So amidst all sorts of chaos (with Newt “walking back,” then “walking back his walkback” of the anti-Bain message, as he is blasted by Rush Limbaugh and Jim DeMint), the pro-Gingrich Super-PAC Winning Our Future released its much-awaited 28-minute video entitled “When Mitt Romney Came To Town.” I delayed this post hoping WOF would provide an embed code, but just go to the website and watch the show. Believe me, it’s worth the time.
You can make your own judgment, but this is one of the most devilishly effective attack communications I’ve personally ever seen–a heat-seeking missile aimed directly at the white working class id. Mitt saying “A bientot” at the end (apparently harvested from Romney’s Olympics PSAs) is the capper.
And aside from the xenophobic flourishes, the film is really just a well-wrought glimpse at the underside of contemporary finance capitalism, with Mitt Romney serving as the chief villain, right up there with Bernie Madoff and other sinister characters. No wonder DeMint and Limbaugh have denounced this video: they should, because it’s an assault on everything they believe in.
Word is 30-second and 60-second clips from the video will go up on SC television tomorrow, as part of a $2.4 million ad buy (some serious coin in this low-cost state). I’ve only been able to see the 30-second version, but it’s obvious these short ads won’t pack the punch of the longer piece.
The rapidly emerging CW is that this assault on Romney will help him win the nomination, either because conservatives like ruthless financial pirates, or (as I have earlier predicted) Republican poohbahs think the contest is getting too nasty, and this particular attack very obviously reinforces Democratic talking points–not just about Romney and Bain, but about many of those alleged “job creators” generally. Hell, if I were a rich guy myself, I’d find a way to put “When Mitt Romney Came To Town” in front of as many people as possible.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Last night was, by all accounts, a good night for Mitt Romney. He went into the New Hampshire primary needing two things: to win by a significant margin and to leave no one else with a plausible path to victory.
The results from the Granite State fulfilled both of these Romney criteria, and it’s now extremely likely Mitt Romney will win the Republican presidential nomination this year. But it’s still unclear whether he will emerge from the process with his reputation, and his polling numbers, intact.
Romney’s greatest threat now doesn’t come from any other candidate: there is no one in a position to beat Romney, and he could quickly wrap it all up with wins in South Carolina and Florida. Having won both Iowa (at least technically) and New Hampshire, Mitt is now the odds-on favorite going forward according to every precedent. Ron Paul’s two best states are behind him, and he’s going nowhere fast. Romney’s Iowa co-winner, Rick Santorum, tied for fourth in NH; whatever “bounce” he had from his Iowa performance has subsided, and he has no natural advantage when the campaign moves to the South. The candidate who is already mounting a potentially devastating SuperPAC assault on Romney in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich, has little if any personal momentum coming out of NH. Rick Perry’s predictably abysmal performance in NH further undermines any hopes of a southern comeback.
The biggest boulder in the road ahead for Mitt, the vicious anti-Bain ads being bought in South Carolina by the pro-Gingrich Winning the Future group, may not hurt him immediately, if only because no rival is poised to take advantage of it: At this point it appears the only effect would be to depress turnout. But Romney should be concerned for their impact beyond the Palmetto State–particularly in the general election. There is almost nothing in these ads that could not be directly repeated in a pro-Obama ad.
The big question now is whether conservative opinion-leaders, who have basically resigned themselves to Romney as nominee, begin to denounce Gingrich for his anti-Romney nastygrams in SC. If they fail to do that, it might tempt the struggling survivors of the competition so far–not only Newt, but Paul, Santorum and perhaps even Rick Perry, who desperately needs a southern breakthrough fast–to go collectively nuclear on Mitt. Lord only knows how many SuperPAC benefactors each of them might identify to back an apocalyptic set of attack ads; we are only now beginning to understand how much the new rules of campaign financing enable billionaires like Newt’s friend Sheldon Adelson to casually expend sofa-cushion money to wreak great havoc with ad buys. Jon Huntsman, whose all-or-nothing New Hampshire bid fell far short of victory, has a Super PAC backed by the bottomless wealth of his father. What if the Huntsmans decide to go for broke?
