December 2005 - January 2006
CANDIDATES FOR THE Republican and Democratic nominations for the presidency in 2008 are wisely waiting to make formal announcements until after the November 2006 congressional elections, but the field is taking shape and some campaigns are already coming into focus.
The Democratic race is already scripted. New York Senator Hillary Clinton will be followed around the nation by six or seven emasculated senators. They'll pretend to run for president while actually auditioning for vice president. At the "debates" Hillary will sit front and center, her chair four inches higher than the others, while Senator John Kerry, Senator Evan Bayh, Virginia Governor Mark Warner, and former senator John Edwards say things like "I was thinking this morning how much I agree with Hillary Clinton's thoughts on this issue and how I admire her leadership ability... which reminds me that Joe Biden is an idiot." The seven dwarfs will kick each other under the table as they suck up to Hillary. It would be a dirty trick for someone in the establishment press to ask any of them the one question they dread, "So why would you be a better president than Hillary?"
Virginia Governor Mark Warner typifies the challenges facing those Dems who would run as "conservative" counterweights to a Hillary at the top of the ticket. Warner cannot run for president as an anti-tax conservative for the same reason that the Greeks did not conquer the rest of Asia Minor using the Trojan Horse ploy. It only works once. Mark Warner lied his way into the governor's office in Virginia by promising not to raise taxes and then pushed through a $2 billion tax hike. Such tricks only work once.
THE REPUBLICAN FIELD, on the other hand, is wide open. George W. Bush has, one hopes, started a trend by appointing a vice president with a health problem that precludes him from using the unearned perch at the Naval Observatory to step unchallenged into the White House.
Virginia Senator George Allen stands most comfortably in the center of the Reagan coalition. He is on good terms with taxpayers, pro-family activists, and gun owners. He was a governor and has a Reaganite voting record with demonstrated leadership on high-tech issues.
Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has the advantage of serving as governor in a state whose television footprint covers the population center of the first primary state, New Hampshire. This was very helpful to Michael Dukakis in 1988, Paul Tsongas in 1992, and John Kerry in 2004. Massachusetts governors also find it easy to swamp New Hampshire with volunteers who can live at home and drive to the state, rather than fly across the country, speak with regional accents, and pay hotel bills.
One great unknown for Romney is the role his Mormon faith will play. On the downside, many evangelical churches still circulate tracts attacking Mormonism, formally the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as a cult. Polls show that while Americans' reticence to vote for a Jewish or black presidential candidate has collapsed over the last 40 years, similar resistance to voting for a Mormon for president stands unchanged at 17 percent. But the "religious right" has expanded through the right to life movement, bringing together Pentecostal and fundamentalist Protestants with Roman Catholics in ways unimaginable as recently as 1960, when Martin Luther King Sr. voted -- for reasons of sectarian bigotry -- for Richard Nixon rather than John Kennedy, who had befriended his imprisoned son. Today, opposition to same-sex marriage may bridge the gap between Mormons and the Catholic/Protestant axis, given that the Mormon church has been a leading financial and political supporter of the Defense of Marriage Act efforts in Hawaii, California, Arizona, and Nevada. Chuck Colson, the widely respected evangelical leader who runs the Prison Fellowship movement, has said he would be open to a Romney candidacy due to Romney's support for pro-family positions.
Romney would also have an advantage that catapulted Vermont Governor Howard Dean to national prominence -- an already existing national network. On January 1, 2004, the Washington Post reported that, "with just one exception, every fundraiser Dean attended outside Vermont in 2002 was organized by gay men and lesbians, as were more than half the events in the first quarter of 2003." Dean's campaign was not driven by the Internet, which was available to all candidates. What Dean did is plug into the national gay community. Romney would have the same organizational advantage through the 6 million Mormons spread across the 50 states. And while the support structures of the two men may be stronger respectively in San Francisco and Salt Lake City, both Dean and Romney find potential supporters in all 50 states while their competitors have to pay good money to build efforts in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has unsettled social conservatives with his decision to support Senator Hatch's position allowing experimentation on embryonic stem cells. Frist is further hampered at present by his job description of Republican Leader. Every day Dr. Frist's job is to throw 55 marbles up in the air and then collect at least 51 of them in a bag. Seen from afar this activity is hardly dignified, what with Frist having to bend over to collect the Olympia Snowe marble rolling left and the John McCain marble rolling towards the CBS camera. This posture is not presidential. When Frist leaves the Senate in November 2007 (he has limited himself to two six-year terms), he will be free to speak for himself rather than be held responsible for the voting and speech patterns of others.
THREE YEARS OUT, Arizona Senator John McCain polls well, courtesy of high name ID and a fawning establishment press. McCain ran in 2000 as a Reagan Republican, a former Vietnam POW with one small liberal impulse -- campaign finance reform. Since then McCain has changed many of his positions. He voted against each of the significant Bush tax cuts. (True, in 2001 he voted for Bush's tax cut before he voted against it.) On guns, McCain has become the most visible and vehement anti-gun Republican. He has championed slowing down the American economy to implement the Kyoto climate change treaty that was rejected by the Senate 95n0 in 2000. The campaign finance "reform" plan that he promised would get big money out of politics instead gave us the era of George Soros and Michael Moore. No other piece of legislation in history has failed more dramatically, more quickly than McCain's campaign finance reform.
