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Posts Tagged ‘Republican’
January 6th, 2014 at 3:53 pm
GOP’s ACA Alternative is Here

I’ll add an Amen to what our friend Quin Hillyer preaches at National Review Online today.

Quin writes convincingly about the opportunity Republicans have to take control of Congress by uniting behind the Obamacare alternative proposed by the House Republican Study Committee (RSC).

The short, snappy piece is worth reading in its entirety, but here I want to draw attention to two points I’m glad Quin made. First, there must be an agreement among the DC GOP leadership to adopt the RSC’s framework for reform. Doing so would commit the party to a conservative version of reform that, as Quin demonstrates, will be an easy sell during the campaign season.

Second, that this strategic decision must be joined to an equally unified agreement to abandon any version of comprehensive immigration reform this year. Just as Obamacare is an internally divisive issue among Democrats, so too is immigration reform among Republicans. In a year where Obamacare is already the dominant issue, there is no reason for Republicans to voluntarily drive a wedge between their members on immigration by reviving an issue that’s currently dead. Instead, GOP leaders should try to divide and conquer the Democrats with votes on Obamacare alternatives they can’t afford to oppose.

Conservatives at the RSC have put forward a viable plan. It’s up to GOP leaders to decide whether they want to spend 2014 defeating Democrats, or fighting their own members.

June 28th, 2013 at 2:04 pm
Passed in Senate, Gang’s Immigration Reform Will Die in the House

After the bipartisan back-slapping subsides, the Senators who passed the Gang of Eight’s immigration reform bill yesterday know one thing for sure – the House Republicans will ignore it.

In place of the ‘comprehensive’ scheme favored by the Senate, the House GOP is already making progress in passing piecemeal legislation that tackles specific immigration issues.

And, unlike the backroom deals used by the Senate Gang and its supporters, the House process is using an open and transparent committee process, reports National Review.

Last week, [House Immigration Committee Chairman Bob] Goodlatte approved two bills out of committee, an interior enforcement bill and an agricultural guest-worker program. This week, he is moving one bill to expand E-Verify nationwide and to reform the high-skill-visa system.

Breaking up a big issue like immigration reform into its constituent parts is the clearest and best way to solve problems. Focusing on specific policies and programs allows Members of Congress – and, just as importantly, the American public – to get their head around the main goal and the means to achieve it.

Kudos to the House GOP for treating the American people, and immigration reform, with the attention and respect they deserve.

June 6th, 2013 at 1:44 pm
House GOP’s Move after Holder Misses Deadline

Readers know we’ve taken an interest in Eric Holder’s, at best, misleading testimony to Congress about his role in the James Rosen search warrant because, most likely, it’s the clearest evidence yet that the Attorney General should be removed from office.

But to find out whether Holder perjured himself, Congress needs to know all the facts. That means getting Holder to clarify his conflicting statements about whether he intended to prosecute Rosen as a criminal, or just allege the accusation as a smokescreen to get unprecedented – and unlawful – access to the Fox News reporter’s personal communications.

Holder made his misleading statement under oath on May 15. The Judiciary Committee gave him until the close of business yesterday (June 5) to clarify. With that deadline now passed, it’s up to House Republicans to make the next move. For the sake of the truth, it better be good.

April 12th, 2013 at 1:28 pm
ObamaCare Crack-up Looms as Next GOP Messaging Disaster

Don’t look now, but with ObamaCare failing to deliver on its promises before it even takes effect, Democrats are already starting to lay the blame on the one party least responsible for this policy monstrosity: Republicans.

Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services and the point person for ObamaCare’s implementation, told a Harvard School of Public Health audience that instead of saying, “let’s get on board, let’s make this work,” Republican opponents coerced her into fighting “state-by-state political battles.” Sebelius complained, “The politics has been relentless,” according to Investor’s Business Daily.

This from the woman whose refusal to honor the conscience rights of religious employers elevates the right to “free” contraception over the First Amendment.

But just because Sebelius’ charge that ObamaCare’s completely foreseen failure is actually Republicans’ fault is laughable to anyone who knows the facts, don’t assume that the GOP communications apparatus can be counted on to frame those facts effectively.

After all, this is the same universe of consultants and staff that got outmaneuvered last election season on liberal talking points like the GOP’s “War on Women,” and Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment.

If the Left wants to present Sandra Fluke and “The Life of Julia” as exemplars of modern feminism, why can’t the Right counter with the common sense observation that what liberals really want is a government sugar-daddy who pays for sex and then subsidizes any consequences thereafter?

