Revolt!
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But the GOP victories of 2010 had no leaders. Incoming House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele all worked hard to win, but none of them was really the leader. Most Republican voters were only dimly aware of who they were.
The real hero was the Tea Party movement, which engineered a massive grassroots rebellion against Obama’s policies, spearheaded by people like Tea Party Patriots leaders Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler, Americans for Prosperity director Tim Phillips, and billionaires David and Charles Koch. FoxNews’ Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, and 60 Plus Association leader Jim Martin were the spark plugs that catalyzed the win, but they were unknown. (See Part VI, The New Leaders, for brief sketches of them.)
Sarah Palin’s endorsements and active campaigning contributed mightily to the victory—far more than any other politician’s—but the 2010 elections were dominated by the grass roots. It was the millions of Tea Party activists who impelled the Republican Party to victory.
So the Republican Party is leaderless. Who will emerge as its candidate in 2012?
First let’s understand how the candidate will be nominated. The process will fundamentally change this year. In fact, it will be the opposite of what we are used to.
Since the procedural reforms initiated by Democrat George McGovern in 1973, which carried over into the Republican Party as well, primaries have determined the winner of the nominations in each party. Iowa and New Hampshire—the first caucus and the first primary in the nation—have tended to sort out the candidates for us. They narrowed down the field and left the rest of the nation with two or three alternatives in each party.
These two small states have dominated the process because the contenders usually did not have the money to wage national campaigns. At the start of a campaign, they could only afford to run in these two small states. And those who had the financial resources to compete nationally (like Hillary Clinton, and Mitt Romney in 2008) were forced to battle in these two states anyway because they were the first test. Having more money didn’t help that much in states so small that TV time was pretty inexpensive.
In effect, Iowa and New Hampshire have become the quarterfinals, narrowing the field to two candidates in each party who compete in the subsequent primaries. In 2000, Al Gore and Bill Bradley were the Democratic semifinalists who survived these early rounds; George Bush and John McCain were their Republican equivalents. In 2004, John Kerry and John Edwards emerged as the alternatives. In 2008, Iowa and New Hampshire winnowed down the Democratic field to Hillary Clinton versus Barack Obama and the Republican contest to John McCain versus Mike Huckabee. The other contenders—Giuliani, Romney, Edwards, Dodd, et al.—might have staggered on for a few more rounds, but their candidacies were doomed.
Now, in the Republican primaries, it will be different. The short list of contenders for the nomination will not be chosen in the early primaries. Iowa and New Hampshire will not impose their will on America. America will impose its will on Iowa and New Hampshire.
The quarterfinals will not be waged in the cornfields of Iowa or the former mill towns of New Hampshire. They will be held in the living rooms of America, among the FoxNews audience!
The share of the GOP electorate that watches FoxNews has become so dominant that the early stages of the Republican nominating process will be held on its airwaves. It is there, and not in the early-morning handshaking at factory gates in Iowa and New Hampshire, that we will meet the candidates and come to choose our favorites.
About half of those who call themselves Republicans report that they watch FoxNews every night, and two-thirds say they watch it “several times a week or more.” Among Independents, 46% and even 21% of Democrats also watch FoxNews several times a week or more.16
FoxNews’ market dominance among Republicans and Independents was not as extensive in 2008 as it is today, but its subsequent growth in market share and ratings has been phenomenal. Now its impact in Republican primaries is decisive.
In 2012, the Republicans and Independents who will choose the GOP nominee will be found watching Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren, Shep Smith, Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly, Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Gretchen Carlson, because it is on these shows that the early narrowing process will take place.
Day after day, we will see all the candidates on FoxNews. Not just in debates, but in frequent appearances on the network’s opinion and news shows. We will watch how they handle themselves, we’ll learn how they answer questions, and we’ll come to our decision. The Republican nominating process will resemble the TV show American Idol, where we watch the candidates perform and vote on who we like best.
Then, we will tell pollsters who we have come to like and those we don’t like. They will record our views every few weeks and, through this process, the front-runners will emerge, candidates will surge, leaders will fall back, and the winnowing process will take place.
Normally, the early national polls don’t mean much; the surveys that professionals follow are in Iowa and New Hampshire. In 2008, Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton led all the early national surveys, but neither one was there on election day.
But now, surveys in Iowa and New Hampshire will show the same results as the rest of the country because all the Republicans will be watching FoxNews—the same broadcasts the rest of us are seeing. Whatever local activity is going on in Des Moines or Cedar Rapids or Manchester or Concord will be drowned out by the constant coverage Republicans will be getting on FoxNews.
And, as the polls begin to tilt to one candidate or another, campaign contributions will follow them. Those who surge ahead will attract funding and the ones who falter will find their bank accounts drying up. Mitt Romney, who will self-fund his campaign (and can count on the strong support of the Mormon community), will not face any financial scarcity, but if he falls back in the polls, his electoral appeal will fade. Money won’t bring him back in 2012 any more than it did in 2008.
