I caught a bit of the Republican Convention last evening, including the Ronald Reagan tribute and as much of the Fred Thompson speech as I could take before shutting it off. I TiVo’d Joe Lieberman but it’s iffy as to whether I’ll get to it.

Matt Yglesias points to a sound byte that I first heard on NPR this morning: President Bush’s line from his video address from the White House: “If the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain’s resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry Left never will.”

Says Matt,

The analogy between American liberals and Vietnamese Communists is extremely offensive. As is the analogy between criticizing McCain’s policy ideas and subjecting him to physical torture and imprisonment.

I’m presuming Matt’s outrage here is faux, given that this is rather standard convention red meat.  Bush is saying nothing more offensive than “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”

It is, however, a rather odd line.  Aside from reminding Americans — in case they’d somehow forgotten — that McCain had been tortured as a prisoner of war, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to accomplish. 

Is the base supposed to be fired up because people on the other side are 1) angry and 2) saying unkind things about McCain?  

Are undecided moderates supposed to say to themselves, “You know, he’s right: Those lefties sure seem to be angry all the time.  I’m going to vote for McCain!  At least he’s always got a smile on his face!  Oh, wait….”

Most of the time, it seems like speeches at party conventions are aimed only at people in the room.

Congratulations to longtime blogger Sean Hackbarth, who starts tomorrow as the Online Communications Specialist for the Senate Republican Conference. Sean worked briefly for the stillborn Fred Thompson presidential campaign and has worked in the PR/politics nexus since.

Moving from punditry into flackery is a strange transition, as it necessarily means a loss of independence and the ability to say what’s on one’s mind.  Relatedly, it also comes at the price of being perceived as less than fully candid.  On the other hand, it means an opportunity to get into the “arena” and leave behind those “cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford has perhaps the kookiest explanation for Barack Obama’s rise that I’ve yet seen.

No, it’s not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn’t have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.

Dismiss it all you like, but I’ve heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who’ve been intuitively blown away by Obama’s presence – not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence – to say it’s just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.

Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

This strikes me as somewhat implausible. Then again, Lightworkers have their own website, where you can become a member for free (although training manuals are extra).

Through the miracle of Google, I see a discussion from February that points out that, “There is one candidate still left in this race who is an Earth Ally. His name is Barack Obama. Yes, thats right. Barack Obama is an Earth Ally. He is a light worker. He is a being of light. He is not conscious of this, but subconsciously he is. His speeches of change and hope are evidence of this. He is the candidate the Galactic Federation of Light would like to win.” It is also noted that “Obama is a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member. The CFR IS THE ILLUMINATI!”

Fascinating!

Interestingly, charges that Fred Thompson was a light worker were harmful to his campaign. Go figure.

Story via memeorandum. Image via Villainous Company.

Jon Henke, Patrick Ruffini, and Soren Dayton are launching a new initiative they’ve dubbed “The Next Right.” It’s apparently yet another attempt to create a right-of-center counterpart of the Netroots. Not yet launched, it purports to be “an online community for change-minded activists and hardcore political junkies in the conservative movement.”

All three of the founders agree that a lot has changed since 1980 and that the GOP is no longer the party of Reagan but rather, as Soren puts it, “at a transitional point.” Jon laments that the Iron Law of Oligarchy has set in and that, “Much of the DC-based infrastructure on the Right – Republican politicians, the advocacy organizations and non-profits, the massive, campaign-oriented fundraising machines that spring up in each cycle – has become the entrenched bureaucracy seeking its own promulgation.”

They also agree that the Republicans have fallen way behind the Democrats in reaching out via the Internet. As Patrick writes, “Netroots activists on the left have built critical mass around an idea that regular people on the Internet can get their hands dirty and remix Democratic politics. They not only raise money. They recruit candidates. They fund full-time investigative journalism to ambush Republicans.”

Beyond that, the three admit they have little agreement. That’s not surprising, really. Jon’s a neo-libertarian who has worked for George Allen and Fred Thompson. Pat’s a longtime Republican activist who has worked for George W. Bush and Rudy Guiliani. Soren briefly worked for John McCain.

And therein, methinks, lies the problem. While most Republican-leaning intellectuals think the party needs to change after seven years of Bush and after a GOP-majority Congress became the kings of pork and fiscal irresponsibility, there’s not a whole lot of consensus on the nature of that change.

