Please, Please, Please Giuliani Is Not a Christie Comp

Can we please get this stopped already? Chris Christie's presidential campaign is not at all similar to Rudy Giuliani's disastrous 2008 bid. Not similar. Not comparable. Okay? Just cut it out.

I'm seeing this all over the place, and it's just terrible.

Viable presidential candidates share two characteristics. They have conventional credentials, and they are within the mainstream of their parties in their positions on matters of public policy.

Granted, sometimes it's a bit tricky to judge. Did House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt have "conventional credentials" in 2004? No one from the House has been nominated in the modern era, but Gephardt himself in 1988 and Mo Udall in 1976 came fairly close. What about (General) Wesley Clark in 2004? But basically, we can look at the winners and all the candidates who came close from 1972 on and see if there's anyone similar. The more the comps, and the closer the comps, the better.

On mainstream views, it's hard to judge in any objective way what counts as sufficiently unorthodox to make a candidacy simply not viable. Almost every candidate has at least one issue position which is not embraced by significant groups within the part. And of course what the "party" thinks is, in part, exactly what's happening in the nomination process. Still, it's not impossible for outsiders to conclude that, say, Ron Paul was out of the GOP mainstream during his candidacies, or that Joe Lieberman's Iraq position was both far from the Democratic mainstream and extremely salient during his failed candidacy.

All of which gets back to Christie/Giuliani.

Giuliani failed both tests. One might argue for his credentials...I wouldn't. At least a couple of mayors have run for president before in the modern era, but none came close to winning. Generally, all the winners and almost all of the runners-up have had at least four years of experience at statewide elected office.

Christie, of course, is almost the classic case: elected governor, served a term, re-elected in a landslide.

As far as mainstream of the party: Giuliani easily failed that one. It's not really necessary to go past abortion, although in 2008 Giuliani was also on the wrong side (for Republicans, that is) on gay and lesbian rights when that issue was far more central to the GOP than it probably will be in 2016. There were more, including some where he had made not particularly convincing campaign conversions, but overall it just wasn't a close call.

Christie will have some problems on some issues with some GOP groups. It may be enough to derail his candidacy. But he's far more similar to Mitt Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008 than to Giuliani (or, say, Huntsman in 2012). He has problems, sure, but so do the other candidates. In other words, he may lose, but he's surely viable.

The various fiascoes of the Giuliani campaign were either irrelevant to the basic situation, or (as in his slow retreat from "contesting" states) a consequence of that basic situation -- that is, his claim that he was not contesting state after state was actually pretty much spin to cover the fact of losing in state after state. Therefore, they really don't apply to Chris Christie's situation at all.

Is Christie the frontrunner right now? I don't know. Is he a viable candidate? Sure. Does thinking about what happened to Giuliani help clarify Christie's situation? No. Not at all. Not even a little bit.

Just cut it out, everyone.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

It's going to be a big week for Chris Christie, so, conservatives: What do you think of Chris Christie?

No, Really, You Can't Skip Iowa (First 2016 Edition)

Yes, it's time to roll this one out already:

The first question Team Christie will have to confront will be whether they play in Iowa at all.  (Christie adviser Mike DuHaime declined to engage questions for this story.)

The last two GOP victors of the caucuses — Rick Santorum in 2012 and Mike Huckabee in 2008 — were ardent social conservatives, backed by gritty grassroots networks of evangelicals, pastors and home-schoolers and bolstered by a relentless retail repertoire.  At first glance, the Hawkeye State does not look like hospitable turf for the bawdy, biting Christie who has cultivated much of his personality around losing his patience.

That's David Catanese, with a balanced approach to the question of whether Chris Christie should skip Iowa (if he runs in 2016, that is).

Unfortunately: a balanced approach is the wrong approach. The correct approach is that no one should ever skip Iowa. You basically can't win a nomination while skipping Iowa. I'm just going to repost a couple of paragraphs from what I said about this way back in 2011...

Skipping Iowa doesn't work. Most people don't pay attention to presidential politics until very late in the game. When they start paying attention -- when the non-obsessive section of the news media starts paying lots of attention -- is around the Iowa caucuses, and a candidate not playing there will, naturally, not receive the publicity that the other candidates receive. Then comes the caucuses, and another blast of publicity that the non-participant will miss. And the last bit is that the winners in Iowa will at the very least be taken more seriously, and perhaps get the kind of windfall positive publicity that Jimmy Carter in 1976 or Gary Hart in 1984 got. Note that Hart's came from a weak second place finish; the news media have to find some candidate to give the rest of the primaries and caucuses some drama.

The truth is that if you don't have a realistic chance of finishing top three in Iowa, you really don't have a realistic chance of winning the nomination. And, yes, I know that John McCain fell just short of that, but that would certainly put him in the category of having had a realistic shot at the top three.

