Freedom Line Blog

It’s funny to whom the media chooses to give a pass in political coverage.  Conservative Senator John Thune (R-SD) has some in the Beltway crowd buzzing about an imminent presidential run, but the rationales given thus far should make thoughtful voters wary of jumping on the Thune 2012 bandwagon just yet.  From Time:

For some Republicans, Thune is the answer to their anxieties: the current crop of GOP contenders is dangerously weak, party leaders privately grumble. (Mitt Romney? Been there. Sarah Palin? Too divisive. Tim Pawlenty? Yawn.) His fans say Thune, 50, offers voters a fresh face, a tall and square-jawed profile plus a solid set of conservative credentials. He’s been a GOP hero ever since he unseated then Senate majority leader Tom Daschle in 2004. His home state’s proximity to all-important Iowa doesn’t hurt either. And he has at least one prominent cheerleader in the current Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell. “I’m a big John Thune fan,” McConnell said on Jan. 25. “I think he should [run].”

According to this description of Thune’s assets, the gentleman from South Dakota brings height, geography, and conservative positions to the presidency, but little else.  If the Republican establishment is looking for their party’s equivalent of Barack Obama (lanky, genial, and bereft of significant policy success), then Thune may be their man.  Should Thune run, however, Republican primary voters should insist on specifics from him as a guard against electing the Republican version of Barack Obama (inexperienced, politically tone deaf, and poor legislative skills).

Being a “fresh face” in politics means one doesn’t have the scars that come with surviving important political battles.  America is waging a war for her soul; now isn’t the time to elect someone else president because he’s too new to appreciate the old.

The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol writes a terrific defense of market forces in selecting the next Republican presidential nominee.

Here are two choice paragraphs:

This vision should be easy for conservatives to embrace. Believers in the free market understand the virtues of competition, of low barriers to entry, and of lots of opportunities for (so to speak) price discovery. We know the superiority of spontaneous order to central planning. But too many GOP bigwigs in Washington who claim to have read Hayek have succumbed to the fatal conceit. They’re meeting nonstop trying to determine for us all now, a year before the first primary—with limited information as to relevant candidate skills and almost no knowledge of next year’s political environment—who the best presidential candidate would be.

Democratic capitalists admire Schumpeter for explaining the virtues of creative destruction. But too many donors to the party of democratic capitalism are huddling in New York this winter figuring out if there isn’t some way to short-circuit this kind of healthy—if messy, to be sure—competition among entrepreneurial candidates testing their skills and their messages. Wealthy individuals who made their fortunes by defying the odds are trying to figure out who’s the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination so they can cluster behind him. Businessmen who swear by the virtues of competition decry the fact that there will be lots of competition for the GOP nomination. Shouldn’t they instead welcome the competition, even encourage it by putting a little venture capital behind several nominees to see how they do? Markets work, and political markets work too. At least, they’re better than the alternative.

Read all of Kristol’s argument for robust political competition here as an antidote for the establishment and media’s tendency to call results much too early.

Surprisingly, former Governor Mike Huckabee (R-AR) comfortably leads all other likely Republican contenders for the party’s 2012 presidential nomination.  Though the lead is of dubious predictive value, the Other Man From Hope, Arkansas continues to be a genuine political force attractive to millions of Americans.  He did, after all, win the 2008 Iowa caucuses and come within a hair’s breath of winning Missouri’s primary.  Had he won the latter, the nomination fight would have boiled down to him and Senator John McCain (R-AZ), with favorable odds for an eventual Huckabee win.

So far, Huckabee says he won’t make a final decision on running until this summer.  The reason being his distaste for an 18-month campaign; a distaste shared by many voters.  Though Huckabee ran afoul of some fiscal conservative groups for some infrastructure spending increases he implemented as governor, he rightly pointed out that all of them were either mandated by federal judicial rulings, or popularly approved by Arkansas voters.

From all accounts Huckabee is probably the most normal person likely to run for president this cycle.  That alone may explain his widespread appeal.  Time will tell if it is enough to get him the nomination this time.

H/T: Political Wire

Governor Mitch Daniels (R-IN) delivered his State of the State Address on Tuesday night to a joint session of the state legislature.  Among several terrific proposals to make government leaner and more efficient, Daniels suggested the following fiscal policy:

And, to hasten the return of an even stronger fiscal position, I again ask you to vote for lasting spending discipline by enacting an automatic taxpayer refund. When the day comes again when state reserves exceed 10 percent of annual needs, it will be time to stop collecting taxes and leave them with the people they belong to. Remember what the Hoosier philosopher said: “It’s tainted money. ‘Taint yours, and ‘taint mine.” Beyond some point, it is far better to leave dollars in the pockets of those who earned them than to let them burn a hole, as they always do, in the pockets of government.

