Yesterday, the NYT and other outlets reported that former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani has decided against running for governor of New York.  But the Daily News is reporting that he is instead “very likely” to run in the special election to fill the remaining two years of Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate seat.

The Republican heavyweight was considered the GOP’s best shot at reclaiming the governor’s mansion. The only declared candidate on the Republican side is little-known former Long Island Rep. Rick Lazio.

One source said Giuliani is prepared to run for U.S. Senate against Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand next year to fill out the remaining two years of Hillary Clinton’s term.

Still, a number of sources said no decision has been made and a Giuliani spokeswoman downplayed the reports. “Rudy has a history of making up his own mind and has no problem speaking it,” she said. “When Mayor Giuliani makes a decision about serving in public office, he will inform New Yorkers on his own.”

[...]

Former Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari, a close Giuliani pal, said the former mayor has shared doubts with him for weeks about running for governor. “What he said to me is that he doesn’t think he’s going to do it,” Molinari said about a conversation earlier this month with the former mayor. “It just didn’t make any sense to him.” Molinari said the ongoing circus in the state Senate, combined with Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s iron grip on Assembly matters, had convinced Giuliani that a Republican governor would have little ability to get things done quickly in Albany. “The big drawback for him was – could I really be effective?” Molinari said. “He saw too many hangups there. He’s not running for the title, that’s for sure.”

That, and the very real possibility he’d lose to popular Democrat Andrew Cuomo.

But it’s not entirely clear what a Senate seat would do for Giuliani, either.  He’s used to making decisions, so he’d be an ineffective legislator.  And if his goal is to run for president again in 2012, it’s not clear how five minutes in the Senate would bolster his resume — as he’d have to hit the campaign trail almost immediately.  He’d be better off going the Newt Gingrich route and simply establishing himself as a Republican Wise Man, doing as many public appearances as possible.

Frankly, 2008 was his best chance and he blew it.  He was at the height of his popularity and running against a lackluster field for the nomination. Yet he ran a joke of a campaign — literally — “A noun, a verb, and 9/11.” As he moves further and further away from the 9/11 attacks, his light dims.

He’ll be 68 during the 2012 race — facing,  should he make it to the nomination, an incumbent president with superb campaign skills — and 72 for 2016.  The latter will be 15 years after his finest hour.

Daniel Larison is a bit too charitable here in assessing Mike Huckabee’s finish in last year’s presidential primaries:

While Huckabee was officially the second-biggest vote-getter in the primaries last year, he achieved this mostly through perseverance and concentrated support from evangelical voters. Had Romney continued to compete and waste his money on what would still have been a losing bid, it is not certain that Huckabee could have managed his second place finish.

In fact, the 2008 Republican race wasn’t even a contest.  Mitt Romney quit the race during CPAC on February 7 and pledged his delegates to McCain.   Rudy Giuliani had failed to make his push in Florida — coming in way behind Romney, who finished second.  The race was over.

Except that, technically, it wasn’t.  Huckabee stayed in the race, along with Ron Paul, despite no chance of beating John McCain for the nomination.  As a result, they padded their totals as everyone not happy with McCain as the nominee had to vote for one of them.  And, really, since Paul was a fringe candidate, that meant Huckabee.

The results, per CNN, are at right.

The fact of the matter was that Huckabee, a virtual unknown at the beginning of the contest, was mostly a stalking horse.  Huckabee finally withdrew on March 5, once McCain mathematically sewed up the race on his own — that is, not counting Romney’s delegates.   As I wrote at the time:

But let’s not get carried away, either. He’s a personable fellow who went a long way with very little money, a weak organization, and zero Establishment support. But there was no time in this race when it was plausible that he’d be the nominee. He won Iowa as the “anybody but Mitt Romney” candidate in a contest McCain, Giuliani, and others skipped. He didn’t win again until garbage time, when he was running as “the conservative alternative” to a man who had all but sewn up the nomination.

