From The Department Of Wait... What?

Rudy! Giuliani is going to run for President again?

Recall that in 2005, Giuliani began preparations after a "Draft Rudy" movement formed (and of course he had a hand in that, let's not be sly about that). He declared in 2007 and quickly supplanted John McCain as the Republican front-runner in the early stages of the primaries. He raised more money than anyone (Mitt Romney had more money than anyone, but that's because he tapped his own personal fortune). He attracted a lot of attention and support. Hell, I supported him.

Then Rudy! got some bad polling numbers from Iowa basically dropped out of the Iowa caucuses, coming in sixth out of seven major candidates there. Then, he came in fourth place out of eight in New Hampshire, attracting barely 9% of the total vote. Then, he came in sixth place three times in a row -- in Michigan he got 3% of the vote, in Nevada 4%, and in South Carolina 2%. He put all his eggs in the basket of Florida's early primary, coming in third place with not quite 15% of the vote, and that was basically it.

That's a pretty miserable showing for over seventy-five million dollars spent. Despite promising to appoint "strict constructionist" judges and coming as close as he could to flip-flopping on abortion, Rudy! just never caught on with conservative voters; he never shook off the mud slung at him concerning his personal life. Now, he says "there's opportunity for a moderate candidate with a background in national security." Maybe, Yerhonner, but that candidate isn't you.

Rudy!, your moment has passed. Your moment was really in 2004, but good for you, you were loyal to the party and didn't challenge W. And you didn't angle for a Cabinet position, either, which you should have done to burnish your resume for 2008. Instead, you went for the money, founding a security consultancy and attaching your name to a high-powered law firm.

By the time of the first election in 2012, it will have been more than ten years since you last really got to shine as a holder of public office. The remainder of your professional life is going to consist of security and governmental consulting for your consulting firm for as long as people will listen to you, and rainmaking for your top-100 law firm, and you've already got all the money you'll ever need to live as comfortably as you want and leave a lot for your hot wife and your adult kids, both estranged and still-gruntled.

Granted, you have to pay for your own plane, but all things considered, this is a damn sweet setup you've got going. Enjoy it, and let me dream a dream about Gary Johnson in 2012, until harsh reality intrudes on that.

Senator Giuliani

So it appears that Rudy! Giuliani will run for Senate in 2010 and not Governor of New York.  This, I think, is not a good use of his skill set.  Rudy! is an executive; he has no experience in a deliberative body, no experience with the give-and-take logrolling that is inherently a part of legislative compromising.  I understand a desire to not be in Albany -- the New York Legislature is thoroughly controlled by someone who isn't Rudy! and there's no practical way to break in to that.

The Senate is, ultimately, a poor proving ground for grooming future Presidents.  It's not a partisan issue -- it's that the skill sets necessary for success in the Presidency are different than the skill sets necessary for success in the Legislature.  If Rudy! is thinking the Senate is a fine coda for his career, then fine.  But I can't believe he isn't thinking about challenging Obama in 2012.  Rudy! has charisma and is very smart, but his personality is ill-suited for the job.

Rudy! For Governor!

Hey, you heard it here first! Well, actually, I heard it first at Below the Beltway. And he heard it first in the Gray Lady. So you probably didn't really hear it here first. But you did hear it here. For the record, I'm not all that super-concerned with who is Governor of New York, for the main reason that I'm not a resident of the state of New York, although I think Rudy! would do a fine job and I think he's a net asset to the Republican Party these days despite the flaws within his set of policy preferences.

The Force Will Not Be With Her

Big Hollywood blogger Kurt Schlichter is, I fear, a bit too fond of Sarah Palin for his own good. He wrote yesterday that her abrupt and as-yet unexplained resignation from the Governorship of Alaska may have been prompted by media criticism of her and vicious attacks on her family, but this has made her “more powerful than [her enemies] can possibly imagine.” A cute analogy, especially with the clip from Star Wars. But Schlichter’s Obi-Wan Kenobi analogy is simply not right. I know that Sarah Palin fans want to believe what Schlichter is writing turns out to be true, but wanting it doesn’t make it so.

Soon-to-be-former-Governor Palin is not stronger now than she was before and certainly will not become stronger than her liberal critics can possibly imagine in the future. She is weaker now, not stronger, than she was even a week ago. She will only become weaker once she becomes “Former Governor Palin.” In order to gain power, you need to show that you can use the power you already have effectively. No less a staunch partisan Republican political strategist than Karl Rove agreed with former Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee that her resignation is a “risky strategy” that has left him “perplexed.”

First, if she’s going to try and build a national campaign starting now, this is a very unorthodox move and consequently, she’s shooting herself in both feet. Three recent examples demonstrate that bailing out of government is a bad way to prepare for a Presidential campaign:

A) Hillary Rodham Clinton. Eight years’ worth of machinations, resume-building, maintenance and upgrades to an already-impressive political machine, and what's more, possibly the most impressive set of political alliances and presumptions of inevitability did not result in President Hillary Clinton. Senator Clinton was outdone by then-Senator Obama virtue of the fact that fundamentally, she did not have enough personal executive experience running an enterprise like a Presidential campaign. At best for Palin, she has not yet demonstrated the kind of executive skill necessary to do that. Palin fans will likely bristle at this characterization of Governor Palin, but see my explanation below examples B) and C).

Nor has she been able to convince me that she is capable of personally overseeing the kind of political machine-building that Clinton did during the Bush Administration. Maybe she wouldn't need to if she piggybacks on the "movement," which already exists and already has machinery of its own in place. That seems to be how she catapulted herself onto the stage of state politics several years ago.

B) Fred Dalton Thompson. He didn’t declare for months after the primary season opened. He assembled “virtual” machinery, recording YouTube videos from a small studio in his house. He skipped debates and continued to party like a private citizen. He didn’t network, didn’t fundraise, and took too long to put together a platform on the issues – and when he did get around to doing that, he didn’t look or sound all that different than the guys who had been out on the campaign trail for months. He didn’t win a single delegate and got only eight unelected delegates to commit to him before he released them to McCain.

