Artur Davis: Handicapping the Republican Primary

By my count, six Republicans of differing degrees of stature have passed on running for President. Some of the hesitation is rooted in jitters about entering the national stage prematurely (Pence, Thune, maybe Christie, if he is chemically capable of jitters); some of it is based on a cold assessment that Barack Obama plus a billion dollar war-chest is too high a barrier in the fall, and that playing kingpin in the primaries is an appealing enough way to spend the winter and spring of 2012.

As for the remainders–Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, and Jon Huntsman seem the most serious and the most plausible, with Mitch Daniels and Sarah Palin still keeping their own counsel. I offer four questions to keep in mind for the growing peanut gallery observing this race:

(1)  Can Romney win a nomination when his signature accomplishment is anathema to his party? In the early part of the last decade, when a centrist record seemed essential to winning general elections, Romney’s stewardship of healthcare reform in Massachusetts seemed ideal pre-positioning for an eventual presidential run. Today, “Romneycare” is why a candidate who just raised 10 million dollars in a day, and who leads in the polls, is still so vulnerable. Roughly 80% of Republicans not only oppose the national legislation that copies major portions of Romney’s work, they loathe it and desperately desire its repeal. Romney’s efforts to explain away the comparison are so far a babble and greater scrutiny of his plan will only make matters worse.

Romney’s hope is that electability, the fact that he alone polls within hailing distance of Obama, will outweigh his albatross. His problem is that in primaries, electability is a vessel for blank slates, not candidates with a freight train of positions. Nor is Bill Clinton ‘s “centrist campaign” in 92 much of a model. Clinton’s defense of the death penalty and his then vague promises to revamp welfare were hardly signature issues that year; in contrast, the fate of Obama’s healthcare law will be front and center, especially in the GOP electorate. The hard reality for Romney: Gerald Ford is the last candidate who won a  nomination with his party opposed to major chunks of his record and that did not end well.

(2) Is there a “silent majority” in the Republican Party? Jon Huntsman and to a degree, Mitch Daniels, think there is and that it is very different from the cultural conservative base that the term was coined to describe. The reason that Huntsman conceives that a social moderate who served in the Obama Administration can win, and the reason that Daniels call for a “truce” on abortion and gay rights, is that in their estimation there is a sleeping center in the Republican Party that distrusts the “culture wars”. There is limited circumstantial evidence for the premise: national polls for the better part of a decade have shown unexpected Republican sympathies for abortion rights and gay rights. But primaries and early caucuses contain more than their share of evangelical leaning conservatives who remain embracing of a traditional moral agenda.

The relevance of social issues and the raw ways in which they can be exploited will remain uncertain in this campaign: the power of the “values agenda” is often underrated in polling and is almost always missed in advance (John McCain did not foresee the sewage in South Carolina that derailed him in 2000). This much is true: the number of Republican primary voters who will base their vote on realigning the GOP social agenda toward the center is probably better counted in streets rather than precincts.

(3) Is populism the “values issue” of 2012? What has altered Republican politics in the last two years is the fact that conservative hostility toward Big Government now sweeps in Big Business too. TARP and the “bailout” of Wall Street are as obnoxious to many Republicans as “Obamacare”. It is their natural discomfort with this element of their base and their affinity for the establishment that threatens Romney, Daniels and Huntsman more than the fact they don’t breathe fire over the moral debate. Mike Huckabee was tailor made to capture this populist slice of the Republican electorate and his absence leaves room for Sarah Palin to reemerge. It is entirely plausible that in 2012 identification with populist anger will be an indispensable element in reaching a dominant strain of the Republican electorate.

(4) Can Tim Pawlenty revive the Jimmy Carter/George McGovern strategy of winning nominations? Somewhere in a distant galaxy long ago, unknown candidates won nominations by camping out in a state with an early voting date, winning on the strength of the local ties they built, and sling-shotting their early momentum into larger more expensive states. The model is long broken–modern races have proved too expensive and in some cases the early winners have proved too flawed or too provincial. Pawlenty’s strategy is to put the model back together and to parlay a win in Iowa into Florida, South Carolina and beyond. The field may be suited to Pawlenty’s plans: he is undefined enough to move hard to the right, as Iowa requires, and he is the serious Republican least connected to the Washington/Wall Street brand, which will serve him well as the race moves South.

Just a few observations, with the guarantee that a question can never be wrong.