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For political parties in America, winning elections is no longer simply about picking the best candidate and letting the voters decide. When your bench is short, sometimes the best strategy is to stir up lots of dirt and hope the voters give you the candidate you can trounce.
Democrats, tired of losing Presidential elections, look like they’re poised to try to knock out Rudy Giuliani, the most electable Republican in the field, before he gets a chance to take on their nominee. And their first strike is the mayor's position on gay rights - a position I support. Rudy's less-government positions from taxes to social issues are why I want Giuliani to be the Republican nominee.
But conventional wisdom among Democrats and Big Media elites is that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has a tough road to hoe if he wants to win the Republican nomination for President of the United States. They believe that the very reason that Giuliani may be electable in a general election - his moderate positions on social issues which are much more in touch with mainstream America - will disqualify Giuliani from any hope of winning a Republican Primary where conservative "base" voters are more active.
Making Giuliani more dangerous is his ability to get votes from people you wouldn’t think would support him. He got elected as a Republican in New York City - which was never supposed to happen. Now, he’s wooing a plurality of Republican Primary voters to his side.
A recent, lengthy, New Yorker article summed this up nicely: “Giuliani’s challenge was to convince Republicans that his social positions should not be held against him any more than the color of his eyes - he was from New York, he couldn’t help it. Giuliani had to demonstrate that he was one of them, and that their enemies were his enemies, too.”
And let's face it, what Democrat wouldn’t prefer to run against Mitt Romney in 2008? So, to eliminate the Giuliani threat, don’t be surprised to see Democrats meddling in the GOP primary by taking a page from one of the most cynical politicians of our time, the one belonging to former - and not much missed - California Governor Gray Davis.
Pardon the brief history lesson; if you’re from California, this is familiar territory. If not, it's a good mirror of current events. In 1998, Gray Davis found himself elected Governor of California with the help of campaign wiz Garry South on the basis of a simple campaign slogan crafted in a race against two mega-rich opponents. The catch-phrase, “A Governor Money Can’t Buy,” was enough to get the career politician swept into office. But within four years, Californians learned that while Davis might not have been able to buy the election, once in office, he certainly had a price. One Californians were paying with his poor stewardship of the state purse-strings. But he won re-election. Why? He found a Republican he could beat and made sure he was the nominee.
In 2002, Los Angeles Mayor Dick Riordan's nomination for governor appeared as inevitable as the words “President Hillary Clinton” seem today. Riordan, like Giuliani, was a big city mayor who had convinced a heavily Democratic town to support him despite his party affiliation. Running against him was California version of Mitt Romney, a self-made millionaire named Bill Simon. Simon said everything he needed to to win the support of the GOP base - he was against abortion, taxes and Democrats - but California Republicans knew he was unelectable even against damaged goods like Gray Davis.
Master-minded by political consultant Garry South, Davis’ campaign sent targeted messages to Republican voters, attacking Riordan for his positions on social issues, like his support for abortion rights and more, taking issues for which GOP voters had forgotten or forgiven Riordan and bringing them to the forefront of the public debate. Davis' campaign even master-minded an attack on Riordan for supporting--get this--Gray Davis! It worked. Bill Simon became the nominee and promptly lost the race to Davis, paving the way for 2003’s Recall and the election of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It’s no stretch, then, to imagine a shadowy Democrat-funded 527 group running ads in South Carolina attacking Giuliani’s support for gay rights, sending out mailers in Iowa claiming Giuliani supports abortions or stirring up talk in Texas that the former mayor wants to take their guns away. It’s already happening. The very week that the Democratic candidates held a forum in Los Angeles to discuss gay and lesbian rights a website cropped up called “Gays for Giuliani.”
The website purported to be a site run by homosexuals in New York who wanted to see their former mayor elected president and were targeting their message to the deep South. The parody video talks about Giuliani's creation of a Domestic Partner registry in New York while mayor and highlight plaudits he received from gay-rights groups like the Empire State Pride Agenda and Log Cabin Republicans.
