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December 2007 archives
With little more than a week left until the Iowa Caucuses, it seems that conventional wisdom has been swept aside and the candidacy of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is for real. Huckabee is formidable not for his resources - his war-chest is anemic - nor for his ideas - few folks really want a theocracy. His story, however, resonates.
Huckabee is the man from Hope, Ark., who, as governor of a small southern state, balanced its budget and is a compassionate conservative. If that sounds familiar it is because it is pretty much the same narrative that swept the last two presidents - Bill Clinton and George W. Bush - into office.
In the Republican Primary, Huckabee is finding support among Christian Conservatives who heretofore had been disappointed in the field of candidates. Rudy Giuliani never appealed to them, John McCain had scorned them when he went after George Bush in 2000, and they know not whether to trust Mitt Romney’s words or his record.
A former pastor, Huckabee appeals to the Christian Conservatives because no one can question his authenticity on their issues. He’s anti-abortion, wants to quarantine the gays who have AIDS and has never wavered from the idea that he should build God’s kindom - rather HIS God’s kingdom on earth - when he suggests that the global war on terror is a “theocratic war.”
Republicans are divided between economic libertarians and theocratic statists. That is why those who find Huckabee appealing in the GOP primary turn a blind eye to his more-compassionate-than-conservative views on immigration and his embrace of tax increases as budget-balancing solutions whilst governor of Arkansas.
If logic ruled politics, positions like those wouldn’t get Huckabee more than 20% of the vote even in a GOP primary. But political logic has its own pattern and Huckabee, gaining steam in Iowa as I type, may well be a factor in the February primaries and in November. Why? Well, the very thing that makes Huckabee intriguing to GOP voters - his narrative - would also make for an interesting match-up in a general election. In a way, we've seen this story before. And voters liked it.
Nearly a year ago my friends laughed at me when I suggested that the best November election for 2008 would be Hillary Clinton against Huckabee. In a sense, the race would be pitting Bill Clinton’s wife and sometimes acknowledged political partner (sometimes not) against Bill Clinton’s background. Who could lay claim to being more like Clinton - the one who married him, campaigned with him and bore him a child? Or the one with pretty much the same record - born in Hope, grew up to be governor of Arkansas, kept the budget balanced and ran for president as the Comeback Kid?
Even better, Gov. Huckabee comes without Bill Clinton’s flaws. As an ordained minister, the only person he's cheated with was God. While Bill Clinton struggled with his weight, resulting in heart disease - Huckabee fought obesity and won - something many Americans wish they could do themselves.
Ideas and campaign cash aside - and if he does well next week, he'll have both on hand in short order - Mike Huckabee is steamrolling into the New Year on the wave of his greatest asset, his narrative. If voters don’t get a chance to examine his record or his principles, that may just be enough to take him into November - and the rest of our Gods forbid - beyond.
With the Iowa caucuses but weeks away, the mainstream media is facing a troubling decision: Do they want the Presidential contest to be a sprint or a marathon?
In past election cycles, the media has focused its attention on the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, as these two have winnowed out the field and let reporters focus on a handful - not a herd - of contenders. In 2004, Iowa thankfully ended the brief administrations of Presidents-elect Howard Dean and Dick Gephart. Any New Hampshirite will remind you that since they held the first-in-the-nation primary, only two presidents have been elected without winning in their state.
Those two presidents, however, are the last two we've had - George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Even a casual observer might suggest that whatever effect the state may have had on the general election in November may no longer be as powerful as in the past.
Still, a vote is a vote. And for the sake of better ratings, the traditional media’s election year strategy has been to hype the importance of the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primaries, facts-be-damned, to get people to tune in to find out who will be the next president. That's worked in the past when the primary schedule was a bit less front-loaded. This year, if political reporters want to keep their life interesting between February 5 and the late-summer conventions, its in their interest to promote the idea of a marathon-like political campaign.
Indeed the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney seems to want the GOP to battle things out in a brokered convention, writing, “In fact, it is entirely plausible that Mike Huckabee of Arkansas will win the caucuses [in Iowa]; that John McCain of Arizona will win New Hampshire; that Mitt Romney of Massachusetts will win Michigan, Fred Thompson of Tennessee will win South Carolina and Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York will win Florida. In those circumstances, with no obvious front-runner, and with many of the candidates having adequate resources and varying bases of support, they could just divide the prize on Feb. 5 and move on to the next primary.”
