Michele Bachmann’s Last Stand: Will Campaign End In Iowa?
She’s in last place in the polls in the state where she was born, but you wouldn’t know it by watching the relentlessly upbeat Michele Bachmann campaigning on Monday—the last day before Iowans go to the caucuses and, possibly, her last day as a presidential candidate.
Along with her husband, Marcus, Bachmann waded into packed shops and restaurants on a side street in West Des Moines to gamely sign autographs, chat up patrons, and pose for quick iPhone pictures with anyone who asked.
“We’re having a ball!” she said as she led a swarm of reporters and photographers from Paula’s Café across the street to the Diggity Dog pet bakery and on to the Floral Touch florist on the corner, where dozens of people had gone to escape the howling January wind. “This is what the Iowa Riviera feels like!” Bachmann joked.
But unlike her rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, who conducted a virtual siege of undecided voters across Iowa with last-minute “whistle-stop tours” and get-out-the-vote rallies, Bachmann’s only public events for the crucial last day were the impromptu lunchtime visit to West Des Moines and a 9 p.m. event at her headquarters in Urbandale.
Between her sparse schedule, the results of the recent Des Moines Register poll, which showed her solidly in last place, and an anemic $7,600 ad buy (her first and only television ads in the state), there was little doubt Monday that Bachmann was a happy warrior atop a campaign in its last throes of existence.
“I don’t think she has a chance,” said Charlie Freund, a Monday regular at Paula’s Café. “I think she’s a nice person, but she doesn’t have a chance.”
It’s a painfully inauspicious place for the Bachmann campaign to be after launching with fanfare amid a tide of Tea Party enthusiasm six months ago. As Sarah Palin sat on the sidelines, Bachmann jumped into the arena. She hired a top-tier campaign manager, used her Tea Party connections to raise millions of dollars, and rocketed to the front of the pack in early states like Iowa on the power of her personality and the novelty of her mom/lawyer/Obama-is-a-socialist message.
She peaked in August when she became the first woman ever to win the Ames Straw Poll, an early victory that the media downplayed as a fluke, but was at least real enough to send Tim Pawlenty scrambling from the race.
But several verbal gaffes and failed fact-checks later, Bachmann found herself struggling to raise money or her position in the standings, which cratered as skittish GOP voters dashed from one favorite candidate to another and dumped Bachmann in favor of the swashbuckling Texan Rick Perry just days after she won the straw poll. She also had serial staff problems, as Ed Rollins, her campaign manager, left the campaign as quickly as he had joined it, right up through the day she watched her Iowa campaign chairman defect to Ron Paul at a televised rally just days before the caucuses.
Voters who initially felt they had connected with her backed away as they judged her not ready for primetime.
“She lost it in the debates for me,” said Mark Lundberg, the chairman of the Sioux County Republican Party, who remains undecided about whom he’ll caucus for, but knows it won’t be Bachmann.
Larry Steele, from Knoxville, Iowa, said he went to see Bachmann at Floral Touch, but is planning to caucus for Rick Santorum because he seems the most like Mike Huckabee, whom he supported in 2008. “Santorum seems to share my values,” he said.
Despite the ominous signs all around her, Bachmann has refused to show any outward indications of panic, or even concern, right until the very end.
“I will fearlessly stand on the stage and take on Barack Obama, defeat him in the debates, and go on to win and be the next president of the United States,” Bachmann said in front of her hulking campaign bus Monday, likening herself to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in her closing campaign argument. “My goal is to be America’s Iron Lady, and that’s what I intend to do.”
As a part of a specific pitch to women voters, Bachmann’s Iowa ad also makes the connection to Thatcher’s strong-woman, “Iron Lady” persona. “I am women’s best candidate,” she told me in the flower shop. “They need to vote for Michele Bachmann.”
She also insisted that no matter the results in Iowa, her campaign will go on. “We already bought and paid for our tickets to South Carolina and we already have events scheduled, so we’re on our way,” she said. She also promised to go to New Hampshire and build a 50-state campaign operation, a promise made more difficult to keep amid rumors of a poor fourth quarter of fundraising.
But the news wasn’t all bad for Bachmann on Monday. Just mostly bad.
The Des Moines Register reported that she had won the “Coffee Bean Caucus” at the Hamburg Inn, a diner in Iowa City that famously invites patrons to drop a coffee bean into a canister for their favorite candidate. Bachmann won with 28.8 percent of the GOP vote, beating out Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Newt Gingrich, in that order. The only cloud over Bachmann’s victory was Barack Obama’s bean count, which was six times more than hers and more than all of the GOP beans combined.
One person who would have dropped a bean for Bachmann if he had been there was Caleb Sisson, an 18-year-old student and Bachmann convert who was thrilled after meeting her in West Des Moines. “It’s really cool to see her come into town and try to meet everybody,” Caleb said. “I’d absolutely vote for her.” One catch, though. Caleb was in Des Moines on a school trip … from Ohio.