Sure, we want leaders with a gift for communication and inspiration, as we had with Reagan. We’re tired of earmarks and “politics as usual” and all the standard complaints. But there’s not a whole lot of agreement beyond that.

• Should we continue a foreign policy of “American greatness” and trying to democratize the heathens through military power? Or should we retrench to a more traditional Realist posture?

• Should we get more serious about the social issues and improving public morality? Or should we become more libertarian, get government out of the bedroom, and focus instead on economic policy?

• What do we do about immigration? Social Security? Health care? Sustainable energy? Terrorism?

Our choices on those issues will determine the future of the party and radically impact its demographics.

The Netroots have been united by opposition to Bush, the neocons, and the war. It’s not at all apparent to me what it is that will unite the “Rightroots” (or whatever term we coin).

To the extent that The Next Right is a platform for having this discussion, it’ll be interesting. My guess, though, is that we’ll continue talking past one another, though.

Elizabeth Edwards, who despite no public policy credentials other than having been married to a one-term senator and yet oddly seems to get op-ed space in the major papers whenever she requests it, has a rather strange editorial in today’s NYT whining about how the mainstream media is failing in its duty to inform the public.

The first several paragraphs make the silly argument that the press covers only the drama of the race and ignores the issues, with the effect that “voters who take their responsibility to be informed seriously enough to search out information about the candidates are finding it harder and harder to do so, particularly if they do not have access to the Internet.” This, frankly, is nonsense. There’s so much information out there that it’s virtually impossible for those who can’t devote full time to immersing themselves in it to read it all. And who are these people who are simultaneously starving for information about Joe Biden’s health care proposals and yet lack Internet access? Presumably, there are people who are poor and don’t work in a connected office who are interested in public policy. But there’s always the public library.

Interspersed in this is a more interesting, if not particularly novel, complaint: That the press decides who the legitimate candidates are.

What’s more, the news media cut candidates like Joe Biden out of the process even before they got started. Just to be clear: I’m not talking about my husband. I’m referring to other worthy Democratic contenders. Few people even had the chance to find out about Joe Biden’s health care plan before he was literally forced from the race by the news blackout that depressed his poll numbers, which in turn depressed his fund-raising.

[...]

Who is responsible for the veil of silence over Senator Biden? Or Senator Dodd? Or Gov. Tom Vilsack? Or Senator Sam Brownback on the Republican side?

The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. Second place! And he had not done or said anything that would allow anyone to conclude he was a serious candidate. A major weekly news magazine put Mr. Thompson on its cover, asking — honestly! — whether the absence of a serious campaign and commitment to raising money or getting his policies out was itself a strategy.

This is fair enough. Then again, Thompson was a more plausible contender than Dodd or Vilsack or Brownback for the same reason that Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and Barack Obama — are relative novices — were. It’s a Catch-22: Candidates with name recognition and decent poll numbers are deemed legitimate enough to warrant press coverage but without press coverage it’s very hard to build name recognition and poll numbers.

Then again, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul managed to do so.

The press, while holding a certain public trust, is ultimately not a collective but rather a myriad of private businesses that together form a web. Do we really expect the Big 3 networks, already losing viewers at a rapid rate, to devote their 8-12 minutes of nightly political coverage equally among all declared candidates? Or to spend it on the eye-glossing details of Joe Biden’s health plan rather than the interesting kerfuffle of the day?

Similarly, newspaper circulation is declining in almost every market. Papers have more space to devote to features than the television networks and, sure enough, they provide more in-depth coverage. But how often are they supposed to print charts comparing the health plans of the various candidates? If they do so once, are they good? Or must they do so repeatedly to reach occasional readers or those who happened not to read that particular edition?

Here’s the thing: If the public displayed an appetite for these things, the businesses would cater to it. Instead, readers demand more comic strips, horoscopes, recipes, movie listings, gardening tips, “human interest stories,” “good news,” and so forth.

At the same time, though, the incredibly tiny minority of us who are interested in public policy have more ability than ever in human history to get that information in as much detail as we want, as often as we want, and at a time that is convenient to us. That’s a pretty good trade-off.

John Edwards, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Mitt Romney, and the others lost, not because the press didn’t cover them properly but because the public looked them over and didn’t see them as “presidential.” It’s probably true that most people couldn’t tell you much about the health plans of these guys. But, really, who cares? There was never much chance that these people would be president. Why waste your time reading their white papers?