So we can assume Team Romney is burning up the phone lines today trying to convert his objective domination of the invisible primary and the first two voting events into a nomination. And their most powerful talking point may simply be: if you let Mitt get torched, who’s left? The previously torched Gingrich? The feckless Perry? The one-hit wonder Santorum? Surely not Ron Paul!
And thus the scenario that Democrats have long feared–the early-primary success of the candidate who fairs best in general election trial heats against Obama–is now developing in an unexpected way. Instead of convincing primary voters to cast their ballots for him, he may have to convince conservative opinion-leaders to talk his ostensibly vanquished opponents to leave him alone, or at least refrain from going medieval on him. Otherwise Mitt’s likely victory in the nomination contest could prove to be Pyrrhic.

Candidates facing primary challenges almost always claim that any unwanted criticism from their rivals threatens party unity or gives the opposition ammunition it can use in the general election. Sometimes that’s true; sometimes it’s not; often it’s exaggerated.
But the latest multi-candidate assault on Mitt Romney’s record with Bain Capital is a development that not only raises doubts about the likely Republican nominee that can and should continue to haunt him in the general election, but in fact undermines a central element of conservative ideology.
Take a look, if you haven’t already, at the prototype ad pro-Gingrich Super-PAC Winning the Future, with a $5 million war chest behind it, will apparently use as the basis of saturation ads in South Carolina:

It’s nasty. It’s personal. It’s reasonably specific. And, as Jonathan Chait points out, it’s largely indistinguishable from the kind of case that Democrats would make against the heartlessness embedded in Romney’s much-touted history as a “job creator.”
But aside from its relative value as a weapon against Mitt, do conservatives grasp its value as a weapon against conservative laissez-faire ideology?
Yes, there is a rich right-wing tradition of “producerism,” the belief that the job-creating efforts of virtuous industrial titans (and if they are not unionized, their virtuous workers) are being constantly threatened by “parasites”–usually financiers and those favoring government intervention in the economy, but the paradigm is easily expanded to include “elite” consultants like those from Bain–who must be rooted out to create “true” free enterprise. And that’s the sentiment Newt’s Republican enemies are appealing to.
But today’s conservatives do not have anything like a consistent “producerist” agenda. They may occasionally demagogue against Wall Street financiers, but they violently oppose regulation of Wall Street. And for all the exploitation of resentment of Bain’s activities, they also avidly endorse the “creative destruction” of capitalist adaptation to market conditions that Bain represented, and offer the human “collateral damage” involved absolutely nothing. With some editing, the Winning the Future ad could be run against virtually any Republican candidate for office from coast to coast, and certainly any of Romney’s rivals.
It’s unclear how effective the last-gasp assault on Romney will turn out to be. But it is creating a narrative of Republican indifference to the human costs of a Randian approach to the economy that is a pretty good foundation for Democrats to build on, and not just against Mitt Romney, in the months before November.

It is usually assumed that the invisible primary ends with the Iowa Caucuses, when the party rank-and-file begin to have their say. But thanks to an exceptionally chaotic and unpredictable pre-caucus period, the central dynamic of the invisible primary–Mitt Romney’s wooing of conservatives skeptical of him–has been extended. And now it’s reached a new phase: The internal struggle among conservative opinion-leaders about when it will prove necessary to throw in the towel and settle for Romney.
The most underreported feature of the contest so far is that most conservatives have already reconciled themselves to Romney as the nominee. They may prefer someone else, and in pursuit of that preference–or to keep ideological pressure on Romney–they may continue to raise alarms about the front-runner’s record, positions, or general-election strategy. But it is exceedingly difficult to find a significant conservative figure who has not already pledged to back Mitt fully if he’s the nominee.
As a result, there will be no last-ditch rightwing crusade to deny Romney the nomination. Nor will a discouraged base threaten to throw the general election to Obama. Instead, you can expect to see an increasingly public debate on the right about the costs and benefits of further resistance, until an eventual surrender.
