A first(?) thread on 2008: McCain,Giuliani & the Republicans

While [Fred Thompson] cites his voting record in the Senate as solidly pro-life, he says it wasn't until his late-in-life child with his second wife that he was really on-board with the pro-life movement: "[..] After seeing a sonagram of my child ... I will never feel exactly the same again. My heart now is fully engaged with my head. As president of the U.S. no legislation will pass my desk that funds or supports this procedure without my veto."

On appointing pro-life, socially conservative judges, he says if one nominee can't clear the Senate, "you ought to send another one just like him." And he'll keep sending them. "It's a fight we can have all day long, and we will win in the end if we're persistent."

On what he would do in his first 100 days in office: "I don't really know." But, he says, "I know what I would do the first hour. I would go in the Oval Office, close the door, and pray for the wisdom to know what was right, and the strength to do what is right."

This "religion in politics" panel is painful. Dueling old white guys on whether unborn people or living people are the most important issue for evangelicals, and whether Christians need to worry about the planet.

Jim Wallis: Poverty should be the biggest concern for evangelicals.

Richard Land: [A]ll the evangelicals I know think abortion is the most important issue.

Wallis: 30,000 kids die each day from preventable disease. "That breaks the heart of God, it should break our hearts too."

Land: Well, [..] "if mothers would marry the fathers of their children, that would eliminate more poverty than anything we could do."

Wallis: It shouldn't be a choice -- both should matter to evangelicals. "We must not pit the unborn against the poorest children of the earth. They are both among the weak."

There was almost no show of support for Wallis' vision of a wider "pro-life" agenda that includes more than just abortion. He also brought up the environment and climate change, where his views were even less popular, eliciting several loud boos.

Wallis: "Climate change threatens human lives, and the environment is clearly on the mainstream of the evangelical agenda."

Land: "The bible says the earth is for human betterment."

For Thompson, It Was Florida in Four Minutes

But the question is, who will be able to build the house that Ronald Reagan built -- who will be able to strengthen that house, because that's the house that's going to build the house that Clinton, Hillary, wants to build.

georgeob1 wrote:

unless a third party candidate emerges (such as Ross Perot, who got Clinton elected in 1992)

This is not true, far as I know, despite the number of times it's been repeated, particularly by those on the right for whom it's become sort of an excuse.

The polls at the time, I believe, showed that the Perot voters would have broken down to Clinton and Bush in equal parts had Perot not ran. Which would have had Clinton winning by the same margin as he did.

georgeob1 wrote:

My strong recollection and impression is that Ross Perot took a very substantial portion of the Republican electorate with him in the 1992 election. I'm not familiar with the polls you claim to remember, but do know that most of his political organization for the campaign consisted of disaffected Republicans.

There's not necessarily a contradiction.

Most of Perot's voters came from the Republican electorate, yes - people who had voted Reagan before, and Bush in '88. But that doesnt mean that they would have also gone back to the Republicans if Perot hadnt run.

Perot was as successful as he was because of just how disaffected many of these voters were. The polling showed, I believe, that the result was that if Perot hadnt stood in the end, half of his voters would have opted Clinton over Bush as well.

That's the question all right.

The prospect of defeat is making the Republican candidates assume more centrist positions and reducing the clout of the extreme elements in the party. The Evangelicals will huff and snort, but I am confident the prospect of either Hillary or Obama will sufficiently mobilize them.

For the Democrats the situation is necessarily the opposite. The prospect of victory will excite the appetites of their extreme elements, giving them a feeling of entitlement with respect to the party platform. This is already evident in the relatively wider spectrum of declared positions among the Democrat candidates, compared to the Republicans. The issue will become more divisive as the final nomination process completes.

PANDERING...

[..] This is something that's always bugged me. Ever since the 70s, Democrats have had a reputation for being more a collection of special interests than a real party. Basically, if you wanted to win you had to check off all the right boxes: abortion groups, environmental groups, labor unions, trial lawyers, various ethnic minority groups, etc. etc. There was, needless to say, more than a little truth to this reputation.

For some reason, though, Republicans never shared this reputation, despite the fact that they had plenty of special interest checkboxes of their own: tax cutting groups, the NRA, pro-life groups, evangelicals, the chamber of commerce, etc. etc. I was never quite able to figure out why, but Republicans managed to make it look like all these groups were somehow related by a set of core conservative principles, while Democratic box checking somehow always looked like pure pandering.

But Matt is right: this year, for the first time, the interest group pandering is looking a lot more obvious on the Republican side and a lot less obvious on the Democratic side. Why? I suppose it's more the changing fortunes of the parties than any actual substantive change. With Dems looking like big winners, liberal interest groups are all willing to settle down and just work for victory. Divvying up the spoils can come later. On the GOP side, it's just the opposite: with the party doing so poorly, every group is suddenly way more worried about getting its own scrap of attention than in the past. This means that subtle, dog whistle appeals aren't enough. Conservative interest groups are insecure enough that they want full-on panders, so that's what the candidates are giving them.

There aren't any more conservative check boxes than there have ever been, but the pandering demands are so much greater that their existence is way more obvious than it has been in the past. It doesn't help that many of the leading candidates really aren't natural allies of all the conservative interest groups, which means that they have to pander even more obsequiously than usual in order to prove their bona fides (cf. Mitt Romney, above).

RedState has banned talk about Ron Paul.

link

Brand X wrote:

RedState has banned talk about Ron Paul.

link

Dude

I mean, yes the Ron Paulies are mostly insane, but, damn. Feeling defensive are they?

The Bush Factor

More recently, a Gallup poll found Americans' general views of the Republican Party to be far more negative than they are of the Democratic Party. In a Gallup poll in October, 59 percent of those polled said they viewed the Republican party unfavorably. Forty-three percent said they viewed the Democratic party unfavorably.

Tony Fabrizio, the Republican pollster who worked for Robert Dole in 1996 but is not working for any of the 2008 candidates, said that the current Republican candidates can avoid discussion of Mr. Bush's policies for only so long. He also said that much of Mr. Bush's fortunes are tied to public opinion about the war in Iraq.

"The Republican candidates are going to have to address it eventually," he said. "It becomes important for the candidates to try to show some difference with the president. They have a very fine line to walk. They can't stray too far in the primaries, because the president is popular within the Republican party and the support for the war is high within the party."

"But," Mr. Fabrizio said, "when there is a nominee, it will be different."

"Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."

Please keep it up, fellas. Hell, even Fred Barnes has a bead on this one and if Fred Barnes is smarter than these campaigns, then that's one heck of an indictment... http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/310sbgqy.asp