Why the Republicans don't like their candidates

The GOP front-runner isn't Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney. It's "none of the above."

By Thomas F. Schaller

Read more: Republican Party, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Iowa, South Carolina, Opinion, Fred Thompson, Sam Brownback, 2008 election, Mitt Romney

Salon photo collage / REUTERS photo

Top to bottom: Former Sen. Fred Thompson, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Sen. Sam Brownback, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Sen. John McCain.

July 26, 2007 | In the past week, Mitt Romney -- the former Massachusetts governor who seems to be edging into the front-runner's position for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination -- has taken to ignoring his fellow Republican challengers, instead aiming his barbs at the leading Democratic contenders. In a speech last week, Romney denounced Barack Obama's healthcare plan as socialized medicine and dismissed Hillary Clinton's economic views as Marxist. "She said we have been an 'on-your-own society.' She said, 'It's time to get rid of that and replace it with shared responsibility.' That's out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx," said Romney, in a rhetorical flourish that managed to distort both Clintonism and Marxism.

It is a reflection of the desperation of the Republican field that the man who for the moment looks as though he might be the party's presidential nominee clearly hopes to draw Nikita Khrushchev as his opponent in the general election. The Republican Party generally likes to anoint the guy "next in line" as its preferred nominee and cruise through the formality of the primaries, but this time there is no next guy in line, no chosen establishment candidate. Instead, there are nine (or 10, or 11) flawed contenders for the nomination, and the lack of enthusiasm within the party for those contenders is palpable. A CBS/New York Times poll taken earlier this year showed that whereas 57 percent of Democrats were satisfied with their options, the same percentage of Republican voters were dissatisfied with their presidential choices. In an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released last week, "none of the above" beat every announced candidate and Fred Thompson too. Mitt Romney, instead of looking ahead to the general election, had better watch his back. With the GOP one defeat away from being reduced to minority status at every level of government, the 2008 nomination contest has descended into a battle of attrition. The Iowa caucuses are less than six months away, and the nominee may be the candidate who doesn't so much win as move to the lead at the right moment and avoid blowing it.

For a long time, it looked as though John McCain, once George Bush's nemesis, had become his heir. He was leading out of the gate, entering 2007 as a war hero with strong name ID and a loving relationship with the media. But nothing has since gone right for the Straight Talk Express 2.0. In the past month, staffers and consultants have bailed amid cash-flow problems. The campaign's second-quarter fundraising report revealed that McCain had a measly $2 million cash on hand, a sum roughly equivalent to what Clinton and Obama have been raising on average per week during the first six months of 2007. It is now moot whether McCain's fall is a byproduct of clinging too closely to President Bush on immigration, an issue that infuriates the conservative base, or clinging too closely to Bush on the Iraq war, an issue that panics the party's remaining moderates. Either way, the campaign of this former POW has taken a turn toward MIA. Though polls reveal the public's hesitancy to elect a man of his age, McCain's problem is not that he's 70 but that he's been more or less running since 2000. The candidate, not the man, has aged poorly.

McCain's supposed successor as front-runner was Rudy Giuliani. The former New York City mayor, who has been riding for six long years on his Sept. 11 reputation, was positioned to pull away from the post-McCain field but already seems winded. Giuliani's problem isn't the war: He supports it while cleverly avoiding responsibility for it as he positions himself as the candidate of 2002 -- that is, after the terrorist attacks but before Iraq. Nor, contra the conventional wisdom, is wariness among the party's conservative base dooming his candidacy. Giuliani's real problem is that his central claim to the nomination is his electability. But electability -- indeed, his whole campaign -- is based on one issue, and his record on that issue is now under attack. Ground Zero workers, the Uniformed Firefighters' Association union, and the surviving family members of some New York City firefighters who died on Sept. 11 have made it clear they will publicly challenge his anti-terror bona fides. Perhaps Giuliani can dismiss these impassioned attacks as shrill and partisan. At least one important former ally, however, former Sen. Al D'Amato, R-N.Y., finds them potentially resonant enough to have attended a recent private New York meeting between his own chosen candidate, Fred Thompson, and the president of the New York local of the UFA. And if Giuliani is truly immune to doubt about his "America's Mayor" image, why are his poll numbers starting to look like McCain's? Since earlier this year there's been a slow, steady leak in Giuliani's numbers.

With McCain and Giuliani fading, the backstretch belongs to Romney, he of the utterly fungible belief system and utterly immovable coif. But just how much are Republican primary voters willing to bet on the former Massachusetts governor? White evangelicals hold special sway during GOP primary season. They constitute 31 percent of the Republican base in Iowa and 39 percent of GOP voters in South Carolina. How many of them will grit their teeth and vote for a candidate whom they believe to be a religious cultist? If Ralph Nader was capable of siphoning enough votes from a putative Democratic majority to put Bush in the Oval Office, imagine what a disgruntled white evangelical base can do to a Romney-led Republican ticket. And Republicans picking Romney because they care first and foremost about keeping the White House should take a moment to peruse the head-to-head matchups on Pollster.com between the top three declared GOP candidates and the Democrats' trio of leading contenders. Against Clinton, Obama or John Edwards, McCain and Giuliani are competitive or, in some pairings, run slightly ahead; Romney is well behind all three. It's also hard to see how the GOP, which so venerates machismo in its nominees, wants to nominate the one guy to whom Hillary Clinton could legitimately turn in the middle of a debate and say, "I continue to marvel at the media's fascination with my haircuts and clothes, especially since the governor has a much prettier head of hair than I have ever had." The Romney stumble is imminent.

Next page: The field is so feeble that the Republican candidates face an atypically Republican problem: They don't have very much money.