There are powerful arguments for throwing in the towel early, though the factor most often pointed to by the Beltway commentariat–Mitt’s superior electability–is not necessarily the strongest. Yes, some conservatives (along with most Democrats) have embraced the conventional wisdom that successful candidates must be able to move to the center to win and deemed Romney the obvious choice on electability grounds. But these are people largely already in his camp. Though it’s sometimes hard for political pros to accept, most conservatives simply don’t buy the CW. They actually believe what they have been repeatedly saying since they pulled the GOP hard right after two straight general election debacles: This is a conservative country whose electorate responds best to a clear, consistent conservative message. The 2010 results confirmed that in their minds–and neither political scientists nor polls nor pundits can persuade them otherwise.
So if electability is not a clinching argument for getting on board the Romney Express, what might be? The main temptation for conservatives to call it a day is the strong likelihood that an extended nominating contest will become so nasty, divisive, and cash-draining that it will damage the ticket far more than any “base” misgivings about Romney might. Even as Republicans celebrate the general election advantage they expect from Super-PACs, their lethal power in intra-party battles is becoming plainer every day, and now that Gingrich has foresworn positive campaigning, none of the survivors can be expected to play nice.
Just as importantly, “true conservatives” have doubts and divisions about the ideological reliability of Mitt’s surviving rivals. Santorum is regarded by some as an Washington insider and Big Government Conservative. Newt’s heresies were amply aired by those attack ads in Iowa. And Perry, the closest thing to a consensus “true conservative” candidate, greatly upset believers with his position on immigration.
And so, conservative leaders may well be asking themselves: Is the dubious value of nominating Santorum or Gingrich or even Perry instead of Romney worth the risk of creating the foundation for an Obama campaign assault on the eventual winner as a flip-flopping opportunist with the character of a feral cat?
Possibly not. Currently the most important residual reason for continuing the anti-Romney resistance is the feeling that he hasn’t yet paid sufficient deference to movement conservatives (even though, ironically, he was their candidate four years ago) or made sufficient promises to make their priorities his own. These are concerns that should be able to be finessed. There may well be furious behind-the-scene negotiations going on to ensure that Mitt doesn’t emulate his new supporter John McCain by getting all “mavericky” in the general election or implicitly triangulating against the Right. And it could culminate in a sort of political Groundhog Day, when a particularly powerful opinion leader signals the troops to shorten or extend the nominating contest (though the leader best positioned to do so, Sen. Jim DeMint, has indicated he does not intend to make an endorsement at all.)
So the fight could go on for a while, but not for an extended period (unless Romney does something uncharacteristically stupid, or Rick Perry achieves a complete resurrection). In head if not heart, conservative elites have already given their hand to Mitt, and much of what’s going on at the present is simply a matter of maintaining appearances and executing a solid pre-nup.

As my last two posts indicate, I think Mitt Romney’s nomination is finally “inevitable” (though it did not have to be that way, and conservatives have nobody but themselves to blame for having to accept a nominee they really don’t much trust or like). Yes, the nomination campaign will continue for a while, probably through Florida on January 31, or perhaps longer, at least formally (it will take Mitt a while to actually win a majority of delegates; Ron Paul, and perhaps Newt Gingrich, won’t get out until the bitter end). And so long as there is some doubt about the outcome–and in a cycle like this one, it would not be prudent to ignore such doubts–progressives will richly enjoy the hijinks of Mitt’s rivals, who are either a bit unhinged to begin with, or will put on the clown costume in order to posture for the Tea Party crowd.
The spectacle of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum becoming Mitt’s most serious rivals is especially wonderful. Paul’s long history of obnoxious and bizarre beliefs and utterances, of which the desire to destroy the entire New Deal/Great Society legacy is by no means the most objectionable, is becoming well-known all over again, largely shaming into silence those leftbent folk who warmed to him for his anti-interventionist foreign policy views or his opposition to violations of civil liberties (those, that is, which do not involve a woman’s right to choose).