That's what I wrote pre-2012. Just a bit more: you don't have to win Iowa. You don't need to finish second in Iowa. I'm not even convinced that you need to finish third in Iowa. You certainly don't have to go all-in in Iowa, and you certainly can try to lower expectations there. You just can't take yourself out of the conversation for several months in the heart of the nomination battle and still expect to be the nominee, and that's pretty much what happens to anyone who skips Iowa. It's not a realistic strategy.

Christie, Strategic Politicians, and the 2012 Cycle

John Sides makes the point today that Chris Christie's choice to pass on WH 2012 was consistent with the pretty good chance that Barack Obama would be re-elected. Strategic politicians, John says, consider the chances of winning in their decisions about running, and that

a strategic candidate might have looked at the landscape in 2011 and said, “You know what, I’ll have a better shot in 2016.”  And we aren’t suggesting that there aren’t idiosyncratic factors at work either.   It’s just to say that Christie’s decision was nicely in line with what political science says.

Put that way, I would have to agree. And yet.

If we can assume that Christie really did have a very good shot at the nomination...had he asked me at any point in 2011 whether he should run or not, I would definitely have said to go for it.

Yes, the economy plus a first-term president made any Republican a legitimate longshot. However, the economy was rocky enough in 2011 that a significant downturn was a very real possibility. And then there's the chance that Obama would have stumbled in some other way: a scandal, mismanagement of Afghanistan, or a Katrina-like disaster.

And then there's the other side of the coin. First of all, if Christie passes and Obama does tank, then Mitt Romney is president and he has a vice president (who is almost certainly not going to be Christie; it was going to be a conservative favorite), and who knows when the next open nomination opportunity might be?

Then there's the possibility that the economy keeps Obama afloat through 2012 and then really gets going after that, putting the Democrats in excellent position for 2016. John refers to Gary Jacobson on strategic politicians, and rightly so, but waiting for a shot at a House seat is a lot different from strategic choices for presidential elections -- there are just far fewer opportunities.

And that's also true on the nomination side. If it's really true that Republican party actors were ready to ditch Romney for Christie and he therefore had an excellent chance for the nomination, it may turn out to have been by far his best shot at that prize. And he could have known that in 2011, too. A significant feature of the 2012 cycle for Republicans is that thanks to Democratic landslides in 2006 and 2008 followed by a Republican landslide in 2010, there were a surprisingly small number of potential Republican candidates with conventional credentials in 2012 -- but an unusually large number who were on track to have those credentials for 2016. That's something that a strategic politician needed to take into account, too.

However...

I'm really not convinced that Christie had much of a chance at the nomination. John is reacting to an anecdote from the new Dan Balz book, that (as David Lauter puts it) "Republican notables, including Henry Kissinger, Nancy Reagan and some of the nation's wealthiest businessmen" were trying to get Christie to run. Okay, I haven't read Balz, but: meh. If Kissinger is one of the big names recruiting you...well, ever, but certainly in 2012, then you really don't have much. It's not at all clear that Nancy Reagan has had any significant independent clout within the GOP for some time now. As for those "wealthiest businessmen," if they aren't important players within the party, then I'm not sure why we should be so impressed by them. Even if they were ready to open their checkbooks.

What I actually think Christie shows is, in part, how conventional credentials work. Christie gets elected in 2009; unless he's ready and willing to run right out of the box, he's getting a very late start. Was it possible? Maybe. But surely it wasn't for those elected in 2010. By the time they could have got started, too many people had made too many commitments. And it's very possible that was the case for the class of '09, too.

But if he really had an inside track to the nomination...I'm not even sure I would have advised against going for the 1984, 1972, and 1964 nominations for out-party prospective candidates. I definitely would not have advised Christie against a run on the basis that Obama was a small, but solid, favorite.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

Chris Christie: solid conservative for the most part, and certainly an acceptable presidential nominee -- or really just another Eastern Establishment moderate?

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Daniel Radcliffe, 24.

Plus some good stuff:

1. Steve Kornacki on how Chris Christie may have a serious campaign finance dilemma in 2016.

2. Bruce Reed's political education.

3. Good Ezra Klein interview with This Town author Mark Leibovich. Actually, the good parts are mostly the questions, but worth reading for that.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

Chris Christie: half (at least) RINO who at best is the best to hope for in New Jersey, but certainly should be nowhere near a national ticket? Or: a promising conservative presidential candidate?

Building It

My wrap on Chris Christie and Ann Romney's speeches is over at Greg's place. Short version: she was pretty good, he was okay, but what a substance-free party they are.

To add on to that a little, after a long day of convention watching...

Quite a few people noted during the day noted how remarkable it was that they build the entire day around an out of context quote from Barack Obama; they spent the day asserting that, yes, indeed, we did build that.

