One question of each candidate;
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/crowded-field-dreams_996630.html# (more at the link)
At the center of each candidacy lies a fundamental question, the answer to which will determine whether the candidate becomes the Republican nominee. Some of those questions are philosophical, some of them political. With all 16 candidates formally in the race as of last week, and with the first debate just two weeks away, here is a look at the field and those questions.
For nearly half of the candidates, the fundamental question is the simplest one in politics: Am I viable?
This is the question now facing Jindal, Santorum, Fiorina, Graham, and even Perry. The top 10 candidates will be invited to the Fox News debate in Cleveland on August 6. At press time, none of these candidates would qualify on the basis of the Real Clear Politics average of national polls. If you’re not in the debates, you have no shot.
Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson will both make the debates, but they face the same question. Huckabee is a good communicator, but he appeals largely to social conservatives, and his only hope is a strong showing in Iowa, where he’s currently running sixth. Carson has a strong grassroots following, and his early-state supporters seem more committed to their candidate than are the early backers of other candidates. His challenge is to expand his appeal beyond that core group.
Kasich: Will primary voters rally to a candidate arguing that the good Lord wants him to expand government?
Kasich, the governor of Ohio, entered the race with a 45-minute extemporaneous speech that served as a strong reminder of the importance of speechwriters. More than once, Kasich seemed to end up in a rhetorical cul de sac, pausing momentarily to wonder how he’d gotten there before abruptly heading out in a new direction.
There is an authenticity about Kasich that could well be appealing, particularly in a state like New Hampshire, where voters are often open to quirky Republicans. And if government experience were the most important qualification for the presidency, Kasich, with 18 years in the House of Representatives before his two terms as Ohio governor, would be the Republican nominee.
But Kasich, who portrays himself as a budget hawk, chose to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, arguing that anyone who decided otherwise would be disappointing God. “When you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small,” Kasich told an Ohio lawmaker skeptical of his expansion. “But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.”
It’s an argument without a limiting principle that could be used to justify any expansion of government. And Kasich’s Medicaid expansion is already over budget—some $1.4 billion over budget in just 18 months.
Christie: Will voters, and donors, give him a second look?
Four years ago, with Mitt Romney the odds-on favorite in the Republican primary, a group of six influential Iowa Republicans flew to New Jersey to implore Chris Christie to consider a presidential run. He declined. Christie is running this time, and none of those six men is supporting him. In the RCP average of polls, Christie registers a paltry 2.8 percent.
There are several explanations for this. Being governor of New Jersey means extra attention in the media capital of the world, particularly from the broadcast networks. That’s an advantage, but also a liability, as Christie discovered during the “Bridgegate” scandal in 2013. The story received widespread coverage on television and in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, newspapers with national readership. The governor of Oregon, forced to resign amid scandal, didn’t receive a fraction of the coverage that Christie has on the bridge.
Beyond that, conservatives have grown increasingly skeptical of Christie for reasons both substantive and symbolic. Christie, like Kasich, opted to expand Medicaid in New Jersey, a deal with the devil that will inevitably mean vastly more state-level spending when the federal support for the expansion ends. Christie once proclaimed that failure to reform Medicaid and other entitlements put America “on the path to ruin.” And in 2012, he said: “Obamacare on Medicaid to the states was extortion.” But facing reelection in a blue state in 2013, Christie agreed to the expansion, and he now defends it as necessary. That would be a problem for anyone, but it presents a particular challenge for Christie, who is running as a “telling-it-like-it-is” candidate who will deliver the hard truths on entitlements.
But for many conservatives, it was Christie’s embrace of Obama in the days before the 2012 presidential election that left them skeptical. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, as Christie sought federal help for his battered state, he toured the coast with Obama and offered praise for the president. It was a brief moment of little actual consequence, but for many conservative voters, it is an enduring memory.
Cruz: Can the mad-as-hell conservative base be converted to mad-as-hell supporters of Ted Cruz?
Cruz has money and arguably the clearest, most consistent message in the entire field: He’s had it with Washington, he’s had it with the Democrats who have expanded government, and he’s especially had it with the Republicans who have enabled them. The good news for Cruz is that large parts of the American electorate agree with him; the bad news is that they’re not yet prepared to make him their spokesman. Cruz, at 5.4 percent in the RCP average, correctly understands that Trump is occupying space that he’s fought for several years to own. And he correctly understands that Trump is only renting that real estate, so he’s been very friendly to Trump in the hopes of staking a claim to it when Trump is evicted.
