Explaining McCain's South Carolina Surge

Paul Mirengoff over at Power Line offers his explanation on why McCain's surging ahead in South Carolina:

When I traveled with the McCain campaign in early November, a reporter asked the Senator (who was still polling poorly) how he planned to win the nomination. McCain said he would do it the traditional way, by winning two of the following three early contests -- Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina (he didn't mention Michigan, which may help explain at some level why his message to Republicans in that state was so off-key).

McCain acknowledged that his prospects in Iowa weren't very good, so it became clear he was banking on New Hampshire and South Carolina. Even back then, a McCain victory in New Hampshire seemed quite possible to me, but I wondered how he could reasonably expect to win in South Carolina, an extremely conservative state in which only Republicans can vote. McCain explained that, unlike in 2000, he had secured endorsements from key members of the state's Republican establishment. But with polls showing him barely reaching double digit support and running well behind Romney, Thompson, and (in some polls) Giuliani, this sounded like wishful thinking.

Yet today, McCain is at the front of the pack in every South Carolina poll I've seen, and holds a lead of 8 percentage points over Mike Huckabee (ironically, the only contender not ahead of him in early November) in the RCP average.

What happened?

I don't understand South Carolina politics well enough confidently to provide an answer, but here are a few observations. First, let's examine the question of whether McCain is getting a bounce from New Hampshire or is instead reaping the reward of the same general revival that helped produce New Hampshire. The answer may be "both." Even before the New Hampshire primary, McCain had roughly doubled his level of support in South Carolina from its early November level, moving from roughly 10 to 20 percent. After New Hampshire, he quickly moved to roughly 30 percent, where he is today.

But, of course, this may not all be "bounce." After New Hampshire, McCain basically traded places with Huckabee, and this may have more to do with voter exposure to some of Huckabee's non-conservative positions than with New Hampshire election results. Indeed, it seems odd to suppose that many South Carolina Republicans would take their cue from a mixture of New Hampshire Republicans and Independents. At most, I suspect, the New Hampshire results prompted some to take another look at McCain.

The real question is how McCain is surviving (at least so far) the scrutiny of Republicans in a very conservative state. If McCain couldn't command plurality support from Republicans in Michigan and New Hampshire, how is he commanding it (so far, it appears) in South Carolina. Are Lindsay Graham and company that influential?

It seems to me that McCain is riding quite a bit of luck. First, until very recently his opponents hadn't pointed out to voters McCain's main deviations from conservatism. Second, and this is a related point, Mitt Romney decided that Michigan, not South Carolina, was the place to revive his fortunes. Not only is Romney willing to go after McCain, but he also had the endorsement of South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint. His decision to "go dark" in South Carolina probably helped McCain. Third, Giuliani's decison not to compete in South Carolina means the "moderate" vote won't be split to any meaningful degree.

Finally, McCain doesn't need a big number to win the South Carolina primary. He can lose two out of every three ballots cast and still quite possibly come in first. McCain's stature coupled with the support of the state's political establishment might well be enough to get him to 33 percent (only a little above where he was a year ago during his days as the putative front-runner). Subtract out 12 percent support for Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani combined, and you have three South Carolina-friendly candidates -- two running as traditional conservatives plus one very strong social conservative -- vying for the remaining 55 percent of the vote. That formula would very likely translate into a win for McCain.

UPDATE: As if on cue, I learn, via NRO, that an American Research Group poll poll has McCain in first place at 33 percent. Huckabee is in second, 10 points behind. Huckabee, Romney, and Thompson are dividing 56 percent of the vote.

The ARG poll shows "undecideds" at 3 percent. I suspect, that a significantly larger percentage of South Carolina Republicans actually are undecided.

MORE: Chris Cillizza offers his explanation of why McCain is so well-positioned in South Carolina. He focuses on demographic changes in the state since 2000, and cites election results since then that show a decline in the influence of social conservatives. But the winning candidates in those races -- for example, Jim DeMint who has endorsed Romney-- weren't of McCain's maverick-style political orientation. Thus, I'm not persuaded that the demographic changes explain why McCain seems poised to win.

STOP THE PRESSES: Rasmussen shows a very different race: McCain (24%); Huckabee (24%); (Romney 18%); Thompson (16%); Paul (5%); Giuliani (3%). Rasmussen also finds that "7% of voters have yet to make up their mind, 10% say there’s a good chance they could change their mind, and another 24% might change their mind." The part about voters being undecided or prepared to change their minds seems right to me.

McCain's got the big mo, you think?

Actually, the Rasmussen results are in line with today's survey from McClatchy, which found a McCain-Huckabee dead heat.

Recall earlier I mentioned Romney's win in Michigan would be a setback for Mike Huckabee?

The former Arkansas governor got the message (somehow), as it appears he's pulling out his knives to slash McCain's momentum. The effort includes a nasty round of push-pollling, which Mary Matalin on Sean Hannity's show is calling "beneath" Huckabee's record of integrity (see here and here).

McCain Holding Firm in S.C. Polling

I wrote yesterday on John McCain's lead in South Carolina polling heading into Saturday's primary.

So far, the Arizona Senator's holding firm, according to this afternoon's update to Zogby's South Carolina tracking poll (via Memeorandum):

Arizona Sen. John McCain kept his lead in South Carolina in the second installment of the Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby tracking poll. He is followed by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, just as he was in the survey released yesterday. Their levels of support have remained static, with McCain holding steady at 29% and Huckabee losing just a point to stand at 22%.

There have been shifts lower down, however. Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson has ousted former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney from the number three spot. Romney, who won the Michigan primary Tuesday, dropped a point, from 13% support to 12%, while Thompson jumped two points to 14%.

Also, Texas Congressman Ron Paul has edged ahead of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. But at 5% support, but Paul is ahead just by a fraction of a point. Giuliani, who is focusing his campaign efforts on Florida and who lost a point since yesterday’s tracking poll.

About 10% of likely voters said they were still undecided. The rolling tracking survey was taken between Jan. 14 and Jan. 16. The surveys included 815 interviews with likely voters, which included a margin of error of +/- 3.4 percentage points.

Among Republican voters, McCain gained a point to reach 30% support from his party. Huckabee, however, gained close to four points among Republicans, moving from 20% support to almost 24%. McCain, meanwhile, lost about four points among independent voters, sinking from 33% to 29% support. Huckabee, too, lost support from independents, but just by a point, going from 20% to 19%.

Romney saw his support slip among Republicans, as Thompson gained. Both were at 14% Tuesday, but Romney dropped to 13% while Thompson ticked up to 16%.

Paul, who had dominated among younger voters, lost ground in the 18-29 age group, going from 31% support to 23%. McCain jumped from 6% to 14% with younger voters, and Huckabee picked up four points to reach 32% support with that group. McCain continued to get most support from senior citizens and people aged 50 and over, though he lost a few points with those between 30 and 49. Huckabee’s support among those over 30 remained consistent.

But see also MSNBC, which has the results of a new McClatchy poll with McCain holding a slim lead over Mike Huckabee, a margin that's a statistical tie:

Two days until South Carolina’s GOP primary, John McCain and Mike Huckabee are locked in a virtual tie in that contest, according to a new MSNBC/McClatchy/Mason-Dixon poll.

