“Desperation Mode”: What ‘Draft Mitt’ Reveals About The GOP’s Future
Could Mitt Romney really run for president again in 2016?
According to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the answer is yes. During a Monday evening appearance on MSNBC’s Hardball, Chaffetz insisted that Romney will not only run — but that this time, he’ll win.
“A hundred times he says he’s not, but Mitt Romney has always accomplished what he’s set out to do,” Chaffetz explained to host Chris Matthews. “I think he’s proven right on a lot of stuff. I happen to be in the camp that thinks he’s actually going to run, and I think he will be the next president of the United States.”
Chaffetz, who endorsed Romney early in the 2012 primaries, is not the only Republican to call for a third Romney run. Former Bush administration Assistant Treasury Secretary Emil Henry penned a Politico op-ed which (favorably) compared Romney to Richard Nixon. The Washington Post reported on a GOP donor summit which “quickly became a Romney revival,” and quoted several of the attendees pining for another presidential bid from the twice-failed candidate.
“Everybody realizes we’re devoid of leadership in DC,” top Republican fundraiser Harold Hamm told the Post. “Everybody would encourage him to consider it again.”
The report also notes that MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough encouraged the crowd “to begin a ‘Draft Romney’ movement in 2016,” insisting that “this is the only person that can fill the stage.”
Such a movement now exists; more than 51,000 people have signed a petition urging Romney to run in the next election.
Despite all of this “Mittmentum,” the odds of a Romney run remain extremely long. Romney himself has repeatedly denied any interest in another White House bid, and after the long string of indignities he suffered during his two presidential campaigns, it’s easy to believe him.
Still, the “Draft Mitt” drive is undisputably a real and growing movement within the GOP. And that must be profoundly sad for Republicans.
For years, Republicans boasted of their “deep bench” of 2016 presidential contenders (a narrative that was eagerly embraced by the political media). But by 2014 the bench has been left, as Salon’s Joan Walsh deftly put it, “in splinters.” New Jersey governor Chris Christie entangled himself in “Bridgegate” as his state’s economy sank. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is fending off ethics questions of his own, and is no longer even a safe bet to be re-elected in 2014. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal boasts a 32 percent approval rating in his own state. Florida senator Marco Rubio’s clunky attempts to appeal to both sides of the GOP civil war left him detested by both. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is literally Democrats’ dream candidate. And former Viriginia governor Bob McDonnell is literally on his way to jail.
Of course, Romney has plenty of baggage of his own. He’s still the same stiff, sneering right-wing plutocrat who struggled to fight off the likes of Herman Cain and Rick Santorum before losing the general election by 126 electoral votes. In 2016, he’d face the added hurdles of age (at 69, he’d be tied with Ronald Reagan as the oldest president to ever enter the office), and the fact that it’s been nearly a decade since he’s held a job other than unsuccessfully running for president.
It’s not as though Republicans aren’t aware of Romney’s flaws; many of them vocally and repeatedly pointed them out in 2008 and 2012, when Romney still had a realistic shot at becoming president. That some are now crawling back to him when his odds would be longer than ever speaks volumes about the damaged state of the Republican Party.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, July 9, 2014
“Republicans’ Pathetic Last Resort”: When Jeb And Mitt Are Your 2016 Saviors
Only last week, it seemed as if scandal-dogged GOP Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Scott Walker of Wisconsin might be back in the 2016 game. At Mitt Romney’s Utah summit, Christie told big donors that his troubles are “over, it’s done with and I’m moving on.” Walker’s supporters crowed that in May, a judge put an end to the second John Doe probe he’s faced, this one into illegal coordination between his anti-recall campaign and outside conservative groups like Club for Growth.
Then came Thursday, when shoes dropped for both men. An Esquire report alleged that U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman has close Christie confidants talking about all the New Jersey scandals, not just Bridgegate, and he may be close to indictments. The same day a Wisconsin judge released documents showing that John Doe prosecutors believed Walker was at the center of a “criminal scheme” – two words no governor wants to see attached to his name.
It’s important to note that the shocking documents were released because a judge found no grounds to continue the probe. Walker may not face any further legal trouble here. But his political trouble keeps getting worse. The most stunning piece of evidence was an email from Walker himself to Karl Rove, boasting about his political operation, which seems to indicate some effort to coordinate with outside groups like Rove’s American Crossroads – though in the end, Rove did not wind up getting involved with the Wisconsin races.