But there’s a risk to this approach. If Cruz is seen as too close to him, Trump’s inevitable collapse, spectacular as it is likely to be, could damage Cruz, too.
Paul: Is the novelty wearing off?
For years, Rand Paul has attracted attention by being a different kind of Republican. He challenged the hawks who dominate the party and campaigned in places Republicans have ignored for too long. Time magazine dubbed him the “most interesting man in American politics.”
Are Republicans losing interest? Paul is at 5.6 percent in the RCP polling average, and his second-quarter fundraising totals were well below what many observers had expected.
Paul has inexplicably focused on issues where his libertarianism is out of step with the Republican base (national security and civil liberties) and spent less time on those where his party is naturally more libertarian (taxes, regulation, health care). Last week, Paul released a video in which he destroys the U.S. tax code in a variety of ways—chainsaw, bonfire, woodchipper. Perhaps the video is an attempt at a course correction, but it feels like desperation.
His anti-interventionism played better as a theory than it has in real life, with Barack Obama as its chief practitioner accumulating failures around the globe. So Paul has sounded less dovish in recent days, reversing his onetime embrace of Obama’s Iran deal and even suggesting last week that military force might be required if the mullahs move toward nuclear weapons. The irony is that, as Paul has tailored his idiosyncratic views to appeal to a more conventional conserv-ative electorate, he has begun to look more and more like the traditional politicians he deplores.
Bush: Is Jeb Bush the strong conservative reformer he was as governor of Florida or the more cautious and moderate Republican he has been over the past few years? During a brief press availability at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, on April 17, a reporter asked Jeb Bush whether he was comfortable with the growing perception of him as a “moderate” Republican. “No, look, I have a conservative record,” Bush replied, adding, in case there were any doubt, that he considers himself an “I’m-not-kidding conservative.” The coda: “Perhaps moderate in tone is misinterpreted to moderate in terms of core beliefs.”
And yet Bush has been vocal about his concern that the Republican party has become too conservative in recent years. He worried that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have a place in the modern GOP. He famously said Republicans must be willing to “lose the primary to win the general,” a declaration that he wouldn’t allow himself to be pulled to the right in order to win the nomination. It was a lesson he learned from the 2012 Republican primary. He later described his feelings this way: “I used to be a conservative, and I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think I’ve changed but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective. And that’s kind of where we are.” Beyond that, Bush backs comprehensive immigration reform—he says illegal immigration is often an “act of love”—and he remains an unwavering supporter of Common Core, the education standards loathed by many conservatives.
But the fact that many primary voters see him through the prism of Common Core and immigration could allow him to surprise in the debate. Conservatives who assume that Bush is moderate across the board might well be more open to supporting him when they learn he is not.
The other big question, of course, is his name. Even if voters warm to Bush over the course of the fall campaign, will they be willing to embrace the dynasty and throw out what will likely be at the heart of the Republican case against Hillary Clinton if she’s the Democratic nominee—that she’s a relic of a bygone era, a professional politician by marriage, with stale ideas and who doesn’t understand the lives of everyday Americans?
Rubio: Will voters see him as the Republican Obama?
Five years ago, when Rubio was running for Senate, many of those who saw him on the trail compared him to Barack Obama. At the time, it was the highest compliment they could imagine. But six years into the Obama administration, and in the context of a Republican primary, it’s not a compliment but a critique.
The similarities are obvious. Rubio, like Obama, is a great communicator, would come to the presidency with relatively limited experience, and would take office as a young man by historical standards. Rubio skeptics say: We’ve done this with Obama, and look how that turned out. But that assessment assumes that the problem with Obama was his lack of experience or relative youth. It wasn’t. As Rubio is fond of pointing out, Obama is a failed president because “his ideas don’t work.”
Rubio’s team pushes back hard on suggestions he’s like Obama, pointing to his experience as speaker of the Florida house and contrasting it with Obama’s unremarkable tenure as a state senator in Illinois. And they point out that Rubio will have had two more years of experience on national security, with seats on the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees, than Obama did when he took office.
But the smartest move for Rubio might be to embrace the comparison, rather than reject it. If Rubio can convince people that he would do as much to limit government as Obama has done to expand it, he will have a winning argument.
