He has clearly expanded his support from 2008, is basking in some enviable press coverage, could very plausibly win Iowa, and has a credible strategy to gobble up delegates in subsequent caucuses, but if you need further proof that Ron Paul is starting to make Republican elites uneasy, here’s Exhibit A: Sean Hannity went after him hard on Wednesday night.
Hannity’s shtick is to be the GOP’s cheerleader-in-chief, relentlessly pressing anti-Obama talking points while puffing up any Republican who’s willing to read from the script. Thus, he’s spent the current campaign presenting every major Republican candidate in a flattering light and telling his audience that each is equally capable of taking down Barack Obama — except for Paul, whose non-interventionist foreign policy views and warnings about blowback are fundamentally at odds with the virtual merger of GOP and Likud politics.
Hannity’s preferred strategy has been to ignore Paul, so it’s telling that less than three weeks before the Iowa caucuses he felt the need on Wednesday to bring Bill Bennett on his show for a segment of unsaturated Paul-bashing. Bennett articulated an increasingly common concern among GOP elites, saying that Paul’s candidacy “isn’t going anywhere — except if he wins Iowa.”
And what happens if he does?
If you have a mischievous streak, it’s a fun possibility to consider, because the short answer is that guys like Bennett and Hannity will freak out — and their freak-out could last for a while. An Iowa victory would make Paul the center of the political media world, flood his campaign treasury with even more small-dollar donations, and boost his prospects in subsequent states. He might be able to parlay it into an impressive showing in libertarian-friendly New Hampshire, weather losses in South Carolina and Florida (where the numbers just aren’t very promising), then surge again in February, when his caucus state strategy kicks in. If the rest of the field remains unsettled then — with, say, Romney winning New Hampshire and Newt Gingrich taking South Carolina and Florida — Paul could find himself at or near the top of the delegate race, pushing the Hannity/Bennett panic level through the roof.
If the scenario I just sketched out sounds vaguely familiar, it’s for good reason. It’s roughly the story of Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign for the Democratic nomination. Jonathan Bernstein first made the Paul/Jackson comparison last week, and there’s a lot to it. Like Paul, Jackson was a repeat candidate who enjoyed much wider support in his second bid. He was also seen as a niche candidate and was persona non grata to most Democratic leaders, who saw his far-left views (particularly on foreign policy), penchant for controversy (“Hymietown“), and ties to black urban politics as potentially damaging to their party. And, just like Paul, his unfavorable poll scores among his own party’s voters tended to be much higher than those of his opponents. So the prevailing assumption was that Jackson faced a unique ceiling in the Democratic race.
But the combination of Jackson’s expanded base of support and an unusually volatile Democratic race in ’88 led to a moment in the primary season when the party’s elites actually believed their worst nightmare might be playing out. It came when Jackson, who skipped Iowa and New Hampshire, essentially fought Michael Dukakis and Al Gore to a three-way tie in the early March Super Tuesday primaries. Jackson won five states that day, and nearly picked off a few more. It was a revelation to the political world, which until then hadn’t realized the extent of Jackson’s expanded support. More to the point, it put him within spitting distance of the delegate lead.
And then things got really funny. A week later, Dukakis — who had been seen as the front-runner, albeit a weak one — was crushed in the Illinois primary, finishing a distant third with just 17 percent. The winner (with 42 percent) was Paul Simon, who represented the state in the Senate but had previously suspended his campaign. Jackson, boosted by his Chicago ties, was next with 32 percent — far better than he’d been expected to do. Now the press was asking: What’s wrong with Dukakis? Why won’t Democrats rally around him? Then came Michigan, where Jackson scored a shockingly easy victory over Dukakis — and took the lead in the national delegate race. Here’s how the New York Times described the reaction of party elites:
Democratic Party leaders expressed astonishment today at the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s landslide victory in the Michigan caucuses Saturday and confessed that they found it hard, after weeks of surprises, to predict how or when the party’s Presidential race would be decided.
For the first time, party professionals began actively contemplating the possibility that Mr. Jackson could emerge from the primary season, which ends in California and New Jersey June 7, with the most delegates.
One said that it was ”remotely, barely, distantly conceivable” that the party might actually end up by nominating Mr. Jackson. Others agreed that outcome was possible but, although they would not say it for attribution, almost none believed that a black candidate can be elected.
