South Carolina Debate

I did a long write-up on the debate over at Plum Line, so I'll mostly just send you there. If you missed it, but enjoy presidential debates in general, I'll recommend this one: started with a bang, and rarely let up.

As I said over there, how it will affect GOP voters in the short run depends mostly on what spin is accepted within the GOP partisan press; there's certainly plenty of great clips to support virtually any interpretation. Beyond that, I'm very curious about how Rick Santorum's attacks, especially his quite vicious and personal attacks on Newt, played to conservative audiences. It played really well to me, and in my view any conservative should buy the idea that Newt absolutely cannot be trusted, but I'll certainly confess that I'm not exactly neutral on that subject.

And I'll also repeat what I said over there about John King: he totally, totally screwed up the "open marriage" question. Probably his best bet was to just leave it alone, but if he really wanted to press it he could have framed it better in lots of different ways. All that said: don't assume that five good minutes from Newt makes the issue go away. Among other things, Jay Leno and the rest of that gang aren't going to lay off just because a partisan crowd fell for a cheap rhetorical trick. Don't forget, too, that his marriage record is only one of Newt's many, many, many vulnerabilities. I wouldn't want to guess how it affects him in South Carolina in the short term, but in the long term very few Republican politicians or operatives really want to spend all summer and fall defending Newt's personal life.

Catch of the Day

Bill Clinton's critique of Barack Obama includes a complaint that Obama didn't sufficiently explain that bank bailouts for an unfortunate necessity because despite helping the undeserving rich they would also help everyone else. Andrew Sprung notes two instances in which Obama basically made that exact point, one in a 2008 presidential debate and one in an April 2009 speech.

It's just amazing how often it turns out that the president has actually said anything that someone says "the president should have said..." Granted, one can argue that the president didn't repeat it often enough, or didn't say it in a properly high-visibility environment (although a presidential debate is quite visible, in this case!). It's not just this president, or even just presidents; virtually every time I've ever heard someone argue that "Democrats should say..." it's something that I've heard Democratic pols say multiple times (or Republicans; I'm not aware of any partisan split on this).

Nice catch!

Perry Out

Rick Perry drops out and endorses Newt Gingrich. Reminder: he endorsed Rudy Giuliani last time around.

Presidential nomination politics is fascinating in part because all of the drama that only counts around the margins in most elections really can make a huge difference in nomination politics as it's currently practiced. Candidates and their campaigns really do matter. Campaign events -- the perfect ad, the debate gaffe or great line, the press conference gone awry -- really can make a difference to voters with few cues to use to choose between nearly identical candidates.

Of course, structural things matter too. That's why I thought Rick Perry was a viable contender a year ago, when he was saying he wasn't running; it's why I think he still was viable, despite all the disasters of his campaign, as late as mid-December. As it turned out, it was Rick Santorum who caught the late bounce and "won" Iowa, but it's worth pointing out that Perry wound up only 3500 votes behind Newt Gingrich for 4th place, and only 14K votes behind Ron Paul for third. On the one hand, that's a solid drubbing, no question. But one good ad, or one slightly better and slightly more redeeming debate performance, and it's easy to imagine things working out very differently. Because Perry still had plenty of structural advantages that could have turned a somewhat better finish in Iowa into a very strong campaign down the line.

But it was not to be. Perhaps it was Perry's position on immigration, or even more so the way he talked about it (calling those who opposed him heartless). Perhaps it was just that Republicans couldn't handle the debate performances. Perhaps it was the memory of George W. Bush -- before Perry entered, a lot of pundits (but not me) said that there was no way another Texas governor would be nominated so soon after Bush, and perhaps there was something to that. Perhaps Perry's gaffes would have been excused a little more easily if they didn't remind people, somehow, of what happened the last time Republicans decided that policy knowledge was irrelevant and nominated Bush.

As Buzzfeed is saying, "running for president is hard." Perry was a lot better at it in December and January than he was in the fall, but it was too little, too late.