Only they didn't, really. The best one was the guy from Nevada whose entire business, apparently (according to him, that is) was getting government contracts...I think it was for road signs. And how disappointed he was when the stimulus didn't give him any new business. But all day long, we heard speaker after speaker start to explain how they, alone, had built their business, only to eventually credit their family, their workers, their communities.

Well, actually my favorite was the talk-show host who scolded Obama because God, it seems, was really the one who built America. Which, you know, is actually a lot more consistent with what Obama said than what the GOP theme of the day is, but never mind that. It sounded like a good rebuke.

Which really was all they had today. And, for what it's worth, is probably okay, as far as WH 2012 is concerned. You don't convert people through clever arguments at the conventions; you furnish those who really are inclined to vote for you but haven't quite accepted it yet for whatever reasons with acceptable reasons to do do what they want to do anyway. So really a day full of substance-free nothing may be suboptimal, but it sure beats culture war or Tea Party crazies.

That said...it really was an amazingly substance-free day. I know, I know; Republican policy planning shouldn't be expected to necessarily have the detail that liberals have. But there's just nothing there. It's Father Guido's five-minute university, GOP version. Foreign policy? Exceptionalism. Economic policy? Deficits are bad. Anything else? Energy? Drill. Anything else? Nope, that pretty much covers it. Again, for most voters, that's not going to matter. The problem is that it's all they have, as far as I can see.

The other question, I suppose, is whether basing the convention on lies (such as the welfare thing) and out-of-context scare quotes really works with undecided voters. It sure seems to me that the previous idea that Barack Obama is a good man who just isn't up to the job should play better than the idea that Obama hates America and, in particular, is actively hostile to small business. On the one hand, anyone inclined to vote for Republicans should respond to either. On the other hand, any really undecided voters who check out both conventions are just not going to hear anything at all next week that will confirm what they're hearing this week, and it doesn't strike me that they're hearing a message that they could believe even if they leave next week finding Obama to have good intentions. But that's extremely speculative; it seems to me it should work that way, but who knows if it will.

One last thing before I let the first day go. I know it doesn't matter at all -- at all -- whether convention days have coherent themes or not. But for whatever it's worth, the one thing that would have really capped off the day and made the GOP look a lot more intellectually energetic would have been a strong, sane, argument for small-government capitalism. A speech like that would have very much appealed to centrist pundits. Would it play to voters? Only a very well-written one (not that they would object to it otherwise, but it runs the risk of being dull). So, who knows, maybe platitudes and cliches from Christie was a safer path. But for whatever it's worth, it would have tied together the whole day a lot better. And, again for whatever it's worth, it would fit a lot better with the actual Mitt Romney than cliches about leading even when your ideas are unpopular, which just doesn't match the way most people think about Romney at all, and is unlikely to change anytime soon.

I suspect I'm going to duck more of the second day, but we'll see. I should mention, for those who read my earlier item:: a terrific rendition of the nomination roll call of the states, and I totally nailed South Dakota, Corn Palace and all. So I got what I wanted out of this convention.

Christie Out

Chris Christie is out of WH 2012. You'll see lots of people saying he decided not to run. You know what? I think that's probably wrong. I think he did run for president for a few weeks, and has now been winnowed out. Chalk another one up for the invisible primary.

Now, as campaigns go, it wasn't much; it's not like the full-fledged Tim Pawlenty campaign, or even the mostly-fledged Haley Barbour effort. But by all accounts (including his own, really) he looked around to gauge his support, and he certainly delivered at least one campaign-type speech at the Reagan library last week, and that to me is a campaign.

How should be understand the rise and failure of Chris Christie? One way is factional: there was, as Josh Marshall theorizes, a party faction that supported his candidacy. I think that's probably accurate, and what Christie's demise tells us is that he rapidly discovered when he looked around that (1) it's a relatively small group within the party, and (2) most other party actors are reasonably happy with either Rick Perry or Mitt Romney or at least the choice between them. Or perhaps he heard that his record of moderation made him an absolute non-starter for important party groups (such as, say, the NRA). To put it another way...Marshall says that Christie is making a "smart move" because "a pro-civil union, global warming believing, sharia-loving, non-Mexican hating New Jersey governor just ain't gonna survive first contact with the GOP nominating process" -- which I'd reply that we may well have just seen him not survive that first contact, and what he was smart about was doing it more or less out of the limelight.

That said, I've talked before about the possibility that interest in running is probably more than an on/off variable. In other words, perhaps Christie was interested in running -- but not desperate to do so. In that case, it may have only taken relatively light resistance (and the promise of a hard race) to dissuade him from continuing on to a formal declaration of candidacy. What we don't know, from the outside, is exactly what perceived odds of winning Christie would have needed to proceed. Hey -- it's even entirely possible that he couldn't tell you accurately exactly why he chose not to continue. What we can say, no question about it, is that the GOP seems to be highly efficient at winnowing the field, and this is yet another piece of evidence for that.