While that is entirely possible it is only likely if the candidates themselves believe it. There are plenty of more realistic scenarios.
As much as Mitt Romney craves the trappings of the White House, if he is knocked off by an upstart like Mike Huckabee in both Iowa and New Hampshire, it will be difficult for him to explain to his wife why he should continue to blow the family fortune on TV ad buys and political consultants.
And while a winning Huckabee will get plenty of earned media out of wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, his impoverished campaign will not have the funds to fight in larger media markets. Without an influx of cash, Huckabee will not survive.
John McCain seems to be doing a pretty good impression of John Kerry this year. The once straight-talking Senator is lurking in the shadows of the GOP field just waiting for everyone or anyone else to stumble, making him the Republican candidate of choice. Or is that anti-choice? McCain may have changed his position again this week.
Like Bill Clinton in 1992, Rudy Giuliani will have to rely on the larger, later-voting states to secure the nomination. He is making this plan known to the public now to lower expectations in Iowa and New Hampshire at the same time pushing to get absentee ballots cast in California, Florida and New York, where his message of moderation is more agreeable for voters.
The rest of the Republican field - Fred Thompson, Ron Paul, Duncan Hunter - must rely on an apocalypse among the front-running candidates to have a hope to pick up more than a handful of delegates - not unlike Ohio State and LSU did this year in college football. If they do, and we actually do end up with a brokered convention, one of these minor candidates could become a king maker. But he won't become king - or president.
In politics as in life, neither our greatest fears nor our wildest expectations are likely to come to pass. In the case of the GOP 2008 presidential nominations process, that means that the race won't be decided in early January or in early September, but somewhere in between as the field shakes out after Super-Duper Tuesday on February 5.
And if you’re John McCain or Rudy, Giuliani that’s good news.
In early 2007, it seemed that a Subway Series presidential contest was all but inevitable. New Yorkers Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton had jumped into the Presidential race with sizable leads based on the idea that each was their party’s most electable candidate. But as the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary near, at least one of these candidates is quickly losing ground as he squanders his greatest asset - his electability.
When Rudy Giuliani spoke to the California Republican Party in February 2007, he received standing ovations that weren't given to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger when he spoke the night before. Giuliani’s message was designed to broaden the base of the Grand Old Party. It was a simple and inclusive platform: that America is the land of freedom, and that in order to promote freedom abroad, we should protect freedom at home.
I found that message refreshing, as did many others, and I jumped on the Giuliani bandwagon, proclaiming an urban conservative rennaissance. Unfortunately, the Giuliani campaign seems to have lost sight this great advantages, Through the debate season and now that the primaries are nearing, the candidate is beginning to list right-ward, in an apparent attempt to appeal to conservative values voters. As a result, his lead among GOP voters is failing.
Since he entered the race, Giuliani’s strength has been that he is the best Republican candidate even if he is not the best Republican. Republicans across the country are smart enough to realize that even if he were able to run, President George Bush would not win a third term in 2008 so the party should not nominate someone who is trying to out-do George Bush at being George Bush.
But that is exactly what Republicans will get if they nominate either of the two former governors in the race for the nomination, Mitt Romney (Massachusetts) or Mike Huckabee (Arkansas), both candidates who are less appealing to the electorate at large than a president whose approval ratings are in the twenties. Romney and Huckabee are better Republicans than Rudy Giuliani because they are against abortion, for family values and one even propose quarantining AIDS patients; they are not better Republican candidates because, well, these social issues are not issues that will get someone elected president in 2008.
Although Giuliani’s rightward shift is not nearly as dramatic as that of Mitt Romney, it is causing the same mistrust among voters for both candidates. Voters are asking themselves which candidate they’re getting, the one whose words they hear today, or the one whose deeds that can see in the past.
On immigration, Giuliani has gone from being a mayor who saw the economic benefits of immigrants in his city to one who wouldship ‘em all out if he could. The man who once proudly supported women’s reproductive rights is now saying he’d appoint anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court. And the former mayor who once lived with two drag queens is now preaching that we should love the sinner but hate the sin when it comes to The Gays.