Kevin Drum cites several instances of John McCain acting in ways inconsistent with his maverick image and yet surviving with the image more-or-less intact, a situation he ascribes to a fawning press corps. He asks, “And what window do Democrats go to to get the same treatment the press gives McCain?”

In reality, all of the remaining major candidates have benefited from this treatment and most of the also-rans did not. The press has the same tendency as the rest of us to filter incoming information through our preconceptions, a phenomenon social scientists call “expectancy bias.”

Hillary Clinton is the smartest person in the room and has loads of experience. Barack Obama is a post-racial uniter who will heal our wounds. John McCain is a straight-talking maverick who’s not at all like other Republicans. Those are simply facts and any evidence which might controvert them must therefore be aberrations to be explained away.

The Sunday New York Times had a long feature which demonstrated, rather clearly, that Clinton had grossly exaggerated her involvement in her husband’s foreign policy achievements. The headline? “Clinton’s Schedules Offer Chance to Test Assertions.” Readers could have been forgiven for skimming past that story.

To be sure, there have been several stories on the controversy. But the pre-existing framing — that Clinton is very, very experienced in foreign policy — survives intact.

Will Bunch describes a visit yesterday by Clinton to the NY Daily News offices which produces the excited blog post “Exclusive: Clinton acknowledges a ‘misstatement’ on Bosnia sniper fire.” Yet, if one looks at the front page of the paper’s website, the exclusive is nowhere to be found. It’s buried somewhere inside (the Web edition doesn’t include pagination).

This isn’t a homer paper in the bag for Clinton. It’s just not considered big news because, obviously, Clinton has tremendous experience and she can be forgiven for having gotten all the times she’s been in danger whilst representing the United States abroad confused.

Absent the videographic evidence, though, we simply would never have known. Reporters have known about Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ for years. Christopher Hitchens had a piece in Slate weeks before the story broke mentioning the “substandard and shade-oriented” nature of the place as almost an afterthought. The controversy only erupted because the church was so proud of its pastor’s sermons that it put a few out on video. Because of his association with Obama, some of the most colorful found their way to YouTube and all hell broke lose.

Even so, the mainstream press is framing the story in terms of how it will affect the horse race, what it reveals about our history of race relations, and the like. There’s no suggestion outside the commentary pages that the association reflects poorly on Obama, let alone that he might be less post-racial than previously believed. That’s inconceivable.

It’s worth noting, as a brief aside, that the other candidates in the race also had to contend with framing issues. Mike Huckabee was a lovable religious nut. Ron Paul was just a plain nut. Mitt Romney was a robot with keen executive skills. Fred Thompson was kind of lazy. Joe Biden was a loose cannon. Sam Brownback, Duncan Hunter, Mike Gravel, and others were vanity candidates not to be taken seriously as contenders. None ever broke out of those boxes.

While media is decidedly plural, there’s nonetheless a herd mentality. There’s a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance which allows well-established memes to survive repeated collisions with counervailing facts.

John Hawkins lists 24 candidates that John McCain might conceivably pick as his running mate with synopses as to the pros and cons of each. I’m rather sure the eventual choice is on that list, as there’s nobody that I’ve heard of who isn’t. Indeed, there are several people I haven’t heard of on it.

Frankly, the available choices are rather uninspiring. There are good reasons for bypassing each of McCain’s big name opponents (Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee) and there aren’t a lot of Republican governors who already come with name recognition.

Fred Thompson has become the latest former 2008 Republican presidential candidate to endorse John McCain.

Fred Thompson, the one-time Republican presidential candidate, endorsed Sen. John McCain Friday, calling on the party to “close ranks” behind the presumed nominee.

“This is no longer about past preferences or differences. It is about what is best for our country and for me that means that Republican should close ranks behind John McCain,” Thompson said in a statement reported by the Associated Press.

One wonders why Thompson held his fire this long. The endorsement was natural and expected and yet he waited until McCain had the nomination all but mathematically sewn up.

One also wonders how long cognitive dissonance will continue to plague anti-McCain Republicans. Many were enthusiastically behind Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and even Rudy Giuliani, all of whom are now backing McCain. Were they wrong about those guys? Have they sold their souls in the name of party unity? How about John Bolton, the Patron Saint of Diplomacy? Or Tom Coburn? Steve Forbes? John Cornyn? George Allen? The list is getting pretty long.

