Ross is right -- those of us who predicted that Mike Huckabee's rise in Iowa would ultimately redound to Rudy Giuliani's benefit seem to have been pretty wrong and drastically underestimated the extent to which his rise in the polls could spill beyond Iowa's borders. I think we can say only in our defense that this years Republican race has proven very unpredictable.
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Department of Corrections
16 Dec 2007 11:27 am
Comments (13)
I hope your current take proves correct, but I won't stop worrying until Rudy-Rudy in on a curb somewhere, watching the campaign go by and contemplating which crooks to shill for next in Giuliani Partners. After 8 years of GWB, a Rudy WH is just too frightening to contemplate.
Actually, this year's Republican race has proven very predictable. Not so much in terms of who will win, but in terms of the ability of the field to prove itself completely lackluster and incapable of producing a real frontrunner. And that's not going to change.
Huuckabee's national support in primaries is going to top out at no higher than 30-35%, just like Romney's and Giuliani's. If the field gets winnowed down to two candidates, Republicans will respond largely by staying home come primary day rather than choosing sides.
Even if not brokered the Republican convention will be a mess, forced to choose between further splitting the party through marginalizing the supporters of losing candidates and allowing prominent Republicans who refuse to endorse the nominee prime speaking positions; a large chunk of the Republican establishment will refuse to give a meaningful and enthusiastic endorsement to whoever gets nominated.
This year's race is in many ways more predictable than any Republican race in memory, so long as you avoid predictions about who's going to be the nominee.
I think Matt and Ross were right in their instinct that Mike Huckabee's rise could help Rudy Giuliani, but as it happened, Huckabee's surge came just as a series of sleazy stories broke about Giuliani.
His tawdry affairs and dirty associates, while well known among New Yorkers and political junkies, are news to many primary voters, who only known him as the Man Who Tamed New York And Appeared Churchillian For The First Couple Days After 9/11 When Our Real President Was Shitting The Bed.
It would almost be worth having Rudy in the White House just to see the reactions of the right-wingnutosphere when he starts dating again.
well, it's about time matt pulled away from the conventional wisdom he'd been parroting over the last few months about huckabee and guiliani.
philly, how could matt's instincts have been correct initially when rudy has always had those skeletons in his closet? everyone who's paid any attention to his career knew about all of that garbage, and the idea that rudy would simply sit on some cloud somewhere while huckabee roughed up romney and then come down to reap the benefits of huck's dirtywork, without undergoing scrutiny...
well, that made no sense at all.
a political contest is just that: a contest where all of the participants are involved and any analysis has to consider the dynamics and interplay of all of the contestants.
what matt's prior position reflected was simply the tired old conventional wisdom that first probably came from rudy's camp, got repeated by the likes of the politico and fox news and then chris cilliza of the post and chuck todd at msnbc and mark halperin at time and then by the blogosphere as people just picked up the idea and started repeating it. it sounded kind of smart and sophisticated and thoughtful. and people repeat it and those people talk to each other and repeat it to each other and voila! its out there and before too long all of these supposedly smart people are invested in an "analytical" view that is really utterly dumb, but they cannot stop repeating it because they will look even dumber. but i think you could probably track the original idea back to spin from the rudy camp.
it seems like a classic case of how a campaign infects the discourse and gets their spin out there, and sometimes that spin becomes the conventional wisdom.
rudy would love for huck to be his hit man, so they can come in afterwards and clean up.
aint gonna happen.
and it was never gonna happen.
i give matt credit for stepping up and admitting tht he was wrong. that's a lot more than what others will do.
andrew sullivan was absolutely on target and correct when he described huck as karl rove's frankenstein. the monster is loose and he's wreaking havoc on the village!!!
I think we have "peaked" on all the religious stuff. America has major domestic, economic, and foreign affairs problems crashing down on us and I think the trivial stuff about hobbies, Mitt's underwear, Obama's pastor, and Reverend Huckaberry being a creationist who believes in a 6500 year old Earth will fall by the wayside.
Next cycle of news will be to see if Mitt can come back from the Religious Right siding with Rev Huckaberry, if Rudy can find a way to get out of America's doubt about his sleaze and "terrahist evildoers" as his main issue. And more calls for Hillary to come clean and show proof of her Co-Governor and Co-President claims because the public is not stupid enough to take her or Bill Clinton at their word.
I kinda sorta agree with frankie d here: there were plenty of us who, after the Iowa straw poll, saw the potential for the GOP race to turn into a battle between Huck and an anti-Huck, and rejected the insider baseball practiced by Beltway pundits (even smart ones like MY) totally unfamiliar with the ways red-state voters think. I'm still betting McCain will become the anti-Huck, squeaking by in New Hampshire once establishment conservatives figure out that they need a real establishment conservative to rally the disaffected troops. Romney just ain't that man, given his flip-flops and plastic campaign persona and his endless pandering to the Huckabee voters, who now have cast their collective lot with one of their own.
Matt may be right that the GOP primary has been fluid and unpredictable, but if there's one sure thing we know about '08 at this juncture, it's this: Mike Huckabee has earned himself a berth on the Republican ticket. Nothing else is nearly so clear on either side as that salient fact.
What this reminds me of is a weak signal that is being amplified in order to normalize it. None of the candidates has a particularly robust appeal, and yet the polls have to add up to 100%. That means small fluctuations, which would otherwise be insignificant, get magnified to the point where they affect the results.
Given our revised understanding of Huckabee's impact on Giuliani's campaign --
Maybe we should exercise a bit of caution about predicting oh-so-confidently that Huckabee's candidacy will be a boon to Democrats in the general election, too.
I think the assessment held a lot of truth to it.
The problem is that with the NIE report Giuliani's lost a large part of the national security rationale while Shaggate really took the wind out of him.
"I think we can say only in our defense that this years Republican race has proven very unpredictable."
Isn't that another way of saying "all our predictions were wrong"? If your predictions don't come true, well, that's because the election was hard to predict? Sounds like a fricking tautology to me.
So the rise of Huckabee has created the greatest benefit for the Huckabee campaign. Nobody saw that coming.
Comments closed December 30, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Okay.
Posted by ferd | December 16, 2007 11:39 AM