Huckabee will not win the nomination in 2012. Or 2016. Or 2020. He’d easily win a Senate seat from Arkansas if he changes his mind. But he’s not going to be elected president.

I  stand by that assessment.

Matt Yglesias justifiably has some fun with the news that twice divorced, thrice married Newt Gingrich is charging that “The Democratic Party has been the active instrument of breaking down traditional marriage.”  And one can’t blame him for being amused that twice divorced, thrice married Rudy Giuliani is championing traditional marriage as a cornerstone of a possible gubernatorial bid.

To be sure, divorce doesn’t carry the stigma it used to  and remarriage after divorce has much more tradition behind it than marrying someone of the same sex.  This stance doesn’t make them hypocrites or even insincere — merely horrendously bad spokesmen for the cause of traditional marriage.

Victor Davis Hanson has a piece out today that I suspect will be the first of many of its kind. Intermixed with some excellent points about the perception of McCain campaign negativity, the politics of race, and scandalmongering, he aims this cheap shot at Republicans who have expressed dismay at McCain or even endorsed his opponent.

Second, with Obama now with an 6-8 point lead, some in the DC/NY corridor these last three weeks figure it’s time now to jump or at least sort of jump, since the train they think is leaving the station and there might be still be some space at the dinner table on the caboose. They also believe as intellectuals that the similarly astute Obamians may on occasion inspire, or admire them as the like-minded who cultivate the life of the mind-in contrast to the “cancer” Sarah Palin, who, with her husband Todd, could hardly discuss Proust with them or could offer little if any sophisticated table-talk other than the proper chokes on shotguns or optimum RPMs on snow-machines.

This is such utter nonsense. Conservative intellectuals are, by definition, both conservative and intellectual. While many of us understand the practical realities of politics and campaigning, we are ideologues who are motivated by fundamental principles of governing, intellectual consistency, and the ability to coherently articulate the message. While we are “team players,” having generally chosen the GOP as the best vehicle for carrying those ideas into fruition, we’re not party hacks who will publicly adopt positions of convenience for our candidate at the expense of intellectual honesty.

Here at OTB, the authors have broad agreement on general principles but have different emphases and thus different preferences in this election. As is almost always the case with intellectuals, none of us is thrilled with the available choices. I continue to support McCain, albeit less enthusiastically than even a month ago. Alex Knapp continues to support Obama, although never with any great joy. Dave Schuler, a Scoop Jackson-Sam Nunn Democrat by inclination, hadn’t made up his mind as of last Wednesday evening. (The others haven’t, so far as I recall, weighed in.)

I don’t spend a lot of time discussing Proust. To the extent that I’m invited to dinners and parties with smart people, that’s not going to change based on whom I support in November. There are plenty of smart folks on both sides of this one. What would, however, ruin my credibility in those circles is carrying the water for my party in direct opposition to my previous intellectual positions.

I was never a McCain fan, having found his 2000 campaign self-righteous and off-putting. He has been flat out wrong on a number of issues, notably his signature issue of campaign finance “reform.” I came to admire him during this year’s primary campaign, though, for doubling down on Iraq and fighting his party on immigration at a time when both those positions appeared to be political suicide. Once it became clear that Rudy Giuliani was not who I thought he was, McCain became, as I expressed it in a June 2007 post, “my least unfavorite among the 2008 field.”

I’ve defended him against charges and “Outrage of the Day” scandals that I thought were dubious and noted that many things he was doing that I personally found distasteful were well within the bounds of the rough and tumble of the American political system. Then again, I’ve done the same for his opponent.

Yes, I’ve been pretty hard on him for choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate. Not only did she undermine his core message of the importance of experience and “being ready on day one,” but she’s simply the kind of politician that makes me recoil. I object to Palin for the same reason I bitterly opposed the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court: neither was “qualified” by traditional standards for the exalted positions for which they were chosen. Miers and Palin were/are both nominally qualified and both probably had the tools to carry out their jobs but given the available talent pool, their selections made no sense.