An unorthodox campaign style with “new machinery” did not produce President Fred Thompson – for all the talk of the “new machinery” Obama assembled, a scandalous amount of his electoral power came from old-fashioned volunteer work, and even more old-fashioned dirty tricks like ballot-box stuffing and polling-place thuggery. What was new about Obama was that he found a new way to build the old-fashioned machinery. What was new about Fred Thompson was that his non-traditional campaign produced non-traditional results.

C) Rudolph William Lewis Giuliani. Remarkable personal charisma and six years’ worth of groundwork raising money for himself and for the political allies he sought as backers was not enough for Rudy! to find purchase in the Republican Party. Too many strange things from his past, too many bad decisions made along the campaign trail. Now, in his case, he did not reverse position on abortion, but he did promise "movement conservatives" that he would appoint "strict constructionist" judges to the Supreme Court, and as we all know, "strict constructionist" is conservative code for "Will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade," something that is so far on top of the conservatives' wish list that they seem willing to forgive nearly anything else a politician or a judge does as long as they do that.

Sarah Palin, too, has outstanding personal charisma and unlike Rudy! she is personally pro-life and does not need to cozy up to the religious right on this issue. Now, I presume that if she is quitting now to lay the groundwork for a run full-time and from a location more convenient than Juneau or Wasilla. She will do the same thing that Rudy! did from 2002 to 2008 by whoring himself out to other candidates to give speeches and lend his political support and fundraising ability to them. Palin, too, can only try to make the right friends by raising money and making campaign appearances for them in 2010. But making very strange decisions – personal, policy, and political – are a pattern that can be found in Sarah Palin’s abbreviated political history, as well. The resignation is only the culmination of a series of odd decisions she's made, from "going maverick" in the middle of the McCain campaign to letting herself get interviewed in front of a working open-air poultry slaughterhouse to demanding new elections for Senator after it seemed to her the voters of Alaska voted wrong. And this bodes very poorly for her abilities as a candidate.

As promised, here is my thesis for Sarah Palin’s unproven executive ability. Sure, Alaska has a balanced budget, but that’s because it makes so damn much money on its excise tax that a fourth-grader could balance the state’s budget. Palin's brief tenure as Governor of Alaska has been highlighted by a number of ethics investigations that found the Governor to have abused her authority but which lacked the teeth to punish her in the face of a generally-friendly Legislature -- the most high profile of which she claimed exonerated her when in fact the exact opposite was true. Also, she presided over the the creation of a natural gas pipeline that had been in the works for four years before she assumed office, vacillated on accepting Federal pork money, and the institution of helicopter wolf hunts (which may make sense if you accept the idea that wolves in Alaska needed to be culled, but it just looks bad and besides, this is hardly a towering accomplishment). She took on some corruption in her own party, which was good, but has been unable to escape the taint of corruption herself. You can find the rumors about how her really nice house got built yourself.

Second, whether there is a scandal or corruption problems with her or not, it looks like she’s stepping down because she has something she wants to hide. You could say, “She wants to protect her family from this evil media machine,” and I’d totally respect that if it were true. But if she refuses to endure the media circus, then that means that she doesn’t want to run for President (at least, in a way which would be reasonably calculated to her actually winning). The fact that it looks like she’s running out of the kitchen because she can’t stand the heat is what’s important, because perception matters more than reality. I’ve heard more than a few rumors that the scandal she is ducking has to do with her time as Mayor of Wasilla rather than as Governor of Alaska, with a deal that looks really similar to the Ted Stevens scandal.

(An aside: Palin didn’t win any points with me for sticking up for Ted Stevens, either. That’s not to say I think the prosecutors handled the case against him well, because they didn’t. Stevens is a free man now because the prosecutors overstepped the case. But to say the prosecutors screwed up the case is not the same thing as saying Stevens was innocent. The evidence strongly suggests he was on the take, and we don’t need a figure of towering, arrogant, unapologetic corruption as a leader in the GOP. We now return to the peroration of your regularly-scheduled jeremiad.)

There were people -- nearly all of them self-identified "movement conservatives" -- who wanted Dan Quayle to run for President in 1996, in 2000 and even still had a few die-hard proponents early in the 2008 cycle. Quayle’s supporters were attracted to the former Vice President for the same sort of visceral reason that they are attracted to Governor Palin now: he was an object of derision and hate by the left and they felt sympathy for him as a whipping boy who didn’t really deserve the abuse he got. This was a reaction to a choice made by the Left. Had the Left not savaged Quayle so thoroughly, the Right would have picked a different avatar.

This was, and still is, bad politics -- don't let the Left pick your candidates for you because they're going to pick the one that they think they can beat easiest. That person, right now, is Sarah Palin. Ever since her resignation, every Democrat I know has said, "I hope this means she does run for President, and I hope you guys are dumb enough to nominate her." This is the political equivalent of the double-dog dare. These Democrats say that not because they fear or despise Palin. (Well, they do despise her, but that's because she's a "gender-traitor," a woman who dares to adhere to a political point of view at variance with the "feminist" constellation of policy positions.) It's because like Republicans, they like winning. And hey're convinced they can beat her.

You may (correctly) think the Democrats are wrong-headed about (many of) their policies, and you may find them (more or less correctly) to be morally bankrupt as a political unit and as represented by their leadership. But don't let that fool you into thinking they're stoooopid.

Dan Quayle was irrelevant in 2000 and even more irrelevant in 2008, and he had the good sense to realize that. He shows up to events, speaks to the rank-and-file faithful, raises some money, and then he goes home. Dan Quayle’s past is Sarah Palin’s future.

Rudy! On The Reboot

From a new website called New Majority, Rudy! talks about what the GOP has become and how it can get better again:

Yes, to some extent, it's the same thing over and over again in the "Republican Reboot" posts here -- the Republicans have offered too much social red meat, and not paid enough attention to policy issues that actually matter to centrist and suburban voters. But damnit, we need to hear this and more importantly, we need to take action on it. We need to get beyond the point that a criticism like this strikes close to home.

If we don't start changing our ways, our insufficient-to-win-on-its-own voter base will slowly die out over time and the Democrats will become so ascendant that the whole country will become like the South in the 1940's -- the real election will be the Democratic primary; if a Republican even bothers to run, it will be a formality; and if one manages to win, it will be an aberration that will last a single frustrating term in office. This is not a bright future.

