Kautzman’s AP GO PO Blog

Calm down. The GOP’s demise isn’t as imminent as some would have it.

By Karl Rove

NEWSWEEK

Feb 2, 2008

“We are at the end of the Reagan era.” Or, at least, that is the claim of voices as diverse as Newt Gingrich and Ed Rollins on the right and Sen. Chuck Schumer and pollster Stanley Greenberg on the left. It is true the Republican Party is having difficulty retooling its message for the 21st century. But so is the Democratic Party.

Every presidential election is about change, and no more so than at the end of a two-term president’s time in the White House. Parties have to constantly update themselves if they hope to remain relevant. The difficulty for both Republicans and Democrats is that our political system is at a point where more than the normal amount of party growth and development is needed. Both parties are suffering the consequences of seeing substantial parts of their 20th-century agendas adopted; both parties are struggling to fashion new answers to the new challenges of a young century.

But that’s not to say that the Reagan legacy is exhausted. Ronald Reagan’s legacy was not simply that he was “a campaigner and orator of uncommon skill,” as Don Campbell argued last week in USA Today. President Reagan’s gifts to the Republican Party were ideas: growing the economy through tax cuts, limiting government’s size, forcefully confronting totalitarian threats, making human rights a centerpiece of America’s foreign policy, respecting unborn human life, empowering the individual with more freedom. Those ideas endure. They give Republicans a philosophical foundation on which to build. The Reagan coalition has a natural desire to stick together. Fiscal, defense and values conservatives have more in common with each other than with any major element of the Democratic Party’s leadership.

Democrats have a similar philosophical storehouse in the ideas of FDR and LBJ. Both expanded the size and scope of the federal government and saw it in almost an entirely positive light: as an agent of economic redistribution from the rich to the less affluent, as a provider to the poor and the disabled and as an enforcer of equal rights and equal justice. The Democratic Party has two challenges. One is that the modern economy has led voters to prefer markets, decentralization and consumer choice far more than centralized control by government and the substitution of “expert” decisions for those of the individual. The other challenge is that many in that party mistake the “Third Way” tactics of the Clinton years for a substantive approach to governing. Triangulation—making yourself look good at the expense of allies and adversaries in both parties—is lousy for providing coherent answers to modern issues.

Why then the media’s recent fascination with the supposed demise of the Republican Party? What are the reasons given for why, at least when it comes to the Republicans, “the party’s over,” as NEWSWEEK recently pronounced? First, we are told the GOP nomination has not been won “fairly quickly,” as in recent contests. This is a horrible misremembering of history. The senior Bush took 45 days after the first contest to secure the nomination in 1988. It took Bob Dole 35 days to become the presumptive nominee in 1996. The current president took 45 days to clear the field in 2000. The first contest this year was on Jan. 3. Let’s at least give the process until the middle or end of February before pundits start predicting doom because of how long it’s taking. And if the Republican nomination not being settled is evidence of disaster, what does the Democratic nomination being up for grabs say? It’s normal for both parties’ nominees to be undecided at this point. The season is not moving too slowly. If anything, it is moving too quickly this time, with 38 contests in the first 33 days.

Second, we are told recently by Susan Page, also in USA Today, that “never before in modern times has there been such a muddle,” and then by Jon Meacham in this magazine that the “chaotic nature of the Republican primary race” means “the party of Reagan is now divided in ways it has not been in more than a generation.” Many who witnessed the primary battles of 2000, 1996, 1992 or 1988 might disagree. By their nature, primary races are chaotic. Then a nominee emerges, and the chaos recedes (most of the time). If spirited competition on the Republican side is evidence of a crackup, then what about the Democratic battle? It is focused more and more on race and gender, and Hillary Clinton has the highest negatives of any candidate at this point in an open race for the presidency. The Democratic House and Senate have plummeted to the poorest congressional approval ratings in history.

