Freedom Line Blog

After a barrage of base-hating tweets, even the liberal website Talking Points Memo thinks former Utah Governor and Obama China Ambassador Jon Huntsman’s GOP presidential campaign is headed for failure.

TPM’s headline says it all: “Is He Even Trying?  Huntsman Seems Determined to Alienate the GOP Base

CFIF and others have been all over Huntsman’s record, noting how deliberately incompatible it is with almost any slice of the Republican electorate, let alone conservatives.

If voters want a former governor with corporate ties and moderate-to-liberal positions, they’ll vote for Mitt Romney.  If they want someone else, it won’t be Huntsman.

So almost three years after Barack Obama was elected President, he promises to unveil a “specific jobs plan” next month.  Very gracious of you, Mr. President.  Apparently, one of his brilliant ideas is to create an entirely new bureaucracy within the federal government, a “Department of Jobs.” Never mind that we already have a Labor Department, a Commerce Department, and so on.

But here’s something for Obama to ponder.  As noted today in The Wall Street Journal, “Over the past five years, Texas has added more net new jobs than all other states combined.”  Naturally, Team Obama and the desperate political left are already attempting to discredit Texas’s economic success.  But the facts, unsurprisingly, refute their claims.  For instance, for all of the attempts to mislabel those new jobs as low-wage, the Bureau of Labor Statistics “pegs the median hourly wage in Texas at $15.14, 93% of the national average, and wages have increased at a good clip:  in fact, the 10th fastest state in 2010 at 3.4%.”  Keep in mind the lower cost of living in Texas, where those wages therefore go further.

So as Obama ponders a “Department of Jobs” during his extended Martha’s Vineyard vacation while the economy stumbles, perhaps he will experience an epiphany.  Namely, that he should do at the federal level what Texas has done at the state level – bring legal reform, reduce taxes and allow the private sector to flourish.

It’s always nice when liberals deign to give advice to conservatives on whom should be admitted to the next Tea Party rally.  Commenting on excerpted parts of Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry’s book Fed Up!, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones thinks Rick Perry is wrong to think that it’s unconstitutional for the federal government to regulate banks, consumer financial choices, the environment, guns, civil rights, a minimum wage, and create programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

At least Drum acknowledges that Perry makes certain exceptions for federal regulations on racial discrimination since that fulfills “the intent behind the passage of the Reconstruction Era amendments.”

What makes liberals like Drum gasp is the fact that Perry thinks that, as James Madison argued in Federalist 45, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined.  Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

But if a secondary source won’t cut it for Drum, here’s the text of the Tenth Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

If they cared to, Drum and other liberals would look in vain to find an enumerated grant of power to the federal government to regulate the items on the list above.  That’s why they rely on activist judges to read into the Constitution federal powers that do not exist.

The Tea Party – like Perry, Michele Bachmann, and other constitutional conservatives – know their Constitution and the meaning behind it.  If liberals like Drum are aghast, it’s only because a grassroots movement is forming to challenge nearly 80 years of unconstitutional jurisprudence.

President Obama has fallen to a new low in public approval as measured by Gallup, with only 39% approval and 54% disapproval.  Even more troubling for Obama and his supporters, no President has won reelection with ratings this low at this point in their tenure.

According to Gallup, President Truman’s approval/disapproval stood at 55%/29% at approximately this stage, President Eisenhower possessed a positive 71%/16% ratio, President Nixon’s approval outweighed his disapproval by a 49%/38% margin, President Reagan remained barely underwater with a 43%/46% ratio, President Clinton possessed a 46%/43% positive edge and President George W. Bush held a positive margin of 59%/37%.  All of these Presidents won reelection, and it should be added that President Reagan, unlike President Obama, was on a steadily upward approval trajectory that had him enjoying a 53%/37% approval surplus just three months later in November 1983.  The nation’s economy was accelerating throughout 1983 following the arrival of his tax cuts that January, whereas our current economy continues to stagnate.  Additionally, although President Kennedy was assassinated before he could face reelection, he enjoyed a 56%/29% approval edge at this point, and his Vice President Lyndon Johnson won in 1964.

In terms of Presidents who did not win reelection, President Ford actually enjoyed a 45%/37% approval balance, whereas President Carter found himself in a negative 30%/55% hole, while President George H. W. Bush still maintained his post-Gulf War approval rating of 74%/19%.

So while Obama can state that he isn’t as bad as Carter, he cannot point to a single instance in which a President with his current Gallup approval/disapproval margin won reelection.

Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry announced his candidacy for President of the United States today during a speech in South Carolina.  Though the text of the speech is worth reading in its entirety, here’s my pick for the best line:

I’ll work every day to make Washington, D.C. as inconsequential in your life as I can.

If Perry’s campaign can reduce that sentiment to a bumper sticker, he might be able to sow up the GOP nomination by Labor Day.

The Washington Examiner reports that GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is trying to retrace the steps Senator John McCain (R-AZ) took to the 2008 nomination.  Citing his moderate stances on just about everything, Huntsman and his advisors (many former McCain hands) avoiding the conservative-dominated Iowa caucuses and hoping for “a good showing” in the New Hampshire primary.  Thereafter Huntsman hopes to win the South Carolina and Florida primaries with a pure economic message.

What a riot.  McCain was the undisputed national security candidate last time around, and was able to paper over many of his moderate-to-liberal heresies with a compelling military background.  By contrast, Huntsman has been a well-connected ambassador to the Far East (China and Singapore), and has never served in uniform, let alone suffered torture.  Moreover, McCain won the New Hampshire primary by 6 percentage points over Romney.  Alternatively, Huntsman wants a “good showing”?  Hopefully, that’s more than the 1.8 percent he’s polling nationally, or else he won’t make it to South Carolina.

The truth about the Huntsman campaign is that it features a candidate in search of a constituency.  Anyone in the Republican Party who is repelled by the Tea Party and trusts Wall Street more than Main Street is already voting for Mitt Romney.  Huntsman is a slightly different version of the same formula.

If history is any guide, the GOP tends to give the presidential nomination to the next guy in line.  In 2008 it was John McCain.  In 2012, it will be Mitt Romney.  Only a big name with big money like Texas Governor Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann seems poised to spoil the party.  Refusing to campaign to an entire wing of the Republican base by skipping the Iowa caucuses isn’t at bottom a campaign strategy – it’s an acknowledgement that Jon Huntsman is the answer to a presidential question no one is asking.

Gallup is out with its new presidential polling numbers today. The results are dismal for President Obama. Only 16 states and the District of Columbia show the Commander-in-Chief with an approval rating over 50 percent.

Of course, we have to insert the normal caveats: we’re still more than a year away from the 2012 presidential election and it’s how Obama runs against his Republican opponent — not how he performs in a vacuum — that will determine his ultimate fate at the polls.

That being said, what’s most interesting about the new polls is their implications for next year’s electoral college. Crunching the numbers, RealClearPolitics’  Tom Bevan finds that the states giving Obama an approval rating of 51 % or higher have a total of 166 electoral votes between them; states at 49 % or lower have a total of 320 (270 are required to win a presidential election).

Digging deeper into the math only makes the picture more dismal for the White House. Bevan calculates that even adding states where Obama’s approval is at 49-50% (Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin, respectively) only gets him to 218 electoral votes — 52 shy of the total needed for victory.

Does this make Obama’s defeat inevitable? Not by a long shot. But it means that the president is in for a very steep climb over the next 15 months. Let the games begin.

Dig

Last week, Ashton took a look at the Tea Party’s irritation with the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Just as in 2008, the Tea Party believes (with good reason) that the NRSC is trying to put its hand on the scales during Republican primaries and shut conservative challengers to establishment incumbents out of key races throughout the nation.

This may not be the biggest stage on which the Tea Party movement refuses to be broken in 2012, however. This will be the first presidential election since the movement has congealed, and Tea Party leaders are making known that they don’t intend to squander their leverage. Per a report on the Daily Caller today:

The country’s largest Tea Party organization is warning that the future GOP presidential nominee shouldn’t automatically count on having the support of its grassroots activists.

“There was some controversy that was created when another Tea Party group came out and said the Tea Party movement would line up behind whoever is the Republican nominee,” Mark Meckler, a national coordinator for the organization, said during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast briefing with reporters Wednesday. “I think that’s presuming an awful lot.”

“Tea Partiers are very independent folks by nature,” he said in response to questions from The Daily Caller, “they make their own decisions, there’s no organization, no leader to tell them what to do.”

Two things are striking about this development. First, the fact that members of the Tea Party — which is now into its third year on the American political scene — still have to explain that they are a leaderless movement unified around a set of loosely-defined core principles is remarkable, particularly when that explanation is directed at Republicans, who should be conversant in Hayek’s concept of “spontaneous order“.