Rudy Giuliani will not out-Republican the other Republican candidates. And if he keeps trying to shift his positions to appeal to core conservative voters, he stands to lose his strongest argument, the core of his political strength. Because he can expand the party’s base beyond fiscal or social conservatives, he's the best Republican presidential candidate - one who can win.
In the Los Angeles of a decade ago, race relations were so charged that the mere accusation of racism was enough to undermine a person’s credibility or send politicians scrambling for the hills. The “race card” was made famous when O.J. Simpson’s lawyers successfully accused Los Angeles police officer Mark Fuhrman of using “the ‘N’ word” thereby undermining his testimony and implying that the officer might have planted evidence against their client.
But Los Angeles - and maybe the nation - has changed for the better in recent years. We might not be a color-blind society, the “race card” is no longer a trump card.
In the last L.A. mayoral election, the white incumbent was seen as the African-Americans’ candidates, the Latino challenger was the darling of the white, liberal Westside near where I live and the African-American former police chief appealed to the sensibilities of conservative Republicans.
That election was perhaps a turning point for the L.A., once shorthand for "simmering racial tension" in recognizing that ideas, not appearances, are what matters in public discourse. Last year, we even had an African American lesbian running for the State Legislature—as a Republican!
If trends started in California are harbingers for the nation, this may well be good news for Democrat Barack Obama, who could become the first minority to win a major party's presidential nomination in the history of the United States.
But it's not just elected politics where cooler heads appear to be prevailing when it comes to the once white hot issue of race. Twice in the last week, the issue of race has tried to creep into the public discourse, only to be shot down vehemently by those tricky things called facts.
On Monday, when UCLA’s Latino athletic director Dan Guerrero fired the Bruin’s African-American football coach Karl Dorrell, the Associated Press immediately brought out Dorrell’s race. Merely by mentioning that, “Dorrell's firing leaves five black coaches at 119 major college programs,” the AP suggested that the color of Dorrell’s skin - and not the 35-27 record of his football teams - had something to do with the decision.
Fortunately, no one with any sense was buying it when it came to Dorrell. Not even the head of the Black Coaches’ Association could muster up a credible argument for why Dorrell shouldn’t have been fired other than to suggest that maybe he could have gotten one more year on the job.
In this case, the race card was a joker, not a trump, just as it is across town, where it is being played under the table in the shadowy deliberations of the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission.
In its negotiations to keep playing its home games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the University of Southern California is having to deal with racial politics. Stymied in attempt to use the Coliseum, USC has entered negotiations with the Rose Bowl to play its games in tony, mostly white, Pasadena, rather than the urban, predominantly black, neighborhood surrounding its campus and the nearby coliseum.
USC is offering to invest $100 million to improve the Coliseum and is asking, in exchange for some control over the facility and access to stage events such as graduation and women's soccer and lacrosse games and to keep the stadium open for international soccer tournaments and similar events. No dice, says the commission whose fiercest opponent, city councilman Bernard Parks, is trying to build a coalition of African-American Coliseum Commissioners to block a deal which would hand the keys over to USC.
Parks' argument? Giving control of the Coliseum over to a private institution would deny access to the facility for the mostly-minority neighboring community. Hogwash. Parks himself has been trying to hand the keys to the coliseum over to a “private institution” - the National Football League - for years.
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Vilolaraigosa - a Latino - saw through the smokescreen and declared the NFL dead to Los Angeles and has taken the lead in working out a deal for USC to stay at the Coliseum. So Parks’ success at demagogueing the issue by pitting mostly white USC against the neighborhood that surrounds the school has yet to be played out.
This isn't just local. When Hillary Clinton’s campaign tried to play the race card against Barack Obama, reminding voters that Obama attended a kindergarten in Indonesia, plotting to be a Muslim-born Manchurian Candidate, her campaign was laughed off the cable talk shows.
As the election progresses into 2008, we will hear old notions of race and gender percolate in the questions voters - and the media - as of the candidates and themselves: Is a woman be mentally stable enough to be President? Is a Mormon a "Christian"? Can a man with a Soprano-sounding last name really not be in the mafia?
The American people will tell us whether they’ve moved beyond identifying candidates with characteristics they cannot control, and instead judge them by the content of their ideas and character. Let’s hope they do.