Third, we are told Democrats have raised more money. You will search in vain for a similar declaration of last rites for the Democrats in 2000 when Republicans outraised them. And having more money doesn’t decide the contest. Consider 2004, when Democratic presidential candidates, committees and 527s outspent their Republican counterparts by $124 million—and lost. Besides, the RNC has nearly eight times the cash on hand as the DNC. Just a month has passed since voting began, and nine months remain before November. Let’s see what happens to Republican bank accounts as the year goes on.

Maybe we are not seeing the crackup of the GOP. Rather, America is more likely to be at the start of an intense and exciting election. The contest will be hard fought, the actions of the candidates each day hugely significant. It’s far too early to draw sweeping conclusions about the health of either party; the presidential race, after all, has barely begun.

Lots of surprises lie ahead.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/107568

By MICHAEL LUO

DENVER — After devoting two years and more than $35 million of his money trying to win his party’s nomination for the presidency, Mitt Romney and his advisers face the possibility that his effort could end with the nominating contests on Tuesday.

Senator John McCain of Arizona has won a series of major primaries and landed big-name endorsements as he seeks to present himself as the Republican Party’s putative nominee.

Operating in survival mode, Mr. Romney’s circle of advisers has come up with a detailed road map to try to salvage his campaign. The plan is complete with a new infusion of cash from Mr. Romney, a long-term strategy intended to turn the campaign into a protracted delegate fight and a reframing of the race as a one-on-one battle for the future of the party that seeks to sound the alarm among conservatives about Mr. McCain.

The advisers have drawn up a list of states, dividing and ranking them into those considered relatively easy and inexpensive targets, along with a broader grouping of more costly battlegrounds where the advisers hope that Mr. Romney can be competitive.

Some states like Arizona and Arkansas, the home states of Mr. McCain and Mike Huckabee, respectively, are largely written off.

The question is whether the planning, along with the campaign’s one trump card, the candidate’s vast wealth, can overcome the growing sense of inevitability that has begun to attach itself to Mr. McCain.

Complicating the outlook, Mr. Romney’s campaign has been racked by infighting over advertising strategy between some senior advisers, including some consultants who joined the campaign after leaving Mr. McCain’s.

Polls in many major primary states on Tuesday, including California, the linchpin of Mr. Romney’s strategy, where he is spending $1.7 million on advertising, according to a rival campaign, show Mr. McCain with a comfortable lead. He also appears to hold significant edges in New York and New Jersey, winner-take-all states where many former backers of Rudolph W. Giuliani have joined the McCain camp.

The endorsement by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California boosts Mr. McCain there, and the national news media buzz contributes to the air of a coronation.

“I don’t think anyone should write Mitt Romney’s obituary yet,” said Todd Harris, a political consultant who worked on Fred D. Thompson’s campaign. “He can be a compelling candidate with a ton of money. But at some point if he’s not winning, the entire rationale for his campaign becomes that he is a well-funded candidate who’s not John McCain, and that’s not enough.”

Another unforeseen complication is the funeral on Saturday of Gordon B. Hinckley, president and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in Salt Lake City. The funeral, taking Mr. Romney off the trail on the most important weekend of campaigning so far, will draw attention once again to Mr. Romney’s Mormon faith.

His advisers point to some signs of hope in an election cycle in which conventional wisdom has often been turned upside down. They say they are starting to see a groundswell of opposition to Mr. McCain among conservative leaders, as well as at the grass roots, especially on talk radio.

The day after Mr. Romney’s loss to Mr. McCain in Florida, his aides said, the campaign set a record for one-day online contributions, almost $400,000.

Mr. Romney’s advisers are also convinced that their mantra on the economy and bringing change to Washington and the economy remains compelling.

The campaign’s director of strategy, Alex Gage, sent a memorandum to supporters on Thursday that highlighted exit poll data from the previous nominating contests, saying just a few percentage points of support to Mr. Romney from conservatives would swing the nomination to him.

