Kevin Sullivan

Tonight’s Debate

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Tonight’s debate will be unlike any that we’ve seen thus far.  Unlike the multicandidate forums–where there’s often an account and calculation for how to bounce off of, team with or ignore the other candidates on the stage–this will be a message vs. message event. 

It’ll be harder to duck, but allows more time to prove yourself.  And bury yourself.  Debates aren’t really informative in an idealistic, civics class sort of sense.  They really can’t help that much, but can hurt you a lot if you screw up.  The candidates would like nothing more than to get their message out repeatedly, while at the same time enumerating where they stand on the issues.  Engagement with the other candidate opens up the potential for disaster. 

This is obviously unavoidable now.  Despite my support for Obama, I think Clinton has handled herself better in the debates than he has.  She is on point, on message and generally pleasant.  Obama gets testy and frustrated.  When cornered, he loses focus and becomes less effective.  If that happens tonight, you can be sure that the YouTube clips will wind up in the inboxes of a whole bunch of February 5 voters.  If he steps up, gets his message out, and maybe even gets a few barbs in he’ll have a nice little cap feather going into next week.

We’ll see. 

UPDATE: Damn!  So I’m posed with a dilemma.  Do I do my civic duty and watch the debate, or do I watch the season premiere of Lost?    

Obama Must Be Stopped!

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And if it takes a Dutchman, well so be it!

:)

Cosmetic Conservatives, No Longer

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I think Rick and I are of the same mind today, as he dissects the car wreck that is the GOP nomination process:

Since when is initiating class warfare a conservative campaign tactic? Pundits call his philosophy “conservative populism” but it’s really much simpler than that. He is using class as a political scalpel to snip away a portion of the Republican electorate while slicing the bulk of Christian conservatives away from more traditionally conservative candidates. There is no path to the White House for Huckabee employing these tactics. But he should be able to harvest a couple of hundred delegates on Super Tuesday by winning 2 or 3 primaries while picking up delegates for finishing second and third elsewhere. He will then be in a position to humbly offer his services as Vice President to John McCain who will, if things remain relatively unchanged, come out of Super Tuesday with a huge lead in delegates on Mitt Romney.

For McCain, I suspect his fealty to conservatism and conservative principles will last until he wins the White House. It will be at that point that we will get a glimpse of just how important he thinks his conservatism is by looking at his cabinet appointments and the manner in which he fills other important posts in his Administration. I daresay there will be many “maverick” choices – including Democrats – that will curdle the blood of most movement conservatives and dismay the rest of us.

Would Romney be any different? The former governor and CEO would almost certainly look for the most competent people he can find to run the government. No doubt we would be disappointed in some of his choices. At least we could be assured that his selections were not made to “stick it” to conservatives – a disease McCain seems to have acquired over the years as his contempt for the right has been demonstrated on numerous occasions.

McCain and Huckabee can say they’re the best conservatives in the race until doomsday and it won’t make it so. And Romney can call his conversion to conservatism true and honorable until the cows come home and there will always be that nagging doubt in the back of everyone’s mind.

As I addressed earlier, I believe the chickens are coming home to roost a bit here.  The Republican Party was quite content to push these cosmetic conservatives to the front in order to help out their candidate in 2004.  Now, those people want the party.  They’ve been backbenchers for a while now, and they’ve been told by their own party that they are crucial for the health of the big tent.

There’s definitely a kind of Dewey backlash going on here, and it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.  I feel for Rick, who unlike myself, actually has an ideological investment in this fight.   

Grand Old Prospects

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John McIntyre–Editor of RCP, and full disclosure, my boss–has an interesting read on the bump President Bush received following the RNC in 2004 (see the graph above).  As is often mentioned, the GOP presented before the American people back then was a far more moderate, tolerant and flexible one–a big tent.  John points out how the torch has been passed to this faction just four years later, and what they need to do to keep the “Bush Coalition” intact:

For a President who was struggling with sub-50% job approval ratings (ratings that many pundits felt would ensure his loss) these four speakers were meant to send a clear message to Independents and moderate Democrats that they were welcome – and wanted – in a big tent, majority Republican Party.

Starting Tuesday in the state that delivered George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 and in California yesterday and today with the Giuliani and Schwarzenegger endorsements, the Bush/Cheney baton has been passed to John McCain.

Many on the more conservative side of the Republican Party are balking now that the Schwarzenegger, Giuliani, McCain faction looks likely to be the standard bearer in 2008. But with President Bush’s approval ratings hovering in the low 30’s (as opposed to the high 40’s of 2004) and after the wipe out in 2006 where the GOP was annihilated in the Northeast and basically everywhere outside of the South, the Republican party is putting forth – either through luck, serendipity, or design – its most competitive general election candidate, by far.

With the country screaming for change and very ready for a Democratic president, George W. Bush would not win a third term. But if the Democrats nominate the divisive Hillary Clinton over the inspiring Barack Obama, John McCain will be in a very strong position to keep the White House in Republican hands, with one caveat.

Without Schwarzenegger, Giuliani and McCain voters in 2004 George Bush would have lost to John Kerry and without Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and evangelical voters in 2008 John McCain does not have a chance against Hillary Clinton.