Second, the Tea Party — long predicted to be co-opted by the GOP — is still boldly staking out its independence. That means any Republican presidential candidate hoping to inherit the keys to the White House will have to satisfy the conservative Tea Party base, establishment Republicans, and a fair number of independents. If that sounds like a tough road to hoe, it is. But it comes with one great virtue — any candidate with such a broad appeal would be an electoral lock. And if he (or she) lived up to those principles once sworn in, it could create just the kind of political coalition needed to unwind the dangerous excesses of the Obama years.

Troy’s earlier point about the media creating a false story about presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (R-MN) being a pill-popping migraine sufferer is borne out by reporting from Byron York.  Citing what amounts to a doctor’s note from the resident physician in the House of Representatives (released with Bachmann’s permission), York says:

The doctor says Bachmann has had “an extensive evaluation by both my office and by a board-certified consulting neurologist.”  That evaluation, he continues, “has entailed detailed labwork and brain scans, all of which were normal.”  Monahan says Bachmann’s migraines occur “infrequently,” and that when she does have a headache, she is “able to control it well with as-needed sumatriptan and odasentron.”  Monahan says Bachmann has not needed to take the medication daily.  The two drugs, he adds, are “commonly used therapies.”

With that behind us, let’s get news that really matters, like whether Joe Biden’s botox habit is compromising his ability to advise (or possible succeed!) the president.

The New York Times has an interesting biographical gap filler on Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry’s former life as a Democratic state representative.  The theme that stands out is Perry’s uncanny ability to run for office at a time perfectly suited for his personal ambitions.

Here’s an example from when he switched parties to become a Republican running for statewide office.

Rumors that Mr. Perry would defect to the Republican Party — and run against Jim Hightower, the populist Democratic agriculture commissioner — picked up steam by late 1989. On Sept. 29, Mr. Perry made it official at a Capitol news conference. At his side were Fred Meyer, chairman of the Texas Republican Party, and Senator Phil Gramm, a former Democrat, who was aggressively courting would-be converts.

Mr. Perry’s timing, now legendary, could not have been better. He was one of only two Republicans elected to nonjudicial statewide office in 1990. Eight years later, Republicans swept every one of them.

“Perry has been a risk taker,” said Mr. Hance, the party switcher who became the chancellor of Texas Tech University. “And if you look at Perry’s timing in every race, he’s been the golden guy.”

Could 2012 be another such moment for the Texas Tea Party governor?

The Houston Chronicle (scroll to the bottom) has a helpful side-by-side chart comparing the positions of declared and presumptive GOP presidential candidates, all of whom lean in one way or another toward the Tea Party.  The line-up includes Texas Governor Rick Perry, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, and businessman Herman Cain.

Some highlights:

• AZ Immigration Law: Bachmann and Cain support it; Paul has “some reservations,” and Perry thinks it “would not be the right direction for Texas”

• Middle East Foreign Policy: Bachmann and Perry support Israel; Paul wants troop withdrawals from the Middle East; Cain is unequivocal: “You mess with Israel, you’re messing with the U.S.A.”

• Economy: Bachmann, Perry and Cain all support tax cuts; Paul wants to go even farther: abolish the Federal Reserve and reestablish the gold standard

Here’s hoping for a substantive debate featuring all these candidates and their ideas.  America needs it.

As CFIF reported earlier this month, presidential candidate Jon Huntsman (R-UT) is hiring staff that previously worked for Senator John McCain (R-AZ) in the latter’s bids for the White House.  Byron York details how many conservatives are interpreting Huntsman’s personnel hires as accurate indications of how he thinks about policy.  (Hint: Not conservative.)

Huntsman’s top campaign aide is John Weaver, who was John McCain’s top campaign aide in 2000 and in the early stages of the 2008 campaign — campaigns that often raised the ire of the GOP base. (Weaver has also worked for some Democrats.) Other McCain veterans have signed on with Huntsman, as well. Still others, like Mark McKinnon — the aide who worked for McCain in the 2008 primaries but left because he did not want to campaign against Barack Obama — also favor Huntsman. (McKinnon is a co-founder of the “No Labels” movement, much derided by conservatives.)

When Huntsman took second place in the Republican Leadership Conference straw poll in New Orleans recently, Politico reported that he benefited from the vote wrangling of former Louisiana Rep. Joseph Cao, whom conservatives well remember as the only Republican to vote for Obamacare in the House. There’s another mark against Huntsman. And that’s before conservatives consider the fact that Huntsman spent the past two years working for the Obama administration.