An aside: Am I the only one who thinks someone stupid enough to send Karl Rove a personal email that at least smacks of an effort at illegal campaign coordination is too stupid to be president – and maybe even to remain as governor? I thought that when Walker was pranked by a faux David Koch, too, but apparently Wisconsin voters are more forgiving. Still, Walker’s in a tough race for reelection this year and he may have to fight hard just to stay in Madison; he sure can’t look ahead to Washington.
At any rate, the continuing flow of bad news out of New Jersey and Wisconsin has to terrify GOP donors and the rumored “establishment.” It’s increasingly unlikely that either governor can emerge as a “pragmatic,” pro-business 2016 alternative to Tea Party zealots like Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. This ups the pressure on former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to run – and may even swell the ranks of Republicans reassuring two-time loser Mitt Romney that the third time’s the charm.
Don’t laugh: Romney is the runaway front-runner in a New Hampshire primary poll released Thursday night, crushing Christie and Paul and the rest of the field. OK, it’s one of Romney’s many “home states,” but that’s got to have Romney admirers thinking “what if?” The Romney-convened summit that hosted Christie last week also featured lots of wistful thinking about what a President Romney might be doing now – as well as what President Romney could do in 2017.
“It was intended to be a passing of the torch to the Republican Party’s would-be saviors,” the Washington Post’s Phillip Rucker wrote Monday. Instead, it “became a Romney revival.” My MSNBC colleague Joe Scarborough reportedly urged the 300 guests to begin a movement to “draft Romney.” And leading Romney fundraiser Harold Hamm told Rucker, “Everybody realizes we’re devoid of leadership in D.C. Everybody would encourage him to consider it again.”
Meanwhile on Monday Jeb Bush heads to Cincinnati to headline a Republican National Committee fundraising dinner, a visit to a crucial swing state his brother carried in 2004 that’s been lost to Republicans ever since. Bush allies have been pushing back hard on the conventional wisdom – espoused by me, too – that the former governor’s presidential hopes were dimmed by Eric Cantor’s surprise defeat, in a campaign where immigration became a huge issue. Still, a man who describes some illegal immigration as “an act of love” is inarguably out of step with the GOP primary base, Cantor’s loss aside.
Some Republicans have floated Bush as a smart choice for vice president, especially if the nominee is a green Tea Partyer from a Red State. “Jeb could be a safe choice for anybody,” Stuart Spencer, who helped push Ronald Reagan to pick Bush’s father for V.P., told the National Journal. “He has name ID, a Spanish background, [is] a former governor, and he’s conservative.” That seems crazy to me – Bush already played a kind of second fiddle to his younger brother; I can’t imagine him doing it again for, say, Ted Cruz — but it’s a sign of how hard some in the GOP want to shoehorn Bush onto a national ticket.
Of course, Christie’s backers continue to argue their guy will survive his allies’ legal troubles. On Friday he spoke to Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom conference. Meanwhile, Scott Walker appeared on Fox and Friends Friday morning to claim he’s out of legal hot water. “Many in the national media, and even some here in Wisconsin, are looking at this thing backwards,” Walker said. “This is a case that has been resolved.”
Asked if his troubles were comparable to Christie’s, Walker said yes. “There is no doubt that the media jumps on this, some on the left spin this. We get our detractors out there trying to claim there is more than there is.” But big GOP donors can’t be reassured by either governor. The party’s hopes now rest with two flawed candidates, one of whom insists he won’t run again, while Bush only equivocates. Reporters who are busy inventing rivals for Hillary Clinton in 2016 ought to put their imagination into coming up with presidential candidates for a party that truly needs them.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, June 20, 2014
“Why Scott Walker Will Never Be President”: A Political Style That Doesn’t Say Statesman
Scott Walker, an ardent Ronald Reagan fan from his youth, was never likely to follow Reagan’s footsteps to the White House. The Wisconsin governor lacks his hero’s way with words, skill for crossing lines of partisan and ideogical division (especially within the Republican Party) and confidence on the national campaign trail.
Yet Walker has wanted to believe in the possibility so badly that he has spent the two years since his 2012 recall election win positioning himself as a contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. He penned a campaign book, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge, which was so transparent in its ambitions that Glenn Beck’s The Blaze refers to it as “the prototypical book about someone running for president who doesn’t want to come out and actually say that he is running for president.” He jetted off to Las Vegas to to try and impress Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, but Adelson missed the Wisconsinite´s speech. He even persisted in making the rounds nationally after polls showed that his enthusiasm for presidential politics did not sit well with the Wisconsin voters he must face in a November re-election bid.
