Some people claim that the ancient Mayan calendar predicts the
end of the world in 2012. While I am generally skeptical toward
such doomsday prophecies, recent events have undermined my habitual
skepticism and filled me with foreboding premonitions. If 2012
doesn’t bring the end of the entire cosmos, there are those who say
it is likely to destroy the Republican Party as we know it, and the
first cataclysmic event is now less than two weeks away.
Nobody knows which GOP presidential candidate will win the
Iowa caucuses Jan. 3. Political wizards keep peering at the poll
numbers in search of omens and portents, but only fools read polls
as prophecies. As pollsters themselves often caution, a poll is
only a “snapshot” of opinion at any given time, and the opinions of
Iowa Republicans seem to be shifting back and forth so rapidly that
the images are hopelessly blurred. Given the wide disparities in
recent survey results from the Hawkeye State, it is tempting to
conclude that Iowans are on the verge of a mass psychotic
breakdown.
Overwhelmed by the burden of being first in the nation to
cast votes that actually count toward the GOP nomination, have the
previously steadfast Midwesterners finally snapped under the
unbearable stress? Their psyches have been assaulted by an endless
barrage of TV attack ads, and they are unable to go out for a cup
of coffee without encountering a Republican candidate shaking hands
and asking for their votes. Can we blame Iowans if they have
succumbed to paranoia, considering how they are being relentlessly
stalked by the GOP contenders? Their mailboxes are full of
postcards and pamphlets from the candidates, and every time they
answer the phone, it’s either a presidential campaign volunteer
soliciting their support or a pollster conducting another damned
survey. It wouldn’t be surprising if a few of them flipped out and
began babbling gibberish when Gallup or Rasmussen calls. Buried
somewhere in those uncategorized responses that pollsters lump
together as “other,” we can be sure that there must be at least one
fed-up citizen who, his supper interrupted by yet another harassing
call, screamed into the phone his intention to cast a write-in vote
for Harold Stassen.
Psychological trauma is the only plausible explanation for
the wild mood swings pollsters are reporting among Iowa
Republicans, and the results of these surveys are like a Rorschach
inkblot upon which pundits and analysts project their own inner
madness. When Newt Gingrich was riding high — just 10 days ago, he
was at 31 percent in the
RealClearPolitics average of Iowa polls — any conservative who
criticized Newt’s record or rhetoric was accused by Gingrich’s
supporters of attempting to throw the nomination to former
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. And in case you haven’t followed
the 2012 campaign closely, it is here necessary to explain that
many conservatives have declared Romney the worst RINO (Republican
In Name Only) in all human history, even though many of these same
conservatives supported Romney in 2008 when he was the chief rival
to Arizona Sen. John McCain, who previously enjoyed the distinction
of being the worst RINO in all human history. If the past is
prologue, these conservatives will continue denouncing Romney right
up until the moment when Romney clinches the nomination, at which
point they will begin offering arguments why all patriotic
Americans must vote for Romney as the last hope for freedom. For
the time being, however, Romney is the dreaded RINO menace whose
nomination All True Conservatives are expected to oppose with every
fiber of their being and, as recently as a week ago, this meant
that no True Conservative could say a discouraging word about Newt
Gingrich, who was supposed to be the final champion of the “Anybody
But Mitt” movement.
As crazy as that sounds — because Newt’s bona fides as a
True Conservative were never exactly impeccable — it isn’t nearly
as crazy as what has happened since Newt’s poll numbers began
sinking. Pundits were thrown into a full-blown schizophrenic frenzy
by the prospect that Texas Rep. Ron Paul might win the Iowa
caucuses. Since late November, no poll has shown Paul worse than
third place in Iowa. Two polls this week have Paul first, with
Gingrich slipping to third behind Romney in one poll, and all the
way to fourth place in another. According to some conservatives, a
Paul victory in the Hawkeye State would be the worst thing to
happen to the Republican Party since Lincoln’s assassination. It
might even be a sign of the final apocalypse foretold by the
ancient Mayan calendar.
This doomsday view of Paul’s candidacy is due mainly to
his foreign policy stances. Having been the 1988 Libertarian Party
presidential nominee, Paul is arguably to the left of Barack Obama,
which outrages those Republicans who consider an assertive
international military posture to be the essence of patriotism.
Having spent much time among the Libertarians (I
covered their 2008 convention in Denver), I understand their
critique of GOP hawkishness, and also know that some conservative
Republicans share their concerns about what might be called
“strategic overreach” during the post-9/11 Bush
presidency.
Of course, Paul takes his anti-interventionist arguments
far beyond such mild criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, and his
forthright radicalism has attracted a fanatical following that
includes some distinctly disreputable elements. Yet as Paul’s Iowa
poll numbers pushed past the 20-percent threshold and Newt’s
numbers sank (partly due to a hard-hitting TV ad from Paul blasting Gingrich’s
“serial hypocrisy”), an absurdly disproportionate panic ensued.