George Will, Christopher Buckley, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, Kathleen Parker, and other conservative commentators who are criticizing McCain and Palin are doing so at a risk to their standing, not to bolster it.

So, while I agree with Hanson and others that, given the choices, the McCain-Palin ticket is more likely to preside over policies that conservatives like — or at least block those we don’t like — than the Obama-Biden ticket and, as a resident of suddenly-swing state Virginia will vote accordingly, I’m not going to pretend that it’s the second coming of Ronald Reagan and Morning in America, either.

Most of the analysis of Sarah Palin’s vice presidential acceptance speech has, predictably, divided on party lines. Republicans tended to love it, thinking it struck the right tone, while Democrats think it was mean-spirited and full of lies.

If one reads through the text of the remarks, thereby ignoring the delivery and optics, one sees a pretty standard party convention speech.  The characterizations of the opponent were clever but unfair.  The record of the speaker and her party were embellished.  Promises were made.

The Obama camp has already put out a “fact sheet” rebutting Palin’s speech.  See Mark Kleiman for a reprint.  Hilzoy does her own fact checking as does AP’s Jim Kuhnhenn.

Palin Lied About Palin

The most problematic charge, because it cuts against the “reform” image Team McCain is trying to craft for her, is that this line is untrue:

I told the Congress “thanks, but no thanks,” for that Bridge to Nowhere. If our state wanted a bridge, we’d build it ourselves.

This is, at best, political pandering and, at worst, an outright falsehood.  She supported, as one would reasonably expect an Alaska politician to do, all sorts of earmarks for her state.  As Steven Taylor reminds us, Palin supported the so-called Bridge to Nowhere during her 2006 campaign for governor.

Who finally killed the Alaskan bridge projects?  The Republican Congress, back in November 2005, well before Palin became governor.

Straining to show new dedication to lower spending, House and Senate negotiators took the rare step of eliminating a requirement that $442 million be spent to build the two bridges, spans that became cemented in the national consciousness as “bridges to nowhere” because of the remote territory and small populations involved.

The change will not save the federal government any money. Instead, the $442 million will be turned over to the state with no strings attached, allowing lawmakers and the governor there to parcel it out for transportation projects as they see fit, including the bridges should they so choose.

And spend it she did.  She did cancel Gravina Island Bridge last September.  But she approved funding for a road that was supposed to go to it (I’m not familiar enough with Alaskan infrastructure to know whether it’s therefore a Road to Nowhere).  Oh, and she’s still building the less infamous of the bridges to nowhere, the Knick Arm Bridge.

Palin needs to explain herself on this and stat.

Palin Lied About Obama

The most talked about line this morning has been this one:

And there is much to like and admire about our opponent.

But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform – not even in the state senate.

My colleague Alex Knapp details the response.  In his short Senate career, Obama has had his name on at least two laws and was a sponsor of many more.  He was more accomplished as a state senator.  And he has  worked on ethics reform issues in both places.

Was this a “lie”?  No, since one can hide behind the word “major” here.  Indeed, it would be hard to characterize two laws that virtually no one has ever heard of as “major.”

This is well within the bounds of political puffery and it’s an effective line.  First, it pokes fun at Obama’s self-importance and reinforces the “elitist” meme.  Second, it effectively rebuts the attacks on her as being unqualified because she’s a mere small town mayor.

Palin Lied About McCain

This is the weakest of the “lies” charges.   Hilzoy and others seem particularly vexed by this line:

As for my running mate, you can be certain that wherever he goes, and whoever is listening, John McCain is the same man.

It’s true, as Steve Benen has documented, that McCain has had more than his fair share of position changes over the years, some of them curiously timed for political advantage.   It’s also true that McCain has maintained some unpopular positions, notably on the Iraq War and immigration, which many of us thought would kill his chances of getting the nomination.

Palin Was Too Mean

Bernard Finel, writing in the comments of my instant reaction post last night, wrote,

Perhaps the nastiest, most divisive speech on a national stage since Pat Buchanan’s culture war speech in 1992.   Amazingly contemptuous. The Democrats did nothing like that last week. You need to go someplace like DailyKos to find a similar level of venom.