By: Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast, January 3, 2011
Romney’s Decision-Making Algorithm: “It Seems To Me, He Lives His Life With A Finger In The Wind”
Byron York had an interesting report the other day on the process Mitt Romney went through before running for the Senate. He noted, for example, that the Massachusetts Republican traveled to Salt Lake City in 1993 in order to brief several leaders of his church about the policy positions he intended to take.
That in itself may prove controversial, and raise questions about Romney’s appreciation for the church-state line.
But before he did even that, Romney took a poll.
How Romney handled that dilemma is described in a new book, “Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics,” by Boston journalist Ronald Scott. A Mormon who admires Romney but has had his share of disagreements with him, Scott knew Romney from local church matters in the late 1980s.
Scott had worked for Time Inc., and in the fall of 1993, he says, Romney asked him for advice on how to handle various issues the media might pursue in a Senate campaign. Scott gave his advice in a couple of phone conversations and a memo. In the course of the conversations, Scott says, Romney outlined his views on the abortion problem.
According to Scott, Romney revealed that polling from Richard Wirthlin, Ronald Reagan’s former pollster whom Romney had hired for the ‘94 campaign, showed it would be impossible for a pro-life candidate to win statewide office in Massachusetts. In light of that, Romney decided to run as a pro-choice candidate, pledging to support Roe v. Wade, while remaining personally pro-life. [emphasis added]
So, let me get this straight. Mitt Romney was pro-choice because a poll told him it was the easiest way to advance his political ambitions? And then he decided he wasn’t pro-choice anymore, when that was the easiest way to advance other political ambitions?
There’s going to be a point later this year when voters will be asked, “How can you trust Mitt Romney?” and the answer, even for Republicans, will be far from clear.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 2, 2012
Mitt Romney Takes His China-Bashing Campaign To Company That Touts Its Chinese Outsourcing
Well, this is awkward. Mitt Romney, who’s been on the trail recently talking tough on China, is making his last campaign stop of the day before the caucuses at a business that touts the way it outsources much of its manufacturing to China.
Competitive Edge is a firm headquartered near Des Moines that creates and sells promotional items with corporate logos. Romney’s scheduled to make a campaign stop there at around 9:00 PM CT, as part of a day-long tour through the Hawkeye State in the run-up to Tuesday’s caucuses.
What he may not mention: customers of Competitive Edge are choosing a company to make their promotional goods that brags about how much manufacturing work it sends to China.
From the company’s website:
We achieve this goal by utilizing a global network of manufacturers that assist us in sourcing, designing and making our products. It is not surprising that most labor-intensive products are produced in China. What may not be as well known is the level of sophistication and technical expertise that Chinese manufacturers have developed. Competitive Edge takes advantage of these foreign assets and has been working with Chinese manufacturers for over 25 years. As a result of our years of experience and our extensive factory and agent relationships in China, we are able to bring great value and a high level of service to our customer.
The website also features pictures of Chinese employees hard at work on what looks to be Competitive Edge orders. They’re really quite good at sending work to China, the website says:
Our extensive use of cutting edge technology makes it easy for us to collaborate and compete in real time with people and companies located anywhere in the world. Utilizing computer networking, e-mail, teleconferencing and dynamic software applications, conducting business in China is as easy for us as working with domestic companies.
At the Clive location, where Romney will be speaking, the company houses its “Screen Printing and Embroidery Departments.”
On the trail, Romney has said he’d take China before the WTO to be penalized for currency manipulation. Rival Jon Huntsman has warned against that, saying it would start a trade war that would boost prices on Chinese goods and, presumably, making life a lot harder for companies like Competitive Edge.
By: Evan McMorris-Santoro, Talking Points Memo, January 2, 2012
Why Mitt Romney’s Opportunity Tack Won’t Work
So Mitt Romney, writes Thomas Edsall in The New York Times, wants to make the election about entitlements vs. opportunity. He warns darkly against a government that “provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk.” This is the sort of thing that used to scare the bejesus out of Democrats and still does frighten some of them, but it needn’t. Romney’s error in this framing is one Republicans often make—assuming that they are the “real Americans,” and Democrats are in some way fake Americans, and therefore all of middle America must agree with them.
Romney’s approach is clever up to a point. It does successfully blend more traditional Republicanism with Tea Party resentment (reflecting, perhaps, the way in which this supposedly “new” Tea Party is really just the same old anger at poor people and nonwhite people, outfitted anew in culottes). He uses the lie Republicans have used for many, many elections, that liberals and Democrats insist not on equality of opportunity but equality of result. And he invokes “government dependency”—a well-turned locution I must confess, those being two pretty unappealing words to most people. If he becomes the nominee, and if he can get most Americans to see the election as a choice between the candidate who wants Big Daddy government to look after every aspect of your life and the candidate who insists on your freedom to pursue wealth and liberate yourself from any obligation to those below you, then he’ll be in pretty good shape.