McCain leads Huckabee by two points, 27%-25%, which is within the survey’s 5% margin of error. They’re followed by Mitt Romney at 15%, Fred Thompson at 13%, Ron Paul at 6%, and Rudy Giuliani at 5%. Eight percent say they’re undecided....

Looking deeper into the poll numbers, the McCain-Huckabee race in South Carolina shows a striking split between voters who think that leadership and strength are the most important qualities they’re looking for in a presidential candidate, and those who believe that sharing their values is the top quality.

Among the 43% of likely GOP primary voters who cite strength and leadership, 33% chose McCain -- compared with 19% for Romney and 17% for Huckabee. But among the 39% who say values, 37% picked Huckabee -- versus 19% who selected Thompson, 15% who went with Romney, and 12% who said McCain.

In addition, respondents who identified themselves as born-again Christians pick Huckabee over McCain, 33%-20%. Among those who aren’t born again, the split is McCain 39%, Huckabee 11%. Self-described born-again Christians made up 62% of the Republican sample.

Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Mitt Romney - just two days after his "big" win in Michigan - has quit South Carolina to focus his campaign on the Nevada Republican caucuses, also scheduled for Saturday. (Note that some reports have Romney hedging his decision to cede the state, going ahead with a big ad buy to flood South Carolina's media markets).

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani's late-entry, Florida launching pad strategy - which I've characterized as foolish - is raising troubling questions back home.

I'm doubting the Giuliani's going to benefit much from the failure of a clear frontrunner to emerge. Perhaps something miraculous will happen...

Antiwar Groups Admit Defeat on Iraq

I've noted it many times on this page, but check out Ryan Grim's article over at The Politico, highlighting the utter collapse of the antiwar effort on Iraq (via Memeorandum):

After a series of legislative defeats in 2007 that saw the year end with more U.S. troops in Iraq than when it began, a coalition of anti-war groups is backing away from its multimillion-dollar drive to cut funding for the war and force Congress to pass timelines for bringing U.S. troops home.

In recognition of hard political reality, the groups instead will lower their sights and push for legislation to prevent President Bush from entering into a long-term agreement with the Iraqi government that could keep significant numbers of troops in Iraq for years to come.

The groups believe this switch in strategy can draw contrasts with Republicans that will help Democrats gain ground in November and bring the votes to pass more dramatic measures. But it is a long way from the early months of 2007, when Democrats were freshly in power and momentum for a dramatic shift in Iraq policy seemed overpowering.

“There was a consensus that last year was not productive,” John Isaacs, executive director of Council for a Livable World, said of a meeting attended by a coalition of anti-war groups last week. “Our expectations were dashed.”

Read the whole thing.

See also, "Poll Shows More Public Backing on Iraq," "President Bush Surging at End of Tenure," "Democratic Finger-Pointing ," "John Murtha's Cut-and-Run Turnaround," and "Democrats Can't Get Things Right on Iraq."

Urban Schools Do College Prep

I'm glad to see, via today's New York Times, the push for more college preparation among educators in urban high schools:

At Excel High School, in South Boston, teachers do not just prepare students academically for the SAT; they take them on practice walks to the building where the SAT will be given so they won’t get lost on the day of the test.

In Chattanooga, Tenn., the schools have abolished their multitrack curriculum, which pointed only a fraction of students toward college. Every student is now on a college track.

And in the Washington suburb of Prince George’s County, Md., the school district is arranging college tours for students as early as seventh grade, and adding eight core Advanced Placement classes to every high school, including some schools that had none.

Those efforts, and others across the country, reflect a growing sense of urgency among educators that the primary goal of many large high schools serving low-income and urban populations — to move students toward graduation — is no longer enough. Now, educators say, even as they struggle to lift dismal high school graduation rates, they must also prepare the students for college, or some form of post-secondary school training, with the skills to succeed.

In affluent suburbs, where college admission is an obsession, some educators worry that high schools, with their rigorous college preparatory curriculums, have become too academically demanding in recent years.

By contrast, many urban and low-income districts, which also serve many immigrants, are experimenting with ways to teach more than the basic skills so that their students can not only get to college, but earn college degrees. Some states have begun to strengthen their graduation requirements....

Although federal studies show that most students yearn for a college degree, each year tens of thousands will not even make it through high school. In New York City, for example, roughly half the students complete high school though the new small high schools have shown substantial improvement in graduation rates.

Of the 68 percent of high school students nationwide who go to college each year, about a third will need remedial courses, experts say. For various reasons, from financial to a lack of academic preparedness, thousands of low-income students drop out of college each year.

Fewer than 18 percent of African-Americans and just 11 percent of Hispanics earn a bachelor’s degree, compared with almost a third of whites, ages 25 to 29, experts say. Of families making less than $25,000 a year, 19 percent complete an associate degree or higher, compared with 76 percent of families earning $76,000 per year or more.

The innovations range from creating high schools that offer an opportunity to take college courses for credit, to devoting senior English classes to writing college application essays, and holding parties to celebrate students who complete them. New York City has a $10 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation to develop extensive college counseling and connections with higher education institutions at 70 small high schools and three redesigned large ones.

Although affluent suburban schools have been increasing academic rigor in recent years, many large urban schools have been organized around the same low academic expectations for nearly three decades, experts say. When these schools opened their doors about a hundred years ago, relatively few teenagers even went to high school, education historians say. Enrollment in high school was not universal until the end of the 1950s.

By the 1970s, academic standards were being lowered to make it easier to move large numbers students of different abilities toward the diploma that was considered sufficient education for most, the historians say.

Today, however, some states are putting in place more rigorous high school exit exams, and students understand that a diploma no longer provides entry to the middle class. Over the past two decades, the percentage of low-income students who say they want a four-year degree or higher has tripled, rising to 66.2 percent in 2002, from 19.4 percent in 1980, according to federal statistics. And parents are stoking their children’s hopes.

As a community college professor, I see first hand the challenges of students who've not been considered "college material," or those without a family background of educational attainment.

Still, I'm blown away when I read the reports on the crisis in high school graduation rates.

The Los Angeles Times had a troubling story last year on the urban high school crisis, "The Vanishing Class," which notes, "For many, the traditional U.S. education system is a dead end."

Leftist Hatemongers

Arthur Brooks argues that hard-left ideologues are less tolerant than those on the right, at the Wall Street Journal:

A politically progressive friend of mine always seemed to root against baseball teams from the South. The Braves, the Rangers, the Astros -- he hated them all. I asked him why, to which he replied, "Southerners are prejudiced."

The same logic is evident in the complaint the American political left has with conservative voters. According to the political analysis of filmmaker Michael Moore, whose perception of irony apparently does not extend to his own words, "The right wing, that is not where America's at . . . It's just a small minority of people who hate. They hate. They exist in the politics of hate . . . They are hate-triots."

What about liberals? According to University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, "Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others." They also "believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference." Indeed, generations of academic scholars have assumed that the "natural personality" of political conservatives is characterized by hostile intolerance towards those with opposing viewpoints and lifestyles, while political liberals inherently embrace diversity.

As we are dragged through another election season, it is worth critically reviewing these stereotypes. Do the data support the claim that conservatives are haters, while liberals are tolerant of others? A handy way to answer this question is with what political analysts call "feeling thermometers," in which people are asked on a survey to rate others on a scale of 0-100. A zero is complete hatred, while 100 means adoration. In general, when presented with people or groups about which they have neutral feelings, respondents give temperatures of about 70. Forty is a cold temperature, and 20 is absolutely freezing.