Serious journalists from Reason Magazine to the Los Angeles Times have asked, straight-faced, whether the site was real or whether it was really an attack against the former mayor. Which means it's worked; conservative Republicans now know Giuliani is in favor of gay rights. A simple search of domain registries would show that “Gays for Giuliani” isn’t for Giuliani at all. The website is owned by the notorious Mike Rogers, an avowed Democrat and blogger-activist best known for outing Republican Members of Congress and their staffs. He's got as much interest in seeing Rudy Giuliani become president as I do in seeing Dennis Kucinich move into the White House.
The Huffington Post is soliciting funds for the “Gays for Giuliani” campaign, which has one lawyer friend of mine upset. He emails, “Gays for Giuliani is not a legal campaign but is anti-Giuliani campaign and NOT registered yet it is soliciting funds through The Huffington Post and a Pay Pal Account. It is illegal.” I am no election law expert - and the law here is not clear at all - but this probably crosses some line that John McCain and Russ Feingold considered in their efforts to reform campaign spending.
It is kind of ironic that people who claim to support gay rights would be trying to eliminate the electoral hopes of any Republican that agrees with that idea, kind of like the NRA running an ad against a Democrat who supported gun control. But politics today is apparently no longer about policy. It’s about winning. At all costs.
Editor's Note: Spot-on's Mike Spinney has had a few comments recently about politics and winning. You can read that here. And Chris Nolan's been worrying about the use of dirty tricks in on-line campaigning since the early summer. That post is here.
Presidential polling in August of an odd-numbered year isn't likely to tell you much, but it reveals a little something about those who obsess over the numbers. And coverage of the latest round of numbers hints at the possibility that the national political media, sticking to the narrative of presidential primaries of the past, may miss the boat when America votes in 2008.
Hillary Clinton stole the headlines in the latest poll by increasing her national lead to a near-majority of Democratic Primary voters. Her recent confrontation with rival Barack Obama over his experience and fitness to serve, so the narrative goes, worked. In the same poll, among Republicans, fellow New Yorker, front-running centrist Rudy Giuliani, extended his lead over non-candidate candidate Fred Thompson, big-spending Mitt Romney and the moribund John McCain campaign although you'd hardly know it from the news accounts.
Why? Well the political press are following the old script that says the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire primary are still the most important states in picking a president. More likely, that talking point has been well-distributed by the campaigns of Mitt Romney and John Edwards who are undoubtedly saying: don't look behind the curtain of the national numbers - we're competitive in Iowa and New Hampshire!
Unfortunately for these two states and those two candidates, the traditional first-in-the-nation status held by New Hampshire and Iowa has quietly fallen. The first votes of the 2008 Presidential contest will be cast in Downey, Calif., not De Moines, Iowa and in Modesto, Calif., not Manchester, N.H..
The California primary is officially February 5th, but more residents of this state will have cast more ballots before the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire Primary than will be counted in both the states combined when they are able to start voting on January 7 - a month before the polls open. And many of those folks - permanent absentees - will be reminded to vote when they get their ballots delivered to their doors by the U.S. Post Office sometime in early January.
That's one reason why the presidential nominees from either party won't be those who are focused on Iowa, which caucuses on Jan. 14, and New Hampshire, which votes on Jan. 22, but will likely be the candidates who realize that Californians will begin voting just after Christmas, before college football has crowned my beloved USC Trojans champions in New Orleans on January 8th. And they'll keep casting ballots through and until February 5th when the polls open.
In 2004, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom rode to victory on ballots that were mailed in well before election day. Two years later, Republicans in California focused heavily on securing absentee votes and there were early indications that the GOP could claim victory in some statewide offices. On election day and anti-Bush, anti-GOP fervor swept the nation, suppressing Republican turnout and encouraging some Republicans to even punch the chads of Democrats. But despite the Democratic tidal wave on election day, Republicans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steve Poizner managed to win statewide office with two others coming within spitting distance of their opponents.
