Nominatability
Another one of J-Ger’s highly-placed anonymous sources on the mirage of Rudy Giuliani’s inevitability:
“If the Republican party nominates a pro-choice candidate, we’re entering uncharted territory… The trick to winning is get as few states in play as possible, and to put the conservative states to bed early. The CBS poll was pretty telling – Rudy’s up by twenty, and leads among evangelicals and conservatives for whom family life and the character of the candidate are most important. That tells you how disengaged voters are in most states. That’s not going to continue. Rudy’s just not going to continue to be the first choice of those folks.”
The source has an equally dim view of Rudy’s electability:
“Now, the whole base won’t stay home in a Rudy vs. Hillary matchup, but the question is, how much of the base can he afford to have stay home? Didn’t we recently learn that it’s about five hundred votes in Florida on the right day?
The CBS poll is crap, by the way. However, even reliable national surveys are trending in Rudy’s direction as respondents grow increasingly bored with Fred Thompson’s reticence.
Of course, we don’t (officially) have a national primary, and Mitt Romney continues to lead in Iowa and New Hampshire. Since the early winner in primary season usually gets the instant inside track, a national lead - whether it’s five points or twenty - five months beforehand is still largely a reflection of name-recognition rather than true preference, and thus an exercise in vanity.
On the other hand, Rudy could easily pass Romney in Iowa and New Hampshire between now and the first snowfall. But how likely is that? How many conservatives will really be willing to put their noses in a vice until their nostrils fuse together to punch the chad for a candidate who would be on the left side of the Democrat party on moral issues? When has the GOP base ever been so partisanly unified that they were willing to chuck core principals overboard for the sake of a victory that would quickly become pyrrhic? It sure didn’t happen in last year’s midterm election, and there are rumblings that 2008 will be more of the same, at least at the congressional level. It’s hard for me to see that same rock-ribbed Republican electorate being so ideologically flexible in selecting a presidential standardbearer, Hillary or no Hillary.
We keep hearing that the Democrats will be more unified and more rabidly energized than ever next year. And we keep hearing from Team Rudy that he can put large “blue” states in play without losing any “red” states. So I pose the question: which is the more credible assertion?
August 15th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
I really hope people can move beyond abortion and look at the whole picture. Whether the nominee, whoever that is, is against abortion or not is really not important. Presidents have little to say on the matter. If Giuliani says he will support the kind of judges the GOP wants, that’ll have to do.
Abortion will be a sideshow if our cities are being hit with bioweapons. Terrorism and Islamism are the issues for 2008.
August 16th, 2007 at 7:18 am
That’s easy to say if abortion isn’t your issue. I don’t pretend to understand single issue-ism, but it appears to matter to an awful lot of the base as a symptom of what kind of person a candidate is.
For me it’s quite straight-forward: Rudy is pro-Roe, and any candidate who is pro-Roe will not, by definition, appoint constitutionalists to the federal bench because Roe was the antithesis of a constitutionalist decision.
Now if the point of differentiation was the war, where Rudy was the only candidate who wanted to keep fighting it, and his competitors were also socially liberal, I would agree that he would be the best we could do. But Romney and Thompson are just as strong on the war AND are NOT pro-Roe. And I am highly skeptical of Giuliani’s abortion stance putting “blue” states into play; and, if that WERE so, how a number of “red” states wouldn’t also be thrown up for grabs along with them.
I’m on record as listing whomever gets the GOP nod next year as being a prohibitive underdog to Hillary in any case. I’d simply rather see us go down (or even pull off the upset) with our strongest, most unifying candidate rather than a man who is guaranteed to take the edge off, and quite likely divide, the base instead.
August 16th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
You’re probably right. Thompson and Romney are both fine on the war and Islamism. But I wonder if Fred hasn’t waited too long. I hope not, as I like everything he’s said so far. It’s encouraging to see the liberal media already trying to trash him and he’s not even in yet. That shows us they are afraid of how popular he could be.
Romney is fine by me, but I don’t know if voters can get past the LDS issue. David Brooks in the NYT recently wrote that he wished Romney would tell us about his new ideas rather than talking about social issues. Romney has made a fortune as a business innovator.
I guess we’ll have to wait to see what happens when Fred gets in. I read somewhere today that he plans on being very aggressive from the start. I hope so.
Sadly, by the time the big primaries come around in Feb, the whole country will be sick of it.
But if Hillary is nominated, perhaps the country will run away from her in terror after listening to her voice from Feb until November.