But there exist mountains of evidence that most Americans don’t think the way Republicans want them to. As Edsall notes: “The American public is highly conflicted on the subject of providing aid to people in need. While strongly opposed to ‘welfare,’ decisive majorities support more spending in key public policy areas. Polls conducted since 1972 by the General Social Survey show that by margins of two to one, voters consistently say too little is spent on the poor, on education, on health care, on drug treatment—the list is long.”
And that’s just spending on the poor. Spending on the middle class enjoys far greater support. “Welfare” as we once knew it being largely off the table as a divisive political issue, the Republicans really don’t have much material to work with here. In one sense, the entire GOP approach on these issues since Ronald Reagan’s time has been to hide the actual agenda because Republicans know most people don’t agree with them. A famous memo from Paul O’Neill’s Treasury Department in early 2001 to the Bush White House told the new president and others to be careful about juxtaposing tax cuts with spending because “the public prefers spending on things like health and education over cutting taxes.”
So Republicans know that Americans like much of the spending that government does. And yet, like the true believers that they are, they really end up spending more of their time persuading themselves that the public agrees with them. And they do this because they genuinely believe that on some basic level they are real and good and patriotic Americans while liberals and Democrats are fake and bad and weak Americans. This is a core conviction, and it has a corollary: that we (the Republicans) represent and speak to middle America, while the Democrats represent and speak to Cambridge and Berkeley, and surely what we have to say about these matters resonates deeply in flyover country.
It’s just not nearly as true as Republicans persuade themselves it is. Middle-of-the-road voters in Iowa aren’t any more right wing than they are left wing. A tautological sentence, perhaps, but one that nevertheless needs to be repeated and understood. Republicans always assume America is behind them: on removing the reprobate Bill Clinton from office, on wanting to dismantle Medicare and Social Security, on sharing various paranoid and absurd convictions about who Barack Obama is, Republicans enter the fray certain that Middle America will agree with them. But then Middle America does not. They really liked Clinton and recognized what was going in 1998 as a time-wasting witch hunt, they love their Social Security and Medicare, and they elected Obama over a genuine war hero by (for such an evenly divided country) a pretty massive margin.
So back we come to Romney. His chosen words are pretty good. But this isn’t the mid-1980s. Majorities of average Americans no longer think the Democratic Party is in essence stealing from them. And majorities of average Americans pretty much like Obama personally. If they didn’t, his approval rating would have dipped down into the 30s when unemployment was north of 10 percent. It never did. Most Americans are pulling for the guy. Another fact that drives wingers nuts, and that I chuckle about at least four or five times a week.
Romney has been drinking tea-infused water for months now, trying to appease those to his right. I’m sure he thinks that at the same time, he’s talking sense to the rest of America. But the rest of America isn’t as intoxicated by those hairy-chested nostrums about self-reliance as conservatives think they are.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 27, 2011
Election Day Registration, No Photo ID Requirement Will Help Boost Turnout In Tomorrow’s Iowa Caucuses
Tomorrow, when Iowa Republicans gather across the state to vote on their party’s presidential nominee, one important tool will be available to boost turnout: election day voter registration.
Though Iowa, unlike most states, permits those who haven’t registered (or just need to update their file after a move, for instance) before election day to do so when they show up at their precinct during regular elections, the Huffington Post notes that the Iowa GOP is in charge of setting the rules for its own caucuses.
Despite nationwide efforts to make voting more difficult, the Republican Party of Iowa decided to buck the trend and allow for on-site registration. In doing so, however, they necessarily undercut the argument being made by GOPers in many other states that election day registration (EDR) invites fraud. (Of course, voters are 39 times more likely to be struck by lightning than commit fraud at the polls, and EDR actually helps prevent already-miniscule levels of fraud.)
Residents of just nine states currently enjoy EDR: Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. However, in a number of these states, the GOP-led war on voting has targeted EDR for repeal, most notably in Maine. Republicans in the Maine legislature passed a bill ridding the state of EDR, only to see the popular program reinstated by referendum in November by an overwhelming 61%-39% margin.
Election day registration will certainly help boost participation in tomorrow’s Iowa caucuses. A 2001 study found that states which employ election day registration (EDR) boost their voter turnout rate by 7 percentage points, without partisan gain for either side. The study found that poorer and less educated voters benefited the most from EDR. ThinkProgress spoke with a number of Maine voters who also lauded the ability to update their registration if they’ve recently moved, particularly because most residents are at work during the day and unable to visit the election clerk during normal business hours.
Had the Iowa GOP followed the lead of their brethren in Maine and elsewhere, thousands of Iowans who will cast their vote tomorrow with the help of election day registration could have been turned away from the polls.
Update
Brad Friedman also points out that the Republican caucuses will not require voters to present a photo ID in order to cast their ballot, a requirement GOPers around the country pushed vigorously in 2011.
By: Scott Keyes, Think Progress, January 1, 2011
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