I agree, in part.  I don’t know that these talkers and chattering kingmakers should be overstated, though.  Limbaugh declared that Huckabee was no conservative prior to the Iowa caucuses, and the governor still won.  The McCain-Huckabee faction won a solid majority of conservative voters in South Carolina, despite the protests of the talkers.  This week, McCain owned Florida. 

These folks are conservative careerists, and they need to maintain the idea that their words and actions move voters and define the conversation.  But when you let a select group of ideologues define what it means to be a conservative, you fall into the same trap that Democrats often find themselves in.  

Lucky Man

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“Suspending”

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 Is Edwards really done?  Read the transcript:

Now, I’ve spoken to both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama. They have both pledged to me and more importantly through me to America, that they will make ending poverty central to their campaign for the presidency.

And more importantly, they have pledged to me that as President of the United States they will make ending poverty and economic inequality central to their Presidency. This is the cause of my life and I now have their commitment to engage in this cause.

—

Today, I am suspending my campaign for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency.

But I want to say this to everyone: with Elizabeth, with my family, with my friends, with all of you and all of your support, this son of a millworker’s gonna be just fine. Our job now is to make certain that America will be fine.

Suspending?  Suspension is not withdrawal.  It’s not dropping out.  As Donna Brazile noted today on CNN, this could allow him to sit back, not endorse and see what happens on February 5.  If he can still chip away at some delegates, and the race between Hillary and Obama tightens, he may still get to play kingmaker at the convention. 

Trippi says that they’re “banging down the doors” for an Edwards endorsement.  I’m sure the are.

I think Edwards is giving himself this week, so let’s see if he endorses.

Shadow Primary

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The Kennedy endorsement just might shift the super-friends. 

Weary and Wavering

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Ben Smith and David Paul Khun believe that Rudy’s embarrassing campaign signals the end of 9/11 politics.  Here’s the crux of it:

“The American attention span has always been very short,” former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, the former chairman of the commission and an adviser to the Partnership, told Politico.

When Gallup last asked about Sept. 11, in the summer of 2007, only 43 percent of Americans considered the war in Iraq “to be part of the war on terrorism which began on Sept. 11, 2001.” Four years earlier, in the summer of 2003, 57 percent of Americans believed the war in Iraq was related to the Sept. 11 attacks.

It was that perception shift that made a Sept. 11 campaign far more effective in 2004 than in 2008. The image of George W. Bush standing amidst the rubble of the World Trade Center gave the Bush campaign an anchor to effectively tout their candidate’s leadership qualities.

But in the ensuing years — as the war in Iraq plummeted in popularity, concern over imminent attacks ebbed, and Americans became increasingly worried about the economy — the evocative image of Giuliani managing a city under attack became less and less relevant.   

As I argued yesterday, this is as much George Bush’s fault as it is Rudy Giuliani’s.  The current president failed to abide by his own doctrine, failed to mobilize the nation around a war of principle and ultimately failed to present the clear enemy to Americans.  Rudy’s message–based more on rampant paranoia and talk of creeping caliphates–didn’t focus on isolating and punishing states that finance terrorism.  Giuliani’s position instead resembled the most excessive whims of the Bush policy.  Anyone who is a bad guy, who speaks poorly of the United States and promises our destruction is a target.  They are all in it together, and they’re out to get us.  This departs from the somewhat reasonable (and achievable!) Bush Doctrine, and instead requires shooting or bombing away an idea, to paraphrase Thomas Dewey. 

More at memeorandum.     

Khalizad

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What the far Left doesn’t seem to get, although they certainly would wise up were it a Democrat in question, is that you need to have policy discipline from your ambassadors.  This isn’t about the hawks vs. the diplomats, or whatever.  If this were a Democratic administration there’d be no tolerance for this kind of behavior. 

The elected administration of George W. Bush sets State’s policies towards other countries, not a rouge diplomat unaccountable to voters.  In the real world, if you piss off your boss like this on your own behalf, you get a pink slip.

Ambassador Khalizad should be no different.  More at memeorandum.       

Rudy

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Kind of fitting, on a day that we should be talking about Rudolph Giuliani’s departure from the 2008 presidential race, we’re instead discussing a far more significant departure.  Even in concession, Rudy can’t catch a break.  Reid offers us a post-mortem on the mayor’s campaign:

A campaign can’t survive without oxygen, future presidential consultants and managers would do well to note, and Giuliani’s strategy of skipping early contests was the first sign of the campaign’s impending doom. As Romney, Clinton and Obama discovered, even a loss can keep you in the news and at the front of the pack. If Giuliani had competed and won in Iowa and New Hampshire, he would have run away with the nomination. Had he competed and lost, he would have at least been able to finish ahead of Ron Paul and Fred Thompson, and he could have built momentum instead of hoping to stay afloat long enough to survive. As he drops out of the race, Giuliani trails even Paul in delegates accumulated.

I have been repeatedly flabbergasted by the Giuliani campaign’s lack of imagination.  Campaigns need oxygen defines the mayor’s failures perfectly.  In snubbing Iowa and New Hampshire, you must realize that you aren’t simply ignoring voters in those early states.  You’re snubbing the national press, which needs to feed off of these early momentum-builders to write their narratives and create their stories.  If you don’t compete there, you get no ink.  It’s that simple.