The stampede included otherwise sensible friends of mine who were
inspired to issue frantic warnings of dire consequences.
Ed Morrissey of the popular Hot Air blog wrote, “If Iowa picks
Ron Paul as its caucus winner, two things will result. First, Mitt
Romney will probably run the table as Republicans everywhere else
but Iowa recoil in horror. Second, Iowa will likely end up losing
whatever cachet it has managed to build over the last three decades
as a first-in-the-nation proving ground for presidential
candidates, and the drumbeat to unseat both Iowa and New Hampshire
from the front end of the primary system will prove irresistible.”
Whether you find those predictions feasible or far-fetched, the
whole nightmare scenario is contingent on that gigantic
hypothetical “if.” Despite what the current polls show, an Iowa
victory for Ron Paul may yet be averted, and even if he does manage
to squeak out a Jan. 3 win, it is by no means certain that this
would clinch the nomination for Romney.
Let’s start with an obvious fact: Iowans aren’t really
crazy, no matter what the wildly gyrating poll numbers may suggest.
It’s been four months since I’ve been to the Hawkeye State, but the
Iowa Republicans I met were decent, sensible people eager to find
the strongest possible candidate to take on Barack Obama next fall.
While many pundits have bemoaned what they see as a “weak” GOP
field for 2012, most of the Iowans I met in August were either (a)
enthusiastic supporters of one of the candidates, or (b) genuinely
undecided among two or three of the contenders. Two of the
candidates who competed in the Aug. 13 straw poll in Ames — former
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and businessman Herman Cain — have
since quit the race, so their erstwhile supporters have been up for
grabs, along with admirers of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who
didn’t say
her final “no” until early October. The undecided Iowans have
watched a seemingly endless series of televised debates during the
up-and-down “Flavor of the Month” cycles that have shaped this
campaign. Many of those conservative GOP voters haven’t yet firmly
made up their minds on which of the remaining candidates they
prefer.
So this month’s media-driven narrative that the Republican
race had come down to a choice between front-runners Romney and
Gingrich was at least premature, if not entirely mistaken. Romney
and Paul inundated the Iowa airwaves with ads attacking Gingrich,
whose campaign did not have the financial resources to answer the
attacks in equal measure, and what one pollster called Newt’s
“rapidly imploding” Iowa numbers was one result. The emergence of
Ron Paul as a potential caucus winner was another.
Is the Gingrich collapse irreversible? We don’t know, but
his prospects are not encouraging. Texas Gov. Rick Perry released a
TV ad this week labeling
Gingrich the candidate of “K Street” while describing Romney as
the candidate of “Wall Street.” Now under TV attack from three
different rivals in Iowa, Gingrich is also being slammed daily by
Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann as one half of a corrupt creature
she calls “Newt
Romney.” Gingrich hastened back to Iowa this week to mount a
44-stop bus tour of the state, a belated concession to the retail
aspect of the campaign he has too long neglected. If Newt can’t
recover, can another of the “Not Mitt” candidates make a
last-minute surge to the top of the field in Iowa? Again, we don’t
know. The answer ultimately lies with Iowa voters, who may be
undecided but are not crazy. And candidates are still
criss-crossing the wind-swept Midwestern prairies trying to win
over those Iowans. If all is lost and hopeless, if the pollsters
and pundits are to decide the caucus results, then the actual
campaign on the ground in Iowa doesn’t matter. But if the actual
campaign does matter, then all is not yet lost.
Yesterday I spoke to a Republican presidential candidate
who still believes that the campaign matters. Rick Santorum has never been the
front-runner in any poll this year, but he was still hopeful
Tuesday as he traveled across Iowa between a morning event in Pella
and an afternoon event in Mount Pleasant. And the former
Pennsylvania senator had good reason to be hopeful. One recent
Iowa poll showed him in a three-way tie for fourth place with
Bachmann and Perry with 10 percent — a significant bump from the
single-digit numbers he had previously shown. He’s now got TV ads on the air citing praise from
Palin, Glenn Beck and Mike Huckabee and urging Iowans to “join
the fight.” A pro-Santorum “super PAC” has released another TV ad calling him “a true
conservative we can trust.” When I reached Santorum by phone
yesterday, he had just been endorsed by two key pro-family leaders
in Iowa. “It sends a strong signal to social conservatives… who are
coalescing behind our campaign,” he said of the
support from Bob Vander Plaats and Chuck Hurley which, along
with other recent endorsements, indicates “we’re picking up
momentum” in the final push toward Caucus Night.
All the insanity inspired by the intense struggle in Iowa
will be over in two weeks, and nothing would be crazier than to
predict that Santorum — who has lingered near the back of the
Republican pack all year — will emerge with an upset victory Jan.
3. A lot of crazy things have been happening lately in Iowa,
however. A hard-charging social conservative winning the Hawkeye
State wouldn’t be the craziest thing to happen in this campaign
leading up to a year that some see as prophetically significant.
But the ancient Mayans could not be reached for comment.