Hizzonner also gives a postmortem on the 2008 election here. It's at least as good as the embedded video in making the essential point. I linked to the post, rather than embedding that, because a comment there mirrors the point made in my other link (the one that rightly criticizes the current GOP), which in turn dovetails into the point that Giuliani is making in the video. Kind of a great circle of political point-making.

The inaugural address Obama gave is a great example of how to reach out across the aisle to appeal for support from the center, without giving up the essential values that supported him in the first place. That's the sort of thing Giuliani is talking about here. That's the sort of thing I and all the other right-of-center writers I keep linking to are appealing for. That's the sort of thing that will be necessary if the GOP is going to keep itself from joining the Whigs and the Federalists in the dustbin of obsolescent political parties.

Just A Hypothetical

What if I had been right a year ago? What if the parties had nominated Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton instead of Barack Obama and John McCain? Would the race be as one-sided with those candidates?

Personally, I think that if that had happened, Senator Clinton would still be the favorite to win, but the numbers wouldn't look quite so grim. I think there would have been two reasons for that.

Hillary! would have been faster than Obama to concede certain states to the Republicans. Hillary! would have run a campaign much like her husband had run in 1996, raising money from similar sources and not being as exciting as Obama has been. She would have been more vulnerable in states like Virginia and Missouri and Ohio; Rudy! would be competing there as per the playbook. I think that her running mate would have been Phil Bredesen.

Rudy! for his part, would probably be a lot like McCain has been. It seems likely to me that Rudy! would have had to have confronted most of the same kinds of pressures that McCain did by way of trying to keep the Republican house of cards together -- meaning he would probably have nominated someone with the same sorts of social conservative credentials as Sarah Palin. He might not have picked her, though, facing a female opponent directly. Instead, he might well have looked to J.C. Watts instead. But he'd have had to figure out how to run his own campaign while integrating the RNC machine and running their playbook, too -- which means that organizationally and thematically, a Giuliani-Watts campaign would have worked out more or less like McCain-Palin.

The Georgia crisis would not have been as big a political football as it was. Hillary! and Rudy! would have had essentially the same reaction to the War In The Caucasus and both would have had the same level of credibility going out of that event as they had going in. As it was, the War In The Caucasus was politically good for McCain because regardless of the wisdom of the respective candidates' reactions, they were different and the spin worked better for McCain.

The more profound domestic economic collapse, though, is the big question. Rudy! would have taken a hit, no doubt, for the same reason that McCain did -- when the shit hits the fan at home, you do not want to be the nominee of the incumbent party, no matter how striking a difference you've been able to draw between yourself and the incumbent. So I think that would have been to Hillary!'s net advantage. But I think Rudy! would have had a savvier reaction to the crisis and the bailout than did McCain -- not having to go to the Senate himself and be expected to vote in favor of it, he could have criticized it from the outside. This would have gained him big political points.

I'm assuming that no one would have dragged out any more skeletons from Rudy!'s closet, that the conservative right wing would have rallied around Watts as the running mate and drummed itself up into a frenzy about the evils of another Clinton Presidency, and that the public in general would have suffered from no small degree of Clinton fatigue. Some of these are the same kinds of hazards that Obama has weathered, some are not. And then there's the fact that Rudy! is just plain more charismatic than Hillary!, counterbalanced by Rudy! having to thread the needle just so on abortion to keep his party unified, something that his actual candidacy simply could not finesse.

By this point, most of the country would have become sick to death of both of them. Why? Because it would have probably been the most negative, nasty, personal, and dirty campaign since Adams took on Jefferson in 1800. And people get tired of that. The result would be a dramatically depressed voter turnout -- and low voter turnout tends to favor Republicans, whose electoral base is better-trained to show up and vote whether they're happy about their choices or not.

There's a good chance that I'd have grown disaffected with Rudy! by now, myself, and still wound up voting Libertarian.

But, based on all of these wild speculations, if it had been Hillary! versus Rudy! I'd say that Hillary! would have an overall sixty to sixty-five percent chance of winning right now, with the Electoral College map looking a lot like it did in 2004, and battlegrounds in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Missouri, and Colorado. Yes, Rudy! would have to run the table of those states, but he'd have a realistic, although not probable, shot at doing that by now.

That's how I think it would have looked a week out if the two pre-primary favorites had succeeded as projected.

The Upcoming Narrowing Of The Polls

National polls show Obama leading right now by anywhere from four to ten points, with the average being a 6.8% advantage. This spells doom for my bet of a bottle of good Scotch. But on the other hand, the conventional wisdom is that no matter what the polls say in the weeks leading to an election, no matter what the issues are or who the candidates might be, the polls always narrow, the front-runner's lead always evaporates somewhat, right before the election happens and the results are closer than the pre-election polls would indicate. Which is to say that I should not give up hope for winning my bet the way I've given up any belief that McCain has a credible shot at actually winning.

But, comebacks from a deficit this deep are not unknown. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com (the best polling site on the net and I'm not being paid to tell you that -- so I don't mind hotlinking their charts all that much since I encourage you to go there directly and patronize their many fine advertisers) points out two elections in which a contender has narrowed a gap of that size, or more.

1968: Hubert Humphrey trailed Nixon by fifteen points in early October. But on election day, the result was a popular vote differential within less than one percent. Nixon slammed Humphrey in the Electoral College, but the point is the popular vote differential narrowed by almost enough for HHH to put himself in spitting distance of actually winning -- and he did it in less than four weeks.

1980: Ronald Reagan trailed incumbent Jimmy Carter by eight points as on October 26, 1980, and went on to win the election outright, with a popular margin of victory of nearly ten percent. That's an eighteen-point turnaround in less than two weeks.

There are 22 days left in this election. The polls will narrow, but realistic observers of any perspective should take a step back and understand what is really going on.

In both historical cases discussed by Silver, external events (the Vietnam War and the Iranian Hostage Crisis) as well as ongoing economic doldrums mitiated in favor of these "comebacks" and it seems likely to me that something was wrong with both of the polls used to describe the starting points of the turnarounds rather than a very sudden and dramatic shift in the electorate's mood on election day.

