In his efforts to help along the sorta-kinda revival of John McCain’s presidential campaign, National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru came up with an interesting proposal: McCain should announce that if elected, he would serve only one term.
Ponnuru doesn’t exactly explain why this would work magic for McCain, other than attracting some buzz, and perhaps (if he followed Ramesh’s advice and said his one term would be devoted to a few big goals) reviving his tarnished rep as a principled pol among power-mad opportunists. If McCain were in better political shape, a one-term pledge might assuage concerns about his age and health, but those aren’t really his problem at present. Theoretically, knowing a President McCain would leave office in 2013 might appeal to current or potential Republican rivals, but that won’t turn many real votes. If things started looking really, really bad for GOPers in 2008, I suppose McCain could fulfill his old buddy Marshall Wittmann’s dream by announcing Joe Lieberman as a running-mate and propose some sort of four-year Government of National Salvation. But it’s hard to imagine that series of events congealing in time to crucially affect the nominating contest, and as Ponnuru says, the time for a big bold move is now.
But there is one Republican candidate for whom the strategy of a one-term pledge coupled with a strategic, announced-in-advance running-mate could make some sense: Rudy Giuliani. Rudy’s appeal to many Republicans is that he may be the only choice who could thwart the likelihood of a Democratic president working with a Democratic Congress, perhaps breaking the partisan gridlock of the last decade or so, and taking the Supreme Court out of reach of those whose raison d’etre is the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But many of the same people are terrified that a President Giuliani would reshape the GOP itself in his image. Limiting himself in advance to one term, and at the same time choosing in advance a culturally conservative running-mate who would be the Heir to the Throne, might produce a small but crucial breakthrough for Rudy in the GOP ranks.
While we are on the subject, the use of the vice-presidential nomination as a strategic device is an idea that doesn’t get discussed much these days, thanks to the abundant evidence that it usually doesn’t change many votes. But a well-timed and dramatic running-mate announcement is a proposition that’s rarely been tested. What if John Kerry had actually secured McCain as his running-mate in 2004 (which I’m pretty sure was a much livelier possibility than a lot of people realized then or now)? And while the Reagan-Ford ticket that nearly materialized at the GOP Convention of 1980 would probably not have affected the outcome of that election, it certainly might have affected world history by sparing us all the Bush Dynasty.
Then there’s the ever-lurking idea of a candidate announcing a running-mate before winning the nomination. It’s happened just once: in 1976, when Ronald Reagan stunned Republicans by choosing Sen. Richard Schweiker of PA as his putative Veep shortly before the convention. The move was narrowly tactical, aimed at prying loose some delegates from PA, and it failed, because Schweiker’s relatively liberal voting record produced a backlash that lost Reagan the previously uncommitted Mississippi delegation and thus the nomination.
But it’s a strategem eminently available to any candidate who wants to create a large buzz, signal a grand coalition, or attract a key voter bloc. And at some point, if not this year then before too long, it will be tried.

In case you missed it, the robo-pollsters at Rasmussen have released a survey showing that an independent presidential run by Stephen Colbert would net 13% support in a Clinton-Giuliani contest. Just as surprisingly, comparison of the three-way test with Rasmussen polls of the Big Two alone seems to indicate that Colbert pulls significantly more support from Rudy than from HRC. Less surprisingly, Rasmussen finds that the comedian does really, really well–around 30%–among voters under the age of 30.
There is one very obvious reason to dismiss these “findings”: Asking poll questions about an unserious candidate invites an unserious answer.
So why am I writing about it? Because when polls came out a few months ago showing Mike Bloomberg with similar levels of support in a three-way race, many thousands of words of serious analysis were spilled in print and online. But the truth is that polls offering any well-known “third choice” typically elicit significant support well in advance of elections–support that tends to evaporate as actual voting grows nigh. The alleged Bloomberg Boom wasn’t any more serious than today’s Colbert Boom.
Still, to suspend disbelief for a moment, it is fun to wonder why Colbert would cut into Rudy Giuliani’s base of support so disproportionately. Are there actually a lot of Colbert viewers who don’t understand that his Fox Bloviator shtick is a joke? Or is Rudy benefitting from a hitherto-undiscovered segment of the electorate that doesn’t understand he’s dead serious?