The conservative base pays close attention to the people who surround a candidate. In the eyes of some, personnel can trump policy. “At both the Republican Leadership Council and at Right Online (another conservative gathering), the majority of conservative activists I spoke to said they knew nothing of Huntsman’s positions,” says conservative activist Erick Erickson, “but his campaign team had the makings of the second coming of John McCain.”

Huntsman is McCain without the war record to paper over his liberal positions on illegal immigration, cap-and-tax, and healthcare reform.  Thus, he’s a left-of-center Republican hiring left-of-center staff.  If personnel drives policy, beware of a President Huntsman.

Add Kirsten Powers to the list of political professionals who have a deeper appreciation of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) after meeting the GOP presidential candidate in person.  According to Powers, Bachmann is a much more substantive person than her critics imagine.

In person, Bachmann seems eerily disconnected from the TV caricature. She is bright, quick, charming, and thoughtful. She will civilly and gamely debate any issue.

One might expect those qualities in a person who made a living as a tax attorney, raised more than a score of children (5 of her own, 23 through foster care), snagged Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund as a co-author, and convinced several high profile campaign operatives to sign on.

As her performance at the CNN debate showed, Bachmann is a serious campaigner willing to put in the work to win.  If she continues to get out her message in person to voters in Iowa and other early voting states, she’ll quickly move past Tim Pawlenty and make this a two-horse race with Mitt Romney.

A few weeks ago, as CFIF’s own Ashton Ellis was busy delineating the parade of horribles that is former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman’s record, he noted that one of the more chilling (and insightful) stories involving Huntsman in recent months was the quasi-endorsement offered to him by Jimmy Carter.

Well, Huntsman (who is an official GOP presidential candidate as of this morning) keeps bringing the hits. The latest comes from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. As CNN’s Political Ticker reports:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ventured into the 2012 presidential waiting game Tuesday, offering up his pick for the Republican presidential nomination.

“If I had a choice, I would favor Huntsman over Romney,” Reid told reporters after a meeting on Capitol Hill. “But I don’t have a choice in that race.”

Poor Harry. He’s been through a lot because of the declining influence of Democrats in Congress over the last year. And now he won’t even get one red cent for creating a pitch-perfect campaign ad for Mitt Romney.

As for Huntsman, he’s now earned the approval of President Obama, former President Carter, and Harry Reid. He’s one endorsement in The Nation away from being the next Democratic presidential nominee.

Politico’s Ben Smith reports that Jeffrey Bell of American Principles in Action is engaged in a 19-stop bus tour of Iowa to drum up support for returning U.S. monetary policy to the gold standard.  According to Bell, focus groups of Tea Party activists in the Midwest were “astonishing” in their support for the issue.

Bell’s goal is to get the Republican presidential field to incorporate the gold standard into their platforms.  Politico’s Smith explains the issue’s allure:

Arguments over the gold standard date back more than a century, and their ideological charge is linked in part to the fact that making dollars convertible to gold would in theory limit the government’s capacity to act in the economy.

For that reason alone, putting a spotlight on the gold standard would be a good investment of time for American voters.

Conservatives who’ve spent much time in Washington often grow weary of the professional class at the State Department. Though the Foreign Service’s job is to represent the United States abroad, its members often end up doing precisely the opposite. They too often practice the mantra of “blame America first” and view the U.S. as culturally inferior to wherever they’re posted.

That’s galling enough when it comes from workaday public servants, but even worse when it comes from our Ambassador Corps. Now one of those international diplomats is back stateside and about to launch a presidential campaign. But someone needs to tell Jon Huntsman (our recently-returned Ambassador to China) to keep his Embassyitis overseas. This is the lede the Washington Post managed to bury this weekend, placing it near the bottom of a lengthy profile:

On the campaign trail, Huntsman often dwells on how America is viewed from abroad. “From 10,000 miles away, folks, let me just tell you that we lack humanity, we lack civility, we lack basic respect for which this country should be known,” Huntsman told one crowd.

There hasn’t been a campaign in recent history where the notion of American Exceptionalism has been more important on the right. Into that fray rides Jon Huntsman, a man who tells us that the butchers of Tiananmen Square think us insufficiently humane. We’ve got a great consolation prize waiting for you, Jon.

Well, that didn’t take long.  On the day after Rick Perry for President speculation gained new momentum with two of his longtime political aides bolting Newt Gingrich’s campaign, the liberal media is attacking the Texas Republican governor for coordinating a “day of prayer and fasting” for national healing in Houston on August 6.

