This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
This weekend’s “Thanksgiving Family Forum” at a Des Moines megachurch probably seemed like a great idea to Iowa social conservatives when it was first developed. You’d have the presidential candidates arrayed around a “Thanksgiving table,” obediently waiting for a symbolic serving of activist support. In the pews would be thousands of stolid Iowans of the sort most likely to show up at the January 3 caucuses. Wielding the microphone would be focus-group king Frank Luntz, probing the worldviews of the candidates to determine their fidelity to a teavangelical, big-God, small-government creed. And at the head of the table, in spirit at least, would be Iowa right-wing kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats, ready to crown one of the candidates as the Mike Huckabee of 2012.
It could still play out that way, of course, but the political context surrounding the Thanksgiving Family Forum, cosponsored by Vander Plaats’ FAMiLY Leader group, the National Organization for Marriage, and Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink affiliate, suggests the effort to unite Christian Right voters around a single candidate in Iowa could prove too little and too late. Mitt Romney isn’t even bothering to show up for Vander Plaats’s intended display of power, which may be a shrewd estimate of its futility. And with CSPAN pulling its cameras, the event won’t even be televised (though it will be live-streamed by CitizenLink). Indeed, Iowa’s social conservatives, long used to enjoying a remarkable degree of fealty from any GOP candidate hoping to catch fire as a result of a strong caucus showing, are facing an incredibly frightening prospect: their own irrelevance.
Until very recently, Bob Vander Plaats, a perennial statewide candidate who made his mark on the Iowa political landscape with his co-chairmanship of Huck’s 2008 upset win and his role in the successful 2010 purge of three of the Iowa Supreme Court judges who issued the decision legalizing same-sex marriage in 2009, had enjoyed outsize political influence over the Republican Party. And with the 2012 GOP presidential cycle looming, most pundits assumed his Iowa-based group would only garner an even greater status within the party. But FAMiLY Leader quickly stumbled in its first big bid for relevance with its sponsorship in July of a pledge document, entitled “The Marriage Vow,” which was intended to mousetrap candidates lusting for a victory in the August Iowa GOP Straw Poll into a litany of very specific right-wing positions on “family issues” (e.g., same-sex relationships, abortion, and even contraception and divorce). The group’s Vow was so clumsily drafted (implying, for example, that African-American families were better off as slaves than they are today) that all the candidates other than Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum felt free to give it a pass, even though Vander Plaats warned it was a precondition to receiving the group’s endorsement.
Even more importantly, Iowa social conservatives seemed to hurt themselves through their inability to unite behind and stick with a single candidate. Maybe if they’d accepted Tim Pawlenty’s arduous courtship earlier this year, he would have emerged as the “viable conservative alternative” to Mitt Romney. Perhaps if they’d united behind Michele Bachmann the day after her victory in the Iowa Straw Poll, her campaign would have shown more staying power. But instead they hopped over to Rick Perry, only to abandon ship for Herman Cain, who with no end in sight for his sexual harassment/sexual assault scandal is hardly looking like a safe bet for the godly.
This demolition derby of candidates acceptable to people like Vander Plaats has left Iowa’s social conservatives in a highly vulnerable position now. If Mitt Romney manages to win the caucuses with the kind of half-hearted effort he has put into the state so far–all the while ignoring would-be kingmakers–the whole supposition that future candidates must spend every other day in the Hawkeye State for months and years before votes are cast will be significantly undermined. A Ron Paul win, meanwhile, would simply be a testament to his own permanent following, not to any Iowa-specific factor, and would also waste Iowa’s endorsement, since there’s no chance he’ll win the nomination. And even if Cain or Gingrich come out on top, it too will prove the irrelevance of directly courting Iowa’s social conservative leaders: Their surges in state polls are a result of the national appeal they generated through debate performances, not through their practically nonexistent ground-games in Iowa. Indeed, it must be disturbing to all Iowa Republicans to consider the fate of Pawlenty and Bachmann, candidates who “played by the rules” with an intensive focus on personal appearances and organizational efforts in the state only to come away with nothing to show for it.