And rather than deny that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, why don’t Republicans instead hit back with the explosive growth of food stamps and the unprecedented extension of unemployment benefits in the Age of Obama?  Throw in the Obama Phone mentality, and people will start to understand that there are real costs to the liberal vision of welfare.

All this to say I hope Republicans have learned their lesson about how to contest Democratic smear campaigns.  It would be a shame if when ObamaCare comes off the rails next year the GOP fails to capitalize electorally because no one clearly makes the case that only liberals are to blame for the mess they created.

November 28th, 2012 at 11:41 am
Party Polarization on Display in U.S. House

Tony Lee over at Breitbart.com highlights some interesting divergences between the Republican and Democratic caucuses in the U.S. House of Representatives:

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) on Wednesday said to “take a good look when the House convenes after this next Congress is sworn in” to see that the Republican party has gotten “white and more male,” while Democrats are “majority minority and female.”

But a University of Minnesota study found that when the 113th Congress convenes, a whopping 29.4% (59 of 201) of Democrats in the House will hail from California (38 members) and New  York (21 members).

As any number of post-election analyses has shown, liberals have been very successful at defining politics in terms of gender and ethnic identities.  What is striking about the Minnesota study is how much those identities – and the ideology of government activism that supports them – are anchored in America’s two most populous coastal states.

Remember this reality the next time you hear an MSNBC talking head decry the Southern hegemony in the GOP.  As always, the parties are defined by powerbases that offer a glimpse into what each group’s policy goals might look like if the candidates promoting them are successful at the ballot box.

The Democratic Party is becoming increasingly defined by high-tax, high-spending states like California and New York.  Like European socialism, that model isn’t sustainable.  It remains to be seen if a Southern-oriented conservative can articulate not only the reasons to reject a statist future, but also the rational benefits of limited government.

September 29th, 2012 at 6:11 pm
Obama’s Clinton Conundrum

Politico on why the Obama campaign is using former President Bill Clinton so often:

As the campaign acknowledges, Clinton brings credibility to the connection between an Obama presidency and a strong economy, reinforcing the idea that there’s a straight line between Obama’s proposals and Clinton’s legacy of budget surpluses and middle class prosperity.

It’s only a credible connection if you don’t consider the wildly differing contexts.

As Tim pointed out earlier this month, “the so-called “Clinton surpluses” didn’t arrive until 1998, four years after Newt Gingrich and the Republicans captured Congress for the first time in four decades, and six years after Clinton was elected.  Given the fact that Congress controls the budget under our Constitution, it is therefore disingenuous for Clinton and his apologists to claim sole credit.”

Thus, if in 2012 the Obama camp really wants to make the case that a national economic recovery is just around the corner, it should have prayed for a complete conservative takeover of Congress in 2010.  Had he been faced with an entire branch of government – not just the House – passing real budgets, chances are the Obama White House would have had a Clintonesque opportunity to make a deal.

Instead, Obama has had no incentive to move to the middle for the sake of compromise because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has been willing to abdicate his chamber’s constitutional responsibility to pass a new budget for the last three years of Obama’s term of office.  And so the President dithers while the economy sputters.

Call it the Clinton Conundrum.  Both Clinton and Obama are doctrinaire liberals whose policy impulses created pushes to nationalize health care.  Both prefer to raise taxes and spend money.  But Clinton, unlike Obama, was saved from oblivion when Republicans took over both houses of Congress in 1994 and (implicitly and unintentionally) made him an offer he didn’t refuse: either adopt our reform agenda or face defeat in reelection.  Clinton accepted and has benefited ever since.  Obama’s choice was between Senate Democrat dithering and House Republican reform.  He sided with his party and hasn’t governed since.

If Barack Obama wants Bill Clinton’s success, he’ll have to adopt Bill Clinton’s policies.  In large part, that means adopting conservative budget reforms so that he can claim credit for a rebounding economy.

September 14th, 2012 at 12:26 pm
‘Party of Women’ May Have No Female Governors in 2013

Bloomberg shows that for all the Democrats’ talk about a Republican war on women, it’s the self-proclaimed ‘party of women’ that must explain how unless its gubernatorial candidate in New Hampshire wins in November, Democrats will have no female governor anywhere in the United States.

Meanwhile, Republicans have New Mexico’s Susana Martinez, Arizona’s Jan Brewer, Oklahoma’s Mary Fallin, and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley.

Here’s another example of conservative reality beating liberal rhetoric.

September 13th, 2012 at 8:08 pm
Mitch McConnell Hires Tea Party Strategist

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell made a very public peace with Rand Paul and Kentucky’s Tea Party movement by hiring Jesse Benton to head his reelection campaign in 2014.