Image: PoliGazette

Richard Viguerie, the pioneer of the direct mail fundraising approach and a guiding force in Republican politics since the 1970s, has been campaigning at least since this time last year for the nomination of a Reagan style conservative. He was going around the halls at last year’s CPAC convention lamenting the ways in which “Rudy McRomney” fell short of that ideal and has been sending mass emails ever since.

He briefly backed Fred Thompson but, alas, that dog couldn’t get up early enough in the morning to hunt. He then backed Ron Paul but, alas, he doesn’t appeal to Republicans — a distinct disadvantage in Republican primaries — and, as Viguerie himself admits, “most conservatives want a powerful U.S. presence in world affairs and will never support Paul’s defense and foreign policy.”

He believes there’s still time to beat back the tide that seems to have John McCain winning the nomination with Mitt Romney as the only plausible alternative. But who?

Former Virginia Governor and Senator George Allen was considered a frontrunner for this year’s GOP nomination before he lost his reelection campaign in 2006. But his loss can be chalked up to his mishandling of charges of racism and to voter resentment toward the Iraq War, and to the fact that Democrats, desperate to win the Senate, swallowed hard and nominated a former Reagan Administration official to run against him. If losing one’s previous statewide campaign disqualified a person from being president, neither Lincoln nor Nixon nor the elder Bush would have won.

Of course, many would argue that the latter two shouldn’t have won. And the election of the first resulted in a war that pitted brother against brother which killed over half a million Americans.

But, still, their victories do demonstrate that it’s possible to make a comeback. Of course, it helps to serve two terms as vice president under popular presidents, as Nixon and Bush did, or to have an election pitting four major candidates against one another, as Lincoln did. Not to mention having avoided the reputation as a yahoo.

He also puts forth Senator Jim DeMint or Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina as possible alternatives. That neither has any national name recognition, organization, or cash on hand does pose a minor obstacle to each, however.

Or the fact that the nomination may well be all but wrapped up by tonight.

Photo credit: Raising Kaine via Google. Yes, it’s from a movie.

Judging by the enemies he’s making, I’m liking John McCain more with each passing day.

Ann Coulter says she’d “campaign for” Hillary Clinton, who she thinks “is more conservative.”

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck is railing against “Juan McCain” for his outreach to Hispanics.

Thankfully, this over-the-top stuff is being rejected by most conservatives.

AllahPundit calls Coulter’s statement “Madness” and Sean Hackbarth, late of the Fred Thompson campaign, says she is “officially an idiot.”

RedState’s Leon H Wolf warns commenters that they may “complain vociferously about McCain, Bush, or anyone else’s position on immigration” but they will be banned from the site if they do so in racist terms.

Even Jonah Goldberg, hardly the voice of rational discourse while hawking a book about how American liberals are Fascists, thinks “the notion that, variously, conservatism, the country or the party are doomed if he’s the nominee or the president is pretty absurd.”

Moreover, he makes an interesting point:

I think both the GOP and the conservative movement could benefit from a slightly more adversarial relationship. George W. Bush moved the party leftward and/or damaged the image of the GOP in many respects precisely because he was given the benefit of the doubt by conservatives who saw him as “one of us.” It’s not obvious to me that having a more transactional relationship with a Republican president would be altogether bad for the country, the party or the conservative movement.

As I’ve noted many times before, the mainstream of both major American parties would fit comfortably within the British Conservative Party. Indeed, within its right wing. So, the choice between Hillary Clinton and John McCain, if it comes to that, isn’t one between extremes. Contra Victor David Hanson, the “gulf” between them is hardly “Grand-Canyon like.”

That’s not to say, however, that the election is unimportant or that there are not significant differences. Clinton isn’t Barack Obama, the most liberal senator in a recent National Journal survey, but she is #16. The full chart apparently is available only to subscribers, so I can’t find a comparable score for McCain. We do know, however, that his lifetime conservative rating using the same index is 71.8. This compares favorably with Tom Tancredo, a darling of the Borders Are Our Only Issue conservatives, who rates 75.9.

Additionally, from a conservative perspective, there’s another advantage to voting for McCain: You know that he actually agrees with you on the issues where he says he agrees with you. Whether he’s 71.8 percent conservative or 82.6 (American Conservative Union), it’s hard to accuse him of pandering. With Clinton, conversely, one can be excused for wondering if she’s just positioning herself for maximum political benefit.