So to whom can Vander Plaats and his group turn now for redemption? Rick Santorum is the only other candidate who has devoted real time and resources to campaigning around the state, which is why teavangelicals who believe their leverage in Iowa is the most important source of their leverage in the national GOP could give him a good long look at the Thanksgiving Family Forum. Some might find it strange that a Roman Catholic like Santorum could wind up being the last-gasp hope of Vander Plaats and his associates, but only a few cranks among conservative evangelicals still regard Rome as “the whore of Babylon;” most are long used to close cooperation with traditionalist Catholics in the anti-choice and anti-gay rights movements. Moreover, Santorum not only signed the “Marriage Vow,” but has defined his candidacy from the beginning in terms of hard-core, no-compromise social conservatism, even as better-known conservative candidates like Perry and Cain struggled on occasion with their positions on abortion and gay marriage. But in getting behind a candidate as uncharismatic and unrealistic as Santorum, Vander Plaats and his associates would be taking a big risk: If Santorum fails to launch, Iowa’s social conservatives would appear to be paper tigers hardly worth noticing–and that would no doubt be considered the worst fate of all.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In his pursuit of a presidential nomination that a majority of his party’s voters clearly do not want to give him, Mitt Romney has been extraordinarily lucky. Aside from the sheer number of potentially formidable opponents who chose to forgo a run in 2012, the rivals he has actually faced each seem to possess qualities that cast Romney’s own shortcomings in a more favorable light. His authenticity issues, for instance, paled in comparison to those of Tim Pawlenty, who spent most of his brief campaign trying unsuccessfully to convince Tea Partiers that he looked good bellowing anti-government slogans in a tricorner hat. His ideological heresies, meanwhile, might be extensive, but unlike Rick Perry he has never told his conservative tormenters they didn’t have a heart because they disagreed with him. And while Mitt’s buttoned-up, Mormon persona is a bit boring and wonky, Herman Cain has done more than enough to demonstrate the downside of an exciting and unpredictable personality.
None of Romney’s opponents, however, have greater potential to make him shine in comparison than Newt Gingrich. That’s because Gingrich, the latest candidate to surge in the polls on a wave of anybody-but-Mitt sentiment, is the only candidate with a longer and more contradictory track record than Romney, effectively nullifying the most grievous charge levied against the former Massachusetts governor. Indeed, if Gingrich has a divinely appointed role to play in the ongoing GOP nomination drama, one might argue it’s to make Romney look like a piker when it comes to the art of flip-flopping.
Consistency is always going to be a problem for a pol of Gingrich’s rare vintage, who made his first congressional bid in 1974 when Mitt Romney was still at Harvard Business School. Indeed, Gingrich anticipated Romney’s moderate-Republican incarnation of the 1990s by more than two decades, serving as Nelson Rockefeller’s southern regional campaign coordinator in 1968 and then running distinctly to the left of his Democratic opponent in his first two congressional races.
But Gingrich’s most notable flip-flops have been far more recent and abrupt. Both before and during the United States’ intervention in Libya earlier this year, Gingrich seemed to shift positions constantly. And his double back-flip on Paul Ryan’s budget proposal–he was for it, then dismissed it as “right-wing social engineering,” and then endorsed it all over again, all within a couple weeks–nearly destroyed his 2012 campaign before it got off the ground.
The Gingrich flip-flop that plays most directly into Romney’s hand, however, concerns the former Speaker’s shifting positions on heath care reform. Gingrich’s early and strong support for the idea of an individual mandate (particularly as encompassed in a Heritage Foundation proposal for universal health coverage during the 1990s, but reiterated as recently as 2008) will be hard to ignore once attention is drawn to it. To the extent that it closely mirrors Romney’s own image problems over having enacted an individual health care mandate in Massachusetts, it reinforces the perception that this is a heresy conservatives can be forgiven for having once endorsed.
Likewise, when it comes to the environment, Romney’s prior green leanings are nothing compared to the symbolism of Gingrich’s past support for Mother Earth. The fact that Gingrich was concerned about global climate change (he co-sponsored a Global Warming Prevention Act back in 1989) before he wasn’t hardly distinguishes him from other leading Republicans like Romney, of course. But the specificity and visibility of his support for climate change action–including his decision in 2008 to cut an ad for the Alliance for Climate Protection promoting bipartisan action on climate change–far outdoes anything the other candidates have ever publicly said or done on the issue. The ad, which Gingrich now calls “the single dumbest thing I’ve done,” shows the former Speaker and then-current Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sitting closely together on a couch with the Capitol in the background, warbling in tandem about the need to come together for climate change solutions.
It is hard to imagine, short of tenderly kissing Barney Frank after agreeing with him on housing policy, what Gingrich could have possibly done to provide a more damaging optic from the perspective of the Tea Party folk on whom his candidacy now relies. Sitting in front of the Capitol with Pelosi indelibly reminds viewers of his long Beltway insider pedigree. Chatting and smiling with “Princess Nancy” is a supreme symbol of the now largely extinct desire for bipartisanship that Tea Partiers hate intensely, and it’s all the more shocking coming from the man who now regularly refers to the opposition as “the secular socialist machine.” The Pelosi ad is already beginning to pop up all over the blogosphere, and the more Gingrich apologizes, the more he reinforces the impression that he, not Mitt Romney, is the champion flip-flopper in the GOP presidential field.