Putting aside the arguments for and against Perry’s event, the more the media explains Perry’s commitment to an evangelical Christian worldview, the more social conservative primary voters in Iowa are sure to perk up.  Moreover, Perry is already considered the first-in-the-nation-governor to pick up the Tea Party mantle of limited government, so perhaps those flinty New Englanders in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation-primary might take a look at a guy who takes the 10th Amendment seriously.

But what about foreign policy?  Let’s just say that as a former Air Force fighter pilot from Texas, Perry should have no trouble articulating something pleasing to pro-military Republican voters.

As with Sarah Palin, the mainstream media doesn’t seem to realize that highlighting Perry’s conservatism actually makes him more attractive to Republican voters.  So go ahead, journos!  Keep knocking Perry for being a social, fiscal, and national security conservative.  It only helps grow the brand.

In recent weeks, CFIF’s own Ashton Ellis has been a one-man truth machine, making sure that conservatives are aware of the moderate-to-liberal record of former Utah Governor — and soon-to-be presidential candidate — Jon Huntsman. Well, if the former chief executive of the Beehive State has his way, the day may soon come when Ashton Ellis doesn’t have Jon Huntsman to kick around any more. The reason: Huntsman now appears to be embracing the same political strategy that doomed Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential bid.

Huntsman has already taken a pass on contesting Iowa, where he’s unlikely to play well with social conservatives (as of today, it appears that Mitt Romney may be making the same calculation). That means that the New Hampshire primary (where undeclared voters more sympathetic to his views) will be of critical importance to his campaign.

This is much the same position that Giuliani found himself in during the 2008 race. But Hizzoner’s aversion to retail politics led him to run a drive-by campaign in New Hampshire and focus on larger states where the race would primarily be run in the media. We all know how that turned out.

Now comes news that Huntsman can’t be bothered with some of the vagaries of Granite State politics either. From Politico:

Jon Huntsman’s decision to skip the first New Hampshire presidential debate on Monday has Republicans in the state confused — and predicting that he’ll suffer politically for it.

“As a guy who has said publicly he’s going to skip Iowa, it seems like he’d want to be here for that debate,” said Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire GOP chairman who met Huntsman at one of his early events in Durham. “It’s the first real debate and for a guy who seems to be all-in in New Hampshire.”

Cullen was one of a half-dozen local GOP players raising concerns about Huntsman’s absence from a debate that will feature both Tim Pawlenty and, for the first time, Mitt Romney.

“I think skipping the first debate is very serious,” said Mike Dennehy, a longtime New Hampshire consultant who helped lead John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008. “I think it shows either you’re afraid to join the others on stage for the first time or you’re unwilling to — both of which don’t give voters a lot of confidence in a candidate.”

What is it about this election cycle that produces such lethargic work ethics?

As Ashton noted earlier, Newt Gingrich is having one of the worst days of an already bad campaign. As of this evening, it’s now looking increasingly clear that the injury of his staff’s departure is going to be augmented by the insult of most of them lining up behind Texas Governor Rick Perry. It was just a rumor when Ashton posted earlier, but now it’s looking more like a sure thing. Over at the Daily Caller, Matt Lewis reports:

Two separate and reliable sources in Texas tell me serious preparations are being made for Governor Rick Perry, 61, to seek the Republican nomination for president.

Dave Carney and Rob Johnson — the former top Perry aides who on Thursday left Newt Gingrich’s floundering campaign — are said to be heading to Texas soon to join in on preparations for the run. I am told this is now “ninety percent likely to occur.” Additionally, Perry allies have begun holding meetings in the state and have been instructed to quietly reach out to contacts in early primary states.

All of this drama six months before the first votes are cast. Get ready for a long and exciting primary season.

Wow.  With the news that Newt Gingrich’s entire senior campaign staff resigned en masse this morning, some are speculating that the fallout – and newly freed staff – will benefit the rumored Rick Perry for President campaign.

Prognostications about the future aside, Gingrich’s present is spectacularly unclear.  Where does he go from here?  So far, the most memorable moments from Newt’s 2012 odyssey are calling a sensible Medicare reform “right wing social engineering,” an epic press release, a half-a-million-dollar credit line at Tiffany’s, and now this.  Amazing.

One thing’s for sure: Newt needs to find some way to bounce back, if only for his personal future as a pundit, speaker, and idea factory.  If this mass resignation is the final entry of his presidential campaign, it will be awhile before anyone wants to pony up big bucks to get advice from a guy who couldn’t manage a single week of sustained success.