Or, you know, her counterpart Joe Biden’s acceptance speech.  Both he and Palin told their own life stories and that of their running mate in glowing, rose-hued tones.  Both he and Palin spent large parts of their speeches attacking the top of the other ticket.  That’s what VP speeches do.

TNR’s Franklin Foer dubbed the speech  “Disrespectful, Angry, and Effective”

Tonight, [McCain] presided over an unending stream of raw right-wing populism: attacks on the ivy leaguers and cosmopolitans and media and Washington and elites. Welcome back to Nixonland. To their credit, they were disrespectful and angry with humor, albeit a sophomoric humor. (Giuliani would have done a splendid job at a Dean Martin roast.)  But it’s clear where they are headed. They will respond to the Democrats’ economic populism with cultural populism. Where Obama talked about “One America,” they will run in the polarizing mode of Rove and Atwater. In an election where they don’t have much of an economic case, this was their best card to play. I have a sinking feeling that it will work and we’re in for an ugly eight weeks.

I only caught the tail end of Rudy Giuliani’s speech owing to a TiVo glitch (let’s just say that I didn’t also need the Spanish language version of “Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Dallas Cowboys”) but thought it was flat and mean until it softened at the end.  Palin’s speech, by contrast, was surprisingly warm.  She delivers attack lines with a surprising charm, mocking without sneering.

Foer’s colleague Sacha Zimmerman hated the cheap shot against community organizers.

Since when is a “community organizer” such a big bad thing to the Republicans? I mean, aren’t delegates essentially–nay, actually–community organizers? And shouldn’t Republicans, along with all Americans, encourage all citizens to be community organizers?

She’s not down on community organizers; rather, she’s making a somewhat sneering rebuttal to the Obama campaign’s assertion that she’s a mere “small town mayor” and, yes, attacking Obama’s presidential experience.

Politics ain’t beanbag and convention speeches aren’t objective analysis.  Palin’s speech, like Obama’s, was good political theater that accomplished its goals.

John McCain’s latest ad, “Love,” contrasts himself with those dirty hippies who spent the summer of 1968 on sex, drugs, and rock and roll rather than being tortured for their country.

The voiceover:

It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The “Summer Of Love.”

Half a world away, another kind of love — of country.

John McCain: Shot down. Bayoneted. Tortured.

Offered early release, he said, “No.” He’d sworn an oath.

Home, he turned to public service.

His philosophy: before party, polls and self … America.

A maverick, John McCain tackled campaign reform, military reform, spending reform.

He took on presidents, partisans and popular opinion.

He believes our world is dangerous, our economy in shambles.

John McCain doesn’t always tell us what we “hope” to hear.

Beautiful words cannot make our lives better.

But a man who has always put his country and her people before self, before politics can.

Don’t “hope” for a better life. Vote for one.

McCain.

The response I’ve seen so far has been positive.

• Brian Montopoli summarizes the obvious message: “The spot casts presumptive GOP nominee John McCain as a man who served his country abroad while many of his peers were enmeshed in the upheaval of the 1960s at home.”

• DrewM. isn’t so sure, “I think the ad is fine, though I’m not sure tying Obama to the 60s is going to work considering the guy was born in 61.” (The original version of the post, as I got it in Google Reader, had a great line that’s since been redacted: “What’s the next McCain ad going to be…Hey, get off my lawn!?”)

• Matt Yglesias thinks “it’s a decent ad that does the job of simultaneously hitting McCain’s main biographical theme while also trying to position McCain as a candidate for those who think the country’s on the wrong track.”

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (not to mention angering Jim Geraghty) I continue to believe McCain is banging the war hero drum too loudly. He’s quickly getting into Rudy Giuliani a noun, a verb, and 9/11 territory. That he was a grown man dealing with the worst the world has to offer while Obama was in grade school is a point worth making. But it won’t be — nor should it be — enough to get him elected. Elections are about the future, not the distant past.