Republicans in Washington, D.C. and around the country should be listening to the Hoosier State governor who just might be the right man for the presidency in 2012.  Check out the entirety of Daniels’ speech here.

Judging by this announcement list of top staffers, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) thinks highly of people who worked on former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s (R-MA) failed 2008 presidential campaign.  Of eight top staff positions, Rubio gave three to former Romney for President people.

With Romney lining up support for a 2012 presidential run via PAC donations and outsourcing staff to rising Republicans, don’t be surprised if Rubio endorses Romney for the White House.  If it comes early enough, it just might be the thing that cinches a Romney-Rubio ticket.

Teagan Goddard of Political Wire repeated a rumor going around about former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-NY) getting some of his political hands together for another run at the White House.  Presumably, those are the same people that talked their boss into a suicidal primary strategy: skip Iowa, abandon New Hampshire, and bypass South Carolina for an all-or-nothing shot in Florida.

Of course, by the time the Florida primary rolled around, the GOP nomination was a two-horse race between John McCain (R-AZ) and Mitt Romney (R-MA).  (Governor Charlie Crist’s late support of McCain sealed the deal for the Maverick’s Sunshine State win.)  In the process, Giuliani spent a ton of money effectively not contesting the nomination until it was too late.

And now he wants to do it all again.  I’m sure his “brain trust” won’t mind dusting off the 2008 playbook while cashing 2012 checks.

The GOP rank and file may be in love with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, but there’s one issue on which the Trenton Thunder is out of the Republican mainstream: it seems that he’s the only conservative in America that doesn’t want Chris Christie to run for president.

Yet despite the fact that Christie has repeatedly — and dramatically — forsworn any interest in making a presidential bid, a shocking new Zogby Poll shows that Christie is the Republican favorite for the party’s presidential nomination in 2012, with a whopping 10 point lead over his closest competitor (Mitt Romney). Even more amazing? Christie is the only Republican who currently outpolls President Obama in a general election. Not bad for a man who’s spent one year as the Governor of New Jersey.

Christie’s denials of presidential ambition (at least for this cycle) have been positively Shermanesque. In fact, they’ve been so emphatic that going back on them may undermine his reputation for straight talk. But with numbers like these, look for the Draft Christie movement to catch fire in 2011.

While House Republicans are planning on bringing the repeal of Obamacare to a vote next week, even the staunchest opponents of the healthcare law admit that a fullblown reversal isn’t coming anytime soon.

With that in mind, healthcare analyst Avik Roy lays out the practical implications for conservatives in a piece on National Review Online. Roy is sagacious across the board, but his delineation of the consequences for the 2012 presidential election are especially pertinent — and jarring:

We must remind ourselves of the electoral realities. For Republicans to succeed in repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), they will need to control the House, the Senate, and the White House. From a political standpoint, if Republicans are not able to achieve this in 2012, they are unlikely ever to repeal Obamacare.

 This means that influential Republican activists must — must — coalesce around the most electable Republican presidential candidate who can articulate conservative health-care principles. This is no time for single-issue small-ball or personal score-settling. A GOP nominee who passes all the litmus tests but can’t win in November would only succeed in making Obamacare permanent. One who can win but isn’t capable of pushing for real health-care reform wouldn’t be much better.

Roy is right. Who the Republican nominee is in 2012 could well determine how free of a nation the United States is for the forseeable future. Vote accordingly.

With much of the 2012 presidential election coverage centering on Republican candidates, it’s worth noting – as this blog from the National Interest does – that President Barack Obama posted lopsided support among African-American and Hispanic voters during the 2008 campaign (95% and 67%, respectively).  Those numbers will likely grow as Hispanics continue to increase their share of the voting base.

So, what’s a WASP-ish GOP frontrunner like Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, or even Sarah Palin to do?  Any contestant eyeing a general election takedown of Obama-Biden (or even, heaven forbid, Obama-Clinton) should make travel plans for Santa Fe, New Mexico.  There newly inaugurated Governor Susana Martinez can teach them how to frame a winning position on illegal immigration: “It’s not about the Mexican population.  It’s about the Mexican border.”

That message, combined with Martinez’s career as a state prosecutor and traditional values stances, earned her 30% of the Hispanic vote in a heavily Democratic state.  It’s the kind of success story that just might earn her a place as the next Vice President of the United States.