This is the moment that could await Republicans in the weeks and months ahead.
Of course, the rest of the Jackson story is instructive, too. The rally-around-Dukakis effort from party elites took on immediate urgency, with Dukakis quickly scoring badly needed wins in Connecticut and Wisconsin, then enduring a brutal, racially divisive fight in New York (thanks, Ed Koch). After his double-digit Empire State win, Dukakis was never threatened by Jackson again and rolled to the nomination with ease. Not that Jackson didn’t make the pre-convention months as difficult as possible for them, publicly campaigning for the No. 2 slot on Dukakis’ ticket and threatening to upstage Dukakis in Atlanta and on the fall campaign trail.
In the end, Jackson did face a real ceiling on the Democratic side. But it wasn’t nearly as low as everyone originally thought it was, and it took an entire primary season to figure out exactly where it was. The same may be true for Paul.
Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, a four-term Republican from Michigan, just became the first incumbent congressman in seven decades not to qualify for his party’s primary ballot.
Of the 1,830 signatures that his campaign turned in, election officials have decreed that just 244 are valid – well short of the 1,000 needed for ballot access. So while the state attorney general’s office looks into whether there was any intentional fraud on his campaign’s part, McCotter will now run as a write-in candidate in the August 7 primary. He still might survive – he says party leaders are on-board with the effort, and the only candidate whose name will be on the ballot has little money or name recognition – but Michigan’s rules for write-in candidates are a bit stringent, and the use of ballot stickers is barred.
That it’s come to this is, obviously, an indictment of the competence of McCotter’s political operation and, perhaps, the congressman’s judgment. (In trying to account for the snafu, he said that “someone… lied to me.”) But in a way, it’s also a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when your average backbench member of Congress becomes a minor cable news celebrity and mistakes it for having a genuine national following.
This is what led the 46-year-old McCotter to enter the Republican presidential race last July. First elected to the House in 2002, he gained a measure of prominence in the Obama-era through his House floor speeches and his appearances on the overnight Fox News show “Red Eye,” showcasing what Jim Newell called “his brand of ‘wry’ Republican and Tea Party humor, which is really just the same old nonsense with a twist of sarcastic condescension.” With Mitt Romney facing a skeptical party base, McCotter apparently spotted an opening and jumped in.
His campaign lasted for just two months, during which time he was roundly ignored by the media, donors and party leaders and finished dead last in the Iowa straw poll with a total of 35 votes – 0.2 percent. His most visible campaign activity consisted of pointedly tweeting about unrelated subjects during GOP debates he wasn’t invited to, and the most press attention he got came through sarcastic reporter tweets about the futility of his efforts. In September, he dropped out.
There may or may not be a direct relationship between that quixotic adventure and McCotter’s current nightmare. It’s possible his attempts to make it on the national stage caused him to take his eye off the ball on his House reelection, or maybe it’s just a coincidence. Either way, a presidential campaign that he thought would elevate his standing ended up having the opposite effect, and it looks more foolish than ever in light of this week’s news.
This is not the first time a story like this has played out. There’s the classic example of “B-1” Bob Dornan, the far-right Orange County congressman who tried to parlay C-Span prominence into a campaign for the 1996 GOP nomination. Unlike McCotter, he actually made it into the debates, but it didn’t matter. On the weekend before the New Hampshire primary, Dornan ended up literally begging a roomful of New Hampshire Republicans to check his name off so that he’d get at least one percent of the vote. They ignored him and he dropped out, then returned home to find his House seat in jeopardy. His vanity mission hadn’t gone over well with the locals, who ousted him in favor of Democrat Loretta Sanchez that fall. Dornan was last seen mounting a random 2004 primary challenge against Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, falling short by 68 points.
McCotter may yet avoid Dornan’s fate, and when you consider that even Herman Cain managed to gain traction last year, you can at least begin to understand why he decided to give the White House race a shot. But if he had it to do over, here’s guessing McCotter would have spent less time worrying about the Ames straw poll and more time focusing on his own backyard.
Nearly two months after he began sporting the title “presumptive Republican nominee,” Mitt Romney is poised to cross the magic 1,144-delegate threshold in Texas today. In terms of the current campaign, it’s a ho-hum milestone; the political world’s attention long ago shifted to the Romney/Obama general election fight. But take a step back, and the circumstances are a bit more remarkable.