Of course, it’s always possible Gingrich can overcome his own record, or convince conservative voters that his years of vicious partisanship and conservative ideological agitation are more important than his moments of cuddling up to Democrats and adopting trendy liberal causes. And maybe Tea Partiers really would prefer to support just about anybody against Romney; it is notable that Gingrich, Cain, and Perry have all in turn managed to reach levels of support in the polls higher than Romney’s support at its peak. But if Romney does win the nomination, it’s increasingly clear he owes it less to his own virtues than to a field of rivals who seem determined to show just how much worse Republicans could do.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Last week was a difficult week for the Tea Party. Tuesday’s election results firmly rebutted the idea that the movement had touched off an irresistible rightward wave in American politics, one that would not subside until it submerged the Democratic Party and its union/liberal allies once and for all. Meanwhile, the process of choosing a champion to drive Barack Obama out of the White House is not going well at all. With only seven weeks until actual caucus and primary voting begins, how did the movement arrive at this seemingly hopeless state?
Tea folk knew they’d have a fight on their hands, but they weren’t prepared for it. They wanted to fight off the Beltway hacks and RINOs who had so disingenuously sucked up to the movement in its early days; the devious Mitt Romney was these types’ obvious choice, reflecting as he did their own lack of principle, so Tea Partiers would have to come up with their own candidate. Their chosen method for asserting their interests–namely, by ruthlessly enforcing ideologically rigidity–has proven itself flawed, but they have stuck with it regardless. Despite the electoral defeats of Tea Party candidates like Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell in 2010, to most Tea Partiers the lesson of the midterm elections was that the only thing keeping the Republican Party from an enduring majority was its lack of ideological rigor and its cowardly refusal to adopt total war tactics. The very concept of political “overreach,” the term most often applied to the losing side in Ohio’s recent Issue 2 battle, is alien to the Tea Party mind, in which extremism in the defense of liberty is never a vice.
As we’ve seen, the movement has enough size and muscle to give its preferred candidates significant national clout. But with its ideological extremism and insularity, it has also been selecting for candidates who are all but guaranteed to succumb to the intense public scrutiny of a presidential race. It’s no accident that we have seen so many Republicans ascend to frontrunner status, only to flame out in glorious balls of fire.
All along, Tea Party supporters have been holding their own mini-primary during the lead-in to actual voting. Initially, their problem seemed to be an embarrassment of riches when it came to candidates seeking their favor. With Sarah Palin on the sidelines, Michele Bachmann was often called the “Queen of the Tea Party.” But despite her win at the Iowa GOP Straw Poll and her frontrunner status in many national polls, Tea Partiers abandoned her for what then looked like a behemoth of a candidate in Rick Perry, who had thrilled hyper-conservatives in Texas with harsh anti-government rhetoric and event hints of secession as a last resort.
But having brushed aside Bachmann and other Tea Party favorites, Perry promptly lost most of his Tea Party admirers when he reiterated and then clumsily defended his support for making the children of undocumented workers eligible for in-state tuition at Texas colleges–a position that Tea Partiers found deeply offensive, especially when he made the supreme mistake of saying those who disagreed with him had “no heart.”
When Perry crashed, it was not surprising that Tea Partiers flocked to the banner of Herman Cain, one of the earliest Tea Party boosters as a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The glib former pizza executive seemed the epitome of the citizen-politician, fond of attractively simplistic cure-alls like a modified flat tax plan, long popular in Tea circles.
But just when non-Tea Partiers were coming to grips with the strange possibility that Cain would have to be taken seriously as a candidate, his amateurism, so attractive to his fans, began to undo him. Even if he forges his way through the current sexual harassment allegations without being proved a predator and a liar, the bloom is off his rose. The days when Cain could count on universally positive feelings from Republican voters are long gone, and there is a palpable fear (nicely reflected by Michelle Bachmann’s comment that the GOP couldn’t afford any “surprises” from its nominee) that he is one press conference away from complete, final disaster. Any chance that Rick Perry could quickly ride back into contention, meanwhile, probably expired during the November 9 debate in Michigan. Questions about Perry’s debating skills aside, any Tea Party champion worth his salt can list the federal agencies he’d shut down in his sleep.
