Well, it looks like Iowa and New Hampshire both get to claim one official victim in the 2012 GOP Presidential sweepstakes as Jon Huntsman is announcing today that he is going to be the first to follow Michele Bachmann out the door. Huntsman never managed to get off the floor nationally, and wasn’t able to make enough of a dent in New Hampshire (the one state he actively campaigned in) to gain sufficient momentum and money to carry his campaign forward. So he made one of the few sensible political choices he’s made in this run and decided to drop out while he’s not too far behind. Governor Huntsman was good enough to sit down and talk with me at relative length during the campaign season (see here ), and I came away liking Huntsman much more than I did going in. However, even in that interview you could see the seeds of political tone-deafness that ultimately doomed Huntsman’s campaign. For instance, Huntsman is the only Presidential candidate I am aware of who has kicked off his campaign by taking a job working for the incumbent he hopes to defeat. I cannot for the life of me understand why or how Huntsman was unable to perceive how this would play with the GOP primary electorate. Ultimately, I get how and why Huntsman took the job as ambassador to China; he should have understood, however, that it was a choice that would make it impossible for him to run for President in 2012. Huntsman’s other early missteps likewise threw him in the political cellar, from which he ultimately never emerged. The first of these was no doubt the hiring of John Weaver, who inexplicably continues to get jobs working for Republicans who want to get elected. At this point, the message is clear to everyone who is paying attention – hiring John Weaver to manage your Presidential campaign is a giant middle finger to the GOP conservative base. Even John McCain’s campaign did not take off until he canned Weaver. I suppose it is possible that someone might be able to win a GOP primary election somewhere while actively angering conservatives, but it is not going to happen in a Presidential primary. Huntsman’s failure to put any distance between himself and Weaver’s controversial comments (that essentially called the TEA Party a freakshow) was another major factor in his inability to get off the ground quickly. Third, Huntsman’s inability to modulate himself, even at all, was ultimately harmful. A prime example of this quality came during my interview with him, when I gave him an explicit opportunity to walk back the infamous “call me crazy” tweet. I certainly wasn’t expecting a full Romney flip-flop on global warming, but here was a prime opportunity for Huntsman to at least apologize for the tone of the tweet, or for failing to consider how people might perceive it, and he flatly refused. As Erick has noted here many times before, Huntsman simply refused to play the game that has to be played. I guess to some extent that’s admirable but in this context it involved refusing to apologize to potentially insulted voters, which is a suboptimal election strategy. As sad as it is to say, the ability to read your electorate politically matters a lot to a potential President, and even more to a Presidential nominee. At every step along the way of his early campaign, Huntsman displayed a stunning lack of ability to perform this basic function which, if it had not tripped him up so early in the primary, would have doomed him in the general or made him a horribly ineffective President. Huntsman was Exhibit A for why, although I only support Governors as nominees, not all Governors are suited to national politics. Finally, even if he could have overcome these intrinsic weaknesses and mistakes, this election was simply the wrong time and the wrong moment for a candidate like Huntsman. Let us be honest: the GOP primary electorate is ticked off right now. They are ticked off at Obama, and they are equally ticked off at Republicans in Congress. Right now, the electorate more than ever wants someone who can convey an ability to kick butt and take names against any and all comers who refuse to aggressively shrink the size and scope of government, and to address the spiraling debt problem in this country. Regardless of his politics, people are desperate for the tone of a guy like Christie (who has likely blown his one and only shot at the Presidency) right now, not the soft, manicured gentle (and probably unintentional) condescension of a Jon Huntsman. Accordingly, nearly everything Huntsman did in public fell flat on its face this election season. His jokes bombed at the debates. People mistook his attempts at empathy with ordinary people for smugness (in Huntsman’s defense, very few people who grow up very rich can pull this off with any other result). The overwhelming feedback Huntsman provoked in his debate and media performances – despite his admirable record as Governor – was “get this guy off the stage.” His ultimate doom was indicated when almost half his voters in NH indicated that they were satisfied with the job Barack Obama was doing as President. This was the surest indication yet that in this year, at this time and place, Jon Huntsman’s campaign for the Republican nomination was going nowhere. Governor Huntsman seemed like a decent guy and his record led many to believe that he had promise. But due to his own failings as a candidate and the mood of the electorate overall, he never stood a reasonable chance in this election.