External events do not favor John McCain -- not because of anything he's done but rather because as the Republican nominee, he gets to carry water for the incumbent Administration which has presided over what 91% of the public feels is a complete meltdown of our network of financial institutions. (One wonders what, exactly, the other 9% are thinking. Maybe they're the short-sellers and they've made scads over the last month.)

And modern polling is significantly better than it was in the 1960's and 1970's. Not perfect, but pollsters have learned a thing or two about their craft and are better-able to formulate sample pools and use sophisticated mathematical models to extract data from them. I'm not saying the polls can be wrong. But I really don't think a "Dewey Beats Truman" situation is brewing here. Yes, a year ago the CW had it as a foregone conclusion that right about now it would be a within-a-point duel between Rudy! and Hillary! and everybody else was going to be an also-ran. Things have changed dramatically. But it's not 2007 anymore and Election Day looms in our immediate future.

The questions I have are not whether Obama will win, but rather by how much, and whether he will have any coattails, especially in the Senate. Projections are about one in four that Democrats will emerge from the election with a "fillibuster-proof" Senate majority of 60 or more seats. At that point, the real question is what will Democrats do once they absolutely control all of the political branches.

Keynoter

Rudy Giuliani will not be John McCain's running mate. If that were still in the cards, Giuliani would not have been tapped to deliver the keynote speech at the RNC. This, by the way, is also a sop to the pro-choice Republicans out there, so we can be reasonably sure that McCain's running made will be pro-life. I feel confident stating, although it is no surprise anymore, that the Republican Reboot I've wished for -- one in which the party recasts itself as less strident on social issues in favor of other kinds of policies and political foci -- will clearly not be taking place this cycle.

What A Long Strange Trip It's Been

Six months ago, looking out at the world of politics, I knew a few things for sure:

1. The Republicans had a mess on their hands. No viable leader for the social conservative movement was stepping up to the plate and it looked like the primary was going to be reduced to a five-way slugfest with Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney best-equipped to make it through the long haul. John McCain was out of dough and neither Mike Huckabee nor Fred Thompson were to be taken seriously. It was a wide-open field and no one candidate was going to be able to get the party to unify, for anything.

2. The Democrats had an annointment. This Obama kid, he has promise, but he needs to go be Governor of Illinois for a few terms so he can get ready to run to replace President Clinton in 2016. Because Hillary's got all the money locked up, all the endorsements locked up, all the name recognition and voters will be excited about electing a woman.

3. Iraq was going to be the Republicans' albatross. Ultimately, the Democrats would have a huge advantage in November because the country would still be saddled with an unpopular, bloody, and inconclusive war.

So, how did I do?

1. Huckabee won Iowa and credibility. McCain won pretty much everything after that. Giuliani's strategy turned out to be very poor, and poorly-executed. Romney hung in there and picked up a few wins here and there but people figured out he was a phoney. And Thompson might as well have been James Stockdale, unable to answer the question "Who am I? Why am I here?" With precious little money and in the face of what should have been strong opposition, John McCain effectively sewed things up on February 5. And we haven't heard a word from him since.

2. Obama turned out to have more money than God. Seriously, if Jesus ran for President, he couldn't raise more money from more small donors than Obama. I think you can wire his campaign five bucks a month from your cell phone or something like that. Not only did Obama make it a fight against the Crown Princess, he figured out that a delegate is a delegate and put effort into "red" states to rack up some wins, and never lost hope. Eventually, he overtook her in votes, in delegates, and fundraising. And now it looks like he'll be our next President.

3. Astonishingly, we seem to be winning in Iraq. The Maliki government is standing up and conducting internal military operations with fewer and fewer U.S. advisors; political violence is down although not completely gone; and while they aren't necessarily happy about it, Iraqis are resigned to the idea that their future is now inextricably intertwined with ours. Our "temporary" bases are likely to become permanent. Yes, the country is still politically immature and religious parties and ethnic separatism are significant forces that could tear at its fabric. But it looks like it's finally on its way towards our newly-defined victory conditions. Again, not that you'd know from reading the news.

But the Republicans still have an albatross -- the economy. Distilled to its essence, the GOP is being held to answer for the outrage of paying four dollars a gallon for gasoline. I'm not hearing huge cries for health care reform, tax cuts, or the silly and unwise economic stimulus. People just want to be able to afford to drive to work. Amazingly (in sort of an ominous way), we are starting to reach the point where the allegedly and famously inelastic demand curve for gas is starting to bow, and people are really driving less. Not that the Democrats are going to solve that problem any more than the Republicans have; they haven't a clue. But that's looking like the most likely reason voters will be dissatisfied in November.

Then again, I've been wrong before. Let's revisit this in mid-October, shall we?

A Peculiar Request From A Politician

Appeals to party unity are always pretty much pure bullshit. So why is John McCain asking his supporters to raise money for Rudy Giuliani? Really, he is. He wants Hizzonner to have retired all of his campaign debt so that "...we can move forward with everyone spending 100% of their time helping to get John McCain in the White House ... The time Rudy Giuliani has to spend raising money to pay down his debt is time he could be spending raising money and reaching out to voters for us."

Campaign debts normally just sit out there and never get collected on. Vendors like poster-printers, television stations, hotels, and bus companies know when they do business with campaigns that, in part, they're betting on the campaign being a winner. Hillary Clinton, for instance, has had to pay cash on the barrelhead for several months now, where Obama's credit has been good (and he's proved his creditworthiness, too). The candidates try and raise some money now and again, but it's very difficult to get people to give money to a campaign that's already lost.

But here's the part that's really odd. Giuliani's campaign, although strategically a massive failure, was quite powerful from a fundraising perspective. It continues to report $4 million dollars cash on hand and only $3.1 million in debts. That means that it's liquid and does not need McCain's help to retire the debt, if the leadership of the campaign decides to even do that (which would be wise, all things considered, but it is technically speaking optional).

So what gives? Why is McCain asking Republican donors to give money to a failed rival campaign that doesn't need the money in the first place? Two theories present themselves -- first, maybe McCain is thinking about Giuliani as a running mate; second, maybe McCain can get the balance of the campaign dollars transferred to himself under the name of "party unity" after engaging in debt-retiring fundraising for his former rival.