After all, it was almost exactly one year ago that another development in Texas seemed to put Romney’s nomination prospects in grave danger: Rick Perry’s unexpected May 27, 2011, announcement that he was considering jumping into the race.
This came at the end of a month in which Romney’s supposed “healthcare problem” dominated coverage of the race, with the candidate using a speech at the University of Michigan to plead with Republicans that they not consider his Massachusetts law as the blueprint for ObamaCare. Early polling wasn’t encouraging; already Romney had been (briefly) lapped by Donald Trump, and now Herman Cain was making a move. The only thing keeping Romney in contention, conventional wisdom held, was the lack of a truly credible alternative – someone ideologically acceptable to the base but with a resumé weighty enough to satisfy party leaders. Perry, the third-term governor of the nation’s second-largest state, seemed like he might fit the bill.
That Romney overcame this can, of course, be attributed to Perry’s utter incompetence as a communicator. When Perry finally entered the race in August, he immediately opened a large lead over Romney and – and unlike, say, Cain – had an opportunity to cement it by uniting the party’s opinion-shaping class behind him. But Perry’s trainwreck debate performances scared those Republicans away and hastened his demise.
But it’s also true that Romney was actually fairly well-positioned at this time last year. Healthcare was never that big of a problem for him, since it was simply the idea of ObamaCare – and not any of the particulars of the actual law – that enraged the GOP base. This allowed Romney to rail against ObamaCare while spouting gobbledygook to claim that he’d done something completely different in Massachusetts. If he’d defended the federal law for some reason, Romney would have been giving away the nomination, but he knew better than to do that.
The other advantage Romney enjoyed, as Seth Masket points out, has to do with the Tea Party-era evolution of the definition of conservatism. The policy positions that the right now demands were relegated to the fringes just a few years ago – meaning that there really never was going to be an alternative to Romney who was both ideologically pure and credible as a national candidate. Even Perry, as it turned out, had some ideological baggage. And besides Perry, Romney only had to fend off candidates that party leaders were never interested in lining up behind – Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann.
This doesn’t mean the nomination was in the bag for Romney the whole time. Perry was a legitimate threat (and Tim Pawlenty perhaps could have been one, had he shown any life on the trail), and a major chunk of the GOP base – white evangelical Christians, especially in the South – remained resistant to Romney even as it became clear he’d be the nominee. But the predictions of his imminent demise that popped up throughout 2011 seem a bit foolish now.
Is there a lesson here for the next time around, even given the odd circumstances and candidate roster that defined the 2012 GOP race? Maybe it’s this: If a front-runner seems wounded and vulnerable, don’t write him or her off until there’s a truly credible alternative on the stage.
There’s still a week left, but the prevailing expectation is that Scott Walker will survive Wisconsin’s June 5 recall election.
The Republican incumbent has led by a margin in the mid-single digits for the past few weeks, though Democrats insist their internal polls are closer. Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate, turned in an aggressive and generally well-received performance in a Friday debate, the first of two head-to-head showdowns, and is now playing up the ongoing federal inquiry into Walker’s fundraising practices from his days as a county executive. The possibility of a late charge by Barrett can’t be dismissed, but he enters the campaign’s final days as a decided underdog.
Not surprisingly, this has Republicans pointing to the state as a ripe November target for Mitt Romney. There’s plenty of logic to this. The recall effort has been the story in Wisconsin for a year now, and the partisan and ideological lines are clearly drawn. So, given this polarized, high-interest climate, if the numbers end up breaking the GOP’s way on June 5, how could it not be some kind of harbinger for the fall?
Actually, there’s a good reason to think it won’t be: The same polls that have Walker well-positioned to fend off Barrett don’t give Romney quite the same strength. The most recent public survey, released last week by St. Norbert College and Wisconsin Public Radio, put Walker ahead 50 to 45 percent in the recall race and Obama up 49 to 43 percent on the presidential side. Before that, a poll from Marquette Law School gave Walker a six-point lead while showing a dead heat in the Romney-Obama contest.
