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- On the wonderfully ignominious collapse of Rudy!, I think Noam Scheiber gets it right: "Was Rudy's strategy flawed, or was it the candidate? I say the latter. Rudy spent a good chunk of time and money in New Hampshire in November and December. The net effect was to move his numbers down." Right. Claims that Giuliani's problem was strategy ignores not only the substantial amount of time and money he spent in New Hampshire but the fact that he effectively pulled out early for good reason; he was cratering. It's hard to see that just doing the same thing would have suddenly started working. The Florida firewall strategy had no chance of working, but that's because nothing can work when active campaigning actually hurts your numbers. It should also be noted that Giuliani was never a genuine frontrunner; you'd think that Lieberman 2004 would have made it clear that national polls well in advance of the primaries mean virtually nothing, but some people apparently have to be reminded every four years.
- John Holbo wonders how conservative pundits who have been attacking John McCain relentlessly ("perhaps not more liberal than Obama?" These people are nuts...) will deal with his impending nomination. It should be easy for conservatives to get over their McCain issues since overall he was always the most conservative of the major candidates, but of course if these pundits were rational they would already see that. I think he's leaving out the most obvious one, though. If Democrats give the GOP the gift of Clinton, which still seems very likely, these pundits can pretty much ignore McCain and focus entirely on Hillary Clinton's purported Trotskyism, murder and drug running operations, "shrillness," her husband's penis, etc. This almost exclusively misogynist resentment plus Clinton derangement strategy may not be enough -- ask Bob Dole -- but it's clearly where the conservative punditocracy is headed.
--Scott Lemieux