I've thought for a while that Rudy Giuliani was simply not a viable choice for John McCain as his running mate. McCain is still viewed with suspicion by the right wing of the party, who have had to console themselves with the idea that Obama is infinitely worse than anything that McCain might do -- and some of them have made what must seem like a devil's bargain and switched their support to Hillary the Huntress. McCain needs to pick a Veep who is palatable to the right wing of the party while he personally appeals to the more moderate Republicans and reaches out into the great, decisive mass of centrist voters who will sway the critical states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Florida. Giuliani as his running-mate puts states like North Carolina, Tennessee, and Montana in play for the Democrats and carries no significant advantages because Giuliani can't even deliver New York (maybe he could if he were on top of the ticket and weren't running against Hillary, but he won't be).

So if McCain isn't laundering a running mate, why would he throw his own campaign money after Giuliani, for a net gain of $900,000 in transferred funds, and some campaign time with a former rival? Admittedly, these two had a nice mutual admiration society during the intramural debates, so maybe this is just a genuine gesture of respect and thanks for Giuliani's early endorsement, or thanks for his having conceded New Hampshire to McCain, irretrievably torpedoing his own shot at the top.

Early Returns (Updated)

The Florida polls just closed about fifteen minutes ago, and some early voting and absentee ballots have been reported. McCain has about 34% of the vote and Romney has about 33%, and if the early numbers are any indication, a winner will not be called for several hours. Giuliani and Huckabee are fighting it out for third place, splitting the leftover one-third of the vote nearly equally between themselves. Giuliani looks right now like he'll win that fight, although he had hoped not to be on the undercard and even winning there is far from certain.

Early returns are sometimes a bit skewed from the regular live vote, but it doesn't seem to be that way this time around. The patterns are more or less the same in random samplings of counties across the state -- rural and urban, north and south, alike. So I'd expect that those two will get the lion's share of the delegates, and Giuliani and Huckabee will wind up with a few each.

So -- given the format of the upcoming elections on February 5, Rudy will probably keep on campaigning to pick up some delegates and support. Then he'll probably drop out and wind up endorsing McCain. Which is not the right move if he really wants to be the kingmaker between McCain and Romney -- he needs to drop out and make that endorsement tomorrow because he has proven that his efforts and charisma can and do attract votes -- and this would throw a ton of votes McCain's way, adding nearly half again to his support and giving him a decisive lead against Romney instead of merely a statistical one.

Maybe Rudy could do that tomorrow night, on live TV, during the debate. That would be fun. He'd have to work out a substantial compensation to himself for doing so, of course (Vice President? Secretary of Homeland Security?), and that's something that his people need to negotiate with McCain's people right quick.

Interestingly, my folks reported a lot of negative thought about Hilary Clinton from the people they'd spoken with during their recent trip; they believe that they met with about equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans and no one had anything good to say about Senator Clinton. But she's handily beating Senator Obama and as soon as they could, all the networks called the primary there for her.

UPDATE: McCain did win, and it does look like Giuliani will drop out and endorse McCain. Huckabee, however, says he's in to play "all nine innings." While that sounds nice, he's also quickly going to become not much of a factor; exit polls in Florida show that the evangelical voters in Florida split evenly between Romney, Huckabee, and McCain. Florida is somewhat more evangelical than the rest of the GOP (nearly 4 in 10 exit poll respondents self-identified as evangelical) but even so, if Huckabee's draw leaves that bloc of voters split more or less evenly, his participation or non-participation in the race won't affect the outcome of what has become a two-candidate race.

There are GOP caucuses in Maine on Friday, but that's a non-event since the delegates that will result from the state convention delegates selected at those caucuses are required by Maine law to go to the convention unpledged. No, the big deal is that Giuliani will throw his support behind McCain, and although Hizzonner's numbers are nothing like what they used to be, there is still some force there and between his win tonight and that endorsement, Romney is now at a significant disadvantage.

Barring a substantial resurgence by Mitt Romney this week, the United States will elect its first sitting Senator to the White House since 1960.

SECOND UPDATE: John Edwards is out, too. A trial lawyer acquaintance from Nashville will be very disappointed, but it's hard to see what exactly Edwards would have gained by continuing. It remains to be seen if Edwards will endorse or not, but I'd expect more of his supporters to go to Obama than to Clinton.

Premortem Analysis

It may be too early -- by about twenty-three hours -- to start dissecting what exactly went wrong with the Rudy Giuliani campaign. How did he go from front-runner with an innovative and high-risk, high-reward strategy, to utterly irrelevant, in less than a month?

Ryan Sager for the New York Post has two answers, and I agree with them both:

First, Giuliani abandoned his basic identity. He was always a moderate conservative at best, and true moderate probably describes his basic personal ideology better. Tough, tell-it-like-it-is, and pragmatic were the basic components of his appeal. He's pro-choice, not averse to the idea of gun control, thinks gay people are A-OK Americans if they pay their taxes and don't jaywalk, and doesn't let religion get in the way of governing his personal life. So he was never going to be a comfortable fit for the Christian right. But he's also a personification of law-and-order government, strength and resolve in the face of foreign challenges, competence in government, and did a convincing job of explaining that "I may be a sonabitch, but I'm going to be your sonofabitch."

When he started to pander to the religious right -- a group of voters that he must have known, or at least should have known, would never back him in the primaries -- he was sacrificing that identity for the chance to appeal to people who would always have distrusted him. David Brooks took him to task for this just over two months ago. Other Giuliani supporters were highly alarmed at this quite a bit earlier in the process, and when it didn't stop, some of his original supporters bailed out. Problem is, he failed to convince more new people to replace them than were leaving.

He lost faith that there were a significant number of pro-choice Republicans (last time I checked, something like 40% or more of Republicans identify as "pro-choice," which is a significant cleavage within the party.) He tried to toughen up on immigration, despite the fact that a majority of Republicans prefer a streamlined, liberalized naturalization process -- well, they don't use the word "liberalized," but they do want to see workers come here and play by the rules.

But the moatdiggers were the large minority in the party Rudy did try to listen to -- and they were never going to trust him, either. In fact, the moatdiggers have found themselves without any real standard-bearers once Tom Tancredo failed to make any significant impact in the primary. The best they found was Fred Thompson, and even he wound up being kind of squishy for them.

