I wrote last month about the I wrote last month about the somewhat odd rise of a new system for presidential nominations, where candidates no longer become famous by running successful campaigns but, rather, must already be famous in order to gain the level of attention necessary to succeed. I should have noted that, on the Democratic side at least, the results have at least had some merits. The two most progressive candidates in the race -- Barack Obama and John Edwards -- both got famous in no small part through making good speeches, which is itself part of what it takes to win a general election and, indeed, part of the job of being president. Hillary Clinton, the third member of the Democratic "big three," meanwhile, is only short on political experience in a formalistic sense and is, more realistically, one of the most grizzled political veterans on the current national stage, surrounded by a team of likewise battle-hardened aides.
On the Republican side, by contrast, things are a bit of a joke. You'd think a fairly normal conservative Republican would win the Republican nomination. But it hasn't been possible for any normal conservative Republicans to get famous under the Bush shadow, except for Bush's brother Jeb who, it seems, can't run because he's the incumbent's brother. Instead, we're left with the Terrible Troika of Romney, Giuliani, and McCain.
It's a crew so bizarre you're inclined to think that none of them could possibly win the nomination. Giuliani's pro-choice and pro-gay views are fairly well-known at this point. To some extent, however, this only scratches the surface of his un-nominability. Compatible with both his record as a social liberal and his record as an authoritarian, Giuliani was a supporter of New York City's draconian gun laws. Moreover, he was an enthusiastic enforcer of these laws. The ugly truth is that the ex-mayor's record of tension with African-American New Yorkers is probably an asset in a GOP primary. But it's important to note that one major locus of these tensions was the Giuliani-era NYPD's affection for the combined NAACP/NRA nightmare of frequent, random, seemingly racially targeted stop-and-frisk searches of citizens not under suspicion of a specific crime in hopes of finding guns to confiscate.
There's also the matter of Giuliani's view on immigration laws. He was against them. He was against enforcing them. He prohibited city officials from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities. Then congress passed a law banning such local practices. Giuliani sued to have the law overturned. He lost. He ordered city officials to ignore both immigration law and the federal law ordering those officials to stop ignoring immigration law.
What's more, people forget this, but the same factors likely to hinder Giuliani with the base won't help in a general election, either. This far out, you need to ignore the polls and think about how an actual campaign will play out. A thrice-married occasional cross-dresser with a penchant for seizing guns while turning a blind eye to illegal immigrants who also thinks cutting taxes on the rich is the be-all and end-all of economic policy isn't going to inspire anyone to wonder what's the matter with Kansas. Next to Giuliani, everyone looks like the candidate for values voters.
But none of the alternatives look any better. Mitt Romney is the most freakishly transparent liar I've ever witnessed. His party is desperately reliant on playing the Christian card on election day, but most traditionalist Christians deny that his religion counts as Christianity. He can't decide which state he's from, invested major resources in barely winning a Conservative Political Action Committee straw poll last weekend, and, for his trouble, managed to snag the endorsement of Ann Coulter at the same time she was calling John Edwards a "faggot."
Then there's McCain. To the kind of liberal who spent 2002 fantasizing about McCain beating Bush in '04 on the Democratic ticket, his pathetic decline is probably a sad story. To me, it's more like a funny one -- like when that guy slipped and fell down a flight of stairs and it all looked very painful but he was a huge jerk anyway. McCain is old. And sick. And obviously so. He has the misfortune of being both the most conservative candidate in the race and the one most hated by conservatives. His website makes it look like he's campaigning for Führer. Worst of all, George W. Bush's Iraq policy is so crazy that it's managed to ruin McCain's devilishly clever positioning on Iraq.
What clever positioning am I talking about? A little while back, McCain faced an apparent problem -- his demented, run-amok militarism clashes with the national mood at a moment when Iraq is becoming a horrible millstone around Republican necks. McCain, however, had a way around this -- simply advocate the one policy so crazy nobody would ever possibly do it, namely throwing more troops into the war. That way, things would continue to go downhill, congressional Democrats would surely force some kind of de-escalation, and McCain could campaign not on an unpopular pledge to actually send more troops, but simply on an in-retrospect observation that more troops should have been sent. But then -- because sometimes the strangest things happen -- Bush decided that he agreed with McCain and was going to implement a "surge." And with that, the once promising Cult of John McCain began to fall apart.
But this gets at what's truly insane about the three unorthodox Republican contenders. Given that they're all viewed skeptically by cultural conservatives, the only possible way for any of them to campaign for the nomination is with an escalating race to the right on national security, even though Iraq just led the GOP to disaster last November. Which vulnerable state that Bush won in 2004 is rendered more secure by making the Republican Party less committed to social conservatism but more committed to the Iraq project? Ohio? Virginia? Missouri? Nevada? Iowa? I don't see it. But only a real conservative Christian can afford to put even a ray of sunlight between himself and the president on the subject of Bush's massively unpopular war, and the cult of celebrity has left the GOP's top-tier field without one. It's too early to say anything with confidence, but from where things sit right now, the Republicans look, well, doomed by their tunnel vision about potential nominees.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
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