When the actual primaries take place, their results will tend to ratify the consensus the country has come to from watching FoxNews. Americans will impose their views on the early primaries, not the other way around.
Of course, the final decision will be made in the big state primaries that follow. There, the delegates will be selected to the nominating conventions and the winner will emerge.
So, the quarterfinals will be waged over FoxNews and ratified by the voters in the early, small state primaries.
The semifinals will take place in the big state primaries later on.
And the finals will be in November when we choose a president.
This process will favor the less well known candidates. They won’t have to compete financially at first, but can rely on their FoxNews appearances to build their constituencies. Mike Huckabee, whose consistently witty, incisive, and conservative debate performances in 2008 led to victory in Iowa, will be the model for candidates to follow in 2012. Mike never had two dimes to rub together, but he defeated Romney in Iowa and outlasted him in the contest against McCain by months.
OK, but who will be the candidate?
We don’t yet know. Neither of us has even met all the candidates, but here are our subjective, early impressions.
Mitt Romney
Although he led in the realclearpolitics.com average of polls from October 27 to November 21, 2010, with 19% of the Republican primary vote,17 Romney can’t get the nomination, and he shouldn’t. Some object to his religion; we don’t. That’s not our problem with him. We object to his support of an individual mandate to buy health insurance in Massachusetts (the very provision that has been found unconstitutional by a Virginia court). He passed and signed a bill that comes awfully close to ObamaCare in its essentials.
As Grace-Marie Turner, writing in the Wall Street Journal, noted, “the former Massachusetts governor enacted something very similar to the Obama health plan. It isn’t working well.” She said he “has been
on the wrong side of the defining political battle of our time.”18
Romney said on Fox News Sunday that the plan he signed into law is the “ultimate conservative plan.”19
Really? Conservative? The Wall Street Journal emphasizes its similarity to Obama’s program.
“Both have an individual mandate requiring most residents to have health insurance or pay a penalty. Most businesses are required to participate or pay a fine. Both rely on government-designed purchasing exchanges that also provide a platform to control private health insurance. Many of the uninsured are covered through Medicaid expansion and others receive subsidies for highly-prescriptive policies. And the apparatus requires a plethora of new government boards and agencies.”20
Romney defends his program saying “our plan is working well.”21 But in fact, it is ruining the state’s finances.
While 97% of his state has health insurance now, more than half of the 408,000 newly insured pay nothing and are entirely subsidized by the taxpayers.22
Like Obama, Romney promised that his program would lower health care costs, but a Harvard study said that one-third of the state residents report higher health care costs. In Massachusetts, a family of four pays almost $14,000 on health care, which is 27% higher than the national average.23
And, predictably, both scarcity and the inevitable de facto rationing have set in. A study by the Massachusetts Medical Society found that 56% of internal medicine physicians are no longer accepting new patients. For those who get an appointment, the average wait is seven weeks. In the words of Dr. Sandra Schneider, vice president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, in the Journal, “Just because you have health insurance doesn’t mean there’s a [primary care] physician who can see you.”24
As the Journal noted, “Many patients are insured in name only: they have health coverage but can’t find a doctor.”25
Romney defends his program by pointing out that “we didn’t do what President Obama’s doing, which is putting controls on our system of premiums for private insurance companies.”26
No, indeed. But the requirement of universal coverage without any expansion in the supply of doctors and medical facilities has led insurers to request rate hikes of 8 to 32% this year.27
As Michael Graham wrote in the Boston Herald, “the disaster of Romneycare is already upon us.”28
And so are the health care police! The Herald reports that the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector “created under Romneycare [is] cracking down on more than 3,000 [Massachusetts] residents who are fighting state fines, and has even hired a private law firm to force the health insurance scofflaws to pay penalties of up to $2,000 a year.”29 Their crime? Not having health insurance!
The Herald summarizes the impact of the legislation: “Before Romneycare, you were on the hook for $1 billion for Medicaid and other state health care subsidies. Less than three-years later, the taxpayer bill has gone up another $750 million—a 75% increase!”30
Though Romney now says he will repeal or modify the heath care law, he signed a bad bill once and can’t be counted on not to do so again.
After Romney, there are three front-runners for the nomination: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich.
All have three things in common:
a) They are all good, solid conservatives.
b) Each is well known and well liked by Republicans.
c) All three have massive political baggage that could drag them down to defeat.
In other years, in other elections, we might be inclined to take a chance on overcoming the baggage. But in 2012, running against the likes of Barack Obama, we don’t dare do so. So the question for each of them is: can they overcome their baggage?
We will see a lot of each of them. Palin and Huckabee live on FoxNews, and Newt shows up there all the time. In the battles of 2011, we will see how they hold up and whether we sense that the American people are willing to embrace them.
Sarah Palin
Let’s begin by getting one thing straight: Sarah Palin was a masterful choice for vice president. She delivered something to John McCain that no vice presidential candidate has ever given her running mate—a lead! For three weeks after the nomination, McCain led Obama in the polls. It was the only three weeks he ever did. Then McCain blew it by going back to Washington and voting for the TARP bank bailout, but that wasn’t Sarah’s fault.