Walker: Will voters view Walker as a battle-tested, reform-driven governor with a string of electoral and policy victories, or will the changes he’s made, in tone and sometimes in substance, erode the reputation he built during his tenure in Wisconsin?
Walker ran for governor in 2010 on a pledge to create 250,000 jobs and balance the budget. He didn’t accomplish the former but did, after a nasty and exhausting fight, implement reforms that allowed him to achieve the latter. So the $3.6 billion deficit that Walker inherited was eliminated. He has cut taxes, reformed state welfare programs, and won election three times in a purple state.
But since floating his name as a potential candidate last winter, Walker has equivocated on several issues. Walker had been for comprehensive immigration reform, but now opposes such reform as “amnesty” and is open to greater restrictions even on legal immigration to protect American workers. He once opposed renewable fuel subsidies but now prefers a gradual phaseout. In his 2014 reelection campaign, he ran an ad in which he declared that he was pro-life but said the “final decision” is between “a woman and her doctor.”
Asked in a recent interview about these changes in position, or at least in tone, Walker told The Weekly Standard: “It’s totally overblown. The only position I’ve changed on is my position on immigration, which was a pretty limited position as a governor to begin with. There are a lot of people covering this race who don’t get how people have to talk in a state that’s as swing a state as we are. And talking in a way that doesn’t alienate people doesn’t equate to flipping positions. It means articulating it in a way that maybe isn’t the same red meat that they’ve heard from conservatives in Washington.”
But enthusiasm for Walker’s grit—demonstrated in his fight against public-sector unions and Democratic special interests during a failed recall attempt—remains. And many Republicans are in the mood for a fighter—or, as Walker prefers, a “fighter who can win” on “commonsense conservative reforms.”
But these days, GOP primary voters are behaving as if they would settle for a fighter who has no chance of winning, no common sense, and isn’t a conservative. Which brings us back to Donald Trump.
Trump is without question a fighter. He seems to spend much of his day fighting with his Republican rivals, mainstream journalists, high-profile pollsters—anyone, really, who has said anything negative about him.
But before his recent conversion, the views he expressed over the years would make him a mainstream Democrat. This is the great irony of the current moment in American political life: The man leading the primary of a party whose recent success owes largely to a shift rightward has never really been a Republican.
Trump described himself as “very liberal on health care” and was an advocate of a single-payer health insurance system, a view that puts him to the left of Barack Obama. He long considered himself “very pro-choice” and was in favor of drug legalization. Trump once called Mitt Romney’s self-deportation proposal “crazy” and “maniacal.” Trump said Obama’s $787 billion stimulus was “what we need” and added, “It looks like we have somebody that knows what he is doing finally in office.”
As those comments suggest, Trump didn’t think George W. Bush did a very good job in office. But he didn’t stop there. Trump said Bush was “evil.”
Trump’s financial support for Democrats over the years has been well documented, with checks to Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, and others. That’s no surprise, since he said in 2004, “I identify more as a Democrat.” He praised Nancy Pelosi as “the best” when she became speaker of the House in 2007. That same year, he said of a prospective Hillary Clinton in the White House: “I think Hillary would do a good job.”
To put it mildly, Trump is an uncomfortable fit in the Republican party. And that’s why he is unlikely to be there at the end of this process.
That doesn’t mean he won’t run for president. Trump’s political activism has its roots in the Reform party movement of the late 1990s. He flirted with a presidential bid in 1999 on the Reform party ticket. He has in recent days repeatedly declared his openness to running as an independent candidate in 2016. Last week, he told the Hill that “so many people want” him to run as an independent if he doesn’t win the GOP nod and acknowledged that revenge could play a role if he loses. “Absolutely, if they’re not fair, that could be a factor.”
If he does run, all of the strategizing, planning, and campaigning that those mentioned above are currently engaged in could well be for nothing. With an evenly divided electorate and an angry conservative base, if Trump runs as a third-party, right-wing populist he could well siphon off enough votes to make Hillary Clinton the next president.
On the other hand, perhaps Trump won’t run. And, given her current troubles, with polls showing more Americans disapproving than approving of her, Hillary seems increasingly not a terribly formidable candidate. She seems eminently beatable. But which Republican can win the nomination and defeat her?
