Good Monday morning Fellow Seekers of Wisdom and Truth,
Friday morning at the Humphrey Institute, former congressman, now lobbyist and big-time Republican insider Vin Weber gave an outstanding overview of the state of conservatism, focusing largely on the race for the Repub nomination for president.
Weber is the best I know at promoting his (Republican) side and his (conservative) cause without denying the obvious or making those who disagree with him feel that he is insulting their intelligence.
An early and ardent supporter of the Iraq war, Weber’s presentation of even that awkward topic combined qualities of candor with at least the best defense of what Pres. Bush has done, and the possibility that it won’t sink the Republican ticket this year, as you can imagine. I’ll give chapter and verse on that below. But first, his overview of the Republican presidential field at this moment in the contest:
Weber started by, as he said, “acknowledging the obvious,” that according to the current polling, the Repubs have given back over the last three years all of the gains they had made since 1978 – gains that had enabled them to win five of the last seven presidential elections. Having pulled to parity in party identification, the Repubs now trail the Dems by 12 points. The Dem advantage is bigger among younger voters.
The Repubs are no longer the party that most Americans trust on issues of national security or prosperity/economic security.
Front loading of caucus and primary schedules has backfired
If the states that moved up their primaries and caucuses thought they were going to increase their impact and force the presidential candidates to spend time and money there, they have brought about almost the opposite effect.
With 20 states (including New York and California) holding primaries or caucuses on Feb. 5 (and the Dems have 22 day), the nominations have an excellent chance of being decided that night.
But since none of the candidates has the resources to compete in that many widely scattered state races, the candidates are focusing even more of their time and money on Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, believing a strong showing in those traditional early contests is the best way to do well on the superest of SuperTuesdays.
Mitt Romney (Weber is a high-ranking Romney advisor) has built his early strategy around the traditional one-two punch in Iowa and New Hampshire. His problem is that his big lead in Iowa has disappeared. In a hallway conversation with me, Weber acknowledged that Romney hasn’t come across well in the recent debates, and appears to be on the defensive.
Rudy Giuliani’s best states (like New York) are in the SuperTuesday lineup, and Giuliani had originally hoped to avoid seriously competing in the early states, but he has now realized that if start 0-for-4, you head into SuperTuesday looking like a loser. So he’s now changed his strategy and trying to gin up a decent showing in New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Mike Huckabee, the dark horse of the year so far, has a strategy based on pulling a big come-from-behind win in Iowa. Weber acknowledged that “there’s every possibility he could win in Iowa,” which would be a big blow to Weber’s guy Romney. But Huckabee has little organization or natural appeal in New Hampshire and little money in which to run in the big SuperTuesday states. So Weber doesn’t see an easy way for Huckabee to build on his Iowa surge,
John McCain (whom Weber backed in 2000) started out thinking he could run a national campaign as the natural frontrunner, has found out otherwise and is now betting everything on New Hampshire. He will drop out soon after New Hampshire if he doesn’t win there.
Fred Thompson is betting the farm on South Carolina. But Weber says Thompson isn’t strong “anywhere north of Nashville,” and Weber has never understood what made Thompson think he had a chance for the nomination.
The problems of neo-Reaganism in 2008
Thompson is supposedly the most Reagan-like of the candidates, and Republicans still believe in the Reagan magic. But Weber said that Reaganism “is not something you can just pick up the way it was invented in 1980 and say the same lines all over again.” Weber took apart the three strands of American conservatism — economic, social and national security — that Reagan wove together into a winning coalition, and explained the current Republican challenges with each of them.
On Reagan-style economic conservatism, Weber said the problem was that 40 percent of U.S. households don’t pay any income taxes. It’s hard to construct a tax-cutting message that has widespread popular appeal, Weber said. He mentioned that Huckabee is promoting the so-called “Fair Tax,” which does away with income taxes entirely. But Weber seems to think that idea is pretty crazy and most people figure this out when they learn that the income tax would be replaced with a 23-30 percent sales tax on everything they buy.