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Requiescat in Pace, Jon Huntsman for President Campaign
In response to my post debunkin g one of the main Republican establishment myths, Ramesh Ponnuru claims that I joust with phantoms by “doing battle with someone he calls by my name but has very different views.” Yet he moves the goal posts in three ways that suggest those phantoms might be too close to reality for his own comfort. First, Ramesh now admits there was, “some slippage on the right but not a huge amount.” That was not stated in his original article. However, he continues to sell the data short. He keeps focusing on the presidential year of 2004. But let’s compare off-year elections, apples to apples. As Ramesh notes, i n the bad year of 2006 , conservatives voted 78% for Republicans and made up 32% of the electorate. Compare with the strong year of 2010 , in which conservatives voted 84% for Republicans and made up 42% of the electorate. A six point differential, even when less of the electorate is conservative, is significant. Second, Ramesh now concedes that at least some of this slippage may in fact have been due to “Republican squishiness.” I never argued that the 2006 election hinged “exclusively” on spending and limited government concerns. I pointed out that the independent voters that Republicans lost in 2006, cared a great deal about excess spending, and that it impacted their opinion of Republicans. I also suggested that Ramesh was wrong–by constantly conflating conservatives with Republicans and by drawing such a stark distinction between conservatives and independents–to conclude that big Republican government had nothing to do with the 2006 election losses. However, even in this discussion, Ramesh is revealing. He declares “that the vast majority of conservative voters favored the prescription-drug subsidies.” I’m not sure where he is getting his proof, but I suspect he is conflating conservatives and Republicans again. According to an ABC/Washington Post poll , 49% of Republicans supported the Medicare prescription drug benefit soon after it was enacted, but 51% either disapproved or did not have an opinion (perhaps because it struck them odd that a Republican president was pushing such a massive new entitlement). Interestingly, 41% of independents disapproved of the new law with 30% approving and 30% having no opinion. The popularity of this new entitlement was hardly “vast” among Republicans, and certainly not with independents. Third, Ramesh now claims that he was just criticizing “a few candidates associated with the tea party,” when he cited Sharron Angle and Ken Buck, and not the tea party as a whole. Unfortunately, he wasn’t just criticizing a few candidates–he was criticizing “conservative primary voters [who] rejected two electable, conventionally conservative candidates” and preaching to similar voters across the country. Nor does he address any of the points I made, including that independents voted for both in the general election. He simply reasserts that both were “weak general-election candidates.” Ramesh also claims that my conclusion that he “has long wanted an agenda that focuses on issues such as wage stagnation, traffic congestion, and student loan costs that appeal to middle class voters, not middle class entitlements that are bankrupting the entire nation” is not true. Not true? In the article I linked to, Ramesh [and Rich Lowry] call for “a reform agenda that helps ordinary Americans….That agenda should center, unapologetically, on the middle class.” In it, after a perfunctory mention that, “spending restraints should be a part of that agenda,” they call for addressing “mundane quality-of-life-issues such as traffic” and “simplifying financial-aid formulas, by replacing subsidized loans with direct grants as much as possible.” And of course, Ramesh is well-known for his foot being firmly on the brake of entitlement reforms . If Ramesh had merely set out to remind us that Republicans need to apply “conservative thought to voters’ concerns, to be competent, and to be clean,” his article would not have deserved a response for that is obvious. But Ramesh set out to deconstruct an electorally-unsound “mythology” that has led to a “fixation on ideological purity” that he opposes. In doing so, he ironically perpetuated an actual mythology of the Republican establishment–a mythology that has serious adverse consequences for conservatives and Republicans alike, and the country at large. That mythology is not true and must be challenged at every turn.
