“It’s gone,” said Ed Rollins, who once worked as President Reagan’s political director and recently became Mike Huckabee’s national campaign chairman. “The breakup of what was the Reagan coalition — social conservatives, defense conservatives, antitax conservatives — it doesn’t mean a whole lot to people anymore.”
I think it's true, as Will (I believe) said, that Romney is the only GOP candidate representing the old Reagan coalition of social conservatives, defense hawks, supply-siders and small-government libertarians. But there just aren't enough people left on the Right who are willing to accept that bargain anymore. Reagan is dead, and Romney represents the last gasp of classical Reaganism. If defense hawkishness is your thing, McCain's your man. If small government animates you, go Ron Paul. Social conservatives have Huckabee. If "Islamofascism" burns bright in your mind, Giuliani's your torch bearer. Romney tries to be all things to all people, and in a fragmented field that might be enough to win him the nomination. But he conspicuously lacks authenticity, and would stand to win only up against the most calculating and unlikable Democrat imaginable, Hillary Clinton. Romney is the purest expression of establishment Republicanism on the current scene, which to me is all the more reason to cheer for Huckabee, Paul, and even McCain.
But I think the real reason is simpler: as with blogosphere conservatives, mainstream conservatives are mostly urban sophisticates with a libertarian bent, not rural evangelicals with a social conservative bent. They're happy to talk up NASCAR and pickup trucks in public, but in real life they mostly couldn't care less about either. Ditto for opposing abortion and the odd bit of gay bashing via proxy. But when it comes to Ten Commandments monuments and end times eschatology, they shiver inside just like any mainstream liberal. The only difference is that usually they keep their shivering to themselves because they want to keep everyone in the big tent happy.
But then along comes Huckabee, and guess what? He's the real deal. Not a guy like George Bush or Ronald Reagan, who talks a soothing game to the snake handlers but then turns around and spends his actual political capital on tax cuts, foreign wars, and deregulating big corporations. Huckabee, it turns out, isn't just giving lip service to evangelicals, he actually believes all that stuff.
Buoyed by the still unsettled field, New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is growing increasingly enchanted with the idea of launching an independent presidential bid, and his aides are aggressively laying the groundwork for him to run. How would another New York mayor in the mix affect the 2008 presidential election?
The more I think about it, the better I feel about a Bloomberg third party candidacy. I think it is obvious he can't win. And while I understand the argument that he could siphon off more GOP votes than Democratic ones, I'm increasingly skeptical that that's how it would work out. By November 2008, I simply don't think that the election will be anything like the referendum on Bush the Democrats want it to be.
Merely by toying with a run, Bloomberg can force the major candidates to pay attention to issues dear to his heart. Fortunately, many of them are sensible, like gun control, progressive immigration reform, reducing carbon emissions, trying new ways to break the poverty cycle and transparency in government. We could do a lot worse, given how many megalomaniacal billionaires this country seems to produce.
Since 1972, the eventual nominee of each party has been among the top three finishers in Iowa. Sometimes, a good caucus showing can elevate a candidate from obscurity as it did with Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush or John Kerry. Often, it ends the campaigns of some candidates who finish lower than expected, because they find it difficult to raise the money needed to continue.
The caucuses are run by the state parties, and unlike primary or general elections aren't regulated by the government. They were designed as an insiders' game to attract party activists, donors and political junkies and give them a disproportionate influence in the process. In other words, they are designed not to be overly democratic. Primaries aren't perfect. but at least they make it fairly easy for everyone to vote, since polls are open all day and it takes only a few minutes to cast a ballot.
Rumors are circulating of an agreement between John Edwards and Hillary Clinton to help bury Barack Obama; or is it perhaps Bill Richardson that the Clinton campaign is trying to get on board? And will Denis Kucinich renew his 2004 alliance with Edwards?
In this strategic fury, hardly anyone is pausing to wonder what Iowa's openness to such manipulation reveals about America's electoral process. Many criticize representative democracies for reducing individuals to pawns in larger power plays, but only the Iowa caucuses can reveal just how profoundly dysfunctional the system is in its indifference to local undemocratic processes.