But a lot of folks don’t know much about Ricky Santorum, aside from his eternal fame in inspiring a a sexual neologism. In some respects, Ricky is kind of the new version of Pat Buchanan, without the old falangist’s isolationist or borderline anti-semitic tendencies. He draws on a rich if disreputable tradition of right-wing European Catholic social and political thinking, which often moves him towards positions of support for reactionary government activism that dismay more conventional conservatives. TDS Co-Editor William Galston penned a fine review of Santorum’s book It Takes a Family for the Washington Monthly back in 2005, and it (the review, not the book!) is well worth a fresh read during Ricky’s fifteen minutes of national prominence.
But philosophy aside, Santorum had distinguished himself most prominently as among the hardest of hard-core social conservatives. Aside from his attacks on GLBT rights that earned him his neologism, Santorum has regularly walked the far boundaries of the anti-choice movement, which he made his signature during his Iowa campaign even as the other anti-choicers in the race (i.e., the entire field) talked more about limited government or the economy. And he really can’t stop himself from making sure no one is to his right on these issues: even as he basked in new attention after running even with Romney in the caucuses, Santorum chose to let it be known that it was aces with him if states sought to outlaw contraception.
If that’s all there was to him, Ricky might be dismissed as a misguided but honest crank like some of his supporters. But Santorum also has his really nasty side, beyond his interest in using government to regulate everyone else’s sex life. It’s been largely forgotten now, but Ricky was the guy in charge of the legendary K Street Project, the sinister Bush-era scheme to force lobbying organizations to fire employees who were not solid Republicans in order to create jobs for former congressmen and staffers and create a monolithic money machine for the GOP. It was at about that time Ricky reportedly started seeing the Next President of the United States in his bathroom mirror every morning, and dutifully published the book which Galston reviewed. But a disastrous re-election defeat in 2006 put that plan on hold until the current cycle.
The man is an all-around piece of work, and I’d be a bit frightened of him if I thought he had a serious chance at the Republican nomination. Unless Mitt Romney develops a sudden case of the stupids, or the conservative movement gets behind Santorum en masse, it ain’t happening. But it says a lot about the 2012 Republican field that social conservatives in Iowa wound up having to choose between Ricky and the truly deranged Michele Bachmann as their champion–and chose Santorum.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As of this writing, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are very nearly tied for first place in the Iowa caucuses, and Ron Paul is close enough to make it a functional three-way tie. But no matter who eventually “wins,” Mitt Romney has already won in terms of Iowa’s impact on the overall nominating process.
That’s the case no matter what tomorrow’s spin on the Caucus results suggests, for the simple reason that Paul cannot win the nomination, and Santorum is a very long shot. The candidate with the resources and positioning to challenge Romney in later states, Rick Perry, is finishing a fatal fifth in Iowa, behind Newt Gingrich, whose reservoir of support in the South will likely dissipate once the negative attack ads on his conservative credentials that destroyed his lead in Iowa spread elsewhere.
In some respects, a Paul or Santorum “victory” in Iowa would almost be better for Romney than an outright Mitt win. Paul’s strong performance will generate endless, fatuous hype about the strength of his revolutionary ground troops, and his alleged appeal to independents, Democrats, “moderates” and young people. Entrance polls from Iowa showing his strength in these demographic categories will gain attention. But that only creates an easy illusion for Romney to shatter in states with less unusual primary electorates. Combined with the nuclear attack Paul will soon face over his foreign policy views and his history of association with racists and other beyond-the-pale extremists, whatever buzz a strong Iowa showing creates will simply detract attention from candidates who have an actual prayer of beating Romney.