It’s a reminder of the very mixed partisan and ideological messages that swing voters frequently send. In theory, it’s hard to imagine a voter brushing off the Democratic portrayal of Walker as a far-right ideologue, tool of the rich and destroyer of middle-class jobs while simultaneously buying into the same caricature of Romney. But swing voters often aren’t making straight judgments on policy and ideology, which is why where they say they stand on major issues often doesn’t line up with how they say they’ll vote in an election. So it’s very possible that Wisconsin voters will give Walker the go-ahead to finish his term and then vote to give Obama a second one this fall.
There have been so few statewide recall campaigns in American history that it’s hard to draw meaningful lessons from the past, but the example of California is worth keeping in mind here. In October 2003, the state’s voters recalled Gray Davis and installed Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor. Added together, Schwarzenegger and the other major Republican candidate on the ballot, Tom McClintock, took 62 percent of the vote, prompting Republicans to argue that the state’s political terrain had shifted and that George W. Bush would have a shot of winning it in 2004.
“Anybody who says California is impossible or out of play is wrong,” Ken Mehlman, who was then one of Bush’s top political aides, said at the time.
But the California recall was a harbinger of nothing. In 2004, John Kerry beat Bush by 10 points in the state, a number that was just two points off Al Gore’s 2000 pace – and consistent with a national popular vote shift in Bush’s favor.
Determining how competitive Wisconsin should be this fall is a tricky matter. Viewed one way, the state is a Democratic bastion at the presidential level: Obama won it by 14 points in 2008 and the state has gone blue for six straight elections. Even Michael Dukakis carried it! But this paints a misleading picture. The ’08 result represented the most dramatic swing in the country from 2004, when Kerry won the state by just two-fifths of one point. It was even closer in 2000, when Gore took it by a fifth of a point. And Dukakis’s win in ’88 could be chalked up to a brutal upper-Midwest economy that resulted in just about the only non-coastal patch of blue on that year’s electoral map.
The polls that have Obama and Romney in a close race in the state are a dramatic illustration of the erosion of Obama’s standing with economically anxious middle-class white voters. The state now seems back to being one where Democrats have a small built-in advantage but where Republicans can compete.
But this would have been true with or without the recall. Which means that Obama’s chances in the state are the same right now as they will be the morning after next week’s recall vote – no matter the result.
National Review’s Robert Costa reported last night that Mitt Romney and Rand Paul had met privately for about 30 minutes in Washington. The speculation over what they might have discussed is mostly focused on this summer’s Republican convention, where delegates loyal (but not necessarily pledged) to Ron Paul will probably control a few hundred slots, with the potential to make some real trouble for Romney.
But as James Hohmann of Politico points out, the sit-down could have much broader, longer-term significance: If Romney ends up winning this year, Rand Paul will immediately become his most obvious threat for a 2016 primary challenge.
With 77-year-old Ron Paul heading off into retirement at the end of this year, Rand Paul is set to become the national face of the libertarian message associated with his family’s name. The assumption is that he’ll ultimately run for president, but the question is when. Unlike his father, Rand seems willing to modulate his message and rhetoric in a way that could expand his appeal within the Republican Party and make him a genuine threat to actually win state primaries and caucuses, something Ron still has never done.
This could make Paul very dangerous to a President Romney, whose ideological purity conservative leaders still doubt. From a governing standpoint, this would give Romney little room for maneuvering, particularly if Republicans control both chambers of Congress. He would be under immense pressure from the right to support and implement their agenda, no matter how politically toxic it is. If Romney were to balk at doing so, or seek some major compromise with Democrats, or simply be seen as not pushing hard enough, he’d be inviting a conservative revolt – and Rand Paul would be a logical figure to lead it.
We’ve seen a dynamic somewhat like this before, back when George H.W. Bush was president. As I’ve written before, there are some striking parallels between how Romney and Bush 41 rose to power – and the suspicion with which their late-in-life embraces of conservatism were viewed by the GOP base. So when Bush cut a deal with Democrats in 1990 to reduce the deficit by raising taxes, conservative activists weren’t eager to give him the benefit of the doubt or to invent some rationalization to go along with him. They revolted, setting off an intraparty war that damaged Bush’s presidency and produced a 1992 primary challenge from Pat Buchanan. (Before Buchanan jumped in, there had been talk that Bush would instead be challenged by a then-former Texas congressman named Ron Paul.)