Tie Goes the Other Way

So the official numbers from Iowa are finally out, and it's still a tie -- but now it's a tie with Rick Santorum having a few more officially counted votes than Mitt Romney. The Iowa Republican Party, which of course knows that Romney is very likely to be the nominee, has decided against calling it a win for Santorum, and the press is playing along -- the New York Times on its home page right now says "No Official Winner for Iowa Caucuses." Adam Serwer calls it correctly:

Odd that media legs are repeating "tie" spin in Iowa, since the only reason that's being said is to avoid embarrassing the assumed nominee.

And adds that if they called the old results a Romney win, then they should now be talking about a Santorum win. I agree -- although better, in both cases, to call it a tie. Remember, nothing tangible is at stake in the question of who had a few more votes, so I don't see any need for the press to pretend to know more than they actually do. It's a tie.

I think this actually demonstrates that I was correct in saying, before Iowa, that it didn't really matter how the votes fell as long as Romney, Santorum, and Ron Paul were 1-2-3 in some order. What mattered was the spin, especially within the partisan press. And that spin was largely independent of the exact order of finish. As it happened, Santorum seems to have received a lot less positive media attention than some previous strong finishers in Iowa, although I'll be interested to hear of any studies about what Fox News actually looked like in the days after Iowa.

Could things have been different had Santorum had this tiny lead on the night of the caucuses? There's no way to prove it one way or another, but again: lots of second place finishers have received plenty of great press. Some of this may actually have been Santorum's own fault, since he inexplicably waited until most people had gone to bed before giving a victory speech that night. But my assumption is that if GOP party actors really had wanted to derail Mitt Romney that they would have spun the results heavily for Santorum, and as far as I could see that never happened. It's hard to believe they would have acted differently had the tie gone the other way back then.

The Post-Endgame

Good item from Steve Kornacki (who has been doing great work on GOP WH 2012, which I feel that I haven't linked to enough; you should be reading him) about what's at stake in South Carolina. He's right: if Romney does well there, he'll be in strong enough shape that the party will begin to act as if the nomination has been clinched, which will in turn mean that he can begin his general election campaign. In my view, he'll in fact lock up the nomination even if he loses to Newt Gingrich there, but Newt will be much more of a nuisance for a while if South Carolina goes his way. In particular, Romney would certainly have to campaign in Florida as if the nomination was in doubt -- and there's a good chance that that he'll also have to take Super Tuesday seriously.

We don't really have a name for that phase of the process: the point at which the last serious threat to win the nomination is gone, but others are still campaigning and could even win some states. We probably reached that point in 2000 for George W. Bush after Iowa; I'd argue that Bill Clinton achieved that in New Hampshire in 1992, probably. It may be the case that Romney really hit that by crushing Rick Perry in Iowa this year, but he'll certainly do it in South Carolina if he knocks Perry and Rick Santorum out.

Note that it's also quite possible that a solid Romney win on Saturday leads to a rapid end to every campaign but that of Ron Paul. It wouldn't be a shock if a Romney win is followed rapidly by a ton of endorsements, along with everyone but Paul dropping out by the end of the week. If the polling is even close, Saturday will mark the end of any realistic uncertainty about the Republican nominee. But there still are lots of possible endgames, or maybe the better term is post-endgames; we'll have to see whether Romney has to pretend the nomination is still in doubt or not.

GOP Field Strength, One More Time

Before we come up with all sorts of theories of why the Republican field was so weak in the 2012 presidential cycle (as Paul Krugman does here or Fred Hiatt does here) or wonder how Mitt Romney would have done against better challengers (as Steve Benen does here), it's just worth remembering that the real GOP field this time was at least Romney, Pawlenty, Perry, and Barbour, and perhaps also several others, including Palin, Thune, Christie, and Daniels. That's the real field that we should consider when assessing what Romney beat. Most of the others who showed up for debates and even took votes in some primaries, such as Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, were just sideshows. Whether deliberately planned that way or not, they weren't actually running for the Republican nomination for president; they were seeking publicity for one reason or another. Or, in the case of Ron Paul, seeking to alter the debate within the party on various issues. Or maybe they were fully committed to running but just had no idea of how to do it or what it would take to win. The point is that Romney really had nothing to worry about from any of them.