Which brings us to the movement’s current, desperate state. As ace political analyst Ron Brownstein recently noted, there are virtually no signs of growing Tea Party acceptance of Mitt Romney as the “inevitable” nominee; instead, there is incipient panic that the inability of the right to settle on a competent candidate could let Romney win by default. Brownstein quotes FreedomWorks spokesperson Adam Brandon as saying his group may decide to endorse someone–anyone–in order to stop Romney and avoid a division of the Tea Party vote. But who?
Some Tea Party supporters greatly admire Ron Paul as a prophet whose cranky monetary theories and cheerful support for a return to Coolidge administration levels of taxation and spending have now become mainstream. But as a battery of four late-October state polls conducted by CNN illustrated, Paul actually draws a majority of his support from non-Tea Party Republicans and Independents, and it’s implausible in any event that super-patriots will rally around a candidate who defends Iran’s right to pursue nuclear weapons. Michelle Bachmann, for her part, hasn’t had a good week on the campaign trail since August.
It is possible that the lightly regarded Rick Santorum, who is slavishly reduplicating Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign strategy in Iowa, could pull off a surprise in the first caucus state by finishing ahead of a collapsing Perry and Cain. If that were to happen, the Pennsylvanian could become a Christian Right/Tea Party lighting rod, and his views are more acceptable to right-wing power centers like the Club for Growth than were Huck’s four years ago.
The only non-Romney candidate with positive momentum in the polls, however, is Newt Gingrich. He’s certainly among the last candidates you’d figure to become a vehicle for the Tea Party Movement. He is, after all, the consummate career politician, someone who by his own admission began fantasizing about political power from a very early age. Conservatives graphically recall how Bill Clinton ran circles around Gingrich during their period of shared power in the late 1990s. His horrific mistake last May of dismissing Paul Ryan’s budget proposal as unrealistic was precisely the kind of Beltway thinking Tea Party activists hate, and hurt him as much in Tea circles as Perry’s later heresies on immigration. And for those worried about Cain’s history with women, is Gingrich-the-admitted-adulterer, whose campaign earlier imploded because he’d rather cruise the Mediterranean with his third wife than attend to his campaign, a better bet?
The very fact that it’s possible to discuss Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum as practical options for the once-invincible right-wing movement shows how rapidly it has lost its way. If you were to script the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest according to the most lurid Tea Party conspiracy theories of secret Establishment manipulation of events, the results would look a lot like what we are seeing right now.
But no elaborate conspiracy theories are needed to explain the collapse of all the movement’s various champions. They wanted hard-core ideologues who scorned experience, conventional political skills, and any hint of sweet reasonableness, and that’s what they got: candidates likely to crumble under the glare of a national spotlight or be torn down for insufficient orthodoxy by the movement’s very supporters–or, in the case of most figures who have already risen and fallen during this election cycle, both.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Has Herman Cain’s campaign always been a joke, or were pundits right to take it somewhat seriously? In the wake of multiple allegations of sexual harassment levied against him, was the media asking the wrong questions by focusing on how it might help or hurt his supposed “candidacy”–as opposed to, say, his book sales? The question of what makes a “serious” candidate for the presidency is at least as old as such twentieth-century developments as state primaries and electronic media. But the angry disputes over the seriousness of candidates for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination are a sign of something new and strange: a tumultuous environment in one of our two major parties that the old rules of analysis set by practitioners, historians, and political scientists may not be adequate to explain.
Indeed, the meteoric trajectories of such untraditional figures as Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain have inspired much anxiety over the forces behind their rapid rises and falls. Jonathan Bernstein has his own theory of how so many “clowns” have wound up cutting capers on the GOP campaign trail, mostly involving the proliferation of “business plan” candidates who are building up their profiles in order to sell books or land TV gigs. But more often the media is getting blamed for giving unserious candidates the oxygen they need to gum up the works. Conservative commentator James Poulos expressed this feeling vividly in the context of Herman Cain’s sudden notoriety:

The media salivates over whatever is of the least substance–as, every week, a freshly manufactured fetish object takes pride of place. Cain runs an operation so unready for prime time that Sarah Palin can’t take it seriously, preferring–how low the bar–Newt Gingrich.
Sadly, the Cain Train is now the locomotive of a Republican race for the White House that’s run off the rails. The grand theme is a total lack of seriousness. Not seriousness in the self-serious sense that, say, Jon Huntsman would use it. Seriousness in the sense that everyone, from Cain to his fans and critics to their proxies in the chattering class, seems positively thrilled to fight to the death over the trivialities of political theater.