Arthur Silber is, as am I, fascinated by the cult of personality surrounding Barack Obama.  He notes some anecdotal creepy gushing on a local radio show and then

Reactions of this kind to Obama are fairly common. No, they are not this extreme much of the time, but such statements are far from unusual. And many of Obama’s less obviously deluded supporters fall along the same continuum. Take a look at the woozily sentimental, intellectually reprehensible remarks collected at the beginning of “Obama’s Whitewash,” the third excerpt here, and the comments here. Moreover, this kind of reaction — an emotion-driven response utterly devoid of coherent ideational content, a response that leads far too many people to be enthusiastically willing to believe virtually anything that Obama might proclaim and to follow him anywhere — is one that Obama and his campaign explicitly seek to elicit.

People had better wake the hell up, and they had better study some history very damned fast. I have sometimes remarked, and I repeat the warning here, that the twentieth century was a nonstop train of horrors — yet in one sense, the most terrible and horrifying aspect of the twentieth century is that we learned absolutely nothing from it.

Among the horrors of the twentieth century were several notable leaders who initiated events that led to slaughter and destruction on an ungraspably monumental scale. These charismatic leaders evoked a response from their followers almost identical to that called forth by Obama. These leaders specialized in “personal stories of political conversion.” Doesn’t anyone see the connection? Doesn’t anyone remember any of this?

This, incidentally, from a man who can scarcely imagine voting for a Republican.

James Benjamin goes further:

Although I seriously doubt that Obama is the next Hitler, his followers are every bit as authoritarian as those who followed Bush (or Schwarzenegger, as I seem to recall) just a few years ago, and that’s something a despot, a strongman would want.

[...]

I would not be at all surprised if either Obama himself were revealed to be some sort of wild card authoritarian in his own right, and/or numerous of his followers were wild card authoritarians – i.e., those who can pose as “leftists” but once in a position of power begin to crack down on dissent much like the right-wingers we all know and loathe. Obama’s own embrace of warmongers, neoliberals, and of course of the awful FISA bill that is likely destined to pass does not bode well for those who wish to continue arguing that he is “progressive” (whatever that is supposed to mean any more). The behavior by groups of Obama fanatics on some of the community blogs (lots of bully tactics as I recall) and the apparent efforts by Obama partisans to shut down individually run anti-Obama blogs is a relatively mild expression of that authoritarianism; we should keep in mind that we’re still early in the game.

Jesse Taylor believes this line of reasoning has guano-level sanity and snarks, “While he lacks any political element of fascism in his platform, he makes up for it in some people liking him a lot, which is like 60% of fascism anyway.”

Obama is quite possibly the most charismatic politician of my lifetime.  Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had superb oratorical skills and charismatic personalities but neither made crowds swoon to the extent Obama does.  John Kennedy was murdered before I was born and it’s hard for me to assess him apart from the strange fascination and conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination plot.  Perhaps Dwight Eisenhower and, certainly, Franklin Roosevelt had it.

Like Silber, it worries me when people get so emotionally involved in their leaders.  I’m not concerned that Obama is going to annex Canada and start the ethnic cleansing of white working class Appalachians and people named Larry;  Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were evil men, not good ones who went mad with too much power.

Then again, I don’t think that George Bush or Arnold Schwarzenegger (or even Rudy Giuliani) are “authoritarians,” “despots,” or “strongmen,” either.  Executives naturally believe in the rightness of their cause and seek to push the envelope of their power when they’re being thwarted by inconvenient institutions.  Some do so more than others.

The problem with cults of personality in the American experience is it that it furthers our tendency to trust government to take care of us.  FDR was well meaning in constructing the New Deal and the vast machinery of government bureaucracy needed to support it to combat the unique challenges of the Great Depression; unfortunately, the solution long outlasted the crisis.  Similarly, I believe torture, rendition, habeus corpus suspension, the Department of Homeland Security, and the other over-reactions to the 9/11 attacks were well intentioned measures to make us safer.