Once can certainly make the case that the actual group who ran from president in 2009-2011 was relatively weak. I'd say it was similar to several previous groups: the Republican field in 2008, and Democratic fields in 2004, 1992, and perhaps 1988. None of those featured real first-tier heavyweights, and each -- including the GOP 2012 crew -- had a handful of plausible nominees, people who had conventional credentials and were within the mainstream of their parties. As far as why this cycle was similar to those, it's mostly supply, not demand. The only plausibly top-tier heavyweights out there really weren't, since neither Sarah Palin nor (gulp) Dan Quayle really qualify, and there's no one out there similar to Ronald Reagan 1980, someone who was a major party leader for years. As many have pointed out, the next tier down, the solid respectable sitting or recently retired Senators and governors, were wiped out to a large extent by the big Democratic landslides in 2006 and 2008. And so the pool of potential plausible nominees was relatively small, before even starting to worry about anything else at all.

The key point here is that Pawlenty at least, Barbour almost certainly, and at least a few of the others were defeated by Mitt Romney, even if those defeats didn't take place in Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina. It's just become the case that Republicans winnow early, but that doesn't mean that the first ones out were actually the weakest candidates or had the smallest chance of winning. And if you stack the 2012 losers against other fields of losers, you're not going to find a huge difference on paper (where Rick Perry looks a lot more impressive, granted, than he turned out to be), and perhaps not even a big difference in fact (since Perry goes with John Glenn, Phil Gramm, John Connally, and other famous flops). It's rare to have a runner-up as strong as Hillary Clinton 2008 or Bob Dole 1988; there are a lot more like John Edwards 2004 or Mike Huckabee 2008 or Bill Bradley 2000 who aren't going to be more impressive than Perry and Pawlenty this time around.

Republicans Have Themselves To Blame For Newt

Ross Douthat has a very nice item about how Newt Gingrich has helped to spike the chances of a more conservative opponent defeating Mitt Romney for the GOP presidential nomination. I have to wonder about the final paragraph, however (his italics):

Instead, Gingrich reclaimed the spotlight, as only he knows how to do. (Romney’s a looter! Poor kids should work as janitors!) For this, if he wins the election, Romney owes him an ambassadorship, at the very least. And conservatives wondering how a man they so mistrust could be breezing to the nomination should know exactly whom to blame.

Whom to blame? I think he means Newt, but the real answer is: themselves.

After all, by the end of 1998,  Newt Gingrich was fully exposed: the ethics problems, of course, but more to the point it was clear he just wasn't a very good politician, at least when it came to governing. Nor was he someone who could be trusted. And his instincts, it had turned out, just weren't very conservative at all. And that's putting aside the marital issues, for whatever they're worth.

And yet Republicans never blinked in rehabilitating him; he was immediately welcomed as a senior statesman and important person within conservative policy and particularly media circles. Just as Oliver North had been, and Gordon Liddy before that. I've talked about this before...the Democrats, for the most part, just don't do this: Jim Wright and Dan Rostenkowski were hardly ever seen again after leaving office in disgrace.

The caveat is that Democrats are willing to forgive one category of disgraced former official: those who were Republicans but are now willing to turn on their old party (John Dean, David Stockman).

Anyway, Republicans in Washington knew exactly what Newt was, but for over a decade they've chosen to pretend otherwise, either because he was useful to have on TV attacking the Democrats, or just because that's how Republicans do things. So after treating him as a distinguished statesman and brilliant conservative politician for over a decade, despite clearly not believing it (as was shown the second he spiked in the polls in December), they're just getting exactly what they deserve.