Santorum is theoretically someone who could inherit the strong anti-Romney vote in the GOP. But he’s not very well-equipped to do so. Having spent virtually all his time in Iowa, he has no organization elsewhere, and whatever money he can raise on the basis of winning, placing or showing in that state will be dwarfed by Romney’s resources. And despite his apparent victory in the “true conservative” subprimary, he has little natural appeal in the southern states where any challenge to Romney must emerge and thrive. For all his success with Iowa evangelicals, he’s a Catholic, with none of the One-of-Us pull in South Carolina and Florida that 2008 Iowa winner Mike Huckabee had. And as recent diatribes by RedState proprietor and southern conservative opinion-leader Erick Erickson showed, Santorum’s record as a longtime congressional insider and supporter of “Big Government Conservatism” is going to be a real problem for him when the campaign goes South.
It’s an open question as to whether Gingrich or Perry can survive their terrible showings in Iowa, but it’s hard to imagine they’ll be raising much money or getting much earned media. And neither showed during the final crucible in Iowa that they can overcome the handicaps that destroyed their once-formidable candidacies. In particular, Perry threw his money and time into a last-gasp effort to resuscitate his candidacy, and succeeded only in beating the doomed Michele Bachmann. To call him the Fred Thompson of 2012 is an insult to the Tennessean.
Once Mitt Romney wins in New Hampshire over an overrated Ron Paul and an overmatched Rick Santorum, the anybody-but-Romney forces in the GOP will likely begin to slink back into his camp, some because they sincerely prefer Mitt to his remaining rivals, and some because his nomination is finally, truly becoming inevitable. If Gingrich or (less likely) Perry can somehow build a southern redoubt, it will only take votes away from the other flailing anti-Romney prospects. And the final conservative surrender could come earlier: say, with an endorsement of Mitt by Jim DeMint in South Carolina or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush in Florida.
Romney’s likely nomination was originally nearly as unlikely as John McCain’s four years ago. But as the Iowa results indicate, the conservatives who could have stymied him couldn’t find another Goldwater or Reagan, and couldn’t even convince Iowa’s savvy caucus-goers to unite on an alternative. The fact that all three “tickets out of Iowa” ultimately belonged to Mitt is a sign that the GOP’s ascendant hyper-conservative wing has lost altitude and will likely find itself anxiously supporting a nominee it does not want or trust.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Having spent much of 2011 writing incessantly about the Republican presidential nominating contest, I’m simultaneously relieved and saddened by the impending end of the “invisible primary” and the beginning, with the Iowa caucuses, of actual voting. In the words of Jerry Garcia: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” And the oddest thing of all is that the outcome most often predicted by the laziest and most conventional-wisdom-bound analysts, the nomination of Mitt Romney, is now, according to InTrade, something on the order of an 80 percent probability.
If you choose to believe Romney’s nomination was determined long ago by a shadowy GOP Establishment that Republican voters follow like sheep, or that conservatives are setting aside their ideology in deference to Mitt’s superior “electability,” or that the party’s “base” understands they must “move to the center” to win close general elections–well, be my guest. But for my part, I think it’s reasonably clear that Romney’s nomination, if it indeed occurs, will be mainly attributable to a demolition derby similar to, and perhaps even weirder than, the one that haphazardly produced John McCain’s nomination in 2008. Romney’s own nomination may now be approaching inevitability, but let’s not forget that it was once very much preventable.
What’s clear is that a GOP electorate which has serially preferred such unlikely candidates as the hyper-extremist Michele Bachmann, the neophyte Herman Cain, and the ultimate retread Newt Gingrich, in some cases by very large margins in national and many state polls, has not suddenly been won over by the virtues of Mitt Romney. Indeed, despite Romney’s mild upward trend in support in the last few weeks, he is still the favorite candidate of no more than a fourth of Republicans other than in his second home, New Hampshire.
The long and short of it is that an essentially anti-Romney party (defined as its actual voting members, not elected officials, pundits or other elites) has failed either to unite behind or eliminate any of his rivals (with the exception of early casualty Tim Pawlenty). Bachmann was never going to be the nominee, yet she served Romney by croaking TimPaw’s candidacy and then locking down enough Christian Right support in Iowa to divide its ranks. Cain spectacularly self-destructed. Gingrich built his surge on a combination of debate performance–a fuel that could sustain him only so long as debates were held regularly–and the public’s temporary amnesia about his personal and political history. Ron Paul soaked up oxygen and activists in Iowa, the one and only state where the lay of the land and the nominating contest rules gave him a chance. And Rick Perry has run an amazingly inept campaign that serves to remind us all that high-paid political wizards often don’t know their asses from page eight when the chips are down, and that state-level success is not always transferable to the big stage.