UPDATE (Alex Knapp): Regarding the National Journal survey naming Obama “the most liberal Democrat”, Steve Benen has an excellent post explaining exactly why this is a ridiculous finding (since I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that Obama is more liberal than, say, Russ Feingold):

What’s more, Obama was the 16th most liberal senator in 2005, and the 10th most liberal in 2006, before racing to the front of the pack in 2007. National Journal suggests this has something to do with Obama moving to the left to curry favor with Democratic primary voters.

But there’s a more logical explanation: Obama missed a whole lot of votes in 2007 — he’s been on the campaign trail — but was on the floor for many of the biggest, most consequential votes. In nearly every instance, he voted with the party. And with that, voila! The most liberal senator in America.

Except that’s not much of a standard. The rankings use an amorphous meaning of the word “liberal,” and the percentage doesn’t take missed votes into account at all (which also helps explain why Kerry nabbed the top spot four years ago)

Brian Beutler further elaborates:

Yes, passion is hard to gauge. But instead of trying (by, say, logging hours spent speaking at hearings, from the chamber, etc., and assigning those a value to be paired with voting records) National Journal relies instead on a weird system by which a senator who takes the “liberal” position 95 times out of 100 is somehow less liberal than his colleague who takes the liberal position 48 times out of 50.

Most of these types of “voting guides” are dubious, and tend to say more about the groups promoting them than they do about the politicians they are ostensibly describing.

UPDATE (James Joyner): Fair point on the various rating scales. There are all manner of problems — What counts as “conservative” vice “liberal”? What to do with missed votes? — but they have the advantage of being independent measures. National Journal or ACU or whathaveyou have a system in place and it serves as a means of comparison. It’s not perfect, by any means, but it’s preferable than basing one’s view on two or three controversial votes, which is what campaigns seem to focus on.

UPDATE II (James Joyner): Sociologist Kieran Healy endorses Lewis and Poole’s Optimal Classification ranking as a better alternative. By this measure, Obama is merely the 21st most liberal senator and Clinton is 25th. McCain is 94th.

Ben Smith and David Paul Kuhn argue that Rudy Giuliani’s poor showing in this campaign “seems also to mark the beginning of the end of a period in Republican politics that began on Sept. 11, 2001.”

“There’s a paradox for Rudy,” said former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, who was a member of the 9/11 Commission. “One of the things he did very well on 9/11 was say, ‘We’ve got to get back to normal.’ And that’s what’s happened. We’ve gotten back to normal.”

[...]

“They never made the pivot from success as a leader after 9/11 in New York to the ability to make success as a leader in federal or national government,” said Matt Dowd, the chief strategist for George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign. “They over relied on 9/11. There was no reason to talk about that. It was baked into his DNA. What they had to do was to make the transition from why what he did in the aftermath of 9/11 why that would make him a great leader at the time of any situation.”

Instead, Giuliani managed to do something that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier: He turned 9/11 into a punch line. The late-night television riffs bubbled into prime time during a Democratic debate in October, when Sen. Joe Biden dismissed the former mayor scornfully. “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11,” Biden said.

That remains the best line of the campaign to date.

But Dowd is right: It’s not so much that 9/11 has faded from the national consciousness — though it has — but that Giuliani thought hammering audiences over the head with his leadership in the ensuing days was enough.

Ed Morrissey notes that things other than “9/11″ factored into Giuliani’s implosion, notably the Bernard Kerik scandal and “a poor decision to stop competing in the early states and allow the media to focus so much on his rivals.” True. Still, Giuliani didn’t do enough to sell himself; much like Fred Thompson, he acted as if simply presenting himself as willing to take the job were enough.

Successful campaigns are generally prospective, not retrospective. History serves as a backdrop of potential to deliver but it’s not enough. It’s all fine and well to tell people what you’ve done in the past but you’ve got to sell them on what you’ll do in the future to win.

via Memeorandum

The victories of John McCain and Hillary Clinton in Florida last night presage what will happen in next week’s Super Duper Tuesday contests and have significantly reshaped the race.

Polls and Predictions Compared to Final Results

The polls finally got one right, correctly predicting the winners and the order of finish of all challengers with uncanny accuracy.