This is a complaint often made in the past by progressives, who seem convinced, for example, that Sarah Palin was purely and simply a media creation (an opinion that betrays ignorance of her celebrity status in pro-life circles well before John McCain brought her to the attention of national media types). But if it may be satisfying to easily discomfited souls to dismiss the unexpected success of unconventional candidacies as products of an out-of-control media culture, it’s probably a good idea to take a fresh look at the question of why this or that would-be president should or should not be taken seriously. In a campaign season in which the GOP nomination is effectively comprised of two separate, parallel races–one for the hearts of the Tea Party movement, and one for those of the conservative establishment–it turns out that the question of who’s serious and who’s not is one over which the mainstream media exercises surprisingly little authority.
To clear up one immediate source of confusion, candidacies can have serious consequences even if the candidate has no plausible path to the nomination. This year, for example, Michele Bachmann was probably never in a position to become the nominee. But it was clear from the beginning that she could, and eventually did, end Tim Pawlenty’s very serious candidacy by beating her fellow-Minnesotan in the Iowa GOP Straw Poll. Similarly, nobody much thinks Rick Santorum is going to be raising his hands in triumph in Tampa next year as the GOP nominee. But his tortoise-like campaign in Iowa could develop sufficient momentum to deny another serious candidate, Rick Perry, a win over the ultimate serious candidate, Mitt Romney, in the Iowa Caucuses on January 3.
Another issue that often causes a dialogue-of-the-deaf on the seriousness of this or that candidate is how broadly you define the “elites” who clearly have some role in shaping the presidential field. Some observers seem to think there is a shadowy, Illuminati-esque cabal of rich folk who literally sit around and decide GOP (and for that matter, Democratic) nominations. Others focus on “Beltway elites,” including K Street lobbyists and big-time pundits. Many definitions of Republican elites seem to assume they are composed of people who are ideologically moderate, or at least disinterested in non-economic issues. Others, like Jonathan Bernstein, have a more sophisticated view of elites as including major advocacy-group players like the Right-to-Life movement and the Christian Right, who have an effective veto-power over candidates–not to mention relatively new, ideologically driven money titans like the Koch brothers or Art Pope, who don’t fit into standard categories. Candidates who are deemed “serious” by elements of this broader set of elites should be taken seriously by journalists as well.
Still another source of rancor and debate in this discussion is the important distinction between candidates who are long shots because they aren’t well known and those who simply can’t win because their views are not within a party’s mainstream. Ron Paul supporters are forever complaining that their man never gets media attention commensurate with his standing in the polls or his ability to turn out crowds. But Paul’s wildly heterodox foreign policy views alone guarantee a cap on his levels of support, and mean that he could never, ever win a GOP nomination even with (or perhaps especially with) universal name ID and unlimited cash. Herman Cain, on the other hand, had always (at least until recently) enjoyed incredibly high favorable marks among the segments of the GOP electorate that had heard of him–and his popularity in the party grew, absent any media goading, alongside his name recognition.
But the biggest factor that suggests a re-evaluation of measures of candidate seriousness is the existence this year of an intense GOP intraparty struggle which has scrambled a lot of the conventional rules. For the Tea Party movement–which appears to represent roughly half the GOP primary electorate nationally, and a lot more than that in some states–candidate credentials like broad name ID or prior experience or early-state positioning or even money have become vastly less important than fidelity to an exceptionally narrow set of conservative principles. That explains why Rick Perry’s heresy on immigration policy was so damaging once it became clearly known to his Tea Party base, and why much of that base immediately gravitated to Herman Cain, whose lack of political experience is considered an actual asset in Tea Party circles. And it’s also why Newt Gingrich, considered laughably “un-serious” as a candidate by most of the political world, is getting another audition now that Cain seems to be on the edge of imploding. The criteria for seriousness in the sub-primary being conducted by the Tea Party to choose a champion against Mitt Romney are not the same as the conventional criteria for the party as a whole.
All in all, it seems wise for media commentators to suspend their prior assumptions about candidate seriousness for the duration of this particular nomination cycle and just follow the lead of Republican voters. If anything is clear, they know what they want far better than anyone who is tempted to tell them who they can or cannot support.

I would not want to be a member of one of those Republican “elite” circles right now, responsible for getting my party out of its presidential quandry.
The Herman Cain implosion is now impossible to deny or ignore. With one of the original sexual harassment accusers going public (and looking highly credible), a new accuser coming forward, and the candidate himself holding a highly self-destructive press conference, the Cain Train’s forward momentum now seems to be depending entirely on blind conservative hatred of the media (and perhaps of those feminazis who think sexual harassment is a serious issue). But even that line of defense may be crumbling. RedState’s Erick Erickson pretty much gave up on Cain when he tried to blame the Perry campaign for his troubles, calling the Cain campaign “stuck on stupid.” The Iowa Republican‘s Craig Robinson has gone into full-fledged attack mode, calling Cain’s conservative defenders part of a “cult of personality.” And those signs of abandonment occurred before today’s rolling fiasco.