A good catch by Michael Crowley, who noticed that the latest LA Times/Bloomberg national poll revealed a very strange finding: among the one-third of GOP voters who say they’d go third-party if Republicans nominate a pro-choice, pro-gay-rights candidate, the plurality choice for that nomination is none other than Rudy Giuliani. These, uh, rather counterintuitive folk amount to only about 8 percent of GOP voters, but it’s still an interesting mystery. Do they not know about Rudy’s history on these issues, and his continuing refusal to support a direct overturning of Roe v. Wade or a national constitutional ban on gay marriage? Or do they buy his arguments that he “hates” abortion and wants states to control gay marriage? Is he benefitting from ignorance, or from persuasion?
In the same post on the same poll, Crowley suggests the numbers support Clinton pollster Mark Penn’s recent assertion that Rudy may have some issues with female voters. Giuliani’s gender gap (among Republicans) in the LA Times/Bloomberg poll, however, is dwarfed by that of Mike Huckabee, who draws support from 11 percent of men and only 4 percent of women. On the flip side, Mitt Romney draws 14 percent of women and only 7 percent of men.
Speaking of Mark Penn, here’s a sneak preview of my review of Penn’s recent book, Microtrends, that will soon appear in The Washington Monthly.

In the first significant policy-oriented thrust by Fred Thompson’s meandering campaign for president, Fred has released an immigration proposal that appears likely to touch off a new immigrant-bashing competition among the various GOP contestants.
The proposal focuses on enforcement of immigration laws rather than prevention of new influxes of illegals. By embracing an “attrition” strategy of reducing current levels of undocumented workers, it supposedly avoids the draconian alternative of mass deportations, without accepting any sort of path to citizenship. More importantly in terms of the presidential race, the proposal includes withdrawal of federal grants to “sanctuary cities” like Rudy’s New York and Mitt’s Boston.
Fred’s own Senate record on immigration issues is one of indifference and occasional pro-immigrant heresy, so his sudden effort to emerge as Tom Tancredo’s saner cousin will draw a lot of fire. But it will also likely bring out the worst in a Republican Party that has begun to see immigration as the new right-wing wedge issue of the twenty-first century.

If you have any reason to care about web traffic, you might want to check out a New York Times piece (via Matt Yglesias) that explains why it’s always hard to answer the question: “Who reads your blog?”
Aside from the basic problem of sorting out hits, unique visits, and pageviews, and determining their relevance, there are a host of technological and even philosophical issues that have prevented the emergence of any “gold standard” for internet site traffic measurement. And the variety of measurement tools complicates the picture immensely.
Back when I was writing NewDonkey.com, I neglected to look at site traffic reports for a couple of months, and when I did, nearly had a heart attack, due to what appeared to be a calamitous drop in traffic for no apparent reason. Turns out we had shifted from one measurement tool to another, and I never did quite figure out whether the old, good numbers were more reliable than the new, not-so-good numbers.
I’ve been tempted to conclude that web traffic stats are like poll numbers: the important thing to watch is the trend-lines within measurement tools using the same methodology. But there are a host of problems that make that approach unreliable as well, viz., the use of RSS feeds, which in some incarnations boost actual traffic while reducing measurable traffic. And as the Times piece, by Louise Story, explains, you also have to pay attention to technological issues on the consumer end, particularly large server software that makes individual usage impossible to measure, and “cookie deletion” by individuals that thwarts tracking.
Story suggests, accurately, that this problem is probably inhibiting the growth of internet-based advertising, which relies on accurate understanding of target audiences. But it also affects a vast number of internet-based political voices, whose reach is hard to assess. Sometimes you have to measure impact by quality as well as quantity, and by how well you reach the destination through the traffic you encounter.

Check out this column from St. Pete Times political editor Adam C. Smith, and tell me if you buy it. Its subject is the alleged advantage Republicans are going to get, now and apparently forever, due to the Democratic presidential candidate boycott of next year’s Florida primary. (Republicans are merely going to strip Florida of half its delegates).
Sure sounds dubious to me. We are supposed to believe that Floridians have instantly acquired the self-referential obsession with their role in the nominating process that voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have developed over many moons. Given Florida’s size and perpetual general-election relevance, it’s hard to believe its citizens think a well-attended primary is important to either the state’s economy or its political standing. But when I was in the state recently, it’s true you heard a lot about this from Democrats as well as Republicans.
In any event, I’m glad I read Smith’s piece, if only to marvel at this quote from state GOP chair Jim Greer: “Our party, because of what the Democrats have done, has an opportunity that it has never had before to step forward and say every vote will count…”
Yeah, that would be a first.

For politics-as-sheer-fun, you might want to check out Joshua Green’s Atlantic piece offering a mock-serious strategy for a mock-serious Stephen Colbert primary run in South Carolina.
Like Colbert at his best, Green eerily comes close to “truthiness” now and then, as when he suggests that the media coverage the comedian would soak up might be bad news for lower-tier candidates, and particularly for Ron Paul, whose young-white-male-internet-based supporters (“pot smokers,” says an unnamed Republican consultant) are probably Colbert-watchers as well. Leaping over the top, Green offers a brief discussion of the often-overlooked “drunken college student” demographic.
But I’m guessing Josh is dead serious in offering his services to Colbert as campaign manager. The cool-factor alone–not to mention future book deals and television bookings–would make the gig invaluable.

