THE GINGRICH INEVITABILITY. According to Josh Marshall, John McCain "is going nowhere" as a presidential candidate. (I agree. His high-wire pandering act just got old; it cost him his already long-outdated appeal to New Hampshire independents without gaining him the real trust of social conservatives, and his support for escalation in Iraq is probably the end of the independent McCain candidacy, which was my fear a couple months ago.) And according to Stu Rothenberg, Rudy Giuliani is going nowhere as a presidential candidate. And there's every reason to expect that Mitt Romney is going to have some trouble, based on his past "multiple choice" position on abortion, the various other natural entailments of being governor of Massachusetts, and what I'm told is a widespread belief among Protestants that Mormons aren't real Christians. (I've got nothing to say on this; all I know about Mormonism is based on a single late-night skim through The Book in a Marriott 15 years ago. It did seem somewhat less reality-based than the Judeo-Christian tradition.) But these three candidates, each in some way compromised in his appeal to the Republican base, are nonetheless the front-runners. They're the only candidates who have real campaigns up and running. And they're not going away without a fight. The most important fact about this is not the particular problems that each of these candidacies have with the party's base, but the fact that there are three of them. Imagine an alternative scenario in which three hard-core conservatives (for example, Rick Santorum, George Allen, and Bill Frist, the three whose careers were destroyed in the last Congress) were splitting the support of the social-conservative base, and there might be room for one slightly more moderate figure -- probably McCain -- to emerge as the alternative. Instead, there are three of these unreliable characters, which makes it almost mathematically inevitable that if all three stay in the race, and divide up the votes of whoever the non-social conservative Republican primary voters are, and if the conservatives have a single candidate, that candidate will win. Brownback? Huckabee? Duncan Hunter? Newt Gingrich? My money's still on Gingrich. I know many think that his personal behavior should make him just as unacceptable to the right as Romney or Giuliani, but the right has never seemed to care who you sleep with as long as you say the right things about who other people should sleep with. And he is a figure of stature and name recognition. Totally unelectable, of course, although having the "definer of civilization" in a debate will surely make for some good television. By comparison, the Democratic field is a nice, healthy range of old and new faces and approaches, no candidate who is totally unacceptable to the party's base and no candidate who, if he or she could win the nomination, is obviously going to have a hard time winning the general. What an unusual position for the party to find itself in!
--Mark Schmitt