The final RealClearPolitics average had Clinton winning 48-29-14 over Barack Obama and John Edwards and the near-final results were 50-33-14. My own prediction of 51-35-14 was slightly closer because I factored in late-deciders.

On the GOP side, RCP had it 30.7-30.1-14.7-12.9 for McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani. With 99% of the votes counted, it was actually 36-31-15-14. My prediction of 35-32-17-11 was close enough for government work.

Impact on the Race

Democrats: Despite the efforts of the Clinton campaign to spin this as “a significant victory,” this was an essentially meaningless contest for the Democrats. Neither candidate campaigned in the state and no delegates were counted.

That said, I believe it foreshadows what will happen on Super Tuesday. Despite both Clinton and Obama raising unprecedented sums of money, campaigning in 22 states in six days is next to impossible. As in Florida, no campaigning gives the advantage to the candidate with the best organization and name recognition. My guess is Clinton will have an impressive showing next week and all but wrap up the nomination.

The polls bear me out. Clinton has decisive leads in the biggest states: California, New York, and New Jersey. If she builds a commanding lead, it’ll be almost impossible for Obama to recover.

[Update/Breaking: John Edwards is dropping out, making his non-factor status official.]

Republicans: The GOP only penalized Florida half its delegates, still leaving it the biggest prize to date. While McCain was the perceived frontrunner after wins in New Hampshire and South Carolina, he was technically in third place in the delegate count yesterday morning. Now, he’s officially in the lead.

More importantly, he’s taken a commanding lead in the expectations race ahead of Super Tuesday. Mitt Romney outspent him 10-to-1 in television advertising and still couldn’t win. McCain also proved he could win a contest limited only to registered Republicans.

Mike Huckabee was already toast after having lost to McCain in South Carolina and last night’s fourth place finish in a “Southern” state merely amplifies that. He came out of nowhere to win Iowa and raised his name recognition considerably with this run. But he didn’t have the fundraising ability or gravitas to catch on beyond a narrow evangelical base. He’ll stay in the race through next Tuesday’s contests and may even win a state or two; but he’s simply not going to win the nomination.

Rudy Giuliani made his final stand in Florida and got crushed. His concession speech last night was eloquent and he’ll remain a major force in Republican politics. All indications, though, are that he’ll drop out as early as today and endorse McCain.

Ron Paul will hang in until the end. Why not, really? He’s raised gobs of money and is a message candidate. But it’s now all-but-officially a two man race between McCain and Romney.

And it doesn’t look good for Romney. Despite his overwhelming advantage in cash on hand — fitting payback to McCain for sponsoring an idiotic campaign finance reform bill — his appeal is simply limited. And a Giuliani endorsement should put McCain over the top, since they’re splitting the same center-right, security minded constituency.

Conservatives ranging from Michelle Malkin to Robert Stacy McCain can’t believe McCain beat Romney. Republican primary voters, apparently, figure an 82% conservative who sometimes takes positions seemingly designed to anger the base is preferable to a guy who was a Massachusetts liberal a few months ago but now says exactly what conservatives want to hear. Go figure.

Yes, it’s true that self-identified “conservatives” once again preferred Romney to McCain, according to the exit polls. Florida’s “closed” primary allows people who describe themselves as “independents” or even “Democrats” to vote in the Republican primaries so long as they’re registered as Republicans. Malkin is angry at this, Flip Pidot is “flummoxed,” and Ed Morrissey is resigned. But that’s how these things always work.

McCain advisor John Weaver observes that, “[I]f Romney wasn’t born on third base, if he had to campaign and fundraise like everyone else, I’m sure he wouldn’t be here anymore.” He’s right. Romney has never been better than 4th in the national polls. He’s been competitive because he’s been able to self-finance a ridiculous amount of advertising in every state while everyone else has had to pick and choose their battles. But even that hasn’t been enough.

Romney has lost in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida. The only seriously contested race he’s won has been in his “home” state of Michigan.

It’s mano e mano from here on out, with Huckabee and Paul mere spoilers. Every indication is that McCain is ahead in the states that matter — and that’s with Giuliani factored in. We’ll know soon enough which man Republican primary voters prefer.

The Veepstakes

Hillary Clinton would be wise to beg Barack Obama to be her running mate but he’d be a fool to accept. She needs his support to heal the damage her scorched earth campaign has caused with the crucial African American base. But their message and style are too different and I agree with my colleague, Dave Schuler, that he’d be far better served to make a run for Illinois governor.