Previously, Benton steered Rand Paul into Kentucky’s other U.S. Senate seat by defeating an establishment candidate handpicked by McConnell.  This cycle Benton ran Ron Paul’s presidential campaign.

With $6 million already in the bank for an election two years away, McConnell’s hiring of Benton likely shuts the door to the kind of Tea Party conservative primary challenge faced by other long-serving Republicans.

May 3rd, 2012 at 8:16 pm
More Paul than Romney Delegates at GOP Convention?

On Monday, I shared a story about how Ron Paul’s fervent supporters are outmaneuvering the Romney campaign in the state-by-state process of selecting delegates to the GOP’s nominating convention in Tampa, FL.

Here’s more evidence from the Washington Times:

Exploiting party rules, loyalists for the libertarian congressman from Texas in recent days have engineered post-primary organizing coups in states such as Louisiana and Alaska, confirming what party regulars say would be an effort to grab an outsized role in the convention and the party’s platform deliberations.

In Massachusetts, the state where Mr. Romney served as governor, Paul loyalists over the weekend helped block more than half of Mr. Romney’s preferred nominees from being named delegates at state party caucuses — even though Mr. Romney won his home state’s primary with 72 percent of the vote.

And from the Las Vegas Sun:

In a letter delivered Wednesday to GOP Chairman Michael McDonald, the RNC’s chief counsel said if Ron Paul delegates are allowed to take too many slots for the national convention, Nevada’s entire contingent may not be seated in Tampa.

John R. Phillippe Jr. said that while his letter is not binding, “I believe it is highly likely that any committee with jurisdiction over the matter would find improper any change to the election, selection, allocation, or binding of delegates, thus jeopardizing the seating of Nevada’s entire delegation to the National Convention.”

Clearly, the RNC fears that mischief at the Sparks convention this weekend could result in Ron Paul delegates taking Mitt Romney slots and then not abiding by GOP rules to vote for the presumptive nominee on the first ballot in Tampa. So they are trying to force McDonald to ensure that actual Romney delegates fill 20 of the 28 national convention slots, thus removing any mystery of who they will vote for.

H/T: Teagan Goddard’s Political Wire

February 28th, 2012 at 12:11 pm
Michigan’s Tricky Delegate Math

Politico notes that “The rules pit the real race for Michigan at the district, not statewide level.”  Here’s what that means:

Michigan awards its 30 delegates based on the new congressional district lines drawn in 2012 redistricting, with two delegates given to the candidate who wins each of 14 districts. Two additional delegates are allocated based on the statewide popular vote.

Thus, the winner of the state’s popular vote may not be the same candidate who wins a majority of the state’s delegates.

The takeaway is to be wary of statewide exit polls that declare a “winner” since what really matters in terms of GOP convention delegates is who won a majority of new congressional districts.

December 26th, 2011 at 8:06 pm
Fascinating Backgrounder on Mitt Romney

Next Tuesday Iowans will begin the process of nominating a Republican challenger to President Barack Obama.  Since just about everyone thinks Mitt Romney will be that man or at least the runner-up, it’s worth reading a revealing New York Times article describing how Romney’s time as a Harvard law and business student made him into a pragmatic problem solver.

If you’re pressed for time (and with the holiday season here, I hope you are), Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin provides a good summary on what the NYT report tells about Romney’s current place in the Republican field:

What his classmates saw at Harvard are the same qualities that both attract and repel voters today. His economic expertise and pragmatism make him the most electable Republican in 2012, while his lack of ideology makes many conservatives long for anyone else to lead their party. Had a more credible conservative appeared to challenge him, Romney wouldn’t have had a chance. But in the absence of such a paragon, Republicans will probably have to make their peace with the man who seems to be very much the same person who excelled at Harvard four decades ago.

December 23rd, 2011 at 2:20 pm
The Moral Case Against Obama’s Policies

Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal draws attention to the central  failure of Republicans losing ground against a Barack Obama quietly gaining in popularity:

One mistake the party is making is fighting this race like the 2010 midterms. A certain laziness has settled in, based on the notion that the GOP can make 2012 another referendum on the president’s mismanagement. But while Obama-bashing may again fire up the conservative base, it delivers nothing to those crucial independent and middle-of-the-road voters who are anxious, confused and looking for someone to convince them they have a better plan.

Strassel goes on to explain how focus groups in battleground states are showing a consistent pattern in swing voters.  They want Republicans to make a moral case against the President and his policies.  They assume both parties will overspend.  What they want is a coherent explanation of why Obama’s policies are wrong for the country and wrong for them.  In short, what Americans want are concrete arguments explaining why Obama’s liberalism is so bad for the country, followed by an alternative vision that flows in the mainstream of American political thought and experience.