In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" did have a fairly low opinion of liberals -- they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are "extremely conservative" or "extremely liberal," the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.

Some might argue that this is simply a reflection of the current political climate, which is influenced by strong feelings about the current occupants of the White House. And sure enough, those on the extreme left give President Bush an average temperature of 15 and Vice President Cheney a 16. Sixty percent of this group gives both men the absolute lowest score: zero.

To put this into perspective, note that even Saddam Hussein (when he was still among the living) got an average score of eight from Americans. The data tell us that, for six in ten on the hard left in America today, literally nobody in the entire world can be worse than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

This doesn't sound very tolerant to me -- nor especially rational, for that matter.

Well, exactly, it's not rational. Many of those who populate the hard-left (bloggers, TV commentators, etc.) are extremely intolerant and resistant to debate.

I see it all the time (my previous post touches on this a bit, with my discussion of Hamsher's Henchmen). I'm glad that Brooks provides some nifty data analysis to back up the point.

See also Memeorandum.

The Reagan Legacy in Campaign '08

Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake tried to take President Ronald Reagan down a notch or two yesterday:

No, Ronald Reagan didn't appeal to people's optimism, he appealed to their petty, small minded bigotry and selfishness. Jimmy Carter told people to tighten their energy belts and act for the good of the country; Ronald Reagan told them they could guzzle gas with impunity and do whatever the hell they wanted. He kicked off his 1980 campaign talking about "state's rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi -- the site of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964's Freedom Summer. He thus put up a welcome sign for "Reagan Democrats," peeling off white voters who were unhappy with the multi-ethnic coalition within the Democratic Party.

One of his first acts was to fire 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 -- one of the most devastating union busting moves of the past century. And his vision of deregulation didn't free the country up for entrepreneurship, it opened it up for the wholesale thievery of the savings & loan crisis. He popularized the notion that all government is bad government and in eight short years put in place the architecture for decades of GOP graft and corruption.

There's enough hagiography of Reagan on the right, I don't think Democrats really need to go there.

Hamsher means Barack Obama doesn't need to go there. Obama speaks of Ronald Reagan tapping into a widescale span of national discontent, a reservoir of demand for change. Hamsher's repsponse, to me, illustrates, the fundamental irrationality of many on the left. Obama's not endorsing Reagan's policies; he recognizing his ability to generate a movement.

Perhaps there's some self-reflection there, for Obama - unlike any other candidate in the race this year - has captured this season's underlying dynamic of change. He represents a break from the past - he's an agent for the new.

Andrew Sullivan in his cover story at Altlantic last month put it forcefully:

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in....

Read Sullivan's essay in full; he's a gifted political analyst.

But back to the issue at hand: What is it with Hamsher? The political strategy of the radical screechers at FireDogLake is political demonization.

Why should President Reagan's legacy be safe? At the time, Reagan was despised by the African-American community for dramatically cutting domestic programs - like welfare - geared to that constiuency. He was also reviled by peace activists for his staunch anti-Communism, his vigorous support of U.S. strategic supremacy, his unflinching promotion of American values abroad, and especially his backing of anti-Communist insurgencies in the Third World.

Victor David Hanson discusses Reagan today in an essay at Real Clear Politics:

Ronald Reagan's presidency was a great success. He rebuilt a chaotic U.S. military and helped end the Cold War. Reagan's radical tax cuts in 1981 spurred economic growth and redefined the relationship between U.S. citizens and their government. And he appointed conservative federal judges and bureaucrats who tried to roll back the half-century trend of expanded governmental control over our lives.

Reagan's nice-guy charm made it difficult for even his critics to stay angry with him for long. But he was no mere smiling dunce, as liberal intellectuals used to snicker. His private papers and diaries instead reveal that he was widely informed, read voraciously, drew on a powerful intellect and was an effective writer.

It is no wonder that conservative leaders - especially the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls - now constantly evoke Ronald Reagan's successful presidency. In contrast, they rarely hearken back to the uprightness of the one-term Gerald Ford, or praise the foreign-policy accomplishments of the two Bush Republican presidencies.

Instead, the candidates try to "out-Reagan" each other by claiming they alone are the true Reaganites while their rivals in the primaries are too liberal, flip-floppers or without consistent conservative principles.

In short, Ronald Reagan has been beatified into some sort of saint, as if he were above the petty lapses and contradictions of today's candidates. The result is that conservatives are losing sight of Reagan the man while placing unrealistic requirements of perfection on his would-be successors.

Hanson goes on to note that all the GOP candidates are tripping over each other to grasp the mantle of the Reagan legacy. But Reagan made mistakes, and Hanson wants to remember both the good and bad.

That's a reasonable way to look at the Reagan record - much more reasonable, in fact, compared to the demonization project over at FDL.

**********

UPDATE: It turns out Obama's comments on Reagan pissed off more lefties than Hamsher's Henchmen.

Matt Stoller at Open Left had this to say about Obama:

There are many reason progressives should admire Ronald Reagan, politically speaking. He realigned the country around his vision, he brought into power a new movement that created conservative change, and he was an extremely skilled politician. But that is not why Obama admires Reagan. Obama admires Reagan because he agrees with Reagan's basic frame that the 1960s and 1970s were full of 'excesses' and that government had grown large and unaccountable.

Those excesses, of course, were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement. The libertarian anti-government ideology of an unaccountable large liberal government was designed by ideological conservatives to take advantage of the backlash against these 'excesses'.

It is extremely disturbing to hear, not that Obama admires Reagan, but why he does so. Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship, but but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power. Lots of people don't agree with this, of course, since it doesn't fit a coherent narrative of GOP ascendancy. Masking Reagan's true political underpinning principles is a central goal of the conservative movement, with someone as powerful as Grover Norquist seeking to put Reagan's name on as many monuments as possible and the Republican candidates themselves using Reagan's name instead of George Bush's in GOP debates as a mark of greatness. Why would the conservative movement create such idolatry around Reagan? Is is because they just want to honor a great man? Perhaps that is some of it. Or are they trying to escape the legacy of the conservative movement so that it can be rebuilt in a few years, as they did after Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I?

Actually, a lot of people don't agree with this attack because it's a bunch of left-wing baloney.

The fact is that President Reagan and the GOP capitalized on a social backlash against the extremes of left-wing policies on race, right, and taxes, and the Democratic Party's descent into unbridled indenty politics, anti-merit preferences, and big government largesse.

See Thomas Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics.

Barack Obama's not only dissed by the old-line civil rights community as "inauthentically black," but the hard-left doesn't like his moderate approach to transcending the pathologies of Democratic Party ideology.

See more at Memeorandum.

The Honor of John McCain

Roger Cohen, over at the New York Times, thinks John McCain's too conservative, and wouldn't support him for the presidency! Here's the introduction:

Nobody’s been right all the time on Iraq, but Senator John McCain has been less wrong than most. He knew a bungled war when he saw one and pressed early for increased force levels. He backed the injection last year of some 30,000 troops, a surge that has produced results.

Modest results, yes, and violence has blipped upward again this month, and, yes, Iraqi political progress is slow. But progress is always slow when a population terrorized over decades is freed. Violent attacks were down 60 percent in December from their 2007 high and refugees have begun to go home.