My guess is that Clinton choses someone like Jim Webb or Phil Bredesen or Evan Bayh.

Joe Lieberman has categorically removed himself as a candidate for VP on a McCain ticket, which removes the most intriguing possibility there. One wonders if Rudy Giuliani would be willing to sign on? I’d have said there wasn’t a chance as recently as last night, but his quick (reported) deal to drop out and endorse McCain may signal that the relationship is closer than I’d thought.

To the extent Giuliani’s endorsement is designed to form a “Stop Romney Coalition” — which strikes me as probable given the animosity Romney’s campaign has engendered — it seems improbable that McCain would ask Romney to be on the ticket. And while McCain and Huckabee have gone out of their way to be cordial, I can’t imagine that pairing.

Fred Thompson might make a good choice. He and McCain like each other, have worked well together, and are close on the issues. And Thompson brings street cred with conservatives without the the baggage of a Huckabee. Yet, as I’ve observed previously, if the man can’t muster the energy to campaign for himself, he’s unlikely to do so for someone else.

There are plenty of candidates outside the 2008 field. Lindsey Graham? A governor, perhaps? Michael Steele?

One thing’s for sure: He’ll need to make a good choice. While the second banana slot is almost always overrated as a decision factor in presidential contests, McCain’s age and the strong possibility that he’d be a one-term president if elected make picking someone perceived ready to step into the presidency more crucial than ever.

Images courtesy CNN

UPDATE: Also see these other wrap-ups and reactions:

• Steven Taylor’s “Post-Toasties (Florida Orange Juice Edition)”

• Robert Stacy McCain: “Despair is not an option”

• Jay Cost: “How McCain Won”

• Michael Graham: “It’s All Over”

• Kevin Drum: “McCain’s Base Problem”

Billy Hollis joins Rush Limbaugh, Peggy Noonan, and other conservative commenters in trying to figure out who is responsible for destroying the Republican Party and which of the potential nominees would destroy it even more.

He thinks that nominating Mike Huckabee would likely lead to “a loss of Goldwater-McGovern proportions.” I’m inclined to agree, especially if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee; I think it would be closer if Hillary Clinton is his opponent. At any rate, Huckabee isn’t going to be the nominee.

John McCain might, though, and that scares the hell out of Hollis:

Nominating McCain signifies the end of the GOP as it’s been envisioned by many since the Reagan years, and only a serious rebuilding effort or a dramatic realignment of political parties will bring back any significant emphasis on freedom, the free market, individual responsibility, and the other principles most of the folks who come around here believe in.

But there’s no point in blaming McCain. He’s just following the pattern laid down by the Bush pair. Talk a good game, pander, arrange “grand compromises” which inevitably lead to expansion of government, and get your place in the history book. Limited government principles? Who needs ‘em?

And the GOP faithful are still out there attempting to scare folks with “What? Any Republican is better than Hillary! If you small-government types know what’s good for you, you’ll get behind the GOP nominee, whoever it is. Otherwise, it will be a disaster!”

Well, it will be a disaster – for the political insiders and those whose life revolves around winning. The Democrats already suffered through theirs. In 1994, the entire Democratic political establishment was shell shocked when the GOP took Congress, by a big margin. The GOP has not yet faced their own disaster, mostly because they’ve been blessed with stupid enemies.

But I think it’s coming, sooner or later. Sooner, if McCain or Huckabee are the standard bearer. Later, if the GOP squeezes out one more victory, but just can’t internalize the need to stop selling the spending, stop the earmarks, and get serious about their core small-government principles.

You would think that their most successful president of the last century showed them the template they need to succeed, and that they would therefore adopt it. Apparently not. As the old saw goes, they might do the right thing – after they’ve exhausted all other possibilities.

First off, McCain is the fiercest opponent of earmarks and runaway spending in the field by a rather wide margin. He’s the guy who opposed the Bush tax cuts, for example, because they weren’t offset by cuts in discretionary spending.

More importantly, though, I reject the idea that McCain — or Bushes 41 and 43, for that matter — are amoral politicians who simply tack in whichever direction the polls tell them to go. Hell, McCain’s positions on immigration, campaign finance, taxes, global warming, torture and a variety of other hot button issues would certainly seem to provide plenty of evidence for that. Rather, he’s an 82 percent conservative (if you take the American Conservative Union’s rating system as the proper measure) who simply disagrees with the Movement on some issues.