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Ramesh Ponnuru Moves the Goal Posts
This morning, Ross Kaminsky critiques the merits of Herman Cain’s “9-9-9″ plan. Kaminsky particularly objects to the introduction of a national sales tax stating, “Here’s the important history lesson: Sales taxes almost never fall.” Kaminsky is wise to qualify that statement because Canada’s
The Greenberg/Carville-sponsored poll certainly does have a good deal to say about the current state of House races, albeit from as positive-towards-the-Democrats position (Hotline called it ‘ sugary spin ‘) as possible. For example, for all of the talk about how ‘cool’ the electorate was towards Republican incumbents the truth is that they’re averaging a 40/32 approval/disapproval rating, and that the generic Congressional vote went from 48/42 Republican/Democrat in 2010 to 50/41 R/D today (which is up from 46/44 R/D in March ). And while the poll will happily tell you that Greenberg & Carville’s recommended message will shift that advantage down to an even-steven 45/45 R/D generic Congressional number, what they don’t mention is that the last time they polled this survey they were able to ‘turn’ a 46/44 R/D into 44/47 R/D. In other words: things have gotten subtly worse for the Democrats since March. As Hotline said: sugary spin. But the big numbers here are President Obama’s: he went from a 48/47 approval/disapproval rating in the surveyed districts to a 41/55 today. That… is a disaster; but not as much as one as the fact that both Perry and Romney beat Obama 49/45 and 49/43, respectively. Couple that with the aforementioned incumbent approval ratings, and… well. It is an article of faith among the Democrats that their problems with the electorate are solely due to their poor messaging; if nothing else, this election cycle should test that theory to destruction. As for what the poll did not say: well, pretty much that at this rate having Obama show up to campaign for you will be seen as a punishment by this time next year. Which you probably knew already, if you watched this Freedomworks video done by RedState’s own Ben Howe: …and no, that isn’t an attempt to change the subject. The above poll is the attempt to change the subject – or, more accurately, the attempt to change the subjects of the populace’s ire from Obama to the Republican House members who were elected to stop Obama from doing in 2011 and 2012 what Obama so incompetently did in 2009 and 2010. Which they have done . The Democrats absolutely hate the fact that Republicans were elected on a platform of saying “No,” particularly since “No” was the right answer – and, again, the Democratic pundit class believes in framing the way that a priest is supposed to believe in God. So if ‘framing’ tells the Democrats that they need to jettison the President (bizarre as that would sound to anyone from 2008 who was reading this) in order to try to get the House back – well, that’s what they’ll try to do. Don’t let them. Moe Lane ( crosspost )
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Democracy Corps (D): Obama 41/55.
Doesn’t exactly bode well for Obama’s reelection chances if Dems are having problems in a district with three times the number of registered Democrats. (NY Times) — Of all the places to hear fulminations against President Obama, one of the least expected is the corner of 71st Avenue and Queens Boulevard, in the heart of a Congressional district that propelled Democrats like Geraldine A. Ferraro, Charles E. Schumer andAnthony D. Weiner to Washington. But it was there that Dale Weiss, a 64-year-old Democrat, approached the Republican running for Congress in a special election and, without provocation, blasted the president for failing to tame runaway federal spending. “We need to cut Medicaid,” she declared, “but he won’t do that.” She shook her head in disgust. “He is a moron.” After nodding approvingly for a time, the Republican candidate, Bob Turner, signaled for an assistant to cut off Ms. Weiss. Frustration with Mr. Obama is so widespread, he explained later, that he tries to limit such rants to about 30 seconds, or else they will consume most of his day. . . . The race was widely viewed as a sleepy sideshow — a mere formality that would put David I. Weprin, a Democratic state assemblyman and heir to a Queens political dynasty, into a seat known for its deep blue hue. Instead, the race has become something far more unsettling to Democrats: a referendum on the president and his party that is highlighting the surprisingly raw emotions of the electorate. Via Ed Morrissey
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NYT Shocked, SHOCKED To Find Voter Anger At Obama In Weiner’s Heavily Democratic District…