Maybe it’s the fatigue of waging an under-the-radar campaign for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination for two years, but outgoing Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty sounds like he may be second guessing opting for higher office.  Telling a Duluth newspaper that he regretted not running for a third term now that Republicans are poised to run the state legislature, Pawlenty wouldn’t be saying that if his sights were focused exclusively on running for president.

I heard Pawlenty speak at this year’s CPAC, and he seems like one of the best people to run for president in awhile.  But with the 2012 campaign about to kick into gear over the next three months, this statement of public reluctance is not what I would want to hear as a donor or staff member.

Whether or not he ends up being a presidential candidate in 2012, Mike Huckabee is already making his mark as one of President Obama’s most insightful critics. After Obama spent last week’s press conference announcing a deal on the Bush tax cuts comparing Republicans to hostage-takers and bemoaning the intransigence of congressional liberals, Huckabee made what should have been an obvious point: you don’t celebrate bipartisan accomplishments by lambasting politicians on both sides of the aisle. Per CNN:

“The most bizarre part of the whole process was watching President Obama self-destruct at the podium yesterday,” Huckabee told the National Journal in an interview published Monday, when asked about the tax deal.

“I was just stunned – I really couldn’t believe that a man that was elected president was as amateurish as he was, and essentially launched from the podium at some of his own, taking aim and mowing down everybody in D.C. and walking away having not understood that he just lost a lot of people,” he said.

Presidents who are sore losers are deeply unbecoming. As for sore winners? Well, that’s a relatively new phenomenon. And there’s a reason for that, Mr. President.

There may be no politician more adept at turning Tea Party popularity into actionable results than Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC).  Yesterday, the conservative icon took the unusual step of publicly withdrawing his support of his party’s fundraising head, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.  There are good reasons to do so, but by publicizing his displeasure DeMint is serving notice on the rest of the GOP that he is ready to push for a more robust conservative presence throughout the party’s apparatus.

With his Senate Conservatives Fund DeMint went head-to-head and beat several GOP primary candidates supported by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, led by fellow Senator John Cornyn (R-TX).  With freshman senators like Florida’s Marco Rubio, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, and Utah’s Mike Lee owing much to DeMint’s patronage, expect to see the junior senator from South Carolina take on a much bigger role in deciding his party’s next presidential nominee.  If DeMint manages to replace Steele with a RNC Chairman of his choosing, he will be better positioned than any conservative in the party to make a serious run for the nomination.

H/T: Roll Call

Whether or not you think he’s a viable presidential candidate in 2012, there can be little doubt that — on his best days — former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is one of the most intelligent, articulate defenders of conservative thought around (full disclosure: I used to write radio spots for the Speaker). Last night Newt delivered a tour de force performance on Fox News’ On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, analyzing the midterm elections and their effects on President Obama. Some video highlights can be seen below. Newt’s best line of the night, however, didn’t make it into the highlights reel. Scroll down beyond the video for the line that had the Fox camera crews cracking up on air:

VAN SUSTEREN: But I just don’t get it, I mean, because he did run on change. And he delivered change. And now the American people — and they told him almost from day one they didn’t like his change, and he didn’t even notice it, and he’s still (INAUDIBLE) and so now he comes (INAUDIBLE) today — I don’t get it!

GINGRICH: Greta, Greta, Greta, Greta, if somebody offers you a chance to go to Disney World and you get all excited, and they promise to take you to Disney World, and then they didn’t quite tell you that, by the way, the way they’re going to get there is they’re going to crash the plane into the park…(LAUGHTER)

GINGRICH: The fact that they were going to take you to Disney World may not have been quite as attractive as you thought. Nobody in America thought we were going to elect a president who would be this far to the left, pass this much spending, build up this big a deficit, try to impose Washington on every doctor’s office, every hospital, every medical decision in America. And the American people now said, Got it. If that’s the change you meant, we’re going to send you a signal that that’s the wrong change.It’s all right to be for change, but you ought to be for the right change, and he didn’t get. Now, what worries me is with two more years, I wonder what it’s going to take for him to begin to realize it’s not about us, the American people, it’s about him.

If ever anyone deserved the title “the speaker” … 

After publishing today’s denunciation of President Barack Obama as the reincarnation of Richard Nixon, self-professed liberal Democrats Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen don’t need to guess if they’ll be getting a White House Christmas card this year.  The duo doesn’t break new ground with their criticisms of the president, but they do enlarge the chorus of commentators disturbed by Obama’s style.  From the section recounting Obama’s sins against campaign decorum:

Indeed, Obama is conducting himself in a way alarmingly reminiscent of Nixon’s role in the disastrous 1970 midterm campaign. No president has been so persistently personal in his attacks as Obama throughout the fall. He has regularly attacked his predecessor, the House minority leader and – directly from the stump – candidates running for offices below his own. He has criticized the American people suggesting that they are “reacting just to fear” and faulted his own base for “sitting on their hands complaining.”

