Candidates Blog

Of all the GOP presidential contenders who could claim to have benefited from the recent midterm elections, Brownback may be the one for whom it is most true. For years, the social conservatives who brought down Miers have been having a fierce intramural debate on the merits of pragmatism versus purity.

In the run-up to 2000, they resolved that debate in favor of the former, and the movement threw its support behind George W. Bush over conservative long shots like John Ashcroft and Gary Bauer. But, now, conservatives appear to have the worst of both worlds: Six years of disappointments on issues like abortion and gay marriage have resulted in a midterm rout and a lame-duck presidency. Purity is looking more attractive by the day.

All the more so when you consider that the early GOP front-runner is John McCain, a man who still makes some social conservatives sputter with rage. If present trends continue and the Republican establishment embraces McCain, conservatives could choose to rally around a more acceptable alternative–that is, if they can find one. Lame-duck Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has already pulled the plug on his presidential ambitions. As of January, Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum and Virginia’s George Allen are both ex-senators. And, while Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney may have escaped the midterm fallout, he is Mormon–a religion many evangelical Christians regard as a cult.

Brownback, by contrast, is closing in on a decade as the leading social conservative in the U.S. Senate. He has impeccable credentials on issues like judges, abortion, and gay marriage. (And, for that matter, any combination of the three: He has threatened to hold up the nomination of a Michigan judge because she once attended a lesbian commitment ceremony.) And Brownback’s leadership of the VAT gives him extraordinary day-to-day influence over the Senate’s social conservative agenda.

There are crasser considerations, too. Brownback was an evangelical Christian before he converted to Catholicism. Iowa has large populations of both. Brownback’s home in Topeka is a four-hour drive from Des Moines, giving him as close to a natural foothold in the state as any GOP contender will have. And, as a long-serving state agriculture secretary and former Future Farmers of America official, Brownback is as fluent in the language of ethanol subsidies and biodiesel production as any politician reared outside Iowa. Put this together, and you have a guy who could theoretically take one of the top two spots in the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. With the Internet’s track record of making juggernauts out of grassroots icons, even a third-place finish could give Brownback an E-Z Pass lane straight through to the final stages of the race. If everything breaks right, and social conservatives are particularly aggrieved over their party’s standard bearer, Brownback could end up on the national ticket.

Brownback, in other words, is on the brink. He is savvy. He is righteous. He is committed. He would appear to have been born for this moment in politics. But looks can be deceiving, because birth is not at all how Brownback came by his place in the conservative cosmos. As recently as 1994, the year of his first campaign for Congress, Brownback was a member in good standing of the moderate Republican establishment. But, by the time he arrived in Congress that fall, he was emitting so much anti-government zeal he gave Newt Gingrich the willies. Within two years, Brownback had another epiphany, from which he emerged as a crusader for Christian causes.

Which raises a question for conservatives mulling a Brownback candidacy: Has the Kansas senator been finding himself? Or has he been finding himself a way to run for president?

Read the full Article HERE

Bloomberg writes up GOP Gov. Mitt Romney’s emergence as the alternative to McCain, noting how Romney has been courting conservatives, has avoided rookie mistakes, conveniently left the country before the Iraq Study Group report came out, and “aims to reconstitute [Bush’s] coalition.” He wants to attract “evangelical Christians with his support for a gay-marriage ban, and will try to lure economic conservatives with plans to overhaul health care and the tax system.” He also seems to be trying to set up sharp contrasts with McCain on immigration reform — he “stresses tough border enforcement over a new guest-worker plan” — and possibly on taxes.

Attacks on Romney have emerged with an unusually hard tone for being this early on a candidate who hasn’t even announced his candidacy yet. Recently, the Boston Globe trumped up charges that Romney hired gardeners who themselves hired illegal aliens, implying that Romney should have investigated and uncovered this (a brazen act which no doubt would have been equally if not more criticized) and his aspirations for president would be ruined by this shocking detail (wishful thinking).