Both Obama and his opponent, John McCain, have a streak of crusading righteousness in them that leads to a dismissiveness to criticism.  Some of our best and some of our worst presidents have had it.   Fortunately, we have a set of institutions — separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism — and a political culture that make realizing authoritarian ideals difficult.

via memeorandum

Steve Benen points to a Daily Mail piece about John McCain’s first wife, Carol, whom he divorced for a younger, more attractive, wealthier woman a few years after returning from Vietnam and wonders if there isn’t a double standard at work.

Now, I should clarify that as far as I’m concerned, McCain’s marital difficulties and adultery aren’t especially significant in this campaign, especially years later. I’m inclined to see a distinction made between public and private worlds. I defended Bill Clinton, and said his personal controversies had no bearing on his ability to be a good candidate and a good president, so I can’t very well turn around and say the opposite about McCain, no matter how badly he treated his first wife.

But therein lies the point: if Clinton’s personal history was a matter of tremendous national significance as a candidate and as a president, then it’s not unreasonable to wonder why McCain isn’t subjected to the same scrutiny. I’d prefer both issues are off the table, but I’m hard pressed to imagine why only Democratic presidential candidates’ personal lives are of interest in the context of a national campaign.

I’d note, first off, that there have been rumblings about McCain’s divorce for months. Indeed, Steve himself published a piece on the matter, which he links, in the Washington Monthly two years ago. So it’s not as if the story has gone unremarked.

As to the differential treatment between what McCain did in 1979 and what Bill Clinton did throughout the 1990s, I’d say the answer is easy: only one of them was a sitting president of the United States at the time of their transgressions. Indeed, only one of them was in public life.

Steve’s right, though, that Christian conservative leaders, who were so appalled by Clinton’s conduct, seem to have accepted bad behavior from Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and McCain. That’s mostly political opportunism, of course, although part of it’s likely personal. Bill Clinton simply rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and the fact that he seemed to get away with everything made the desire to get him all the more palpable. (Indeed, much the same has been true of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, with similar results.)

Ross Perot notwithstanding, I’m inclined to give McCain the benefit of the doubt in a way I wasn’t for Clinton and Gingrich. Partly, McCain has been, to the best of my knowledge, silent about the matter and it’s possible that there’s more to the story than that he came home to find that his wife wasn’t as fun and good looking as when he’d left. For another, to the extent that “growing apart” is a morally acceptable rationale for divorce, five years in a POW camp strikes me as a better reason than most for that happenstance.

I wouldn’t be shocked, though, if a pro-Obama 527 group produced some ad spots on this issue to see if it has any salience. Indeed, I’d be mildly shocked if they didn’t.

Rudy Giuliani is likely to run for the governorship of New York, should there be another sudden vacancy.

In the latest twist in New York politics, Rudy Giuliani is eyeing a run for governor in a special election this fall should Gov. Paterson be forced to resign, sources say. A top adviser to the former mayor, who pulled the plug on his presidential bid in January, yesterday dangled the possibility of Giuliani’s running in a special election.

[...]
The Post reported this week that state lawmakers started researching the line of succession after Paterson’s first week in office was spent responding to questions about extramarital affairs and the questionable use of campaign funds. If Paterson resigns before August, a special election would have to be held in November.

New York’s new governor has spent his brief time in office dropping one bombshell announcement after another. He admitted that both he and his wife had affairs during a rough patch in their marriage and that he abused drugs decades ago.

Chances are pretty good that Patterson will survive the scandal and finish out Spitzer’s term. Regardless, the speculation has sparked some amusing insights.

AllahPundit ponders the irony, “Is the best challenger to a philanderer with mistress-related money problems really a … philanderer with mistress-related money problems?” Jimmie figures that’s no big deal since, “Rudy’s peccadillos are either well-known old news that the folks in New York have already reckoned or, in the case of the money problems, not exactly accurate as reported.”

Allah also offers the “friendly advice” that “You’ll have to campaign in more than one county to win.”