Besides California, the campaign has also bought airtime for commercials in other states as part of a “significant” buy, advisers said, although they declined to say where. A rival campaign also reported that Mr. Romney has bought nearly $350,000 in advertising time to run nationally on the Fox News Channel.

Alex Castellanos, a media strategist for Mr. Romney, said regardless of the delegate count, the winner in California would have the momentum to move on.

“California’s the one to watch,” Mr. Castellanos said.

Rob Stutzman, a senior adviser for the California campaign, said the Republican electorate there was traditionally quite conservative. Mr. Stutzman predicted that Mr. McCain would run into problems because of his moderate stance on illegal immigration.

“The immigration vulnerability is amplified in California for McCain,” he said.

The Romney campaign has had four paid staff members in California since last summer and has been making calls throughout the state since the beginning of January, when absentee voting began.

The field operations are focused on Congressional districts where it believes that organization can have productive effects. The state is set up so that each district is worth the same number of delegates, no matter how many Republicans are in it. A small organizing effort could swing a district.

The Romney campaign is banking on winning Utah, with its heavy concentration of Mormons.

Beyond that, the campaign is also focused on picking off the handful of states holding caucuses or state conventions on Tuesday. The campaign says some minimal organization — it has had at least one paid worker in almost every Feb. 5 state since the fall — and spending can produce results. The states include Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia.

Adding Alaska, where Mr. Romney’s son Josh has been dispatched, more than 250 delegates are at stake in this first group of states out of the more than 1,000 delegates up for grabs on Tuesday.

The campaign has then drawn up a broader list of battlegrounds where it believes it can be competitive, including Georgia, Illinois, Missouri and Tennessee. Advertising will most likely be focused on those primary states.

The most serious obstacle in many places is Mr. Huckabee, who continues to pull social conservative voters from Mr. Romney.

“The more the Romney strategy hinges on picking up red states, the bigger a factor Mike Huckabee is going to be,” Mr. Harris said.

In the face of difficult odds, Mr. Romney’s advisers said, he had been the individual raising their morale whenever it sagged. After his weary advisers dozed on the flight from Florida to California on Wednesday, Mr. Romney gathered them at the front of the plane.

Trying to lighten the mood, he turned to Cindy Gillespie, a senior adviser who worked with him in rescuing the scandal-ridden 2002 Winter Olympic Games, and said: “We’ve been here before, haven’t we? Salt Lake was always three steps forward, two steps back.”

By Michael Barone
Just shy of a month ago, after the first votes were cast in Iowa and New Hampshire, it seemed that the Republican Party faced a fluid and fractious nomination contest, while the Democrats faced a clear-cut choice between two not particularly adversarial candidates. What a difference a few weeks can make.

Now it appears that John McCain is on an unobstructed flight path to the nomination, facing a few crosswinds but no serious navigation hazards, while the two leading Democrats, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, are on the collision course, with the winner taking on serious and possibly disabling damage. And this in a year when the standard metrics — the job performance rating of the president, judgments about the trajectory of the economy, trends in party identification — have seemed overwhelmingly favorable to the Democrats.

How did this happen? Some will give credit to providence, which saw to it that McCain — whose candidacy seemed terminal last July 1 — was able to duplicate, with lesser percentages, his 2000 victory in New Hampshire, then survive a defeat in his best 2000 state, Michigan, then squeeze out a 33 percent to 30 percent victory over Mike Huckabee in South Carolina and a 36 percent to 31 percent victory over Mitt Romney in Florida.

None of which would have been possible without a collapse in Rudy Giuliani’s support, which was as widely unpredicted as his earlier rise to the top of the polls. Or without the collapse of the candidacy of 2000 McCain supporter Fred Thompson, who led in polls as a noncandidate but lost the lead before he officially declared.