On social conservatism, Weber said he was nervous about Republicans who, as they contemplate the possibility of nominating a pro-choice candidate like Guliani, say that the social conservatives will have to stick with the Repubs because they have nowhere else to go. Weber said evangelical Christians used to be Democrats. They became Republicans almost entirely because of the abortion issue. If they decide the party has broken faith with them on that issue, they are not necessarily economic or national security conservatives. Right now they are excited about Huckabee, a Baptist preacher who speaks their language and has been steadfast on the social issues.
“My view is that Mike Huckabee can’t win the Republican nomination,” Weber said, “but Republicans can’t win without those voters.” If Huckabee loses in a way that makes social conservatives feel ignored, disrespected or abandoned, it could be a major blow to the Republican ticket, he said.
Iraq
But the “motherlode” of Republican support over recent years has been the widely-held view that Republicans could be trusted to protect the country while the 1972 McGovern candidacy turned the Dems into a party that the public perceived as dangerously weak on military issues, Weber said.
The Iraq War has cost the Repubs that reputation, Weber said. That’s the kind of acknowledgment of painful (but indisputable) truths I referred to at the top that wins Weber points with me for credibility. And he went further during a Q and A with political scientist Larry Jacobs after the talk.
The level of violence in Iraq is down, and is starting to show up in polls, with more Americans saying the war is going well. But Weber said: “I don’t think Republicans should take much solace from the improved polling.”
The poll numbers haven’t improved on the question: Was the war a mistake? Weber’s interpretation: “The country has decided that it wasn’t worth it. They’re saying: ‘Yes, it’s better to win than to lose. But it would have been better not to have done it at all.’”
The only hopeful sign for his party on that score, Weber said, is that the salience of the war as a voting issue seems to be declining. He didn’t say this, but implied that if the 2008 election is basically a referendum on the Iraq war, the Repubs will lose.
But, having presented the Iraq war as a political problem for his party, Weber said two other things that amounted a half-defense of the war, and a half-prediction that it doesn’t have to sink the Repubs in 2008.
The half-defense was this: When Jacobs asked him directly whether the war had been a mistake, Weber said that it turned out to be a mistake to topple Saddam Hussein when the Bush administration did it.
If Bush had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction (Weber clearly implied that Bush believed the weapons were there, and wasn’t challenged on that point) it would have been wiser to wait to topple Saddam until U.S. troops were no longer tied down in Afghanistan.
BUT, he noted that Bill Clinton had endorsed regime change in Iraq as a U.S. goal, and that Madeleine Albright had compared Saddam with Hitler. Weber asserted that the sanctions regime that had restrained Saddam over the previous decade was unraveling. Weber said that even the Dulfer Report, the final definitive post-invasion statement of the U.S. government on the absence of WMD in Iraq, had concluded that the acquisition of nuclear weapons remained a priority for Saddam.
The half-prediction was this: The Iraq issue doesn’t have to be a big factor in the election if voters can see through the hype and realize that the concrete differences between mainstream Democratic and Republican position on Iraq are not that big.
The Bush administration is planning to start reducing U.S. troops strength in the spring of 2008 (if only, Weber acknowledged, because the current troops levels can’t be sustained). Top Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are talking about a schedule of 16 months or more to withdraw combat troops. Neither Clinton, Obama nor John Edwards would guarantee to have all U.S. troops out of Iraq during the next presidential term. The Democratic position “is not hugely different from what Bush is saying,” Weber said.
Is this clever spin, wishful thinking or a partial truth? This is already a long post and it’s very late Sunday. My gut feeling is that it has elements of all three. What think?
[…] Read the rest of this great post here […]
Sounds like tiny grains of truth, to make the story appear plausible, mixed in with huge vats of fatuous spin and/or nonsense. The usual MO.
First, the Army never deployed any significant troops in Afghanistan, relying mostly on special forces and “local”, so there weren’t any great numbers “tied down” there. Bushco refused to deploy ANY US combat troops at Tora Bora (for some mysterious reason) even though the CIA “commander” on the ground was demanding them. The Pentagon has never explained why it refused the request, when it was clear that the largest pocket of al qaeda fighters to date was corralled and trapped, with a high likelihood that Osmama was there. (It was confirmed that he was present.)
Second, Tora Bora occurred in late 2001, early 2002. The army deployed few troops because they were already aware that Iraq was on the table and that it was going to be the clear priority.