This is not a narrative that suggests Romney’s nomination was inevitable. Here are just a few what-ifs that might have produced a very different end to the invisible primary:
1) What if Tim Pawlenty had not staked everything on the Iowa Straw Poll? The most important asset held by TimPaw’s low-energy campaign was potential. He was more than acceptable to every single element of the GOP, and he positioned himself almost ideally to benefit from the inevitable demise of other candidates. But he wasn’t around to reap the harvest when nearly all of them imploded, because he threw all his money into Ames and lost. What if he had kept his powder a bit dryer?
2) What if Mike Huckabee or [fill in the blank] had run? When Huck pulled back from a 2012 campaign in May, he was running first in the most recent national poll of Republicans that included his name, and also had the best favorable/unfavorable ratio in the field. Had he run, he would have been the instant and perhaps overwhelming front-runner in Iowa, where he beat Mitt Romney handily despite a vast financial disadvantage. Considering the heights deeply flawed candidates like Bachmann, Cain and Gingrich reached before their inevitable crashes, how high might Huckabee have flown, with his powerful appeal to evangelical Christians and his knack for gaining favorable “earned media,” even from liberals? And is there any chance Romney would have risked a second loss to Huck in Iowa? No, not one.
I won’t go through the exercise of examining what might have happened if other potential candidates–notably John Thune, Mike Pence, Haley Barbour, and Mitch Daniels–had run, but again, the appetite of Republican voters for even the most flawed non-Romney candidates suggests that any or all of them might have found traction.
3) What if Rick Perry had run a minimally competent campaign? Though it was only a few months ago, it’s hard to recall what a big, brawling, behemoth of a candidate Rick Perry looked to be when he announced in August. He had money. He had charm. He had that supposedly dazzling jobs record in Texas. He had Tea Party street cred, but the Establishment liked him, too. And so did GOP voters initially, rocketing him to the lead in polls just about everywhere other than New Hampshire. But then he stumbled serially in debates, deeply offending conservatives with his bleeding-heart position on immigration, and subsequently killing every potential comeback moment with gaffes. Exactly how hard was it for Team Perry to figure out that he had a big problem on immigration policy that simply required a well-timed flip-flop or at least some outspoken empathy with nativists? How difficult should it have been to convince their candidate that debate prep ought to occupy some of his time? And what, exactly, did Perry have to lose that kept him from running the kind of vicious, negative campaign against his rivals–any or all of them–that he was accustomed to running back home in Texas? It’s all a mystery, and one that helped Romney immensely.
4) What if anti-Romney conservatives had united behind anyone? The most abiding question is what might have happened if the conservatives who kept saying they wanted anybody other than Romney had figured out a way to identify that “anybody” and gotten behind that candidacy. Perhaps they thought Romney couldn’t win and they were free to back their personal favorites. Maybe they figured somebody else would take the risk of going medieval on him and taking him down. But in the end, even the famously disciplined shock troops of the Christian Right couldn’t make up their minds, and unless a final Iowa surge by Rick Santorum provides a lightning rod, they will go to the caucuses fatally divided when they might have been united.