While much of McCain's last five years appears to be simple spite and ankle-biting aimed at the man who denied him the nomination in 2000, the most damaging act by McCain was his decision to play the Pied Piper and lead seven Republican "moderates" out of the caucus, and commit himself to oppose the Republican Party's efforts to end the filibuster as a tool to stop conservative judges. McCain, not Chief of Staff Andrew Card, was the father of the Harriet Miers nomination. If McCain had not stopped Frist from employing the "nuclear" or "constitutional" option, we would have had another Scalia on the bench by Thanksgiving.
In 2000, while Governor George W. Bush was running a campaign based on issues and principle, McCain ran as Charles de Gaulle: vote for me and I will lead you. This collapsed under questioning ("lead us where?") by the time of the early South Carolina primary.
Some assume that McCain knows that he cannot run for the Republican nomination in 2008 as the anti-NRA, anti-tax cut, Christian-bashing senator who undermines Bush's ability to reform the judiciary. Perhaps McCain is simply remaining true to his phototropic self. He is not moving either left or right, but towards the television cameras and the adoration of the Washington press corps, his true "base."
But McCain, or at least his advisers, know that he must choose. He can be CBS's favorite Republican senator or he can move back to the Reagan Republican positions he took before the Keating Five story broke in the late 1980s. Recent flights to the right -- voting with the NRA to ban harassing lawsuits against gun manufacturers, not trying to tie his anti-gun amendments to reform, and talking loudly about spending restraint -- may simply be efforts to make a presidential bid appear plausible to maintain his attractiveness to Good Morning America.
NEWT GINGRICH, the former Speaker of the House and the man who led the Republicans out of the wilderness into the majority, has been visiting New Hampshire and Iowa. He has made himself an expert on the issue of healthcare and has kept his name and ideas in the limelight enough to be ready if lightning struck and a presidential bid became possible for him.
Kansas Senator Sam Brownback is positioning himself to be the John Ashcroft of 2008 -- the socially conservative candidate who could run as the needed vice-presidential antidote for a nominee with frayed ties to the religious right: McCain? Giuliani? Pataki? Romney?
Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum looks very good on paper -- Catholic, Big State, GOP Senate leadership -- if he can get past the very serious challenge of getting re-elected in 2006. Voter fraud in Philadelphia in November 2006 could cost Santorum a very real shot at the Republican nomination in 2008.
The Katrina hurricane spotlighted Mississippi's Governor Haley Barbour, who already had a number of advocates convinced he would be a strong national candidate based on his years as party leader in the Republican National Committee and his network of party officials and donors. Barbour is a high IQ Southern gentleman whose laid-back style is never confused with laziness or simplemindedness.
NEW YORK OFFERS TWO possible candidates. Rudy Giuliani, the mayor who rebounded in public affection in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and 12-year governor George Pataki. Giuliani has the high name ID of September 11 and his Time Man of the Year award. He was the welfare-reforming, tax-cutting, crime-fighting mayor who turned around a failing city. His social liberalism on gay marriage and abortion has not hurt his ability to campaign and raise money for state and national candidates across America. How will it play in Republican primaries?
Pataki suffers from the truth that he could only enact legislation in New York that passed between the Scylla and Charybdis of the New York State Assembly Leader Silver and the Senate President Bruno. Neither was working to create a record for Pataki conducive to running for president as a Republican. Still, Pataki has been a tax cutter and governed well in a large state that should be able to fund a serious presidential campaign.
The Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has successfully enacted tort reform -- in the state constitution. He passed asbestos tort reform, a feat that has eluded Congress. He stopped any tax hikes and dropped $10 billion from the biennial budget that he inherited from someone or other when he ascended from the lieutenant governorship in 2001. He oversaw the redistricting battle that brought Republicans an additional six seats in the House of Representatives. Should Perry win big in 2006 and pick up a few improved GOP seats in the legislature, he could enact his plans to cut property taxes, establish spending limits for local government, and offer full school choice.
South Carolina's Governor Mark Sanford has carved out a national reputation for vetoing spending bills (unlike others in this new century) and pushing school choice and tax cuts.
Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, has staked out the political ground of "like George Bush, without the Iraq thing hanging around your neck." If Iraq is in the windshield instead of in the rear view mirror in 2008, Hagel may be standing on the high ground.
AND THEN THERE IS JEB BUSH, the man who would be president today if the Democrats hadn't stolen the Florida gubernatorial election in 1994. As governor beginning in 1998, Bush has cut government employment by 5 percent each and every year, cut taxes, enacted some school choice and tort reform, and passed the "Castle Act" allowing citizens to defend themselves against criminals without a legal obligation to turn and run in the face of attack. He speaks Spanish as a second language and English as if it were his native tongue. Bush has led the Republicans to crushing majorities of 26 to 14 in the Florida senate and 84 to 36 in the Florida house.
At present Bush is saying "No" to the idea of a 2008 presidential bid. Some believe he should pass that year to avoid the appearance of a Bush Dynasty. But logic runs the other way. Only in 2008 will it be impossible for even the New York Times to argue with a straight face that we cannot elect one president's brother because we must elect another president's wife.
Grover Norquist is the president of Americans for Tax Reform.
LOAD-DATE: November 21, 2005