But with the release of documents in which Wisconsin prosecutors allege Walker helped to engineer an expansive “criminal scheme” to coordinate efforts by conservative groups to help his recall campaign—by circumventing campaign finance laws—Walker’s presidential prospects look less realistic even than those of his mentor, scandal-plagued New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
The headlines in Wisconsin Thursday were damning:
“John Doe prosecutors allege Scott Walker at center of ‘criminal scheme’”
“Prosecutors accuse Walker of running ‘criminal scheme’”
And the national headlines were just as rough. “Prosecutors: Scott Walker part of ‘criminal scheme,” read the headline of a Politico story that opened with a breathless report that
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker participated in a “criminal scheme” to coordinate fundraising for the Republican in response to efforts to recall him and state senators from office, local prosecutors argue in court documents released Thursday.
Walker, his chief of staff and others were involved in the coordination effort with “a number of national groups and prominent figures,” including Karl Rove, says special prosecutor Francis Schmitz.
“[T]he evidence shows an extensive coordination scheme that pervaded nearly every aspect of the campaign activities during the historic 2011 and 2012 Wisconsin Senate and Gubernatorial recall elections,” Schmitz wrote in a December motion, on behalf of five attorneys from some of the state’s most liberal counties, just now unsealed by an appellate court judge.
Even worse for a governor who has already had to try an explain away highly controversial emails from former aides, as well as the investigations, prosecutions and convictions of aides, appointees, allies and campaign donors, are the actual details of the documents that were ordered unsealed by Federal Appeals Judge Frank Easterbrook.
“The documents include an excerpt from an email in which Walker tells Karl Rove, former top adviser to President George W. Bush, that (veteran Wisconsin Republican operative R.J.) Johnson would lead the coordination campaign. Johnson is also Walker’s longtime campaign strategist and the chief adviser to Wisconsin Club for Growth, a conservative group active in the recall elections,” reported the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the state’s largest paper.
The May 4, 2011, e-mail to Rove read: “Bottom-line: R.J. helps keep in place a team that is wildly successful in Wisconsin. We are running 9 recall elections and it will be like 9 congressional markets in every market in the state (and Twin Cities).”
Walker, who is certainly no stranger to controversy, claimed Thursday that he had been vindicated by judges who have restricted—and even attempted to shut down—the “John Doe” investigation into political wrongdoing. But other judges have sustained the inquiry.
Walker allies argue that he is the victim of a “witch hunt” organized by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm and other top prosecutors, who they allege are out to silence conservatives and harm Republicans. Chisholm is a Democrat, but he is also a respected prosecutor who has gone after Democrats and worked with Republicans.
Lawyers for targets of the probe are fighting to shut it down and, in this unsettled and uncertain post–Citizens United period with regard to state and national campaign finance laws, they believe they will succeed.
Attempts to halt the probe, which have been cheered on by advocates for a no-holds-barred “big money” politics, are part of a broader strategy to gut remaining campaign-finance laws. One way to super-charge the influence of major donors and corporate interests is to undermine bans on coordination between candidates and their campaigns with “independent” groups that operate under different and more flexible rules for raising and spending money during a campaign.
“If you don’t have restrictions on coordination, then the contribution limits become meaningless,” Paul S. Ryan, the senior counsel for the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, explained. Ryan told Politico that without the restrictions, a donor “could max out under the limits [for donating to a candidate], but then you could also just say to the candidates, ‘Hey give me an ad script and we’ll walk down to the TV station and do this ad for you.’”
But even if the probe is prevented from going forward, the documents that have now been released—in combination with the February release of 27,000 pages of e-mails from the seized from the “secret e-mail system” computers of a former Walker aide who has been convicted of political wrongdoing—paint a picture of a governor whose political style does not say “statesman.”
There is no question that Walker is a hero to some Republicans, and to some conservatives.
But Republicans and conservatives who want to win back the White House have to be realistic enough to recognize that Walker has a paper trail that is unlikely to read well on the 2016 campaign trail.
In fact, if the Wisconsin polls that have Walker tied with Democratic challenger Mary Burke are to be believed, Walker might have trouble getting past the 2014 election.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, June 20, 2014
“Jindal Checks The Falwell Box”: In A Desperate Search For A “Base”
I don’t know how I missed the fact that Bobby Jindal was doing the commencement address at Liberty University on Saturday. Perhaps the Lord wanted me to have a peaceful weekend and not think about the Louisiana governor up there in Lynchburg pandering his heart out and checking the Falwell box in his desperate search for a “base” from which to run for president in 2016. Most of his remarks sound about as generic as you can get, in the Times-Pic‘s account of it:
“Today the American people, whether they know it or not, are mired in a silent war. … It is a war — a silent war — against religious liberty,” said Jindal, who spent much of the speech attacking President Barack Obama and the federal government.