So will Cain’s impending collapse finally convince Republicans to unite behind Mitt Romney? Doesn’t look like it. Mitt seems stuck in the polls nearly everywhere other than in New Hampshire. Will it feed a comeback by Rick Perry? Not much sign of that, either.
Indeed, the candidate who seems to be benefiting from the chaos right now is none other than Newt Gingrich, left for dead months ago and still running a limited campaign that’s in the red financially. Brand new PPP polls in Ohio and Mississippi (and also in the state senate district in Iowa that’s holding a special election today) show Gingrich running not only well ahead of Perry, but also ahead of Romney. Jonathan Chait is so stunned by what he calls “The Newtening” (sorta kinda told you so, Jon) that he’s foresworn making any more predictions about this GOP nomination contest.
What’s next? A Santorum surge? (Matter of fact, there are some who see signs of Santorum momentum in Iowa). A Bachmann revival? A Ron Paul breakthrough?
Hard to say, but the one thing that does still make sense, as Ron Brownstein explained week before last, is that there are two separate GOP nominating contests underway, one for each half of the party that is composed of Tea Party supporters and non-Tea Party supporters. Romney is winning the latter handily, but has made little headway among the former, who are obviously struggling to settle on a champion. There is no one in sight who can bridge the gap between the two factions, which means that unless Romney can just wrap it all up early with a surgical strike in Iowa, a collision is inevitable between Mitt and, well, somebody.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Even as the political world awaits the further unfolding of Herman Cain’s handling of sexual harassment allegations, one of his rivals is on the brink of making a strategic decision that could have an even greater impact on the Republican presidential nominating contest, and on the general election as well. Will Mitt Romney go for a “quick kill” by focusing his vast resources on a serious bid to win the Iowa Caucuses just two months from now? Or will he stick to his original plan of beginning his campaign with an almost certain win in New Hampshire, at the risk of allowing someone–likely Cain or Rick Perry–to begin consolidating conservative anti-Romney sentiment with an Iowa victory?
The consequences of Romney’s decision, it turns out, go beyond the strategic question of how best to win the GOP nomination. It could also determine whether the nominating contest will turn into an extended ideological slugfest that poorly positions Romney to face off against Barack Obama next year. Indeed, the real possibility that a drawn-out contest will drag Romney even further to the right should be a considerable factor in his decision-making process–one that, if he is wise, should prompt him to take a serious look at rolling the dice yet again in Iowa.
As New York‘s John Heilemann recently explained, Team Romney has carefully handled Iowa in a way that makes it possible for the candidate to go either way, but he’s now reached the failsafe point:

These mixed signals are neither incidental nor accidental. They’re reflective of a deep ambivalence in Romneyworld about its approach to the Hawkeye State. All year long, the campaign has debated internally whether and how hard to compete in the caucuses. Every option carries both significant upsides and substantial risks. But now, with the voting in Iowa just two months away, decision time is here.

The argument against a Romney commitment to Iowa can be summed up in one word: 2008. At this point in that cycle four years ago, a Romney win in the caucuses, giving him momentum to beat Rudy Giuliani and John McCain in New Hampshire, seemed all but certain. A University of Iowa poll on October 29, 2007 showed him with 36 percent of likely Iowa caucus-goers, with Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, and Fred Thompson all bunched in the low teens. He had vast money (eventually spending $10 million in Iowa) and organization (he had won the Ames Straw Poll in the summer), and moreover, was positioned as the “movement conservative” in the field at a time when ideologues had big doubts about the other candidates. Within a month, however, his lead was gone, and his loss to the low-budget, high-energy Huckabee campaign derailed his path to the nomination.
In every respect other than the disarray of the current field, Romney is in a less enviable position in Iowa today, with polling support in the 20s, a skeleton organization, very little time spent on the ground by the candidate, and most importantly, a reputation as a flip-flopping moderate in a cycle when the GOP base has turned sharply to the right and feels no particular reason to settle for an impure nominee. But then again, who, exactly, is going to beat Romney this time? Rick Perry has lost two-thirds of his support, in Iowa and nationally, since September, and the man who took most of that support, Herman Cain, has less organization in Iowa than Romney, and has been making serious mistakes on almost a daily basis since surging in the polls.
It’s an exquisite dilemma for Romney, who certainly has the resources to make an eight-week blitz in Iowa. But for all the risks involved in the “quick-kill” strategy, what should ultimately sway him to make the plunge is the big advantage a short primary season would give him in preparing for the general election.