Is it possible that the man who ran the longest presidential campaign in history is already looking to extend the record?  If so, 2012 can’t arrive soon enough.

Which of these sounds like the person currently serving as the leader of his party and nation’s chief executive?  On one side is a man crisscrossing the nation in a mad-dash to raise his members’ hopes, and squeeze out a few more votes and volunteers by Election Day.  He is upbeat, full of self-effacing humor, and mindful of long-term perspective.

The other man is in a television studio in Washington, D.C. defending the results of a campaign that ended almost two years ago.  To a comedian.  And failing.

The first man is former president Bill Clinton.  The latter is his current successor Barack Obama.  While Clinton is preaching a “we’re-all-in-this-together” sermon in battleground states, Obama seems lost in self-absorption, unable to feel anyone’s pain – including the crushing news that one’s political career is over because of votes the president asked you to take.

Sure, politics is a big-boy business with harsh outcomes.  But it is jolting to watch President #44 missing so many lessons from #42 about the importance of running through the finish line instead of stopping several yards out.  Just like winning, sometimes people need to feel like they’re losing for something; in this case the president’s uber-liberal agenda.

The failure to lead and inspire in the face of certain defeat will not be forgotten by those Democrats who survive to fight in 2012.  Chance are, the memories of Clinton helping and Obama not will do much to make Hillary Clinton’s dark horse candidacy all the more appealing.

Jay Cost at The Weekly Standard makes a compelling case that one of the reasons a Republican victory next Tuesday may seem ho-hum is that its arrival has been trumpeted for so long.  After months of voter resentment over ObamaCare, the Recovery Act, and spiraling unemployment the notion that the GOP might surpass 1994’s gains can seem pedestrian.

Cost reminds us it isn’t.  In fact, the intensity and location of voter resentment towards the liberal status quo could portend a possible realignment in states President Barack Obama won in 2008 to the GOP column.

The circumstantial evidence in favor of this? As Jim Geraghty’s Obi Wan noted yesterday, it’s all around us.  We simply have gotten used to it. Ohio is all but gone for the Democrats, including the swingiest of swing districts in Columbus.  Michigan is a lost cause. So is liberal icon Russ Feingold in Wisconsin.  Pennsylvania looks like it will go maybe +4-6 for Toomey and Corbett. All of these places voted for Obama, and all of them are basically gone. Weak Republican candidates in Colorado and Nevada keep those races tight, but otherwise the toss-ups are: California, Illinois, West Virginia, and Washington. The last Republican presidential candidate to win all four of these? Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Whoever earns the GOP presidential nomination for 2012 will have the wind at their back and a groundswell of proven precinct walkers at the ready.  We’ll see if the candidate can figure out how to use them.

Pity Peter Beinart. The former New Republic editor was once a voice of intellectual independence on the left — even going so far as to write a 2006 book arguing that it was incumbent upon liberals to aggressively prosecute the War on Terror.

A prophet is despised in his own country, however, and in the world of Washington punditry it’s more common for the prophet to change than the country. Thus, Beinart — after years of being labeled a Zionist warmonger by his colleagues on the left — has turned tail and run into the arms of his left-wing brethren. The source of his rebirth? A scathing rebuke to what he calls “the American Jewish Establishment” in the New York Review of Books and a decided retreat from his previous muscularity on foreign policy.

Having claimed sanctuary with the left, Beinart is now drifting into the realm of liberal self-parody. As his party stands on the precipice of what could be one of the largest midterm election refutations in history, he takes to the virtual pages of the Daily Beast today to confidently proclaim that Barack Obama is “a lock” for reelection in 2012. The only problem is that the self-styled intellectual’s data has been tortured until it confesses his preferred outcome. Consider:

Of course Barack Obama is likely to be reelected. For starters, American presidents usually get reelected. In the last 75 years, incumbents have lost a grand total of three times: in 1976, 1980, and 1992. And what did Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush all have in common? They had serious primary challenges within their own party (from Ronald Reagan, Ted Kennedy, and Pat Buchanan, respectively). The last president who lost reelection without a major primary challenge was Herbert Hoover in 1932.

Beinart’s historical invocation is deeply flawed. He seems to have chosen a period of 75 years only because it yields the most favorable outcome for his thesis. But should the 1936 election really be taken with equal weight as 1992 in understanding modern American politics? Look at it this way: the same data could be used to say that three of the last six presidents have failed to be elected to a second term — that 50 % failure rate provides no room for the confidence that Beinart is peddling.