A trickle homeward, yes, a speck in the ocean of 2.2 million Iraqis forced into exile, but tens of thousands of people don’t return unless they see hope. That’s why more than 4 million Afghans have gone home since the Taliban’s fall.

Yes, I know, the myriad Iraqi dead won’t return.

McCain was politically dead six months ago, his campaign undone by his backing of President Bush’s Iraq policy. His remarkable resurgence, which has put him in the lead among Republican candidates, according to recent polls, is one measure of the Iraq shift.

That shift has unsettled the political ground. With Iraq looking less hopeless, McCain has scored points for being consistent and forthright on the war — a quality shared only by Barack Obama (in his opposition to it) among leading candidates.

At the same time, an economy getting a subprime pummeling has nudged Iraq from the center of Americans’ concerns. The victory of McCain’s rival Mitt Romney in the Michigan primary came in a state craving quick fixes for 7.4 percent unemployment. McCain didn’t offer that.

So, three states have chosen distinct Republican candidates, with a social conservative, Mike Huckabee, triumphing in Iowa; McCain taking New Hampshire with independent support; and Romney using his C.E.O. image to win Michigan. Bush’s party is split: God, heroic nation and Wall Street are out of sync.

It’s been widely assumed that the Democratic Party’s shoot-itself-in-the-foot capacity, evident in 2004, would have to hit overdrive to wrest defeat from victory this year. These Republican splits comfort the notion of inevitable Democratic triumph.

But, as Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute noted, “There’s no doubt that the one Republican candidate that leaves most Democrats quaking is McCain. They’re uneasy about the breadth of his appeal.”

Read the whole thing.

Not too many folks think the Arizona Senator's too conservative (see the point at Cohen's conclusion). There's no doubt, though, that McCain's honor is unimpeachable; and I don't think there's another candidate in the race - on either side of the aisle - who's more prepared to be chief executive.

The man's stubborn, and it showed in his inflexible message in this week's Michigan campaigning. But we could use more straight talk in the country, on economic issues and beyond, and such leadership starts at the top.

The Democrats know it, and so do McCain's GOP rivals. It's no surprise that a McCain-swiftboating campaign's already begun down South. The stakes are high, and there's no room for pussy-footing around, but McCain's rapid reaction team is already on the job.

On to South Carolina!

Will the GOP Race Go to the Convention?

The dramatic GOP presidential race - which has so far failed to produce a clear frontrunner - has raised a good deal of speculation that we might see a brokered convention in 2008.

Why?

The party is divided among its three wings: the anti-taxers, the evangelicals, and the foreign policy hawks. No single candidate has so far been able to unify these disparate factions.

Adam Nagourny, over at today's New York Times, argues that Republicans have failed to restore the voting coalition that propelled Ronald Reagan's two terms in Washington. Mitt Romney's win in Michigan yesterday dramatically illustrates the point:

On the most tangible level, the vote on Tuesday was proof from the ballot box of what polls have shown: this is a party that is adrift, deeply divided and uninspired when it comes to its presidential candidates and unsure of how to counter an energized Democratic Party.

Even in victory, Mr. Romney stood as evidence of the trouble the party finds itself in. He won, but only after a major effort in a state he once expected to win in a walk. That was before he lost Iowa and New Hampshire, two other states where he had campaigned all out.

More than any candidate in the Republican field, Mr. Romney has made a conscious effort to reassemble the coalition of economic and social conservatives that came together with Ronald Reagan and that President Bush kept remarkably unified in his two campaigns and through much of his White House tenure.

Mr. Romney’s uneven performance has highlighted the strains in that coalition, and a central question about his candidacy is whether he will be able to rally its fractured components to his side. It was no coincidence that he invoked Reagan more than once in his victory speech on Tuesday, though it was perhaps equally telling that he also invoked the first President Bush, who like Mr. Romney struggled to convince Republicans that he was Reagan’s rightful heir.

It's still too early to tell whether Romney's the man to unite the fragments of the Republican Party coalition. A second win for either Mike Huckabee or John McCain in Saturday's South Carolina primary might clarify the race a bit, but it's probably going to be February 5 - and the 22 contests showcasing then - when we'll know whether we're headed for a backroom showdown in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Ruth Marcus at today's Washington Post addresses the prospects of a brokered convention this year for both parties. While Marcus mostly discusses the dynamics on the Democratic side - where there is greater proportional representation in delegate selection, and the superdelegates might decide the race before summer - the chances for a real decision-making convention on the Republican side look even greater.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

Following the 1968 election, when Hubert Humphrey secured the Democratic nomination without entering the primaries, the McGovern-Fraser Commission created the modern presidential primary process, which required candidates to win a majority of convention delegates in state caucuses and primaries.

The Democrats have not chosen a nominee at the convention since then (although the GOP selected Gerald Ford over Ronald Reagan in 1976 on the first ballot, the last time in the post-1968 era that a nominee of either party was selected after the primaries).

Jay Cost, over at Real Clear Politics, provides an analysis of the delegate selection process for this year's Republican National Convention. It's not too early to begin political horse trading.

Neoconservatism: The Right Side of History

Jacob Heilbrunn's They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons is out this week.

I'm on my way in a couple of minutes to pick up a copy, but I thought I'd share Peter Wehner's review of the book over at the New York Post.

Unlike Timothy Noah's review at the New York Times, Wehner defends the neoconservative record (and provides a counterbalance to what he sees is Heilbrunn's "animus"):

The author is forced to acknowledge that neoconservatives were right about a few things - like understanding early on that the Soviet Union and jihadism were genuine causes for concern. But, he quickly adds, even the proverbial stopped watch is right twice a day.

This is silliness. To have been right before it was fashionable about the nature and threat of Soviet Communism and militant Islam are deeply impressive achievements. Moreover, neoconservatism has correctly critiqued and offered remedies for many domestic ills. Neoconservatism is an imperfect movement comprised of people of sometimes different and competing views, but it has certainly enriched and deepened our public life.

Heilbrunn believes the Iraq war will return neoconservatives to exile since they were the primary advocates for the war, which to him has been a colossal failure. The bad news for Heilbrunn's book (and the good news for America and Iraq) is that 2007 was a year of remarkable improvement in Iraq, thanks to the counterinsurgency strategy. We have seen often staggering progress, on many key fronts.

Heilbrunn can also be sloppy. He writes that in the aftermath of the failure to find WMDs, President Bush “suddenly veered to embracing the democracy crusade" in his second inaugural (delivered in January 2005). Yet Heilbrunn cites President Bush's November 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, in which Bush said, “Iraqi democracy will succeed and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran, that freedom can be the future of every nation." The truth is that President Bush promoted the Freedom Agenda before the Iraq war began.

Heilbrunn also asserts that neoconservatives like William Kristol, in an effort to deflect criticism for their role in the Iraq war, turned on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on precisely Dec. 14, 2004, in a Washington Post op-ed. Except that Kristol and Robert Kagan were critical of Rumsfeld and his strategy as early as the summer of 2003, writing “[i]t is painfully obvious that there are too few American troops operating in Iraq." The success of the surge is vindication for Kristol and Kagan. They, like Sen. John McCain, were right in their concerns - and Iraq would be in far better shape today had we heeded their early counsel.