Don Surber goes out on a limb with this conjecture: “Might he face Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in November after all?”

via Memeorandum

Now that John McCain has mathematically sewn up the nomination even without the delegates Mitt Romney pledged to him, Mike Huckabee has given up his candidacy.

Calling his White House bid the “journey of a lifetime”, Huckabee spoke Tuesday night from Irving, TX commending McCain on an “honorable campaign” and emphasizing his commitment to the Republican party in the fight to the November election. “We stayed in until the race was over. We kept the faith, that for me has been the most important goal of all,” Huckabee said, standing with his wife on stage at the Four Seasons Hotel. ” I’d rather lose the election than lose the principles that got me into politics in the first place.”

[...]

Huckabee’s brand of social conservatism, combined with his strong core support among evangelicals, and a frugal campaign budget, left party rivals scrambling to defend their conservative credentials. Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney were all, at least in part, victims of Huckabee’s surprise success.

Ultimately, the former Arkansas governor won by losing, attracting significant blocs of the GOP base in state races despite McCain’s significant delegate lead, the latter due in part to the party’s largely winner-take-all delegate distribution.

Huckabee’s folksy appeal earned him clout within the party as a force to be reckoned with. Still, he has said he is not interested in a third-party run for the White House and, presidential aspirations aside, that he would rather go on a “rock tour with Amy Winehouse” than enter the Arkansas Senate race. Huckabee has also downplayed his place in the ‘08 veepstakes, telling a reporter this February “I don’t think Sen. McCain would select me anyway…I think that it’s a little almost off the chart to think that he would end up selecting me.”

Huckabee’s meteoric rise from political obscurity to GOP threat began with his second-place finish in the Iowa Straw Poll — an unofficial but closely watched exercise within the Republican campaign cycle — back in August 2007, which signalled his potential to stage a GOP upset. The momentum that followed Huckabee out of the straw poll finish — complete with cable news bookings, network morning show interviews, and print media outlets clamoring to ask him “how”  bumped Huckabee from second-tier to rising star on the nation’s political radar.

It’s doubtless true that Huckabee far exceeded expectations, including mine. While I was ultimately correct in listing him among the declared candidates who Would Not Be Elected President in 2008,* he won several states and had an impact on the race.

But let’s not get carried away, either. He’s a personable fellow who went a long way with very little money, a weak organization, and zero Establishment support. But there was no time in this race when it was plausible that he’d be the nominee. He won Iowa as the “anybody but Mitt Romney” candidate in a contest McCain, Giuliani, and others skipped. He didn’t win again until garbage time, when he was running as “the conservative alternative” to a man who had all but sewn up the nomination.

Huckabee will not win the nomination in 2012. Or 2016. Or 2020. He’d easily win a Senate seat from Arkansas if he changes his mind. But he’s not going to be elected president.

_______

*UPDATE: I did allow, in the comments section discussion, that “Huckabee is the most viable name on my list, I think, but I just think he’s got too far to go in the money/name recognition race to win it.”

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

John McCain has been the primary beneficiary of Rudy Giuliani’s exit from the race, the latest Gallup national tracking poll shows.

John McCain continues to be the primary beneficiary of Rudy Giuliani’s recent exit from the Republican race for president. The percentage of Republican primary voters nationwide favoring McCain for the nomination rose from 39% in interviews conducted Jan. 29-30, to 44% in Jan. 30-Feb. 1 polling. Neither Mitt Romney nor Mike Huckabee picked up any additional support.

As a result, McCain now holds a 20-percentage point lead over Romney in the Jan. 30-Feb. 1 Gallup Poll Daily tracking results. It is McCain’s largest lead since he assumed the front-runner position following the New Hampshire Republican primary.

It stands to reason that Giuliani’s departure and subsequent endorsement would boost McCain. They were, after all, competing for the same constituency: non-evangelical national security voters. There really isn’t enough polling out there to show this definitively, though, and Gallup isn’t making their crosstabs available; a five point bounce could be attributable to his own win in Florida, a reaction to the debates, or a mere fluke.