By advantages, I don’t mean it would save Romney a lot of money, though it would, or that it would give him more time to mobilize unhappy conservatives in a holy crusade to beat Obama, though it would do that as well. More important than both of these factors, the “quick kill” would enable him to escape the intense ideological pressures of a nominating contest where Romney, in particular, will be required to prove his conservative bona fides constantly, at the expense of his general election appeal.
The gap between the outlook of the GOP’s conservative base and the general electorate is large this year and the nominating contest is widening it still further each day. At GOP candidate debates, it is taken for granted that the very idea of universal health care is an abomination, deflationary monetary and fiscal policy is a great idea during a recession, Social Security and Medicare need to be drastically overhauled, paying attention to income inequality is “class warfare,” and every instrument of government should be bent to the task of further engorging the wealth of “job creators.” Just in the last two weeks, Cain and Perry have been competing for the “most conservative” mantle by trumpeting deeply regressive tax overhaul plans and swearing their fealty to the most extreme anti-abortion sentiments. Perry has already made it plain that his main weapon against Romney will be the constant assertion that his rival is secretly and not-so secretly a liberal, sure to push “Obama Lite” policies. Right-wing litmus-test titans like Jim DeMint of South Carolina will exact as high a price as possible for their weighty endorsements.
This is a very dangerous environment for the ultimate nominee, and particularly for Romney, who has virtually no stored capital of trust with the very voters who will determine his fate. Up until now, he has only made two big concessions to the pressure to turn hard-right: his support for the Cut, Cap and Balance deficit reduction proposal (an explicit condition for DeMint’s support) and his strategic decision to cynically blast Rick Perry for sympathy towards illegal immigrants. If he does not essentially win the nomination before the contest gets into the southern states, how many more ideological gestures of this sort will he have to make?
More generally, a long primary season is a very bad thing for the Republican Party. At this point, Barack Obama’s best, and perhaps only, strategy for re-election is to make this a “two futures” choice, in which the extremism of the GOP gets as much attention as the current state of the economy. Nothing will play into this strategy quite like months of Republican candidates barnstorming through Tea Party-dominated state primaries accusing each other of being reasonable instead of right.
The “quick-kill” scenario may be the only way out of this trap, and only Mitt Romney can trigger it by hunkering down for an intense holiday-season drive through the right-to-life fundraising banquets and local-supporter potluck dinners of Iowa. We’ll soon know whether he has the stomach for it.

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So in the extended game of hot potato that the Republican presidential nominating contest has become, here’s the score:
* Newt Gingrich imploded in May and June, and has clawed his way back to being only a quarter of a million or so in debt, and rehiring a small staff in three states.
* Tim Pawlenty ran out of gas in August, and got out.
* Michele Bachmann got elbowed to the curb in September by the meteoric rise of Rick Perry.
* Perry bombed extensively in late September and most of October, losing about two-thirds of his support nationally and in the early states, with most of it going directly to Herman Cain.
* Herman Cain seems to be in the process of imploding right now, with his only consolation being that not much of anybody is talking about the floundering he was doing a couple weeks ago on abortion and foreign policy.
* Ron Paul ain’t going anywhere, and Rick Santorum looks to be in the position of trying to convince people to consider him formidable if he finishes third or fourth in Iowa, where he is campaigning monomaniacally.
Though it all, Mitt Romney drifts along in the mid-twenties in national and most state polls (except for his top states like NH and NV), even as it becomes apparent that the Tea Party wing of the party still opposes him violently, no matter how many times they are told his nomination is “inevitable.” Unless he pursues the risky strategy (the very one that blew him up four years ago) of entering Iowa with both feet in order to execute a “quick kill” on the entire field, he will probably have to endure an extended primary season in which he will be daily described as a crypto-liberal, forcing him in turn to say crazy, flip-floppy things to fit in.
Nate Silver published an extended piece over the weekend analyzing the odds on the general election outcome from the perspective of three variables: the president’s approval ratings; 2012 GDP growth figures; and the relative extremism of the Republican nominee. Obama’s doing not so great on the first two measurements, but number three is lookin’ good.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The trouble Herman Cain is experiencing with Politico‘s scoop on an alleged past settlement of sexual harassment charges–as well as his initial reaction to it–was, in many respects, predictable. Ever since the pizza executive’s improbable rise to the top of Republican presidential polls, there have been vague but menacing predictions that the new scrutiny he would face could quickly burst the bubble of his candidacy.