Even so, McCain now seems a prohibitive favorite for the Republican nomination. He leads in just about all the polls in the big states that vote on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5. Giuliani has bowed out, and Huckabee’s election night speech reiterated his respect for McCain. Romney alone has the potential to buy enough ads and possibly derail McCain this week. But big-time buys did not win for him in Iowa, New Hampshire or Florida.

In his victory speech, McCain was at pains to pay respect not only to his rivals, but to the concerns of his critics in conservative journals and talk radio. To his undisputed asset as the longtime and persistent advocate of the surge, which has produced such success in Iraq, he added a stern but seldom-before-voiced resolve to appoint judges who would interpret rather than make law. He was paying — for once, and for the time being anyway — heed to his critics at National Review and his boosters at The Weekly Standard. Memo to Rush Limbaugh: You have been heard.

And what were the Democrats up to when the Republicans were receiving the coordinates of a clear flight path? Heading straight toward each other. The Clinton campaign, defeated in Iowa and nearly in New Hampshire, scraping by in Nevada and expecting a clobbering in South Carolina, faced a choice between losing clean and winning ugly. What is amusing is that so many liberal commentators were surprised when the Clinton apparat, with the unhesitation of a shark, chose the latter option.

Bill Clinton and other Hillary Clinton surrogates got busy playing the race card against Barack Obama. They belittled his victory in South Carolina and profited from her victory in Florida — Democratic Party rules forbade candidates to compete — where elderly women, Latinos and Jews, all heavily pro-Clinton (or anti-Obama) constituencies, are heavily represented.

As they will be, to varying extents, in the Super Tuesday states, especially California. Extrapolating from all but one of the Florida results, Clinton will be the big winner there. The exception: Floridians making up their minds at the last minute were evenly split between Obama and Clinton.

Disgust over the Clintons’ tactics has been a staple of liberal magazines and blogs and evidently inspired Edward Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama. Political history mavens will recall that Kennedy, well after he had lost the 1980 nomination to Jimmy Carter, continued his campaign and bitter denunciations all the way to the national convention.

Will he urge such a course on Obama? Hillary Clinton may be content to win ugly. But she may find, as Carter did, that a crash on the runway is not an appealing spectacle.

Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Short Calendar Favors Clinton
By Alec MacGillis and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 2, 2008; A01

ALBUQUERQUE, Feb. 1 — Sen. Barack Obama has two opponents: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and the clock, which is rapidly running down.

With three days to go before Super Tuesday, when roughly half the delegates in the Democratic presidential contest will be awarded, Obama is racing around the country, still trying to introduce himself to voters, speed-dating style.

On Tuesday, he touched down in his grandfather’s home town, El Dorado, Kan., where many residents did not realize until recently — if at all — that Obama has Kansas roots. From there, it was on to big rallies in Kansas City, Mo.; Denver; and Phoenix, followed by Los Angeles, where he tried during an hour in East L.A. to make an impression on Hispanic voters who know little about him. On Friday: Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Boise.

Polling and election results so far suggest that the more time Obama has to present himself to voters, the better he fares. In each of the first four states where voting was sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee, Clinton maintained essentially level support in polls in the months leading up to the contests, while Obama saw a steady upward trajectory the more he campaigned. In Florida, by contrast, where the candidates did not campaign after the DNC punished the state for moving its primary to January, Clinton soundly defeated Obama, offering a rough gauge on how much the senator from Illinois relies on voter contact.

The compressed primary calendar presents a challenge for all of the remaining candidates, as they try to visit as many as possible of the more than 20 states holding elections or caucuses on Tuesday. But the time crunch is particularly acute for Obama, who, for all the hype around his candidacy, remains far less well known than Clinton. Obama vaulted into contention against her by spending week upon week in Iowa before the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. He engaged in an intensive grass-roots effort and visited the smallest towns and the most remote county fairgrounds to introduce himself to voters, who rewarded him with a big win over his rivals.