Neither was the firestorm that greeted her nomination. Nobody has been as universally—or as unfairly—savaged by the mainstream media as Sarah Palin. Her baptism of fire stands as the greatest example of sexist bias in the history of modern so-called journalism. The media neglected her instrumental role in cleaning up Alaska’s corruption, toppling a political dynasty, and working her way up on her own—without relying on a political husband or father who has been in public life to pull her up.
Instead, they focused on topics no male candidate would have had to endure: was her granddaughter really her own baby? What did she think of her daughter’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy? What role would her husband play?
The interviews were ridiculous. Nobody wanted to know her opinion. These were “gotcha” traps designed to show her up. But all this damaged Sarah Palin’s credibility nationally. While she is popular among Republicans and Independents, she has a 36–51 unfavorable rating among all likely voters.31 Among Independents, though, she still has a 54–33 favorable rating.32
Most disturbing is the Washington Post poll that found that 59% of likely voters would “definitely not vote” for Palin. That’s a high hurdle to overcome.33
The realclearpolitics.com average of all polls between October 27 and November 21, 2010, has her winning only 17% of the vote among Republican primary voters,34 two percentage points behind Romney and one behind Mike Huckabee.
Why so low when she is so well known and, among Republicans and Independents, so well liked? Because Republican primary voters are afraid to nominate her, scared that she can’t win. The price she paid for helping the GOP ticket in 2008 was egregious, and many Republicans do not want to have to spend the 2012 campaign rehabilitating the image of their candidate.
Palin did herself no favors when she abruptly resigned as governor of Alaska. She looked like a quitter. And she never adequately explained her decision. Her reasons became apparent in the subsequent months when she used her newfound freedom to write, speak out, go on FoxNews, and travel the country in support of conservatives. But she never told us why she quit…and still hasn’t.
In fact, Sarah Palin is handling herself brilliantly these days. She is rehabilitating her image skillfully. Her reality show, her FoxNews appearances, her endorsements of real change agents across the nation, and her sponsorship of the Tea Party have all rebounded to her credit. If she continues to improve her image, Republicans may take a chance on her. They love her. They just worry that she can’t win.
After all, it is quite credible to say that as governor of Alaska, suddenly plucked to run for vice president, she was not necessarily well prepared for the national stage. But now, having been there for a few years, she is becoming more and more able to handle it, more conversant with the issues, and looks more like a possible president.
We’ll have to wait and see how Sarah Palin does and whether she even decides to run.
Mike Huckabee
A better, kinder, nicer man never walked the earth. His knowledge of issues is deep, his ideology heartfelt. His consistency is almost maddening. He has a great platform style, a winning debating approach, a charismatic personality, and he is viable and visible enough this time around to attract funding. He runs second in the realclearpolitics.com average of all polls between October 27 and November 21, 2010, with 18% of the vote, only one percentage point behind Romney.35
In contrast to Palin, he had a positive favorable rating nationally of 41–25 in the November 22, 2010, Quinnipiac Poll.36
But Mike’s heart betrayed him when he helped to release from prison Maurice Clemmons, who subseque
ntly killed four Washington State police officers. That could cause serious problems for Mike. He makes it clear that he didn’t pardon Clemmons. He merely commuted his sentence so that he would be eligible for parole. The parole board—largely holdovers from a previous administration—voted 5–0 to release Clemmons. Huckabee’s decision to commute Clemmons’s sentence was based on compassion about its unusual length—a harsh sixty years for burglary and theft—and because of his age, as Clemmons was only seventeen at the time of his conviction.
After the parole board released Clemmons, following Huckabee’s commutation, he was again arrested, this time for a parole violation, but prosecutors dropped the charges.
Huckabee points out that he did not free Clemmons, but just made him parole eligible. He also notes that had prosecutors pursued the parole violation, Clemmons would have gone back to prison for the remainder of his sentence.
But still, the fact remains, Clemmons later killed four police officers.
In our unforgiving politics, none of that matters. Huckabee was “blamed” for the shootings.
Why did Mike do what he did? Because he is a Christian who believes in forgiveness. When Dick handled his campaign in Arkansas, he asked Mike if he opposed parole for violent felonies. “Oh no,” Huckabee replied. “The Christian concept of forgiveness demands that we always allow parole if we see evidence of change.”37
Cory Cox, the governor’s clemency advisor, explains that Huckabee believed that “everyone makes mistakes, everyone can be rehabilitated.” He adds that the governor “believed racism is real, especially for people sentenced in the 1960s and 1970s.”38
Most governors see their pardon and commutation powers as dangerous accessories to their day jobs. They don’t want to have to rule on them and would rather duck the issue. Not Mike. He studied each application diligently to see if there was a basis for rehabilitation and forgiveness. He got it right a lot of the time. Many inmates genuinely changed, were released, and are living honest, honorable lives. But in the case of Clemmons, Mike got it wrong, and he might not be able to recover politically in time to win the nomination in 2012.