The RealClearPolitics national averages (about the only concise way to gauge Super Tuesday’s 22-state, all-over-the-map primaries) show only three post-Florida, post-Guiliani polls. Two show an overwhelming advantage for McCain while the other shows a tie:

Let’s look at the tracking (which includes two pre-Florida surveys):

McCain and Romney are both surging, as one would expect in a race that has narrowed into a two-man contest. McCain’s trend is steeper, though, and the gap is widening.

RealClearPolitics‘ John McIntyre reminds us that the 2004 convention gave President Bush a large bounce in the polls, while the Democratic convention did next to nothing for John Kerry. He’s got an interesting theory on why that was:

Who did Karl Rove and the GOP strategists chose to put front and center on prime-time television for the American people? Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Zell Miller.

These prime-time speaking slots were not an accident. For a President who was struggling with sub-50% job approval ratings (ratings that many pundits felt would ensure his loss) these four speakers were meant to send a clear message to Independents and moderate Democrats that they were welcome – and wanted – in a big tent, majority Republican Party.

Starting Tuesday in the state that delivered George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 and in California yesterday and today with the Giuliani and Schwarzenegger endorsements, the Bush/Cheney baton has been passed to John McCain.

Many on the more conservative side of the Republican Party are balking now that the Schwarzenegger, Giuliani, McCain faction looks likely to be the standard bearer in 2008. But with President Bush’s approval ratings hovering in the low 30’s (as opposed to the high 40’s of 2004) and after the wipe out in 2006 where the GOP was annihilated in the Northeast and basically everywhere outside of the South, the Republican party is putting forth – either through luck, serendipity, or design – its most competitive general election candidate, by far.

With the country screaming for change and very ready for a Democratic president, George W. Bush would not win a third term. But if the Democrats nominate the divisive Hillary Clinton over the inspiring Barack Obama, John McCain will be in a very strong position to keep the White House in Republican hands, with one caveat.

Without Schwarzenegger, Giuliani and McCain voters in 2004 George Bush would have lost to John Kerry and without Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and evangelical voters in 2008 John McCain does not have a chance against Hillary Clinton.

He’s right on both counts.

With Michelle Malkin saying she wouldn’t vote for McCain over Hillary Clinton and the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Bob Novak questioning McCain’s conservative credentials, McCain clearly has a lot of work to do to persuade staunch conservatives that he has far more in common with them than they think.

At the same time, though, McCain’s strength as a general election candidate is that he’s not viewed as an extremist. The hard-line Republican platform on torture, immigration, and the environment is a sure-fire loser in November. Not only does it ensure the GOP will never again be a strong contender in places like California and New York but it means that purple states like Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Ohio, and elsewhere are likely to slide into the blue column.

McCain needs the support of staunch conservatives to win the election. They’re a critical part of his base. But they’re a damned sight short of a majority.

Photo: Charles Dharapak, AP

Hugh Hewitt looks at the Super Tuesday math and concludes that his guy, Mitt Romney, will still be very much in the race afterwards. I’m rather dubious on his “worst case” scenario actually being that but he’s fundamentally right: McCain won’t have the nomination mathematically sewn up at day’s end.

Still, it’s not looking good for Flipper. Hewitt observes, “And if the Huckabee voters look at the reality and see they are voting for McCain when they vote for Huck, anything can happen.” Well, anything could happen. What’s actually likely to happen, though, is that they’ll vote for McCain. After all, Huckabee has gone out of his way to make nice to McCain and attack Romney.

And, as McCain OG Bill Kristol points out, almost all of those who recent polls show supporting Rudy Giuliani will switch to McCain, too, given their guy’s withdrawal and endorsement.

Further, as his TownHall colleague RightTeacher1 points out, under Hewitt’s best case scenario, Romney would need to get 60% of the post-Super Tuesday delegates — 80% under his worst-case scenario — to take the nomination. That’s going to be mighty hard.

via Memeorandum