Now, with far less time and broader territory to cover, he must make do with a radically truncated version of that outreach, relying on a single final visit to big cities to win over voters to whom he remains little more than a first-term senator with an exotic name and a reputation for oratory.

His efforts appear to be paying off, as his standing in polls inches closer and closer to Clinton’s. The question is whether he has enough time to make up the gap.

“The schedule is compressed, so no doubt Senator Clinton has an advantage going into February 5 states,” Obama said during one leg of his travel this week. “She’s better known, and I’m still being introduced to a lot of casual voters in the other states.”

The lack of time concerns Obama’s rank-and-file supporters in the Feb. 5 states, who see him packing arenas this week — 15,000-plus in Denver, 13,000 in Phoenix — yet know that most of those turning out are the converted and that countless more undecided voters will not see Obama make his case in person.

“It worries me. Everyone in Arizona ought to see what we saw today,” said Tim Nelson, a lawyer for the state government, after bringing his 9-year-old daughter to see the candidate in Phoenix.

If a few extra weeks would help Obama, the opposite is true for Clinton, whose advisers would be happy with just a few extra days, they said in interviews Friday.

Clinton at one point declared that she would have the race wrapped up by Feb. 5. Now, her strategists concede, as Obama appears to be closing the gap with her, she needs the days until then to keep pushing her message — outreach that includes visiting critical states and luring former supporters of John Edwards, who ended his candidacy this week. “There are a lot of places to touch,” one strategist said.

After a heavy emphasis on the West Coast this week, Clinton will seek to maintain her national lead between now and Tuesday with a whirlwind travel schedule that extends from Missouri to Massachusetts and is capped off with a 90-minute “national town hall meeting” conducted via satellite Monday night. Her campaign also believes that, with her performance in Thursday’s debate, the senator from New York moved past questions about her husband’s role in the campaign and their approach to African American voters, and is now running on comfortable ground — the issues of health care and the economy.

Still, Clinton strategists are not planning on seeing the nomination contest end on Feb. 5. They are looking ahead to March 4, when both Ohio (161 delegates) and Texas (228 delegates) vote, as the date that could be decisive.

Obama is hardly lacking for public exposure, and he is not relying only on his personal appeals to get voters to the polls. He has well-developed organizations making phone calls and home visits in nearly all of the Feb. 5 states, a growing list of prominent surrogates to campaign on his behalf, and enough money to blanket the country with television ads.

But along the trail there are signs of the ground that Obama has to make up with many voters who have had little experience in casting a meaningful vote in the primaries and have only recently trained their minds on their choices.

In Phoenix, Cynthia and Stuart Preston said that as they were driving to Obama’s rally with their children, they quizzed each other to come up with three of the candidate’s major platform planks. To their surprise, they couldn’t think of them. Despite that, Cynthia Preston said she is supporting Obama. She was drawn, she said, by the “popular movement” behind him.

“I don’t know if he has enough time to detail [his plans in all Feb. 5 states], but if you care enough, you can do the research on your own,” she said.

Aware that many voters still have basic holes in their knowledge of his background, Obama is doing his best to fill them, making sure at nearly every stop to mention details such as his years as a community organizer, the death of his mother at age 53 and the fact that he is a church-going Christian, no matter what the false rumors circulated by e-mail might say. He takes time to describe the family history that led him to where he is today.

“My own family’s journey moved west — from Kansas, where my grandparents met and married, and my mother was born; to the Pacific Coast after World War II; and then across an ocean to Hawaii,” he told his audience in Denver.

At that event, supporter Becky Bowman, of Lakewood, said before Obama’s speech that she figured voters in Colorado could get enough information about Obama on their own. But after witnessing him bring a diverse crowd of thousands to its feet with his characteristically rousing pitch, she wondered about the shortcomings of the rushed itinerary.

Voters “need to know the magic. You can’t do that through little soundbites,” she said. “It’s a problem.”

MacGillis is traveling with the Obama campaign. Kornblut is traveling with the Clinton campaign.