Third, numerous memoirs have already shown that the invasion of Iraq was the top priority of the Bushco neo-cons from Day One, and Vin intentionally neglects to mention that little fact—Afghanistan was a “sideshow” from the start (just like today), not the “main event” to these guys.
Finally, perhaps Vin hasn’t noticed that Afghanistan has never been “pacified” and NOW has significant numbers of US/NATO troops there (with the Marines requesting that they be redeployed there from Iraq). So I guess under Vin’s “We should’ve waited till we were done in Afghanistan” rationale, Bushco never should have invaded Iraq, right? Welcome the the Left’s position all along, Vin. Oh, and Saddam still really, really, wanted his nuclear program pony—that argument certainly would have been a solid, legal basis for invading another country, absolutely. (sarcasm)
But the big dissembling here is glossing over all the post-invasion facts revealing that Iraq was a Repub war of choice, undertaken to secure oil resources for America’s gas guzzling addiction. Nothing more, and that’s how historians will view this illegal invasion. WMDs, “ties” to terrorism, democracy spreadin’, all crocks to justify an invasion to liberate Iraq’s oil from Saddam. If Dems had the spine to tell this (accurate) story to the voters, and if the right-leaning MSM would not immediately race to the Repubs’ rescue, then maybe Vin wouldn’t be so sanguine about the Iraq debacle.
Repubs remain the party of insane, irresponsible, mindless militarism, now moving into the “Agressive Wars for Natural Resources” stage of American imperialism. None of their candidates (except Paul) has renounced this new “conservatism”. Far from it. In fact, it’s rather a question of who is the most bellicose militarist among the leading Repubs. They’ve really learned their “lesson”.
Whether our weak, compromised and slightly less militarist “leading” Dem candidates are a real alternative is questionable, but there is no doubt what the Repub party is all about: they are the party of reckless, immoral and insane warmongering and bloated “defense” spending and that’s not about to change, absent an electoral drubbing of historic proportions.
Whether the failed electorate of BushAmerica (which couldn’t even get the 2004 election right) has the sense to administer the long overdue political destruction of this crappy, failed, ideologically bankrupt “conservative” party is another question entirely.
Why Eric Black or the Humphrey Institute sees fit to entertain the opinions of Vin Weber is beyond me. No doubt the man is polite, well spoken and well connected…so what? Has the author not yet sensed the basic indecency to giving forum — much less points for “qualities of candor” — to a Project for a New American Century signator?
Weber is much, much more than “an early and ardent supporter of the Iraq war,” as Black writes, and the author of this blog does a disservice to his readers to omit the elephant in the living room: As an early signator to the documents of the Project for a New American Century, Weber was instrumental to the idea-generation, and policy creation process that led to this war.
I suppose it would be too much to ask for an apology, but it seems galling that now Weber tells us that Bush started the war at the wrong moment. I believe it was Karl Rove, of all people, who trotted some version of this defense while on Charlie Rose last week. What evasions of responsibility will this “party of responsibility” think of next? Had America delayed its invasion, would the intemperate, insular uncuriosity of Weber’s choice for president have been any less destructive?
Weber, like Bill Kristol, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other PNACers in exile surely have a right to make a living in the wreckage of their failed vision. But we all will carry the burdens of his gambit, and as such, our political media and academia surely hold a responsibility to cease lending them the mistaken credibiliy that led us to where we are today.
“forty percent of U.S. households don’t pay any income tax” I’ve sometimes seen conservatives claim that no one making under $40,000 a year pays any income tax. Maybe Weber and his conservative pals ought to read the 1040 booklet rather the WSJ editorial pages. If I reading various table right, a household can make about $35,000 a year and still be in the lowest forty percent of U.S. households. Using the 2006 1040 booklet, I did a quick calculation and discovered that a married couple making $35,000 a year would pay about $2,000 in taxes. That may be nothing to Weber, but it’s a fair amount of money to the poor sods who are paying it, particularly when they could inherit 50 times that much and not pay a dime.
There’s taxes and there’s income taxes.
The taxes that pay for Social Security and Medicare are not technically income taxes.
If you figure them in the picture is a bit different.