Now a Boston-based gay newspaper has revived comments Romney “made during his 1994 Senate bid, in which he said the gay and lesbian community ‘needs more support from the Republican Party,'” per, again, the Boston Globe. In a 1994 interview with that paper, “Romney said it should be up to states to decide whether to allow same-sex marriage and he criticized Republican ‘extremists’ who imposed their positions on the party” even though he also he personally opposed gay marriage. Critics are charging this as a shift in position, hoping that readers will not notice that no actual shift has taken place.

The punchline is that twelve years later, in a recent interview with the DC Examiner, Romney “accused McCain of being ‘disingenuous’ on same-sex marriage, because McCain says he’s against [a constitutional ban of gay marriage] but believes states should decide the issue.” The criticism on Romney, in case you missed it, is that he appears to be criticizing Mccain for not falling in line with what he himself called “extremist” behavior by Republicans. This attempt at a criticism of course relies on the shallow memory of the reader, who, in order to believe this is a disingenuous line on Romney’s part must forget that 12 years ago “gay marriage” was not even heard of as an issue. Indeed, 12 years ago, anyone overly concerned about gays getting married would have been a kook in a time where there was no mass demand for it, no legal controversies over it and a liberal Democrat president named Bill Clinton had signed the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy (which kept gays in the military closeted) and was on his way to sign DOMA (the Defense Of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman).

Since those 12 years when Romney wrote that letter, same-sex marriage has been forced onto the public by unelected judges in defiance of the people’s will, turning an issue that the majority of the country didn’t care about 12 years ago into an issue that 87% of the country feels strongly about. In 2004 for instance, voters in 11 states approved constitutional amendments codifying marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. The amendments won in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Utah and even heavily blue-state Oregon, the one state where gay rights activists had hoped to prevail. The amendments passed with a 3-to-1 margin in Kentucky, Georgia and Arkansas, 3-to-2 in Ohio and 6-to-1 in Mississippi. Bans passed by narrower margins in Oregon, about 57 percent, and Michigan, about 59 percent.

Although Mitt Romney supports gay rights, as he did 12 years ago, he does not support the re-defining of what marriage is, as he didn’t 12 years ago. While Governor of Massachusetts, Romney had no friction with gay activists until his last months in office when the legislature violated the Massachusetts Constitution by refusing to vote on an amendment that would allow the state’s citizens to vote on the definition of marriage.

So far the two major attacks on Romney (that he vicariously hired illegal immigrants, and that he supports allowing the citizens to vote on matters important to them) appear to have only helped energize support for him. Perhaps these failures will move 08 criticism in the direction of actual challenges on the wisdom or merit of ones beliefs instead of cheap “gotcha” games… and perhaps Governor Pataki will win in a landslide *snicker…

MSNBC’s Huma Zaidi blogs that the Los Angeles Times front-pages the “frenzied competition” among Republican presidential candidates over which of them will inherit “a fundraising and vote-getting machine built by the [Bushes] over the years into one of the most valuable assets in modern politics.” More: “Adding to the drama, a sibling divide appears to be emerging” as some key members of Gov. Jeb Bush’s “tight-knit inner circle have signed up to help Romney while several of President Bush’s senior strategists have gone to McCain.” ,

The New York Daily News covers McCain’s tough speech on Iran to a pro-Israel crowd in Manhattan, Rudy Giuliani’s home turf. “Although he called war with Iran a last resort, he added, ‘There is only one thing worse than a military solution, and that, my friends, is a nuclear-armed Iran.’”

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who has ties to imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff, is telling reporters that “‘envoys’ for Sen. John McCain (R) have reached out to him several times in the past year to reach a detente in advance of the Arizonan’s likely presidential campaign,” which McCain’s top political adviser dismisses as “delusional,” Roll Call reports.

Outgoing New York Gov. George Pataki (R) says he will decide at the beginning of next year whether he’ll run for president, the New York Times says.