This is the same rap he delivered at the Ronald Reagan Library back in February, and the only real enhancement is that he’s lucked into having an actual constituent, Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson, he can tout as the latest “victim” of politically-correct hordes of Jesus-hating sodomites. And so he has made his Christian Right persona the last of many reinventions he has pursued in his career, one that has the advantage of not relying on his record in Louisiana, where at the end of next year he’s leaving office after two full terms as governor not terribly popular with people in either party.
Indeed, he leaped effortlessly from talking about Phil Robertson to talking about Liberty’s pop-culture martyrs:
“You may think that I was defending the Robertsons simply because I am the Governor of their home state, the great state of Louisiana. You would be wrong about that. I defended them because they have every right to speak their minds,” Jindal said.
The governor then went on to say he supports David and Jason Benham, Liberty University graduates who recently lost an opportunity to have their own television show on HGTV after making controversial remarks about homosexuality and abortion.
So what distinguishes Bobby from all the other conservative pols making the holy pilgrimage to Lynchburg to offer themselves as field marshals in the spiritual warfare against godless secularists? Well, he’s got his conversion experience from Hinduism to Christianity, which he talked a lot about at Liberty, and will talk about in the future, so shameless and ruthless is his exploitation of anything in his own life that will help his candidacy. Trouble is, Bobby converted to Catholicism, not to the conservative evangelical Christianity of Jerry Falwell. I supposed he could have told the audience at Liberty this was a youthful indiscretion based on the likelihood that he would someday seek his fortune in Catholic-heavy Louisiana. But instead he’s describing himself as an “evangelical Catholic,” which is code for “don’t mind the transubstantiation and don’t listen to the current Pope, I’m as politicized as you are!”
Jindal by all accounts got a warm welcome from a national conservative evangelical audience at Liberty, and from a separate and more select group of Christian Right leaders at a private dinner over the weekend. But you have to wonder if he’s more of a novelty and a mascot for them, someone to warm up crowds with stories of hiding in the closet to read the Bible so his idol-worshiping parents couldn’t punish him, before the real presidential candidates speak. At this point, though, if that’s the role Bobby Jindal has to play to keep getting invited to do “major speeches,” that’s fine with him. Anywhere he goes will be more congenial territory than Baton Rouge.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 13, 2014
“Divorced From Reality”: Fewer Debates Won’t Save The GOP From Itself
Jonathan Martin reports in the New York Times that the RNC has moved aggressively to reduce the number of debates Republican candidates for president will have to endure.
The Republican National Committee moved Friday to seize control of the presidential primary debates in 2016, another step in a coordinated effort by the party establishment to reshape the nominating process.
Committee members overwhelmingly passed a measure that would penalize any presidential candidate who participated in a debate not sanctioned by the national party, by limiting their participation in subsequent committee-sanctioned forums.
The move represents the party’s effort to reduce the number of debates and assert control over how they are staged.
In making the case for adopting the new rule, party officials repeatedly criticized the moderators and format of the 2012 primary debates, appealing to the suspicions that many Republican activists have about the mainstream news media. “The liberal media doesn’t deserve to be in the driver’s seat,” said the committee’s chairman, Reince Priebus, addressing committee members here at their spring meeting.
This means that underdog candidates will have to weigh the advantages of appearing in unsanctioned forums versus the disadvantages of being blocked from sanctioned forums. Of course, that’s an easy decision if you haven’t been invited to the sanctioned forums in the first place.
It’s smart for the Republicans to do this, but their distrust of the mainstream media is just one more manifestation of their divorce from reality, which really took place no later than Sarah Palin’s appearance on the national stage.
When being asked what papers you read is too hard of a question, mistrust builds up in a hurry. If the Republicans are hoping to go through debate season without anyone ever puncturing their right-wing media fantasy bubble, these reforms are not going to be fully productive. And, in any case, if the candidates are cheering the death penalty and talking about the sanctity of marriage and how “severe” their conservatism is, and the wisdom of a self-deportation immigration policy then it won’t matter who the moderator happens to be.
It’s true that the Republicans had too many debates, but so did the Democrats. And it didn’t appear to hurt the Democrats at all. It made Obama a better debater.
It says something that the GOP wants to have a primary season without allowing anyone to watch or question what they are doing.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 10, 2014
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