Woo hoo, go McCain!

Also, check out today's essay from the New York Times' public editor, who defends the paper's decision to hire Kristol as a columnist.

Kristol pointed out Monday that the Democrats - in their predictions on the war - were wrong throughout 2007.

McCain Holds Edge in South Carolina

John McCain holds a lead in South Carolina, two new public opinion surveys out this week show.

Zogby finds McCain leading 29 to 23 percent over Mike Huckabee (via Memeorandum):

New York – Arizona Sen. John McCain is the leader in the South Carolina Republican primary race with 29% support, a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby tracking poll shows. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is a strong second with 23%, and Mitt Romney is a distant third with 13%. The Republican primary election is Saturday. Democrats hold their primary in South Carolina a week later on Jan. 26.

Romney, however, is coming off a handy victory in Tuesday’s Michigan primary, defeating McCain, who had hoped to repeat his 2000 win in that state and continue the momentum generated from his New Hampshire victory.

The interviews of South Carolina likely Republican primary voters included in this report were completed before the Michigan GOP results were in. The survey including 813 interviews with likely Republican primary voters conducted Jan. 13-15, 2007. It carries a margin of error of +/- 3.4 percentage points. The daily tracking poll will continue up until the election.

The survey shows Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson at 12%, just a point behind Romney. Only 5% said they liked former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, while 10% said they were still undecided.

Additionally, Ramussen on Monday had McCain up 9 percentage points over Huckabee:

Over the past several days, the only real movement in South Carolina’s Republican Presidential Primary has been a four-point gain for Fred Thompson and a five-point decline for Mike Huckabee.

The big winner from that trade-off is John McCain.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows McCain at 28%, Huckabee at 19%, Mitt Romney at 17%, and Fred Thompson at 16%. Rudy Giuliani and Ron Paul are tied with 5% support. Giuliani is betting his entire campaign on a strong showing in Florida, where he is now tied for the lead with three others.

The current results show McCain getting some breathing room in South Carolina. The previous South Carolina poll, conducted the night after McCain’s victory in New Hampshire, had McCain at 27% and Huckabee at 24%. Before the New Hampshire vote, Huckabee was leading McCain by seven points. McCain and Huckabee are pulling away from the field nationally in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.

Thompson has been directly challenging Huckabee on the campaign trail and hoping to gain some traction that will keep his campaign afloat. Earlier this year, Thompson had hoped to exploit dissatisfaction with the rest of the field and emerge as the choice for conservatives. When his campaign failed to take off, Huckabee saw the same opening and capitalized on it in a way Thompson did not. As recently as November, Thompson was tied for the lead in South Carolina.

The race remains very fluid with 8% of voters undecided and 11% saying there’s a good chance they could change their mind.

The Zogby results are especially interesting in showing McCain gaining Republican across the state (and not only the coastal regions where he ran strongly in 2000).

Note that both surveys were conducted before Romney's Michigan win, who's likely to get a bump this week - although he'd need a lot of upward movement to dislodge either McCain or Huckabee.

Big, Bruising Week Ahead for GOP in South Carolina

The Michigan primary results have left the GOP still scrambling to settle on a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.

With the first Southern primary scheduled on Saturday, all eyes are turning to the Palmetto State for some relief from the suspense. The New York Times has an analysis:

Fresh from a commanding primary victory in Michigan, Mitt Romney’s campaign rolled into South Carolina Wednesday morning, declaring he was committed to fighting hard in the state’s crowded Republican contest.

There had been some question about whether Mr. Romney would even compete here — a matter his advisers debated over the last few days — given how influential evangelicals are in the state’s Republican’s primary and the suspicions many harbor about Mr. Romney’s Mormon faith. Aides for Mr. Romney, who won Michigan on Tuesday night with nearly 40 percent of the vote, said he was now committed to “playing hard” in the Palmetto State.

The rest of the Republican field meanwhile had its sights on South Carolina already. On Wednesday, Senator John McCain of Arizona, who leads in the polls there, immediately began a sprint to the vote on Saturday, and picked up a key endorsement along the way. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who has a reputation as a voice for fiscal discipline, announced his endorsement of Mr. McCain in Greenville on Wednesday afternoon.

Mr. Coburn called Mr. McCain a man “whose rudder is deep, whose principles are sound, and who has been tested, time and time again,” adding, “Our children are worth John McCain.”

Mr. McCain, for his part, pledged to crack down on pork barrel spending and to keep up a strong military, and he talked about his opposition to abortion, a big issue in South Carolina. “I’m proud of my pro-life record of 24 years in the United States Congress,” he said.

From there, Mr. McCain is expected to travel to Spartanburg and Lake Wylie. Mr. McCain is hoping to appeal to the many veterans in South Carolina and to military families with relatives serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also looking to sharpen his talk about the economy.

The campaign is dispatching Senator Joseph Lieberman to campaign for Mr. McCain in Florida, where Rudolph W. Giuliani has camped out to try to lock down support while the rest of the field has been competing in Michigan and South Carolina.

After losing on Tuesday night, Mike Huckabee and Mr. McCain each need a victory in South Carolina to keep their momentum from flagging. Mr. Romney finished with 38.9 percent of the vote, compared with 29.7 percent for Mr. McCain and 16.1 percent for Mr. Huckabee. Ron Paul, the antiwar congressman from Texas, came in fourth with 6.3 percent of the vote.

The outcome on Tuesday means three different Republican candidates have won each of the first three major contests. The race also moves to Nevada this weekend with no clear front-runner and two credible candidates, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and former Senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee, yet to seriously contest a state.

Thompson supporters this morning are bearing the ignominy of their candidate losing to Ron Paul in Michigan.

Meanwhile, Giuliani's completely off the radar, and doubts are swirling that he can pull anything off in Florida:

Florida is crucial to his strategy, and a win in the Jan. 29 primary would give Giuliani momentum going into the Super Tuesday contests on Feb. 5. His campaign recently unveiled several new ads here and has moved dozens of staffers and volunteers into the state to help with absentee balloting.

South Carolina's pretty much coming down to Huckabee and McCain. The state's obviously key for both candidates, as the momentum from their respective wins in Iowa and New Hampshire fades.

Polling data shows McCain edging the former Arkansas governer by a couple points.

McCain's flirted with permanent frontrunner status going into Michigan, and some sectors of the GOP coalition are trying stem the Arizona Sentor's advance. In South Carolina a vicious attack advertisement has surfaced hammering McCain's integrity during his internment as a POW in Vietnam (see here and here).

Some analysts are dissecting the Michigan results for evidence of a McCain collapse, as well as the potential for the lower-tiered candidates to pull together and "take McCain out."

That might be wishful thinking, according to Fred Barnes:

...McCain's loss in Michigan--a stage on which he trounced George W. Bush in 2000--is hardly fatal. Nor does victory make Romney the frontrunner. Not that he'd want to be so dubbed. Winning improves a candidate's poll numbers, but actual voters don't appear to be affected. They don't swoon. Momentum? Winning hasn't generated much of that in 2008.

This means Romney shouldn't expect a serious bump in South Carolina, which holds its primary on Saturday. In fact, he doesn't. Instead, Romney intends to concentrate on winning the Florida primary10 days later on January 29. However, if he doesn't finish in the top three in South Carolina--that's a distinct possibility--the press will surely gig him for it.