More Strassel:

Consider that ObamaCare was a concern of the focus group, though it had notably receded. This is in part because, while the GOP often complains about the law and its individual mandate, it has largely stopped explaining to voters what else is in it, or how other upcoming provisions will hurt consumers, or exactly how they grow government.

Presidential aspirants and congressional Republicans, take note: To make a moral argument against the president, you also have to make one for yourselves. To the extent the GOP is lobbing the usual Obama complaints or going to the mat over who cares more about a piddling payroll tax holiday, it is wasting time.

In a nutshell, the GOP’s messaging failure explains Paul Ryan’s success.  Almost alone among major Republican leaders, Ryan is defining the problems we face with confidence-building detail, offering thoughtful, consensus-based solutions, and justifying them in light of our history and tradition.  This is the work of a statesman.  The sooner Republicans take the hint and follow suit, the sooner America will remember the moral case for prosperity.

December 13th, 2011 at 7:07 pm
Focus Group: Gingrich is “Favorite Uncle,” Romney “Black Sheep”

From an excellent column by Jed Babbin at American Spectator:

Another reason Gingrich isn’t fading is Mitt Romney. Let’s face it: Mitt Romney is the Republican version of Al Gore. Even people who are predisposed to liking him can’t seem to get there. Romney is supposedly more electable than Gingrich, at least according to the Inside the Beltway crowd and the major media.

Really? Liberal pollster Peter Hart’s focus group, asked to pick a family relationship to Romney, labeled him “black sheep,” “fun neighbor,” “cousin,” “second cousin,” “dad that was never home.” The same group labeled Gingrich “grandfather,” “father,” “my favorite uncle,” and “uncle who keeps bringing home different wives.” Is grandpa less electable than the dad who was never home?

Labeling Romney a black sheep and the GOP version of Al Gore really crystallizes his failure to excite Republican primary voters, doesn’t it?  The most devastating part of these analogies is that they manage to be accurate without being overly negative or hurtful (unless you factor in political pain).

December 7th, 2011 at 6:41 pm
House Passes REINS Act, Senate Likely to Dither

Huzzah to the 241 members of the House of Representatives who, in a thinly bipartisan vote today (4 Democrats voted in favor), passed H.R. 10, better known as the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act.  As the acronym indicates, the bill wants to limit President Barack Obama’s ability to impose job-killing regulations on the economy.

How does the REINS Act purport to do its job?  If passed by the Senate and signed by the President then every new federal agency regulation inflicting at least $100 million in economic costs would be subject to an up-or-down vote by both houses of Congress.  ($100 million is the threshold for “major” regulations these days.)  When those bills fails – which they almost certainly will unless they are inextricably intertwined with a national security issue – the bureaucrats who dream up these obstacles to economic growth will have to go back to the drawing board and divine a less expensive way to grow the federal government.

Characteristically, the Democrats running the Senate and the one occupying the White House have promised to do nothing to help pass this bill.  (The President even threatened to veto it should enough Senate Dems have the temerity to save their states’ small business owners from the paperwork onslaught thanks to 219 new regulations poised to add thousands of dollars per worker in compliance costs.)

Today, fiscal conservatives can cheer passage of a real “job creation” bill thanks to the conservative plurality in the House of Representatives.  Next year, it will critically important to elect more of these to the Senate – and hopefully the presidency – so that America can get back to work.

November 23rd, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Update: Huckabee NOT Endorsing Romney (But Thune Is)

Apparently, the media – and I – misread Mike Huckabee’s remarks to South Carolina Tea Party members as an endorsement of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  Here’s a fuller quote of Huckabee’s answer to whether conservatives should stay home on Election Day 2012 if Romney is the Republican nominee:

“It would be real tragic if they stayed out. Mitt Romney may not be their first choice, but Mitt Romney every day of the week and twice on Sunday is going to be a much more effective president for issues that they care about than Barack Obama.”

In other news, one-time 2012 aspirant Senator John Thune (R-SD) did endorse Romney today in Iowa.  Even without Huckabee’s support, Romney is building up Beltway conservative bona fides with Thune and freshman Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) coming on board.

November 21st, 2011 at 8:40 pm
GOP Voters Smarter than Kathleen Parker

Washington Post columnist and failed CNN host Kathleen Parker caused a stir this weekend with a piece claiming that the alleged ‘know-nothingness’ of Sarah Palin is infecting Republican primary voters.  The evidence, as Byron York of the Washington Examiner points out, points the opposite way.