Finally, he was given a fair shot at making nice with the gun lobby, and he absolutely blew it. He should never have taken that phone call. Seriously, what better way could you have thought of to have said to the most reliably Republican, and easiest-from-whom-to-fundraise, and intensely motivated constituency within the GOP that "My hot wife is more important to me than your support" than what he did? He'd have been better off skipping the speech entirely.

So much for his first mistake. But he made another one. Skipping Iowa, that was a good move. But bailing out of New Hampshire was not. If he was ever going to have a chance to show that he could compete for votes in an early state, New Hampshire would have been a favorable place to do it. And he invested a substantial amount of resources in New Hampshire. Spent a lot of time there.

This was a place where he had some local familiarity; not as much, perhaps, as Mitt Romney who had been the governor right next door for four years, but he had the northeastern Republican vibe still to his advantage. And New Hampshire is a much more secular place than Iowa or South Carolina, and much less Mormon than Nevada or Wyoming. There was no better opportunity for Rudy to be able to be himself than in New Hampshire. But by the time New Hampshire had rolled around, Rudy had stopped being himself and started to be the product of a bunch of a squadron of campaign consultants, who vanilla-ed down the core of his message and told him that he needed to win, and a win wasn't certain against a resurgent John McCain campaign.

Now, it's true that McCain was very much the second choice for a lot of the voters who liked Giuliani. But that was precisely the reason to compete for those voters. By abandoning the New Hampshire primary, after investing weeks of time and millions of dollars there, Giuliani created McCain's momentum. He obviously did not intend to do so. Maybe he would not have won. Likely, had he competed, he would have thrown the race there to Romney. (McCain and Giuliani combined for about 98,000 votes in New Hampshire; Romney got about 75,000.) But either way, he would have been seen as a significant factor. That would have meant getting his share of free media, his share of momentum.

But that's not what he did. Instead, he created McCain's momentum by conceding -- not New Hampshire, but more specifically by conceding those 100,000 moderate Republican voters in New Hampshire -- to another candidate with proven viability there. Giuliani didn't need to win in New Hampshire. He needed to beat McCain there, even if that meant coming in second place to Romney. He could have walked away with head held high, saying that Romney had home-field advantage and that he was the clear alternative to Governor Flip-Flip. Then he could have creditably skipped South Carolina and put all his eggs into Florida and the Super-Duper Tuesday states like California and Missouri, where he has done quite a bit of campaigning.

By conceding those moderate Republican voters in New Hampshire, Giuliani permitted similar voters elsewhere to take a second look at McCain and allowed them to like what they saw there. The result, for instance, is a nineteen-point surge to the lead in polls here in California. Quoth one Golden State pollster: "McCain's gains have come primarily among liberal and moderate Republicans as well as GOP voters under the age of 50. ... Among liberals and moderates, McCain's support doubled from 25 percent to 50 percent in the last two weeks. McCain also gained 29 points among GOP voters under 50 years old." Those younger, less conservative members of the party are both the party's future and Giuliani's current natural support group. Gaining their support has made all the difference for John McCain, who should have bottomed out before the starting gate when he ran out of money seven months ago.

Instead, by failing to fight for his core constituency and instead competing for primary votes he could never win, Giuliani conceded every one of his advantages (now, including money) to John McCain. Military tacticians from Sun Tzu to Napoleon have stressed, again and again, the importance of picking favorable terrain for your battles. Picking the right terrain upon which to fight allows you to wage the war you want to wage, not the war your enemy wants to fight.

Giuliani should have been himself, not Zombie Ronald Reagan. He should have competed in New Hampshire. And if he had played his cards right, he could have been looking at an annointment next week instead of a concession speech.

Chicken Skin Flip Flop

Mike Huckabee has famously lost a bunch of weight. Good for him; I wish I had the kind of willpower he did to resist larger-than-necessary portions of tasty food. So you think he would praise, not criticize, Mitt Romeny for taking the skin off of his fried chicken. Yes, the chicken skin is the tastiest part of even the most juicy fried chicken. It’s also the fattiest. (Strangely, these two facts are related. Oh, wait, that’s not so strange at all.) And seriously, is this how the Republican party is going to pick its Presidential nominee? Is this the best Huckabee could come up with the day before the Florida primary? At least John McCain could respond to Romney’s swipe about loyalty to the party by criticizing his conservative bona fides. Oh, and I get a twofer here – I get to take a swipe at Huckabee and a swipe at the Fish Wrapper. Its reporter is simply wrong to call Huckabee’s reference to Oklahoma as a “great Southern state” a gaffe. Oklahomans think of themselves as Southerners.

By the way, since I’m thinking about Republicans – here’s all you need to know about the status of Rudy Giuliani’s campaign: for the past two weeks, he’s been trailing McCain in New York. So much for six months of being the “front-runner.” My guess is that you Readers are right, and that McCain will win Florida, and Giuliani will then have to decide what, exactly, he can possibly do after he loses his firewall and becomes less relevant to this race than Ron Paul. But losing in New York -- if Rudy can't make it there, he can't make it an-y-where!

Rudy's Confident...

…Or at least, so he claims.  But he’s not paying his senior staff, though, which is not a good sign at all.  Where did all that money go?  He’s been buying air time in Florida like a fiend, but now three recent polls indicate a four-way tie in Florida.  Hizzonner has fallen to third place nationally, and he’s lost the lead and lost the lead in California.  Ah well, at least he’s lost the lead to McCain, which is an acceptable fallback position for the likes of me.  Should be acceptable to most Republicans, too, since McCain is the only Republican who is polling better than Obama or Clinton in head-to-head polls.  That means that McCain has “electability,” an attribute which it seems Giuliani has lost, and neither Huckabee nor Romney ever had.  Still, Hizzonner needs a win in Florida, and not just a squeaker – otherwise he’s probably looking at a spot maybe as a running mate or maybe he’ll just be an also-ran.  What do you think the margin of victory needs to be in a four- or five-way contest in order to be able to convincingly claim real success?  Ten percent, maybe?  And sure, we can get old school and just talk about delegates (which is what really counts, after all), but people seem to get really mad when they realize exactly how un-democratic the partisan nominating processes really are.