But none of these what-ifs happened, and so at the end of the invisible primary Mitt Romney is the lucky fighter whose glass jaw somehow didn’t get hit. He’s even luckier that conservative hatred for Barack Obama virtually guarantees that most will loyally support him in the general election, after securing as many pledges of fidelity to the Holy Cause as they can extract. Whether the charmed life he’s live so far in 2012 deludes him into thinking it will be an easy win in November will go a long way towards determining his–and our–ultimate fate.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
The 2012 “invisible primary” is looking likely to end just how and where it began: with Republican ideologues anxiously looking to Iowa for signs of an electable “true conservative” alternative to Mitt Romney. Depending on whom you ask, they have found no such candidate, or have found too many of them. In either case, despite their fevered hopes the First-in-the-Nation Caucus is not likely to play its intended role as an all-important arbiter where ideological squishes are disciplined or destroyed and the faithful find their champion. Indeed, from the perspective of a conservative movement hoping to consolidate its control over the GOP once and for all and make 2012 the beginning of the end for the New Deal, Iowa has been a big failure.
The sad spectacle of the FAMiLY Leader organization–whose board, after administering a controversial pledge document and then holding a candidate forum, could not reach agreement on an endorsement–is something of a microcosm of the Right’s failure to separate the sheep from the goats throughout the invisible primary. While FAMiLY Leader chieftains Bob Vander Plaats and Chuck Hurley eventually supplied “personal” endorsements for Rick Santorum, Vander Plaats has been subsequently begging Santorum supporters to contribute money to enable him to actually campaign for his candidate–a sign of the gesture’s probable futility. Given the fact that they are appealing to largely the same constituencies and are hardly flush with cash, neither Santorum nor Michele Bachmann seem very likely to win a big “ticket out of Iowa.” And Rick Perry, once the favorite of the Christian Right, is still holding onto an impressive war chest that will likely sustain him, but he’s got precious little else going for him other than the hope that he, rather than Gingrich, will survive through New Hampshire to make a late appeal to southerners. For his part, Newt has not been haunting the highways and byways of Iowa all that obsessively either; the big news for his campaign this week has been its opening of an all-volunteer headquarters in Sioux City, just his second outpost in the entire state.
Meanwhile, neither Mitt Romney nor Ron Paul seems likely to be influenced by the results in Iowa at all. While it’s true that Romney has moved decisively to the right in order to make himself minimally acceptable to today’s conservatives, he’s done so out of deference to the primary process as a whole–not the glare of publicity and pressure on the Iowa campaign trail, which he has largely ignored until very, very recently. Indeed, the main Romney footprint in the state has been via the nasty attack ads on Newt Gingrich launched by the “Restore the Future” super-PAC backing Romney. And while Ron Paul has done well in the target-rich Iowa environment of a low-turnout caucus (lots of home-schoolers and lots of eager college students), it’s not as though he’s doing much of anything he hasn’t been doing for many years. Moreover, it is certain that Paul’s campaign will continue right up until the convention no matter how he does in Iowa.
So the caucuses themselves will probably only cull one candidate from the field, no more than the Iowa Straw Poll back in August that ended Tim Pawlenty’s campaign. As Jonathan Bernstein has recently explained, barring a real upset Iowa’s influence over the nominating contest may well be reduced to spin: Did this or that candidate beat expectations, or set the table for success down the road? That is not a meaningless role to play, but after absorbing so many months of candidate and media attention, it’s hardly ideal from the point of view of Iowa triumphalists who consider their strange contest the epitome of deliberative democracy.
And for the high-riding right wing of the Republican Party–be they denoted as Tea Partiers, the Christian Right, or “constitutional conservatives,”–it’s been a long and arguably pointless trip. Unable to use the unique leverage of Iowa to elevate Tim or Michele or Rick or Herman or Newt or the other Rick, they are now looking at genuinely long odds for denying the nomination to the man they do not want, Mitt Romney, who is more and more looking like the Richard Nixon of the early twenty-first century: The lowest common denominator of a political party in which leadership is in painfully short supply.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
In an invisible primary where it seems everyone other than Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum is fated to have his or her brief day in the sun, two new polls from Iowa show the indefatigable Ron Paul now leading the field among likely caucus-goers, with just two weeks left before actual voting occurs. The media, much to the consternation of fanatical Paulists, is already writing him off as another flash-in-the pan, his libertarianism too extreme to gain the support of moderate conservatives and too at odds with social conservatives to win over their vital support. This is the right instinct–Paul will not win the nomination–but then how to explain his growing popularity? The truth is that, with the singular exception of his Chomskyesque views on foreign policy, Paul is not nearly as divorced from mainstream conservative thought as was the case four years ago.
