Bachmann surges past Romney in Iowa

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The RCP Average still has Romney on top in Iowa, if only barely, but a new poll by The Iowa Republican has Bachmann in the lead for the first time, 25 to 21 over Romney, with Pawlenty and Cain well back at 9.

To some of us -- Richard Barry and me, for example -- this isn't at all surprising. We have long thought that Bachmann has impressive political skills (whatever her right-wing craziness) and could do well in this race, particularly in the absence of another viable candidate on the right. And she's doing well generally in a one-on-one race against Romney, a race without, say, a Perry or a Palin to drain some of her conservative support.

Romney is still the frontrunner and perhaps the favourite. He has a solid ground campaign across the country, will win New Hampshire, has the support of much of the establishment (and monied interests that back the GOP), and is a solid if uninspiring candidate, particularly with the economy at the center of the debate.

But Bachmann could easily win Iowa, surprise with a strong showing in New Hampshire, and then, should she be more or less alone on the right, cruise into South Carolina with the wind at her back.

The concerns for Romney are many, but one of them may be that he has a fairly low ceiling. He has about one-quarter support of Republicans nationally right now, but what if his ceiling isn't all that much higher than that? What if the opposition to Romney is so strong, mainly from the grassroots (Tea Party, "social conservatives," etc.), that he just can't get over the hump in a one-on-one race against a more bona fide conservative like Bachmann? And it's possible that it will eventually turn into just that, if Pawlenty fails to emerge as a compromise candidate and if the conservative vote isn't divided (that is, if Perry and Palin don't run and if the conservatives in the race now, namely Gingrich and Santorum, continue to lag way behind with little support). (I'm counting Huntsman out altogether, though in my opinion he's by far the strongest of the bunch.)

Indeed, as Jon Chait noted yesterday, Bachmann is a bit like Obama in 2007:

Obama trailed badly in the national polls throughout 2007. But he had high favorability and seemed to do well among those voters most attuned to the campaign, which suggested that as elections neared and voters paid more attention, he had the potential to win over voters who were not paying attention months and months before any vote.

And, indeed, Bachmann's "lead expands when the sample is confined to voters paying a lot of attention." Which is to say, Republicans like her more the more they get to know her, with her support coming to a great extent from those who are most engaged in the process -- the people, that is, who decide primaries, the hardcore grassroots.

Will this continue? Maybe not. Maybe Bachmann has her own ceiling. Maybe another big-name conservative will get in the race. Maybe Romney would beat her in a one-on-one race. But what's evident, it seems to me, is that Bachmann is for real.

The tragicomedy of Sarah Palin

By Nicholas Wilbur

Sarah Palin turns heads, particularly those decorated with swinging tea bags on tri-corner hats bobbling atop the corpulent bodies of elderly white folks whose granny arms flap in such furious spasms of patriotic applause every time the Mama Grizzly barfs up another profound prophesy of Obama-doom that they'd fly off into the dawn's early light if it weren't for that extra fifty pounds of adipose tissue they gained after making a public stand against government intrusion by scarfing a pallet full of Wal-Mart's Great Value fudge mint cookies during the season finale of Sarah Palin's Alaska.

Palin, on Fox News discussing the potential

 of a 2012 presidential run.

And then there's the Left – the professional, elitist snobs – who so desperately want to ignore the Palin pop-celebrity buzz but can't, and so must justify their addiction by taking the intellectual high road and reading the gossip via a magazine of national repute like The Atlantic.

The very presence in a left-leaning political magazine of a has-been limelight junkie like Palin proves not only the staying power of the Bible-thumping caribou Barbie in this bizarre new political carnival of America but also the selling power of the Palin brand in the high(ish)brow world of publishing. (The Atlantic advertised Joshua Green's feature, "The Tragedy of Sarah Palin," with a gold teaser on the all-black June cover.)

The deep-but-pathetic roster of potential Republican presidential nominees, and the recent announcements by Mike Huckabee, Donald Trump, and Haley Barbour not to seek the nomination, gives the media due cause to turn the cameras back on the 2008 vice presidential nominee. For political junkies afflicted with a shameful lust for sleazy right-wing conspiracies but reluctant to scroll through through Palin's Facebook and Twitter posts for dirt, the media's half-hearted crawl back into North Star territory provides us with the sick-but-somehow-comforting reminders of how this country might have looked had soccer moms and NASCAR devotees outflanked sanity in the '08 election.

Green knows the dismal odds of Palin winning the Republican nomination, which is why he was forced to legitimize the tabloid-esque Palin piece by disembarking from reality and entering a hypothetical universe that focused not on what Palin has become since "going rogue" on the 2008 campaign trail, but what she "might have been" and "what she could have achieved" had she "kept her impulses in check" rather than "obsess[ing] over her image," blaming the media for her own unpreparedness, and eventually abandoning the only real chance she had of one day capturing the presidency: her governorship.