Giuliani Concedes Wisconsin

People there will switch votes over something like this.

Vote For Rudi

There's been a little mistake in some of the sample ballots prepared in Hillsborough County, Florida -- Rudy Giuliani's name was misspelled, in a fashion suggesting that he is female (as opposed to merely appearing in drag once in a while as a joke). Oops. There's time to fix it, but is it worth an extra $40,000 taxpayer dollars?

The responsible official (who is a Republican, and who admits he just plain screwed up) doesn't know whether he should spend the money and time to do that. I think he should, but then again, I would. Hillsborough County includes the major city of Tampa and its very large suburb Brandon; the error affects a little bit more than 200,000 sample ballots; it's a significant jurisdiction in Florida, which in turn is a critical state for both parties. No word on whether this will affect the actual ballots, although as I understand it plenty of voters use the sample ballots to prepare their punch-card votes before actually voting. (And if you do vote on a punchcard, please be sure to clear out any hanging chad. No one wants a repeat of Florida 2000.)

I'd be interested in what non-Giuliani supporters have to say about that decision.

I Don't Know What They're Talking About, Or, This Sort Of Thing Didn't Win The Fights In The Matrix Either

Hillary Clinton "won" in New Hampshire. By what looks like about 7,700 votes, or 2% of the Democrats and independents voting in the Democratic primary.

Beginning almost immediately thereafter, the media began spinning the results like it was some kind of a Hillary Clinton Renaissance. Me? I just don't see it that way.

As of the time I'm writing this, she's about 2% ahead of a tie. Where I come from, that is not a decisive victory. It borders on qualifying for "squeaker" status. Don't mistake this for some kind of a slapback or a momentum-changer.

Clinton dodged a bullet. Nothing more. Sure, it's gonna keep things interesting, but this is little more than a shot of adrenaline for the Clinton campaign, which is still exposed as badly vulnerable.

As for the delegates, Clinton and Obama did tie, earning 9 each tonight. Counting the superdelegates and their endorsements, Obama actually walks out of New Hampshire with 12 to Clinton's 11 -- which is a win for Obama. She's the one who is supposed to have the edge on the inside game.

For Clinton, it's certainly a far better result than coming in second place once again, which would have driven a stake through her heart. But a 2% margin of victory is not a rebirth of a campaign. This is avoiding clinical death while the paramedics administer CPR.

Clinton needs to do more than win by 2% and split the delegates up for grabs evenly to impress me that she's recovered from the body blow she took in Iowa. Then again, I didn't think her husband taking second place in New Hampshire back in 1992 qualified him as a "Comeback Kid," I thought it meant he lost to Paul Tsongas. But look where he wound up.

(By the way, I always kind of liked Paul Tsongas. Economic moderate-to-conservative, social liberal. Hmm. Doesn't seem like much has changed. Foreign policy wasn't that big a deal in the 1992 election, as I recall.)

On the Republican side, I kind of like a comment made by Mitt Romney tonight: "Well, so far that's two silver medals and one gold. Thank you, Wyoming!" A far more upbeat sort of statement than "Well, shit, that's fifteen million of my own dollars lit on fire for second place twice in a row and winning a caucus no one's ever heard of."

Next stop: Michigan, one week from today, in a contest that only counts for the Republicans because the DNC has stripped Michigan of its delegation due to the early primary date. (Indeed, Michigan Republicans have forfeited half of their delegation because of the early date, too.) This will be followed by South Carolina primary, which will be on Saturday, January 19 for the Republicans and the following Saturday, January 26, for the Democrats.

An interesting question to look at is, McCain won, as expected, in New Hampshire. Can he carry that win into Michigan? One poll in Michigan shows an effective tie there right now between Huckabee and Romney; two very recent polls show what amounts to three-way ties, one with those two and McCain, and the other with those two and Giuliani.

Huckabee is way out in front in South Carolina, which ought to be Fred Thompson's last stand. South Carolina is practically home turf for Thompson, and he failed miserably tonight in New Hampshire, garnering one percent of the vote. (Giuliani came in fourth place, with nine times as many votes as old Fred, and he proved he could outpoll Ron Paul.) The logical choice in terms of policy and political simpatico for Thompson would be to throw his delegates to McCain, but there's no telling whether or when he would do that.

(But when you stop to think about it, what incentive does any candidate have to get out of the race before February 5? So South Carolina ought to be Thompson's last stand, but he'll hang around for another two weeks.)

And if you heard it here first, you haven't been paying attention: Don't count Hizzonner out yet just because he didn't do well tonight. Sure, waiting until there's nothing but big pots to play for may be something of a gadget play, but Kirk Gibson got a come-from-behind home run to win a World Series game that sports fans are still talking about. (How's that for a mixed sports metaphor?) Florida on January 29 will be Rudy Giuliani's Austerlitz, and if he can't win there, Super-Duper Tuesday will be his Waterloo. He needs to, um, start running some advertisements already.

I think Giuliani's got something up his sleeve, though, and here's my prediction -- a Super Bowl ad. So far as I know, no politician has ever bought a Super Bowl ad, because it's so damn expensive, and there has never before been a need to reach a national audience so early in the election cycle. But that's all different now. Last year it was $2.5 million for a 30-second spot, which is a lot of money to blow on a single commercial. But on the other hand, 50% of Americans will see it live and the other 50% will be hearing about it the next day -- and close to 50% of Americans will go to the polls two days after the Super Bowl. Besides, what the hell else has he spent all of that money on? Is he saving it for Texas?

So what does this moderate Republican think of all that? I think I could be reasonably happy with John McCain as the party's nominee. Significantly happier than I would be with Romney or Huckabee. So I consider the results from New Hampshire good news.

But as for the Clinton Comeback? I don't buy it, not a bit.

New Feature and Iowa Results

I'm going to keep track of the estimated delegates gathered by each candidate. It will appear in the right-hand sidebar. Looking at the delegate count, Obama's victory does not seem as decisive as press reports would have you believe. And while I called a narrow Romney victory in Iowa, it turns out that Huckabee had a fairly impressive (9%) margin of victory there. This suggests that in other evangelical-heavy states, like South Carolina, he will also do well.