As for primary challenges, this a more subtle, but still flawed, analysis. In all likelihood, Beinart has the causation wrong. Presidents don’t lose because they have primary challenges. They have primary challenges because of the weakness that ends up leading to their loss. Reagan, Clinton, and Bush 43 simply did a better job of managing their coalitions than Ford, Carter, or Bush 41. But had the latter three not been challenged for their party’s nomination, it’s still not safe to say they would have been on sure footing for reelection.

Were Beinart not imbibing Organizing for America soma, he could have produced a more thoughtful piece. The landscape for Obama in 2012 probably looks closer to that facing George W. Bush in 2004 than any of the earlier models he cites. Like Bush, Obama’s tenure has led to some (still relatively stifled) disquiet in his own party and has polarized public opinion at large — making a majority in the electoral college very tough sledding. But like Bush, he also has the benefits of incumbency and a known brand of leadership to take into an election where the opposition’s bullpen is  thus far a mile wide and an inch deep.

This is no time for triumphalism on the left. Obama certainly retains the prospects of being reelected in 2012. But if he does, it will be a street fight, not a coronation.

In a new interview with The Daily Caller, former U.N. Ambassador and one-time Disney Star John Bolton (up until now unnoticed by “The Great Mentioner“) curiously declines to shut the door on a presidential bid. Consider:

Not shy about his position on a wide range of issues, would this critic-in-chief consider a run for commander-in-chief in 2012? Bolton didn’t reject the idea out of hand.

“[I]t is a very great honor that anybody would even think of asking. I’m obviously not a politician. I’ve never run for any federal elective office at all and, you know, it is something that would obviously require a great deal of effort,” he said. “What I do think, though, and what concerns me, is the lack of focus generally in the national debate about national security issues. Now, I understand the economy is in a ditch and people are concerned about it, but our adversaries overseas are not going to wait for us to get our economic house in order.”

When pressed as to whether that means he would consider a run, Bolton seemed to suggest that he might do it, at the very least to help put national security issues at the top of the debate agenda.

“In the sense that I want to make sure that not only in the Republican Party, but in the body politic as a whole, people are aware of threats that remain to the United States. You know, as somebody who writes op-eds and appears on the television, I appreciate as well as anybody that…there is a limit to what that accomplishes,” he said. “Whereas, some governor from some state in the middle of the country announces for president they get enormous coverage even if their views are utterly uninformed on major issues.”

When pressed a third time about running, he said that while “he is not going to do anything foolish,” he added, “you know, I see how the media works…you have to take that into account.”

Again, not a no.

This is a long way from the denials (or near-denials) that we’ve seen from the likes of David Petraeus, Mitch Daniels, and Chris Christie. And it could be fun just to see Bolton run circles around the rest of the field on foreign policy. Get ready for the 2012 fireworks to start soon.

It’s always great to see conventional wisdom types baffled when someone shuns their advice and proves successful anyway.  This week’s example is Sarah Palin, the political icon who continues to irk the government-media establishment by endorsing people she thinks should govern – not those whom others think should win.

No other likely 2012 GOP presidential candidate has been as outspoken in endorsing 2010 candidates.  True, Palin doesn’t always taste victory (see Washington state’s Clint Didier), but she wins way more than she loses.    According to Time, she’s 8-3 this cycle.  Even more impressive that record was made in 11 tightly contested races where many of Palin’s endorsements went to underfunded long-shots.

Time will tell if Sarah Palin can muster enough support to win the GOP presidential nomination, and after it, the presidency.  But for now, she is the unquestioned difference maker in tight GOP races.  Come 2012, there will quite a few people owing her their support.

Here’s Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) take on President Barack Obama’s Clintonian ability to triangulate:

Looking ahead, Ryan says “a lot of people speculate on whether [President Obama] will triangulate like [Bill] Clinton did” after the GOP sweep in 1994. The Wisconsin Republican isn’t holding his breath. “I don’t know whether that’s really who [Obama] is,” Ryan says. “First, the economy is not going to be like it was in 1995 or 1996. Second, the president is a liberal and Clinton was arguably a centrist. And third, I just don’t think that [Obama] is willing to admit that all the things he did during the first two years of his presidency were wrong, because I don’t think he believes that. I don’t see a big triangulation happening.”

As summer traipses towards fall, the president’s persistence in his agenda is making it more and more likely that he will force his 2012 reelection campaign to be a referendum on him and his ideas.  Hopefully, Republicans will nominate someone who can not only define those deficiencies, but also articulate a better way forward.

H/T: The Corner at National Review Online