In case you hadn't noticed, the media loathes Romney and likes McCain. Reporters think Romney is a stiff and a phony. They give McCain credit for straight talk, though not as much credit as they gave him in 2000.

Anyway, this allows McCain to call reporters "jerks" and other playful names. They know he's joking. On Fox News yesterday, McCain said he needs not only "Republican, Democratic, libertarian, vegetarian" votes, but also "Trotskyites. I know there's still Trotskyites around because I travel with the media on the bus."

If Romney had said that, the press would have pilloried him.

I'll have more analysis this afternoon. See Memeorandum in the meanwhile.

The Democrats and Martin Luther King

John McWhorter's got an analysis of Hillary Clinton's roiling of the racial waters with her dismissal of Martin Luther King's significance, at the Wall Street Journal.

Clinton commented that in fact President Lyndon Baines Johnson bears primary responsibility for the rights revolution of the 1960s, for his leadership in shepherding Civil Rights legislation through the Congress. By implication, a strong leader in the White House - assumably Clinton - is preferable to a grassroots activist - Barack Obama.

What's the problem? Here's McWhorter:

Why do people like op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn and countless black bloggers hear a grievous insult in her simple observation? The outcry is so disproportionate to the stimulus that one can barely help suspecting something outright irregular.

I think of a study published last year in the Journal of Black Psychology. It documented that the extent to which black Americans perceive their lives to be affected by racism correlates with symptoms of general paranoia disconnected from racial issues.

To be able to hold in one's mind the notion that Mrs. Clinton would attack King suggests a bone-deep hypersensitivity that overrides sequential reasoning. "We have to be very, very careful how we speak about that era," Rep. Clyburn explains.

But why so very, very careful? What effect does it have on anyone's life if that era is occasionally discussed in less than perfectly genuflective phraseology? Is the Klan waiting behind a hill? Will a black man working at an insurance company in Cleveland have a breakdown because someone didn't give King precisely enough credit in a quick statement?

There is a willful frailty, a lack of self-confidence, in this kind of thinking. It suggests someone almost searching for things to claim injury about, donning the mantle of the noble victim in order to assuage a bruised ego.

Of course, there is a less depressing interpretation of the current uproar: Mrs. Clinton's critics are playing political hardball. You know, let's get blacks to vote for Mr. Obama by playing the race card to pretend Mrs. Clinton is dumping on King. John Edwards, for example, is obviously not mouthing agreement with these people out of insecurity about his blackness.

Well, politics is rarely pretty, but in this case the price is too high. For one, misinterpretation of statements in this vein makes black people look disinclined to process detail and context -- in other words, dim. It only gives that much more fodder to views on black intelligence like those uttered by James Watson.

Think, for example, how utterly unreal the notion is that Bill Clinton, our "first black president," would call Mr. Obama's whole candidacy a "fairytale" rather than referring, specifically, to perceptions of his record on the Iraq war. It's as if the outraged crowd is only capable of processing seven words at a time.

In an election that is supposed to focus on larger issues such as America's role in a violent world, playing the race card in this fashion distracts us from real problems. When most new AIDS cases are black and the murder rate among young black males is sky high, what kind of black representative throws tantrums over extremely unlikely implications of something someone said?

In the name of speaking for Mr. Obama, the people throwing these tantrums are presenting a parochial, cynical face, rather than the thoughtful, cosmopolitan one that the candidate himself is trying to show.

Overall, Mr. Obama has not run a "black" campaign. The past few days suggest that if he did, many would consider it a favor to him to churn up 10 more months of dustups over phrases carefully lifted out of context and held up as evidence of racism. Hopefully Mr. Obama is too smart, and too much a man of the world, to succumb to this twisted rendition of black identity.

Obama's so far above such pedestrian race politics. Still, he'd better get ready for more attacks ahead. The Clintons will use their race authenticity to provide cover for subtely insidious race-based attacks on Obama's "blackness," credibility, and integrity.

The buzz is that the Democrats are pulling back from the racial brink, but when push comes to shove things could still get nasty.

See more analysis at Memeorandum.

Romney Wins Michigan Primary!

Mitt Romney secured his first primary victory in 2008's topsy-turvy race for the GOP nomination. The New York Times reports:

Mitt Romney, seizing on his personal ties to a state where his father made his family’s political fortune, captured a must-win victory in the Michigan primary on Tuesday, claiming the first major trophy for his ailing campaign and throwing the wide-open Republican field into further disarray.

Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, led Senator John McCain by 9 percentage points. Former Gov. Mike Huckabee, the winner of the Iowa caucus, conceded after polling at 17 percent of the vote.

In the Democratic race with 14 percent of precincts reporting, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won by a commanding margin in a field that did not include her closest competitors, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and John Edwards. However, about a third of voters in the Democratic primary opted to allow the party to choose uncommitted delegates to the national convention, effectively a vote against Ms. Clinton.

“It’s a victory of optimism over Washington-style pessimism,” Mr. Romney told The Associated Press. “The people of Michigan said they believe in someone who is going to fight for them.”

Mr. Romney’s victory guarantees a headache for political watchdogs as the competitive Republican field heads to South Carolina for its Saturday primary. Mr. Romney, Mr. McCain and Mr. Huckabee have each won a major primary or caucus, leaving the party without a clear frontrunner.

Another top Republican, former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, is putting most of his immediate efforts into Florida, which will hold its primary on Jan. 29.

Mr. McCain, of Arizona, conceded the Michigan race, but he told supporters in South Carolina that he would not be deterred in his campaign.

“Starting tomorrow, we’re going to win South Carolina, and we’re going to go on and win the nomination," Mr. McCain said.

Mr. Huckabee has also flown to South Carolina, a state he is looking to win with support from his evangelical base.

Mr. Romney, who was born and raised in Michigan, used his final campaign appearances to remind voters of his personal ties to the state, where his father served three terms as governor. He promised, if elected president, to “not rest” until the state’s battered economic fortunes have been restored.

The message appeared to resonate with Republican voters, more than half of whom said in exit polls that their vote was driven by overwhelming economic concerns. A majority of those polled after they voted said a candidate’s position on the economy was more important than the war in Iraq, illegal immigration or terrorism. The exit poll was conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the television networks and the Associated Press.

Early reports of sluggish voter turnout may also have helped Mr. Romney’s cause. Freezing temperatures, an early morning snowfall, and a dearth of Democratic contenders on the ballot may have affected turnout, according to a state official.

It appeared from early returns that much of Mr. Romney’s support came from the three-county Detroit metropolitan area, home of many well-off Republicans and where the Romney name is better known from his father, George, being governor of Michigan from 1963 to 1969.

Surveys of Michigan voters leaving the polls on Tuesday also showed that Mr. Romney did well among those who decided in the last day or two, validating his strategy of saturating the state with advertising and personal appearances over the last five days. Mr. Romney aired almost twice as many television ads as his two leading opponents combined.

In exit polls, more than half of Republican voters in Michigan said their vote was driven by overwhelming economic concerns. A majority of those polled after they voted said a candidate’s position on the economy was more important than the war in Iraq, illegal immigration or terrorism. The exit poll was conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the television networks and the Associated Press.