Christie

My post over at Plum Line today is about why Republicans have spent the year pining for better candidates, with Chris Christie being the flavor-of-the-month right now. Basically, I say that it's structural, and not particularly about the candidates Republicans have right now.

I say over there that a Christie candidacy is unlikely, but as I always repeat: you can't get inside the mind of politicians. There's always the chance that Christie will foolishly decide to run. Remember, the people around him are certainly telling him he's a great man, and a far better politician than Mitt Romney or Rick Perry; after all, odds are they wouldn't be the people around him if they didn't believe that, and they almost certainly wouldn't be if they weren't willing to say it. That's of course not a Christie thing; I suspect dozens of GOP pols right now have people around them who tell them how well they compare to Romney and Perry, and that dozens of Democratic pols in 2008 had people around them telling them how well they compared to Clinton and Obama. And that's just the relatively sincere stuff; there are also plenty of people who would love to be on a Christie for President payroll, and you can guess what advice they're giving him. Frankly, with all of that, it's a wonder that more 2nd and 3rd tier plausible nominees don't jump in.

Anyway, if he does jump in, I continue to believe he's not a plausible nominee -- and certainly not at this point. He really isn't a movement conservative; Dan Amira (via Drum) has the goods on issues on which Christie would likely have problems with conservatives. And it really is very late in the process. Remember, by all accounts Rick Perry was actually focused on his candidacy long before formally entering this summer (after all, he wrote a campaign book last year). Unless there's a lot of unreported activity behind the scenes, Christie would be starting from scratch. That makes it hard for him to finish in the top three in Iowa, which in turn makes it hard(er) for him to beat Romney in New Hampshire, and then...well, it's just very hard for me to see a plausible path to victory for him.

I'm also a lot less convinced than some are that Republican party actors are unhappy with the Romney/Perry choice. Certainly there are some conservatives who are dubious about Romney, and I'm sure some people are questioning Perry after his debate performances, but I suspect that most of the chatter will die down soon enough. And soon after that, the talk about a "weak field" will be gone, replaced by talk of how either Romney or Perry has dramatically improved and will be a strong nominee after all.

Ryan Might Run! Christie Might Run! Reagan Might Run!

OK, I made up that last one, but what are we to make of the sudden avalanche of rumors that either Paul Ryan or Chris Christie is about to get into WH 2012?

There are several questions to ask:

1. Are the rumors true? It's certainly possible that (for example) Christie's pollster might have tossed in a couple questions about a presidential run, or even something tangential to that, for a focus group even if there's no real serious plan to get it. As Jonathan Chait said this morning, interpreting potential candidates' denials of interest is a fine art indeed, and it leaves all sorts of misinterpretation very possible -- especially for anyone who has an interest in or a preference for a new candidacy.

2. If Christie or Ryan got in, would they be plausible nominees? I'll give the same answer to this that I've always had: they would not. Members of the House don't get nominated, and rarely compete seriously for the nomination. Ryan would be a whole lot closer to Dick Gephardt than to Michele Bachmann, so all things being equal he'd be a more plausible nominee, but that's not saying much. Christie? Again, giving a nomination to a recently-elected governor wouldn't quite be unprecedented (Woodrow Wilson), but there are good reasons it doesn't happen often at all. And all things aren't equal; it's very, very late to jump in from scratch, which is (as far as we know) what they would be doing.

Note: They could get in anyway! I'm sure there are plenty of people close to both who absolutely believe that Ryan/Christie are heavyweights among the lightweights, and sure nominees if they were to get in...and plenty of consultants who would be happy to pretend to believe it if it helps them pick up a nice check (or: plenty of consultants who sincerely believe that they could steer anyone willing to take their advice straight into the White House).

3. If it's not about Christie or Ryan actually getting in, what's driving it? This is a really big question. It could be a few individuals who for whatever reason don't like Rick Perry. Or, it could be important groups within the party who are genuinely searching for an alternative. That's probably very difficult to report on, but such reporting could help us sort this out.

I'll stick to what I've been saying. My guess is that neither Christie or Ryan will actually get in. If they do, I'll continue to call them implausible nominees until proven otherwise. It's not inconceivable that an implausible nominee could win, but I've set the chances at well under 10%, and see no reason to change that now. There's just an enormous amount of grass-is-greener thinking going on here, sparked among other things by the length and, well, invisibility of most of the invisible primary.

And at any rate, I needed an excuse to quote Alex Pareene's reaction:

I dunno, does Chris Christie screaming insults at a room full of random people really count as a "focus group"?