There’s much rejoicing on the Right today after Bobby Jindal’s unsurprising win in yesterday’s Louisiana open primary for Governor. I guess I don’t blame them: Jindal’s a welcome poster-boy for alleged GOP ethnic diversity, and his win provides a rare Republican success story on a bleak overall electoral landscape. The reality is that he won with relative ease due to the combo platter of the post-Katrina demographic change in Louisiana, and an opposition that was badly hurt by the late decisions of Kathleen Blanco, John Breaux and Mitch Landreiu to stay out of the race (Landreiu, BTW, won re-election as Lt. Governor by a larger margin than Jindal managed).
But some of the Republican reaction has been a little over-the-top. My favorite is this bit from prominent right-wing blogger Erick Erickson of RedState.org, a native Louisianan who now lives in Georgia:

I cannot really express what this means to me.
It’s like how the exiled English felt when Mary I died and Elizabeth was crowned. It was safe to go home again.

Somehow I don’t think more-Catholic-than-the-Pope Bobby Jindal would be too jazzed about this analogy.

The conclusion of the Family Research Council’s Value Voters Summit got a lot of ink, not only from venerable conservative Right-watcher Byron York, but from Kate Sheppard of TAPPED (with some help from Sarah Posner), here, and at TNR’s The Stump blog.
The general consensus about the Christian Right panderfest was that the winnner was Mike Huckabee, who won the most applause for his speech, and who also overwhelmingly won the onsite straw poll (even as Romney edged him in the online FRC straw poll that’s been underway since August).
Rudy’s “reaching-out” effort to evangelical conservatives got mixed reviews. York thinks Rudy might have done himself some good, not in terms of nominating-contest support, but in convincing some Christian Right folk not to head for the exits if he’s the Republican nominee.
Fred Thompson–once the Great Right Hope of some Christian conservatives–seemed to lose ground at the event, delivering a languid and empty speech, and not doing that well in the straw poll (scoring 8 percent in the onsite survey, and a bit under 10 percent in the online version).
But while Huckabee gave himself a much-needed boost at the FRC event, it may come at a price: his speech was a masterpiece of extremism. Aside from firmly identifying himself as “from” the Christian Right; echoing demands for constitutional amendments to ban all abortions and gay marriage; thundering about “Islamofascism;” and hurling anathemas at Republican cultural dissenters as violaters of “God’s values;” Huck adopted the bizarre Zell Miller/Tom DeLay argument about the connection between abortion and illegal immigration:

“Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce,” the former Arkansas governor said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”

The abortion-denies-us-cheap-domestic-labor idea will probably get less attention than Huckabee’s use of Holocaust imagery for legalized abortion, though the latter has long been a staple of Christian Right rhetoric. In any event, the more Huckabee articulates his actual views, the more we might hope the honeymoon he’s enjoying with mainstream media types will eventually fade.

This report from Byron York on National Review‘s The Corner blog about the ongoing “Values Voter Summit” sponsored by the Christian Right group, the Family Research Council, is interesting and self-explanatory:

The most buzz-making speech of the session so far was from Tom Tancredo’s. Family Research Council insiders expect that to turn into some votes when the straw poll results are tallied, but how many can’t be predicted. What can be predicted is that the members will likely hear a barnburner from Mike Huckabee tomorrow, so if the votes are determined simply by speechmaking polish, Huckabee will be up there. However, one FRC insider told me, speaking of Huckabee, “He came here last year and talked about the environment and obesity. That’s not gonna work this year.”
Nobody was unhappy with Fred Thompson’s speech, but nobody was thrilled with it, either. Thompson “pushed all the right buttons,” the FRC insider told me, but there remains a certain lack of excitement surrounding his presence.
There’s a lot of anticipation about Rudy Giuliani’s appearance here tomorrow. It’s not terribly positive – “I don’t think there’s any danger of him winning the straw poll,” said the FRC insider – but it is palpable. There’s no belief that Giuliani will change many minds, although insiders say he will have a certain level of support. Rather, it’s just that he’s the big cheese at the moment, and people want to see him. Also, his coming here is a either a show of respect for the FRC members or a recognition of their influence – either way, it makes the people gathered here feel good. “He can’t not come,” says the insider.

Since my beloved Georgia Bulldogs aren’t playing tomorrow, I may pop a No-Doz and check out Huckabee’s and Giuliani’s speeches tomorrow, if they are on CSPAN. If they aren’t televised, I doubt I’ll pony up the $9.95 being charged by the American Family Association for streaming video of the panderfest. I’d rather watch Iowa-Purdue for the drama of figuring out who’s going to get a bid to the Poulon Weedeater Bowl or whatever, and let Byron York tell me what happened at the FRC.