While the voters said a candidate’s position on the issues was more important than a candidate’s personal qualities, more than 4 in 10 voters said it was more important to them that a candidate share their values than be able to win in November against a Democrat or have the right experience.

About a quarter of the voters said it mattered a great deal to them that a candidate shared their religious beliefs.

On the issues of abortion, about 10 percent of Republican voters said it should be legal in all cases, 25 percent said abortion should be legal in most cases, about 35 percent said it should be illegal in most cases and about 25 percent said abortion should be illegal in all cases.

A plurality of voters said immigrants should be deported to the country they came from rather than be allowed to stay as temporary workers or offered a chance to apply for citizenship.

A majority of voters approve of the war in Iraq. When asked to describe their feelings about the Bush administration, they were closely divided.

Michigan’s primary occurred much earlier than usual this year, and many residents interviewed over the past few days said they were not even aware there was an election on Tuesday. Mrs. Clinton is expected to lead the pack on the Democratic side because she was the only major candidate whose name is on the ballot. Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards withdrew their names at the request of the national Democratic Party, which stripped Michigan of its delegates because the early date of its primary violated party rules.

But state party leaders said they believed the Michigan delegate slates would be seated.

The race here in Michigan forced the Republican candidates to focus chiefly on the dismal economy of the state, where thousands of manufacturing jobs have evaporated over the last several years and where the unemployment rate, 7.4 percent, is the highest in the nation.

Mr. McCain may have hurt himself here when he declared in a debate in South Carolina last week that because of the restructuring of the global automobile industry many of those jobs would never be restored in Michigan.

As I noted in the update to my previous post, Romney's optimistic message of economic revitalization appealed to Michigan voters who have been battered by economic transformation and the housing collapse (thanks to Elaine, over at Elaine's Place, for providing me with inside information on Michigan's housing market).

There's a lesson of caution for John McCain's straight-talk campaign: He's right that most jobs lost to global economic competition and market restructuring won't be coming back to the Great Lakes region. But his message was easily attacked by Romney as "economic pessimism." McCain's realism plays better in foreign policy than in economic affairs, where people need a voice of hope to lift their spirits.

I'll be looking at the polling data and political analyses over the next couple of days, but even without checking Memeorandum, I predict that the Daily Kos netroots will take credit for an independent crossover impact in blunting the McCain momentum (which early voter turnout data shows to be false).

Now, while I think McCain's right to focus on the next stop in South Carolina, the bigger impact of the Michigan results is to topple Mike Huckabee from his top-tier perch secured by his win in Iowa.

Romney - with his Michigan take - will have a big push heading into South Carolina. A Huckabee win in the Palmetto state is the former Arkansas governor's do-or-die sitiuation. Fred Thompson's down but not out, and he too will have to secure a victory or a strong second place showing in the first Southern primary to have any hope of being competitive heading into February 5.

John McCain, fresh off his New Hampshire comeback, has the wind of national public opinion at his back - and note that national polls show way more diversity of opinion than the views coming out of the Wolverine State, so it remains to be seen how substantial a bounce Romney gets heading into the later contests.

What's not in doubt is this is the most exciting GOP nomination process in decades!

The "Super Tuesday" round of nominating contests will truly be a crowning event if one of the GOP candidates taps some compelling theme to carry him to victory in a plurality of states, especially the big states like California and New York.

Don't forget, Florida votes before then. Maybe Florida will indeed provide Rudy Giuliani with the bounce that he needs to avoid an utter collapse, although things aren't looking good.

Photo: New York Times

McCain in Michigan: Is There a Push-Back?

Yesterday's Washington Post noted a substantial push-back by conservatives against GOP frontrunner John McCain.

It remains to be seen how right-wing opposition to McCain influences the race. But according to Jonathan Martin over at The Politico, the conservative fire is more heat than light, and McCain's facing little opposition within the overall Republican coalition, in Michigan at least:

His opponents aren’t going after him. There isn’t a single third-party group hammering him in broadcast TV or radio ads. Even anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, a longtime adversary, is taking it easy on John McCain this time around.

In short, McCain is getting a free pass, and it’s beginning to show. In campaign events across western Michigan, voters are once again being reminded of the qualities of character that have made him an admired figure on the national political scene, without the distraction of ads designed to muddy that image.

Asked why she likes McCain, Tina Wolfis of Kalamazoo pointed to “his honesty, his straight-forwardness.”

Other voters, Republicans all, cited similar qualities. Pressed about issues, some mentioned federal spending or the war.

“He puts country ahead of politics,” added David Hassenger, a Republican official in St. Joseph County, just south of Kalamazoo. “[Republicans] deserved to have their asses kicked in the last election. ... We’ve forgotten what we were supposed to be doing there.”

Even those who mentioned immigration — or “the illegal aliens,” as Wolfis put it — seemed unaware that McCain was an outspoken Republican advocate for providing illegal immigrants with a pathway to citizenship last spring.

Sharon Hoogendoorn, who works at Hope College in Holland, Mich., where McCain also had a town hall meeting Monday, said she was a border hawk and felt strongly about the issue. Asked how that squared with McCain’s stance on immigration, Hoogendoorn, who is leaning toward the Arizona senator, said, “I think that’s how he feels — we didn’t bridge that issue today. But I’m pretty sure that’s how he feels, as well.”

As McCain campaigns through western Michigan ahead of tomorrow’s primary, it’s abundantly clear that he’s running a race in stark contrast to the 2000 election, when the conservative establishment united against the maverick senator and went after him in full force after his New Hampshire victory.

McCain’s support appears less tied to any one particular issue than to his well-cultivated, straight-talking persona — one that is unsullied this year as opponents such as Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson express their own admiration or friendship for McCain rather than a desire to defeat him. And the lack of negative messaging has led to widespread unfamiliarity with McCain’s position on illegal immigration. Mitt Romney, for his part, is broadcasting only spots about his own record here after seeing what a barrage of negative ads got him in the first two states.

The Republican candidates aren’t the only ones treating McCain with kid gloves. Norquist, who helped spearhead third-party anti-McCain efforts in 2000, has overseen just a single round of little-noticed phone calls into New Hampshire urging voters to call both McCain and Thompson and urge them to sign the no-tax-increase pledge. He said his group has no plans to do any further calls.Norquist’s approach this year is indicative that McCain is in a stronger position this time around. By Norquist’s reckoning, he has come around on some key issues, while others don’t have the resonance they once did.

“In 2000, we criticized McCain’s call for campaign finance reform,” Norquist noted in an e-mail message. “The whole movement was concerned with that issue — the NRA, Right to Life, Right to Work, American Conservative Union, most business groups.

“Today, McCain is calling for continuing the Bush tax cuts — that is leading with a $2 trillion tax cut,” Norquist added.

So instead of trying to defeat McCain, Norquist has simply declared victory and welcomed him as a convert to the cause.

It may be that McCain's already appearing the most electable Republican to party insiders and voters looking for experience and intgrity on foreign policy.

There's been a backlash in some quarters, of course.

Mark Levin at National Review pulled out the knives in an attack on McCain last week. Bloggers are seeing red over the maverick's New Hampshire resurrection (here and here, for example).

The Michigan results today will sort things out a bit. May the best man win!

