and save the day at the last minute will be disappointed. First of all, the Republicans don’t really function that way. Secondly, even the white-knight pool is very weak. CNN polled Republicans as to whether they would like specific candidates to jump in: they said “no” to Perry and Bush, Christie got a tie, and Paul Ryan of all people got an anemic 48-43 “yes” vote. The only one who got a positive reaction was Giuliani and even he didn’t get enthusiastic backing.
The same poll showed that only 39 percent of Republicans were satisfied with their candidate field, and no single candidate got more than 27 percent “enthusiastic” support: so they dislike both their current choices and the potential replacements. A lot of these guys aren't even popular in their own states. The cupboard is bare.
The same poll showed that only 39 percent of Republicans were satisfied with their candidate field, and no single candidate got more than 27 percent “enthusiastic” support: so they dislike both their current choices and the potential replacements. A lot of these guys aren't even popular in their own states. The cupboard is bare.
The list of GOP prospects who said “hell no” to 2012 include Angle, Barbour, Brown, Bush, Christie, Corker, Daniels, DeMint, Haley, Huckabee, Jindal, McDonnell, Paladino, Pence, Perry, Petraeus, Powell, Rubio, Ryan, Thune, Trump, and Allen West. And you can probably add Arpaio, Cantor, Cheney, Coburn, Cornyn, Crist, Ensign, Gregg, King, Pataki, Sanford, Scarborough, Clarence Thomas, and Whitman.
The Evangelicals. With Huckabee out, the likely beneficiaries within the evangelical and tea-party crowd will be Bachmann, Pawlenty and Palin, depending on whether the ladies formally announce. Palin, Bachmann and Huckabee shared a lot of supporters who would name one of the three as first choice and another as second choice, although some of these folks like Gingrich also. These folks not only want a conservative purist, but also an anti-Romney; Romney wants these folks to remain split among 3-4 candidates for as long as possible, because once they unite behind one leader, the game is on. Watch for Jim DeMint, tea-party fundraiser, to step in and try to play kingmaker if need be; Richard Viguerie is trying to get DeMint himself to run.
Religion unsurprisingly might play a role: Pawlenty and Palin are actual evangelicals; Bachmann is a non-evangelical Lutheran but very conservative, Romney and Huntsman are Mormons, Santorum and Gingrich are Catholics, Cain and Paul are Baptists.
Electability. There are more signs that the Republicans, for all their professed ideological fervor, want a winner, someone with pizzazz who can be elected; the two issues which they seemingly want to remain pure on, are same-sex unions and candidate infidelity. Only Romney and Palin have strong support among Republicans since Gingrich took a big hit over his comments on health care, and of those two, only Romney has national favorability (they're starting to warm up to Bachmann, but not Huntsman). Most of them would struggle to win their home states. We could actually see the candidate herd thin out quickly, once it becomes necessary to make commitments and amass resources: long shots like Santorum, Paul, Cain and Trump, and total unelectables like Palin and Gingrich, may have floated their names out there for the sake of vanity to maintain the illusion that they are relevant, in a country which has passed them by and rejected their ideas -- enjoy a few months of being courted, cheered by crowds, courted by television shows, worshipped on Fox, before bowing out.
Big Names. The Republican party favors known faces for their nominees, and polling consistently showed support, again, for Romney, Palin and Gingrich: they can draw the crowds and reel in the money. Romney, in particular, is likely to pick up some of the few Trump voters and a few Huckabee fans also.
Religion unsurprisingly might play a role: Pawlenty and Palin are actual evangelicals; Bachmann is a non-evangelical Lutheran but very conservative, Romney and Huntsman are Mormons, Santorum and Gingrich are Catholics, Cain and Paul are Baptists.
Electability. There are more signs that the Republicans, for all their professed ideological fervor, want a winner, someone with pizzazz who can be elected; the two issues which they seemingly want to remain pure on, are same-sex unions and candidate infidelity. Only Romney and Palin have strong support among Republicans since Gingrich took a big hit over his comments on health care, and of those two, only Romney has national favorability (they're starting to warm up to Bachmann, but not Huntsman). Most of them would struggle to win their home states. We could actually see the candidate herd thin out quickly, once it becomes necessary to make commitments and amass resources: long shots like Santorum, Paul, Cain and Trump, and total unelectables like Palin and Gingrich, may have floated their names out there for the sake of vanity to maintain the illusion that they are relevant, in a country which has passed them by and rejected their ideas -- enjoy a few months of being courted, cheered by crowds, courted by television shows, worshipped on Fox, before bowing out.
Big Names. The Republican party favors known faces for their nominees, and polling consistently showed support, again, for Romney, Palin and Gingrich: they can draw the crowds and reel in the money. Romney, in particular, is likely to pick up some of the few Trump voters and a few Huckabee fans also.
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