Green's abridged jaunt down memory lane seeks to remind America of this half-term governor's extensive executive experience fighting Big Oil and breaking up the "monopoly of power" by working with Democrats to push through a tax hike. Rubbing shoulders with socialists and increasing taxes in order to boost state revenues may not seem like the type of small government conservatism that the national Republican Party would want to advocate in a presidential race against a so-called liberal, but then that perhaps explains the McCain campaign's decision to downplay Palin's record and fill Sarahcuda's speeches with the same vitriolic "full-throttle assault" against their opponent that landed George W. Bush the White House in 2000 and 2004.

Alas, it could have ended up differently. The alleged maverick of the The Last Frontier may not have lost her credibility, humiliated herself, her family and her country; she may not have returned to Alaska to face a full docket of ethics charges and abuse of power investigations; she may not have seen dollar signs in the wrinkled faces of her fanatical fringe following; and she may not have abandoned public service in order to write two books, pimp her daughter out to Dancing With the Stars, join up with Fox News, and star in her own TV show.

But the fact remains, regardless of a star-gazing magazine writer's speculations, that Palin made a choice. If she wanted to govern, she'd have stayed on as governor. Instead, she left office and spent two-plus years mulling a presidential run on live TV, raking in millions of dollars winking into cameras, "refudiating" the "lamestream media"'s "gotcha journalism" tactics and doing whatever was necessary to continue fueling the ignorant passions of right-wing radicalism with talk-radio rhetoric about our socialist president's "downright evil" policies.

As a result, she's rich, famous and just as unqualified and unpopular as she was in 2008.

There is and has always been only one reason Palin has teased the nation by repeatedly reminding the media of the possibility that she might enter the presidential race, and it has nothing to do with her ideas about America, her eligibility, or her odds.

In his crystal ball search of an alternate reality, Green attempts to validate his investigation into a hypothetically less pock-marked Palin legacy by asking, "What if history had written a different ending?"

It's a rhetorical question, of course. We can't travel back in time and change the course of history. But even if we could – even if McCain hadn't been so desperate that he chose to "shock the world with his vice-presidential pick" in order to have a chance at taking first in the 2008 presidential race; even had Palin never made the humiliating descent into the lower 48 – I doubt American politics would look any different today.

The decomposition of Palin's political career wasn't the sole catalyst for the Tea Party's conception, which is to say that in her absence we wouldn't be suffering a shortage of partisan windbags who earn a living beating the ideological drum of revolution. Rest assured, when Palin finally announces that she won't run – and confirms for us all that she's nothing more than a publicity whore who spent two and a half years dipping her toe into the pond of a potential presidential run only for the cash – someone else will be there to pick up the slack in the provocative political soap opera of populist paranoia. 

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)

Remember 2008?

By Carl 

After eight years of Bush, you may recall, there were Democrats chomping at the bit to get a Democrat in the White House. There were three main candidates -- John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama -- and all three had fervent, passionate partisans. We battled and threw muck and eventually the field winnowed down to one, and the passion the rest of us had went to supporting Barack Obama.

Anybody but Bush('s successor). We had seen the terrible toll he had taken on the nation, and realized that we had to step in and clean up after the children.

Obama, like Bill Clinton before him only writ larger, has tried his best and perhaps has done the best job that anyone could have done given the circumstances. History will have to determine that (and hopefully history will have a way to measure a Hillary presidency and an Edwards presidency, too).

Even the fiercest progressive have to acknowledge the man was dealt a shitty hand. We can argue about how well he played the hand, and even the degree of crapitude he had versus what assets he held as his hole card, but he certainly didn't walk into the same comparatively rosy scenario that Bush did in 2001 or Clinton did in 1993.

Obama will inspire some of the passion he did in 2008, and no doubt many of the progressives who find deep flaws in his administration (like me: I'm still pissed about Gitmo and the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed) will rally around him. Indeed, he's already started to mend those fences. 

The Republicans, however... 

Only those possible contenders who regularly appear on television — or have made bids before — are well known enough to elicit significant views from their fellow Republicans. And of that group, only one, former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, is viewed favorably by more than half of the Republican electorate.

The poll would seem to reflect the late start to the Republican primary season, with many of the major likely candidates seeking to hoard their money and avoid making any missteps that they might have to live with later, when voters go to polls or caucus rooms.

While it may not be unusual for voters' attention to be focused elsewhere at this stage of a campaign, the survey at the very least provides a reality check for a race that has received frenetic coverage at times on cable news and the Internet even though nearly 60 percent of Republicans cannot point to a single candidate about whom they are enthusiastic, according to the Times/CBS poll. 

In case anyone still has doubts about Obama's chances in 2012.

Indeed, John McCain may have picked precisely the wrong election to run in. He could easily have kept his "heir apparent" crown into this election cycle, and probably picked up the nomination with far less difficulty from the likes of Huckabee and Romney (who either would have been the defeated candidate in 2008 or exhausted their personal resources trying), and Sarah Palin (and, by extension, Michele Bachmann) would have been kept off the radar completely. In my opinion, McCain would have been the only viable contender to unseat Obama, à la Reagan in 1980.

This is frankly an astounding poll, when you think about it: Anger at Obama should be at an all-time high, what with the agenda he managed to pass (or shove down the throats of Teabaggers), and as we saw in 2008, that usually means at least one candidate gets the coalescence of that backlash.

Here, we see....nothing.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)