Likewise, Cain’s pose as a victim of a politically, and perhaps racially, motivated smear was also predictable, but could prove remarkably effective. The deep resentments raised by the Clarence Thomas precedent, which Cain and his defenders are already invoking, are a powerful and living memory for the conservative rank-and-file. While the impact of the current allegations against Cain will ultimately depend on whether or not they can be proven, and if so, how deeply they contradict his own account of the affair, there is a strong possibility the candidate will use his own supposed victimization to turn the saga into a plus for his campaign and a direct challenge to his rivals and intraparty detractors. And in doing so, Cain may finally roll the dice and become a deadly serious aspirant to the presidency.
As the allegations against Cain unfolded, the insightful conservative-watcher David Weigel of Slate has sought to debunk the idea that there is any valid parallel between Thomas’ situation and Cain’s. For instance, law professor Anita Hill didn’t come forward with her allegations against Thomas until he was nominated for the Supreme Court, while Cain’s accusers came forward soon after the alleged behavior occurred, and when he was nothing more than the president of a prominent trade association. Moreover, the political context is different, because Thomas enjoyed universal support from Republicans and (initially) strong trans-partisan support from African-Americans, while Cain has a big target on his back within his party and has no visible black support.
But if that’s all true, there remain parallels between Thomas and Cain that go deeper than the mere facts of their “cases.” After the intervening decades of partisan polarization and “culture wars,” it is sometimes difficult to recall how shockingly powerful the emotions unleashed by the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings seemed at the time. The she-said he-said confrontation between Thomas and Hill polarized the entire country, with the murky facts of Thomas’ behavior towards Hill becoming crystal clear when viewed through the various prisms of gender, race, and ideology. It certainly became an article of conservative faith that the effort to defeat Thomas’ confirmation exposed a deep and unsavory hypocrisy among liberals about race, and a proprietary attitude about acceptably “authentic” African-American viewpoints.
Once installed on the Supreme Court, Thomas quickly became identified with radical ideas about the constitution’s connection to divinely endowed “natural rights” that in every important respect anticipated the Tea Party’s brand of “constitutional conservatism.” He also became a living symbol of the emotionally important link in the minds of social conservatives between their cause and the civil rights movement. That Thomas’ once-robust support from African-Americans quickly evaporated after his constitutional views became apparent simply confirmed his status as a rebel against his liberal-brainwashed brothers and sisters, and a brave crusader for the color-blindness that conservatives consider the true, if betrayed, legacy of Martin Luther King.
As an African-American who has cultivated a close relationship with the Tea Party, Cain was the heir to Thomas in the conservative imagination well before there was any question of comparing sexual harassment allegations. From the very beginning of the campaign, he has adopted the Palinesque persona of an anti-politician running an unconventional campaign that is deeply threatening to elites in both parties. A big part of his self-image, in this respect, derives from his unique status as an African-American conservative who is simultaneously “above race,” but is also determined to liberate his own people from the “plantation” of subservience to contemptuous liberals who keep black people in the bondage of dependence on Big Government. Cain has also long been fond of comparing himself to Clarence Thomas and bravely anticipating the kind of “high-tech lynching” the Supreme Court Justice narrowly survived during his confirmation hearings. It’s no accident that Thomas’ wife Ginni, a self-described Tea Party activist, had warm things to say about Cain back in June, when he was largely an afterthought in the presidential campaign.
So in coping with his potentially fatal current situation, it would be astonishing if Cain didn’t play the “Clarence Thomas card,” which may seem like the “race card” to liberals or to Cain’s Republican foes, but in the code of today’s movement conservatives is virtually the opposite. Via the rich symbolism of Thomas’ passion play, Cain can reinforce the sense that he is the victim of a concerted assault by all of the Tea Party’s hobgoblins: secretly racist white liberals, the real-America-hating media elites, and the RINO-ridden Republican Party establishment. Indeed, from the deeply conservative point of view, these forces have been itching for the chance to destroy the man who offers a living refutation of the claim that the Tea Party is motivated not by simple patriotism but by selfish and atavistic resentment of minorities and our current, half-black president. If these powerful, defensive emotions are properly harnessed by Cain, the timing of the sexual harassment allegations could turn out to be fortuitous rather than disastrous, certainly eclipsing doubts about the details of Cain’s tax plan or exactly what he said to Piers Morgan about abortion.
Best of all, for Herman Cain, seizing the mantle of Clarence Thomas gives him a way to prophesy his eventual vindication. After his confirmation, Thomas famously told friends a lifetime appointment to the bench was a great way to have the last laugh. Cain may be on the cross of persecution right now, but what a resurrection it would be if his troubles finally anoint him the true Tea Party champion against Mitt Romney and give him an actual shot at becoming the man who appoints Supreme Court justices!