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times

**********

UPDATE: Captain Ed predicts a Romney victory in today's primary:

I predict that the crossover vote will not be as heavy as predicted, discouraged in part by lousy weather. Three inches of snow wouldn't keep motivated voters from reaching the polls, but I don't think that the Republican slate will motivate non-Republicans to turn out in force while it's dark, snowy, and miserable on the roads. That favors Mitt Romney, and I think he edges out John McCain for his first significant win. My full prediction:

Romney - 30%
McCain - 28%
Huckabee - 17%
Giuliani - 12%
Thompson - 6%
Paul - 4%

I got New Hampshire wrong on the Democrats, but I had plenty of company. Let's see how this turns out ....

I frankly haven't the slightest clue as to who's going to win. Captain Ed doesn't mention other variables beyond the weather.

Romney has bankrolled a huge ad buy in Michigan, spending almost three times the amounts of McCain and Huckabee. Moreover, Romney's upbeat message on the economy is extremely attractive to voters, with Michigan suffering a "one-state" recession that could be a prelude to greater economic troubles nationally.

I think these two points give Romney an edge, although the campaign on the ground may end up being more vigorous than Captain Ed acknowledges.

I'll have more tonight.

Michigan is Do-or-Die for Romney

A victory for Mitt Romney in tomorrow's Michigan primary is a do-or-die situation, as the New York Times reports:

With economic issues at the top of the agenda, the leading Republican presidential candidates set off Monday on a final flurry of campaigning in Michigan ahead of the state’s primary that could again shake up a remarkably fluid Republican field.

Recent polls have indicated the contest is neck-and-neck between former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Senator John McCain of Arizona, with former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas further back.

Mr. Romney’s advisers have acknowledged that the state’s primary is essentially do-or-die for him after successive losses in Iowa and New Hampshire. He has been campaigning heavily throughout the state, emphasizing his childhood in Michigan and delivered a policy speech on Monday focused on aiding the automotive industry.

In his speech at the Detroit Economic Club, Mr. Romney took Washington lawmakers to task for being a “disinterested” in Michigan’s plight and imposing upon the state’s automakers a litany of “unfunded mandates,” including a recent measure signed by President Bush that requires the raising of fuel efficiency standards.

He criticized Mr. McCain and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, for a bill that they have pushed to cap and trade greenhouse gas emissions. Mr. Romney asserted that the bill would cause energy costs to rise and would ultimately be a “job killer.”

Mr. Romney further pledged to bring together in his first 100 days representatives from the automotive industry, unions, Congress and the state of Michigan to come up with a plan to “rebuild America’s automotive leadership” and to increase to $20 billion, from $4 billion, the federal support for research and development in energy, fuel technology, materials science and automotive technology.

“There are some people who don’t think there’s a future for the domestic automobile industry,” Mr. Romney said. “They think the industry and its jobs are gone forever. They are wrong.”

Mr. Romney has hit hard at Mr. McCain for saying that Michigan’s manufacturing jobs are gone and are not coming back. At an event with more than 1,000 people at Kalamazoo Christian High School on Monday morning, Mr. McCain attempted to counter the accusations that he is a pessimist by saying that he would focus on job retraining programs to help the thousands who have lost their jobs in the state.

“We’re not going to leave these people behind,” Mr. McCain said, according to the Associated Press.

McCain had some rough campaigning over the weekend, getting booed over immigration at some events.

Yet polling shows an extremely tight race in the Wolverine State, and McCain even leads in the latest Zogby tracking poll (via Memeorandum):

Arizona Sen. John McCain holds a slim lead over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney heading into the Republican primary election in Michigan, a new Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll shows.

The survey shows McCain with a 27% to 24% edge over Romney, with Iowa caucus winner Mike Huckabee trailing with 15% support. McCain, fresh off a 37% to 32% victory in New Hampshire over Romney, is battling the former governor on what is essentially Romney’s home turf, having grown up in the Detroit suburbs while his father, George, was governor of the state in the early 1960s.

The Zogby findings are a little at odds with the weekend's trend toward Romney, but in the case of a large independent cross-vote to McCain, the Arizona Senator may carry the day.

See Captain Ed's analysis, in any case:

Two arguments can be made from these results. The Romney argument will focus on the response of Republicans to the candidate. They will argue that their lead among Republicans shows that Mitt represents conservatives best in the race, and that McCain will shift the party to the Left. They can point to New Hampshire for support, where CNN's exit polling had Mitt winning the plurality of "very conservative" voters 43%-18% over McCain, while McCain won the plurality of "moderate" and "somewhat liberal" Granite State voetrs (both in the mid-40% range).

McCain's team will press the electability of their candidate. Having the ability to draw Democrats and independents constitutes a feature and not a bug, they will argue. The Republican nominee has to be able to beat Hillary Clinton in the general election, or perhaps Barack Obama, and recent polling shows him best positioned to do both. Romney's limited draw from the center will be their message if McCain wins Michigan.

Which will it be -- electability or policy reliability? On the latter, McCain can be expected to point out his 82.3% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union. That stacks up against Fred Thompson's lifetime 86, and Ron Paul's 76. (Romney, Giuliani, and Huckabee never served in Congress and have no ACU rating.) Will that give conservatives a big enough fig leaf to vote for electability? Expect that to be the central Republican debate over the next couple of weeks, which is at least better than what roils the Democrats lately.

As I've noted here, here, and here, national polling trends favor McCain.

A Romney win tomorrow will staunch the flow a bit, but a knockout for any of the candidates will have to wait until February 5. In California, one of the biggest, trendsetting states voting that day, McCain was ahead this afternoon with 20 percent over Romney's 16 percent.

It's obviously early, and the latter poll results are based on a small sample with a high number of undecideds (6 out of 10), although voters judged McCain the most electable Republican by far.

Photo Credit: New York Times

Gallup Poll Finds McCain Leading Nationally

A new USA Today/Gallup poll finds John McCain leading in national public opinion after his surging come-from-behind victory in the New Hampshire primary:

A new USA Today/Gallup poll documents the net effect of the mixed results from the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses and Jan. 8 New Hampshire primary on national preferences for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.

On the Republican side, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have essentially swapped positions since a mid-December USA Today/Gallup poll. According to the weekend survey, conducted Jan. 10-13, McCain now leads the GOP field with 33% of the vote of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. Giuliani has traded his front-runner position for third place (although he is just two points ahead of Mitt Romney), with 13% now supporting him for the nomination, down from 27% in the Dec. 14-16 poll. Mike Huckabee is in second place with 19% -- similar to where he was before the real voting started. He was tied for second place with 16% in mid-December, though he briefly rose to first place with 25% support immediately after his strong win in Iowa.

Romney is hanging on to his second-tier position with 11%. Support for Fred Thompson, at 9% in the new poll, has faded from the 14% recorded in December, and is his worst showing since he entered the race last spring.

The Gallup findings match up well with today's New York Times poll, which found McCain favored by 32 percent and Mick Huckabee following well behind with 18 percent support nationally. Gallup and NYT's findings for McCain were higher than the results from the Washington Post's poll out today, which found McCain at 28 percent over Huckabee at 20.

What's interesting in this last comparison is the difference in support of undecideds, who are less attached to the lower-tier candidates (Romney and Giuliani), which could work to strengthen polling trends for the leading contenders.

See also the Los Angeles Times, which has a poll out today finding California voters favoring John McCain (more on this survey later).