As it has been for past candidates with a small but intense and highly organized following (most famously Pat Robertson in 1988), Iowa is indeed a promising environment for a Paul upset. That’s partly because it is a caucus state where the number of supporters it takes to win is limited, and partly because Paul has made important inroads with key groups like home-schoolers and college students. Moreover, the steadiness of Paul’s support has given him staying power even as other campaigns have undergone feast-and-famine swings. What’s perhaps most remarkable about the new Public Policy Polling survey that gave Paul his first Iowa lead is how similar the numbers look compared to results published back in April, which showed Romney in the twenties and Gingrich, Paul and Bachmann in the teens. Paul’s poll “surge” is actually a matter of adding seven points over the last eight months.
The reason Paul has been able to slowly build his base of support in the state is that, on most issues, his views no longer lie outside the mainstream of the party orthodoxy. It’s become one of the great clichés of 2012 that the GOP as a whole has moved significantly in Ron Paul’s direction since his last campaign in 2008, and on domestic issues, it’s largely true. Paul’s endless fulminations about profligate monetary policy and the evil Fed, as well as his draconian prescriptions for a radically smaller federal government, now all sound completely within the conservative mainstream.
This development is due, in part, to the fact that there is now a Democratic administration that all Republicans are happy to demonize. More subtly, Paul’s narrative of a long disastrous national slide into socialism, which sounded very weird to many Republicans when their party controlled the White House and Congress, has become commonplace, as have hints and (for some) outright arguments that the entire New Deal and Great Society legacies need to be dismantled.
A Democratic administration has also made it possible for Republicans to disparage, with some degree of impunity, current military engagements in Afghanistan and Libya, while concerns over the economy have generally placed foreign policy issues on the back burner. But in a conservative-movement-dominated GOP, ideological purity is more important than ever, and by any standard Ron Paul flunks every foreign policy and national defense litmus test imaginable. Paul’s views on the projection of American power abroad are sure to get a thorough airing if he does win in Iowa, sending him right back to the fringe status he occupied in 2008.
While there remain different “schools” of foreign policy thinking on the right, the two words that best define conservative orthodoxy at the moment are “American exceptionalism,” the belief that the United States is uniquely endowed (some would say directly by God) with the resources and moral authority to defend the world against totalitarian evil, generally, and what most perceive as an Islamist threat, in particular. A corollary to “American exceptionalism” might be termed “Israeli exceptionalism,” the belief (buttressed by conservative evangelicals with various theological axes to grind) that Israel is America’s best and most important ally, with its own unique role to play in the struggle against Islamists, tyrants, and Islamist tyrants.
Paul emphatically repudiates both forms of exceptionalism, as illustrated most notably by his consistent view that America’s problems with the Islamic world are mainly a product of “blowback” from past U.S. meddling in the region. At a time when other candidates are arguing about exactly how much military power will be needed to prevent an intolerable achievement of nuclear weapons capability by Iran, Paul has actually defended Iran’s right to become a nuclear power and points to the CIA’s role in overthrowing Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 as creating a permanent and justified Iranian grievance against the U.S. As Michele Bachmann charged during the most recent candidate debate (in words we will hear over and over if Paul does well in Iowa), Paul’s foreign policy views place him well “to the left of Obama.” And at a time when conservatives are avid to attack Obama as an enemy of Israel, Paul’s hostility to the U.S.-Israeli military alliance is so notorious that the Republican Jewish Coalition has twice banned him from candidate forums, labeling him a “virulent and harsh critic of Israel.”
To be sure, today’s wild and wooly GOP is a much friendlier venue for the Ron Paul Revolution than it’s ever been, and a low turnout caucus in Iowa may showcase its strengths. But Paul’s residual weaknesses, rooted in a refusal to match domestic with global belligerence, will be enough to give him a one-way ticket back to political oblivion.