So far, there have been three Republican candidates who rose and fell quickly in the polls: Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Cain.  Each rose because voters liked some combination of his or her message, experience, and personal appeal.  But each fell mostly for one reason: Republican voters became concerned about whether they knew enough to be president.

Because the GOP base is conservative, and because the candidates each presented a strong conservative message, it’s hardly a surprise that each received a friendly response early in the game.  But once each candidate’s performance in debates or on the stump raised questions about whether he or she had a base of knowledge broad and deep enough to serve as president, Republican supporters began to peel away.  Bachmann now ranks sixth in the RealClearPolitics poll standings, while Perry is fourth.

The candidate who has consistently stayed near the top of Republican polls is Mitt Romney.  There are no questions about whether he knows enough to be president.   The candidate who is rising at the moment, as Parker points out, is Newt Gingrich, about whom the same is true.  And the candidate who has stayed around the middle tier of the race is Ron Paul, who, for whatever problems exist in some of his policy positions, has not faced questions about his knowledge of the issues.  At the bottom tier of the race, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman have also not faced such questions.

Somehow Parker styles all of this — informed candidates rising, uninformed candidates falling — as a “tide of know-nothingness” engulfing the Republican party.  If that were really the case, wouldn’t it be the other way around?

As J. Robert Smith of the American Thinker reasons, Parker’s position on Palin and the GOP is less about sound analysis, and a heckuva lot to do with her tack to the left as she’s ascended the media ladder from National Review to the Washington Post.  Parker might want to stop by the offices of George Will and Charles Krauthammer to hear how her fellow Post columnists kept their principles and their audience.  After all, conservatives don’t need another David Frum telling them how out-of-touch they are.

October 14th, 2011 at 2:44 pm
Perry Getting Hit from the Right

The hits just keep on coming at Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry.  The governor of Texas is in increasingly hot water as he tries to parry away charges that he’s soft on illegal immigration and insider tax breaks for friendly corporations.

In Texas, Tea Party activists are demanding that Perry sign an executive order or call a special session of the state legislature to pass an Arizona-style law authorizing state police to check a person’s immigration status.  On the business front, Perry’s use of a governor-controlled “emerging technology fund” is drawing criticism for producing more misses than hits for taxpayers told that tax holidays for some would create jobs for many others.

Perry can’t run away from his record.  He can, however, enhance it with better defenses of it.

We’ll see if he’s up to the challenge.

September 9th, 2011 at 3:13 pm
New York Times Flatters Palin

New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas did today what precious few liberal commentators would: give Sarah Palin a fair hearing.  “Confessing” a knee-jerk reaction to Palin that writes-off the former Alaska governor before she speaks, Giridharadas nonetheless noted Palin’s striking analysis of the current political scene from a recent speech in Iowa:

She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).

This is the kind of anti-establishment populism that Palin articulated to victory against incumbent Republicans in Alaska (first, fellow members of the state’s Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, then the sitting governor).  Indeed, one of the main reasons John “Maverick” McCain chose Palin as his vice presidential running mate was because of her willingness to buck the system in favor of her principles.

As just what might those principles be as president?  Giridharadas says:

Ms. Palin may be hinting at a new political alignment that would pit a vigorous localism against a kind of national-global institutionalism.

On one side would be those Americans who believe in the power of vast, well-developed institutions like Goldman Sachs, the Teamsters Union, General Electric, Google and the U.S. Department of Education to make the world better. On the other side would be people who believe that power, whether public or private, becomes corrupt and unresponsive the more remote and more anonymous it becomes; they would press to live in self-contained, self-governing enclaves that bear the burden of their own prosperity.

No one knows yet whether Ms. Palin will actually run for president. But she did just get more interesting.

June 30th, 2011 at 1:45 pm
Huntsman Hiring More McCain Staff

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.

February 11th, 2011 at 2:21 pm
GOP 2012 Hopefuls Shouldn’t Commit a False Start By Announcing Too Early

Apologies for the post-Super Bowl football metaphor, but Jay Cost’s newest commentary made me do it.  Cost argues that “The Fred Thompson Experience” proved that the right strategy for announcing a presidential candidacy is to wait until voters actually start tuning in to candidates.  That doesn’t happen 21 months before the election.  By letting his rivals expend time and money placating the media’s interest for months, Fred Thompson easily catapulted to the front of the line for one simple reason: he was new to the field.  (His failure to capitalize was another matter.)

For just about every serious GOP contender speaking at CPAC this weekend the temptation will be to ride the media wave into an early announced run for president.  After reading Cost’s analysis, perhaps they should wait until the House GOP and President Barack Obama have sparred this year to see which issues are the most relevant when voters start caring.