At least Bush had some wiggle room, though. When he was president, the GOP was evolving into the absolutist conservative party it now is, but there were still plenty of genuine Republican moderates and an awful lot of pragmatists on Capitol Hill. Romney wouldn’t have that luxury. The party and its congressional representatives are far more uniformly conservative today, and whatever instinct Republican members of Congress have for compromise is quickly being snuffed out by the threat of primary challenges.
The threat of a ’16 campaign by Rand Paul – or another prominent conservative – is one that would haunt a Romney presidency and is the best reason to doubt that Romney’s old flair for moderation will return if he’s in the White House.
President Obama’s public endorsement of gay marriage hasn’t had any discernible effect on his approval rating or his head-to-head standing with Mitt Romney. And with Romney and most top Republicans largely content to leave the subject alone, it seems clear that the marriage issue will play a very minimal role in the national campaign, if any at all.
But a new PPP poll provides evidence that Obama’s announcement will play a major role in killing one of the most persistent talking points for opponents of gay marriage.
Maryland legalized same-sex marriage back in March, when Gov. Martin O’Malley signed a bill passed by a Democratic Legislature. Opponents immediately mobilized to put a repeal referendum on this November’s ballot, and initial polling showed only a slight majority of voters favored upholding the law. But in the new survey, the margin has exploded to 20 points, 57 to 37 percent, a shift that PPP explains this way:
The movement over the last two months can be explained almost entirely by a major shift in opinion about same-sex marriage among black voters. Previously 56% said they would vote against the new law with only 39% planning to uphold it. Those numbers have now almost completely flipped, with 55% of African Americans planning to vote for the law and only 36% now opposed.
This is consistent with an ABC News/Washington Post poll of national voters this week, which showed support for marriage equality among African-Americans jumping from 41 to 59 percent in the wake of Obama’s announcement.
In Maryland, the surge in black support means that gay marriage is very likely to be approved by voters this fall. If that happens, opponents will no longer be able to make a claim they’ve been relying on for years – that everywhere gay marriage has been on the ballot, it’s been rejected by voters. Tony Perkins and Ken Blackwell, for instance, penned a column for Fox News earlier this week that made sure to note that “in the 32 states where voters have been allowed to express their views, all 32 have affirmed traditional marriage and rejected its same-sex redefinition.”
That will no longer be the case a few months from now, unless there’s some kind of major, hard-to-envision shift in public opinion in Maryland.
Nor is Maryland alone. In Maine, marriage equality supporters have placed a referendum on this November’s ballot, and polling suggests it has a good chance of passing. There may also be a vote in Washington, where opponents are collecting signatures in an effort to thwart a marriage law signed by Gov. Christine Gregoire earlier this year; if they reach the signature threshold by June 6, the law won’t go into effect unless voters support it in the November referendum. A February poll showed voters supporting the law by a 49-44 percent spread.
All of this speaks to the rapid pace of change in public opinion on this issue. The “every state has voted against it” talking point sounds compelling, but many of the state referendums that account for it took place years ago, when the idea of gay marriage still had a fringe feel to it. Back in 2004, when it was legalized in Massachusetts by the state’s Supreme Court, just 30 percent of Americans said they favored same-sex marriage. In this week’s ABC/Washington Post survey, the number is 53 percent. In just the past couple of years, the shift has been marked. In 2009, Maine voters actually rejected gay marriage by a 6-point margin; it’s a measure of where things stand now that supporters initiated the push to put it back on the ballot this year.
The idea of state referendums, which violate the principle of not using the ballot box to decide minority rights, is a complicated one for marriage equality proponents. And even as states begin voting for gay marriage, it won’t be a complete solution, since there are plenty of other states where it will take years, maybe decades, for popular support to even approach 50 percent. Still, the anti-gay marriage crowd should probably enjoy their 0-for-32 talking point while they can, because it won’t be valid for much longer.
Ron Paul at a 2011 debate and Jesse Jackson on the campaign trail in 1988. (Credit: AP) 
Thaddeus McCotter (Credit: Reuters/Rebecca Cook) 
Mitt Romney (Credit: AP) 
Barack Obama(Credit: AP) 
Rand Paul (Credit: AP/Manuel Balce Cenata) 
President Barack Obama(Credit: AP) 