In 2008, California could see a similar phenomenon with its Presidential primary. So far, the State's polling numbers have tracked along with the national numbers. Clinton and Giuliani are not only leading but they're extending their leads in the Golden State.
Should a John Edwards or a Mitt Romney pull off an upset in Iowa or New Hampshire, it may be too late to affect the vote in California because, well, many ballots will already have been cast. The national media, if they continue sticking to their playbook of campaigns past and are either unaware or choosing to overlook this phenomenon may get left dockside as the Clinton and Giuliani campaign set sail on a tidal wave from the Golden State.
Editor's Note: California's permanent absentee balloting is a phenomenon Spot-on writers have been following for some time. Here's Chris Nolan's take on the Newsom election and the increasing popularity of the state's vote-by-mail system.
Every four years, the media proclaims the virtues of the Iowa Caucuses - real Americans from middle America get together in DeTocquevilliean style meetings to make a choice for the next President of the United States. But the preeminence of the Iowa Cuacuses are costing regular Americans like you and me more than we know. It's a little complicated but, trust me, the caucuses and its Holy Grail status in American politics are at the heart of our current economic woes.
Three times in the last week, the stock market has fallen out of bed to the tune of three-digit losses. On Monday an official from CalPERS - the nation’s largest pension fund serving California's state employees - told CNBC’s Money Honey Maria Bartiromo that the pension fund lost two billion dollars in two days, a feat not even the inept California Legislature could accomplish. And it’s all because of the Iowa Caucus.
Behind the market’s woes is what’s being called the “sub-prime debacle.” Families who leveraged their fortunes to buy a home on an adjustable rate mortgage can no longer afford once it adjusted upwards. Foreclosure notices are being handed out in record numbers. Mortgages are costing more these days because interest rates keep going up. The Federal Reserve has hit the pause button on hiking interest rates but refuses to do the one thing that would help many Americans stay in their homes - cutting rates.
In the meantime, Americans are getting hit at the pocketbooks whenever we stuff something into their mouths. Food inflation has joined oil prices among the leading causes of increased living expenses for Americans. Why does food costs more? The Iowa Caucuses.
Food prices are being led by surges in the cost of one item: corn. And it's not just Nebraska football players who are corn-fed. Which, of course, brings us to Iowa.
Eat a pork chop? That pig probably ate corn. So did the cow they slaughtered to make your filet mignon, and so on. The cost of corn contributes to the rising cost of more than just your Frosted Flakes. So as the cost of corn goes up, so does the expense of producing just about everything else in the food supply.
So why is the price of corn going up so much? You guessed it: the Iowa Caucuses.
Corn is the key ingredient in America’s production of ethanol. Coincidentally, they grow a lot of corn in Iowa. That's long been the reason why any politician with Presidential ambition wants you to put ethanol in your car. Pro ethanol policies help farmers sell more corn and ethanol's newly hip status as a possible "green" fuel is, well, making the idea even more popular. But even before it became fashionable, support for ethanol was probably the only thing that all Presidential candidates could agree on.
Senator John McCain, at least, has been honest about his conversion to pro-ethanol policies since he skipped the Iowa caucuses in 2000 but he's now drinking ethanol as if it were a glass of Kool-Aid. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has an eye on next year’s Iowa caucuses as well, making ethanol the center of his energy policy but he doesn’t ask how much it will cost Americans to replace its foreign oil with corn-based ethanol. The Democrats are not immune to the sweet taste of ethanol Kool-aid either Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have pro-ethanol stances.
Were the Iowa Caucuses not the first official event in the Presidential selection season, I somehow doubt that ethanol would be so popular. If you want the exception to prove this rule, look no further than California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unable to run for President and unaffected by the Iowa caucuses, Schwarzenegger’s environmentalism embraces hydrogen, not ethanol - a technology favored automakers Mercedes and BMW.
So, in a way, if you lost money in the stock market this week or worse, risk losing your home to foreclosure, don’t Blame President George W. Bush. Don't Blame Canada. Blame Iowa and their first-in-the-nation caucuses.