Note that these delegate projections are just that -- projections. The actual pledging of delegates from Iowa does not happen until several months from now. The Wyoming county conventions which will take place on Friday will produce similar "soft" delegate commitments; binding delegate selection there does not take place for several more days. "Hard" pledged delegates will come out of New Hampshire on Tuesday. (I keep on thinking the NH primary was moved to a day other than Tuesday, for some reason, but that's just not right.)

So the delegate results from Iowa (don't forget, all of this electioneering is aimed at getting delegates to the national conventions to vote for the various candidates) will be more or less like this:

Democrats			Republicans
Obama	16		Huckabee	17
Clinton	15		Romney	12
Edwards	14		McCain	3
			Thompson	3
			Paul	2

But that's not the whole picture at the moment. Other "hard" pledging of delegates or readily-identifiable delegate commitments -- Bill Clinton, for example, is automatically a "superdelegate" to the Democratic National Convention (as are just under a quarter of the voting delegates overall). Gee, who do you think he'll vote for? So too are many of the candidates themselves automatically delegates by virtue of their holding elected office and we have to assume that they'll vote for themselves. This is more of a factor for the Democrats than the Republicans, and it explains why so many delegates are already pledged to Hillary Clinton. But there are some non-Iowa delegates out there who have already committed to some other candidates, so this affects them both.

I note that a few minor players -- Joe Biden and Chris Dodd -- are dropping out after Iowa. They've not yet released their delegates to anyone so far as I know. Everyone, myself included is anticipating Fred Thompson to drop out soon, too. He may hang in there until after New Hampshire, though. I'm still predicting a significant McCain win in the Granite State. Rudy Giuliani will have to wait for Florida before having a chance of showing significant wins -- not that he has a choice.

I'm particularly tickled to see Mitt Romney having spent... what? Seven million dollars in Iowa? To come in second place? I'm kind of sad to think that some of the reason for that is overt religious prejudice, because I don't think anyone's religion should be held against them unless it teaches bizarre moral imperatives. But at the same time, the man is a huge fake and this puts his campaign in some trouble. He needs to win New Hampshire now. And let me check... Ah yes. McCain is leading Romney there by an average of five points.

So stay tuned, junkies, this is going to get real interesting in a week.

Lizderago

Airing on radio stations across Florida right now:

El Presidente Reagan depositó su confianza en él para combatir el crimen. El pueblo de Nueva York lo eligió su alcalde cuando esa ciudad se veía perdida y muchos pensaban era ingobernable. Rudy Giuliani. Redujo el crimen un 56%Rebajó los impuestos 23 veces ahorrándole más de $9,000 millones a los contribuyentes. Creó nuevos empleos, recortó la burocracia … Y Nueva York volvió a ser una de las grandes ciudades de los Estados Unidos y del mundo. Enfrentamos grandes retos. Necesitamos líderes probados. Rudy Giuliani. Se pudo en Nueva York y se puede en Washington. Rudy Giuliani: Experiencia, Resultado, Liderazgo. Rudy Giuliani Presidente. "Soy Rudy Giuliani y apruebo este mensaje."

Lots of Republicans in Florida, and lots of them are Cuban. I would expect that, with only McCain having accepted an invitation to a Spanish-language debate on Univision last November (almost all of the Republicans did eventually attend and debate a month later), McCain and Giuliani are the ones competing for this bloc of votes.

"Lizderago" is such a cool-sounding word.

And They're Off!

The Iowa Caucuses are today. Hizzonner is currently polling in fifth place in Iowa despite still being the national leader; Huckabee and Romney are in a dead heat for first place. After Friday, though, no one will care at all about Iowa, because the attention will shift suddenly to New Hampshire, with its primary on Tuesday. Oh, and Wyoming will have its convention on Saturday, in defiance of national GOP rules, but that will attract some attention.

My prediction, based on nothing more than my observations from the media, is that Romney will squeak ahead of Huckabee tomorrow in Iowa. McCain comes in third, which is the "momentum" place for everyone who isn't Huckabee or Romney to be. Romney should also win Wyoming. But then McCain will win New Hampshire, and eventually, South Carolina will split nearly evenly between Huckabee and Romney, not at all unlike Iowa should tomorrow night.

So the net winner of all of these early but lower-stake pots will be Mitt Romney. That will be the effective end of the Huckabee campaign, since he lacks the money and machinery to compete in the big states, and his Christian credentials are only going to go so far outside of the Bible Belt.

The real question is, will this create enough "momentum" that voters in Florida and the Super-Duper Tuesday states will start to to care about Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina? Will enough Republicans voting for Romney -- or at least, the appearance of enough voters going for him -- carry the day for the Governor? Or are voters in places like Alaska, Illinois, and California going to simply disregard the early states and make independent decisions? Giuliani is currently leading the polls in all of the big states -- he's "all in" for Super-Duper Tuesday, and he's the only one with the money and machinery to compete with Romney -- and he has that 9/11 thing that I think he's mentioned once or twice.

Giuliani's is a high-risk strategy, but not an insane risk by any means. The way that the delegates are selected suggests to me that Giuliani will wind up with at least a plurality of delegates after Super-Duper Tuesday and therefore be the "leader" moving to the contests in the second half of the primaries.

Then (speaking of candidates going "all in") there's the other wild card. Thompson is still in it but not polling well enough anywhere to be anything more than a spoiler -- but for who? Who is the second choice of Thompson supporters? This is important because it's likely that at some point between now and February 5, Thompson is going to find he doesn't have enough traction, and he'll bow out.

Where do his supporters go? My guess is their second choice is probably John McCain more than any of the other three. It also seems most likely that Thompson, who publicly places a high value on being plain-spoken and direct, would find McCain the most palatable of the remaining four candidates should he withdraw. But if McCain's been effectively squeezed out by then, it looks like a tossup to me.

Maybe he'll be mischievous and release his delegates to "vote their consciences" at the convention, and it will wind up brokered. Oh, what a delightful prospect a brokered GOP convention would be! The whole thing is a big, complicated, delicious mess. There are no good guys, just some bad guys, and the flag drops tonight.

The Democrats look positively boring by comparison. Republicans: cry "havoc" and let slip the dogs of war!