We have only two political parties in this country and even its leaders don’t agree with everything in the platform. Every deviation from the Holy Writ isn’t apostasy; it’s life under the big tent.

Ronald Reagan last ran for president 24 years ago. A lot has changed since then — partly thanks to his policies. We’re not fighting the commies any more. We don’t have marginal tax rates of 70 percent. It’s now been 35 years since Roe v. Wade rather than 11. It stands to reason, then, that the policy prescriptions of 1980 are going to need some updating.

And, frankly, Reagan’s record — as opposed to his rhetoric — isn’t exactly what those who pine for the Good Ole Days seem to think it was. Reagan did virtually nothing to advance the socially conservative agenda he talked about. He appointed Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, two moderate swing votes, to the Supreme Court to go along with Antonin Scalia, his lone conservative appointee*. And he signed the biggest illegal immigrant amnesty bill in the country’s history. He allowed spending to skyrocket under his administration, leaving the country saddled with historic debt.

It’s 2008, not 1980. Most women work outside the home. There hasn’t been a military draft in more than a generation. There are significantly more than three television channels. We’ve completed the shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. Our political climate has, understandably, changed a little. Goodness, there’s a serious chance that a woman or a black man will be our next president; that was the stuff of stand-up comedy routines in Reagan’s day.

The campaigns of Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul, Tommy Thompson, and Fred Thompson never got off the ground. If you thought they’d be great presidents, you were virtually alone. Sorry for your loss but it’s time to move on.

The president represents 300 million-odd Americans and is selected through a grueling process that ensures he’s vetted by widely varying constituencies. The primary process runs potential nominees through a gauntlet and then the general election requires appealing to pluralities in enough states to get at least half of the votes in the Electoral College.

Not surprisingly, this means it’s pretty rare for a truly ideological candidate to win the thing. Most Americans aren’t particularly ideological, for one thing, and different parts of the country have very different concerns. So, yes, pragmatism and compromise tends to win the day. That’s not very exciting, to be sure, and it can be frustrating for those of us who have very strong ideas about government. But that’s life.

Unless something very odd happens, the winners of the Romney-McCain and Obama-Clinton fights will emerge to duke it out during the summer and fall. Nobody on that list inspires me to do cartwheels. Nonetheless, I’ll pick from among them and live with the outcome.

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*Well, he did appoint Robert Bork. Kennedy was actually his third choice for that seat after Bork was, well, Borked, and Douglas Ginsburg was found to be an active dope smoker.

Steve Bainbridge has a lengthy post responding to some questions that Steven Taylor and I have put to him vis-a-vis why he’s so vehemently against John McCain after having supported his ideological twin, Fred Thompson. He makes some good points about actions McCain has taken that have irritated him but also acknowledges that personality is a part of the equation, in that he finds McCain “arrogant, selfish, unintelligent, and generally smarmy.”

This is reasonable enough, I think, even though we disagree at least somewhat in our assessment. (Certainly, I think McCain’s at least as smart as, say, Thompson.) At some point, style and personality matter just as much as issues. As I’ve noted before, I’d much sooner vote for Barack Obama — or, heck, Chris Dodd or Joe Biden — than Hillary Clinton, despite being closer on the issues to Clinton. We can’t always explain our visceral instincts but we generally trust them.

Regardless, Bainbridge backs off a bit on his threat to sit out the election to teach the Republican Party a lesson:

Having said all that, I must admit that I find McCain the least objectionable of the remaining 4 major candidates. I can’t see myself voting for any of these guys on Feb 5 in the California primary. If we end up with a McCain-Clinton race in November, however, I’ll reconsider my plan to sit out the 2008 general election.

Which doesn’t really surprise me. We’re all disappointed when our favorite candidate loses (I preferred Phil Gramm in 20001996, for example, until his quick exit) but those of us who truly care about politics almost always choose among the available options. I’ve been truly excited to vote twice* — for Reagan in 1984 and Bush in 2000 — but have managed to nonetheless drag myself out to participate in all the other elections in between and since.

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*Electile Dysfunction, indeed.

The Romney campaign has forwarded a copy of Thomas Oliphant’s post for the Chicago Tribune’s Swamp blog entitled, “Romney transplants Thompson’s braintrust.”

I’m not sure why they’re bragging about this but I thought it worth passing along.