Vin Weber on the State of the GOP Race

Friday morning at the Humphrey Institute, former congressman, now lobbyist and big-time Republican insider Vin Weber gave an outstanding overview of the state of conservatism, focusing largely on the race for the Republican nomination for president.

Weber is the best I know at promoting his (Republican) side and his (conservative) cause without denying the obvious or making those who disagree with him feel that he is insulting their intelligence.

An early and ardent supporter of the Iraq War, Weber’s presentation of even that awkward topic combined qualities of candor with at least the best defense of what President Bush has done, and the possibility that it won’t sink the Republican ticket this year, as you can imagine. I’ll give chapter and verse on that below. But first, his overview of the Republican presidential field at this moment in the contest:Weber started by, as he said, “acknowledging the obvious,” that according to the current polling, the Republicans have given back over the last three years all of the gains they had made since 1978 — gains that had enabled them to win five of the last seven presidential elections. Having pulled to parity in party identification, the GOP now trails the Democrats by 12 points. The Dem advantage is bigger among younger voters.

The Republicans are no longer the party that most Americans trust on issues of national security or prosperity/economic security.

Front loading of caucus and primary schedules has backfired

If the states that moved up their primaries and caucuses thought they were going to increase their impact and force the presidential candidates to spend time and money there, they have brought about almost the opposite effect.

With 20 states (including New York and California) holding primaries or caucuses on Feb. 5 (and the Dems have 22 day), the nominations have an excellent chance of being decided that night.

But since none of the candidates has the resources to compete in that many widely scattered state races, the candidates are focusing even more of their time and money on Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, believing a strong showing in those traditional early contests is the best way to do well on the superest of Super Tuesdays.

Mitt Romney (Weber is a high-ranking Romney advisor) has built his early strategy around the traditional one-two punch in Iowa and New Hampshire. His problem is that his big lead in Iowa has disappeared. In a hallway conversation with me, Weber acknowledged that Romney hasn’t come across well in the recent debates, and appears to be on the defensive.

Rudy Giuliani‘s best states (like New York) are in the Super Tuesday lineup, and Giuliani had originally hoped to avoid seriously competing in the early states, but he has now realized that if you start 0-for-4, you head into Super Tuesday looking like a loser. So he’s now changed his strategy and trying to gin up a decent showing in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Mike Huckabee, the dark horse of the year so far, has a strategy based on pulling a big come-from-behind win in Iowa. Weber acknowledged that “there’s every possibility he could win in Iowa,” which would be a big blow to Weber’s guy Romney. But Huckabee has little organization or natural appeal in New Hampshire and little money in which to run in the big Super Tuesday states. So Weber doesn’t see an easy way for Huckabee to build on his Iowa surge,

John McCain (whom Weber backed in 2000) started out thinking he could run a national campaign as the natural frontrunner, but has found out otherwise and is now betting everything on New Hampshire. He will drop out soon after New Hampshire if he doesn’t win there.

Fred Thompson is betting the farm on South Carolina. But Weber says Thompson isn’t strong “anywhere north of Nashville,” and Weber has never understood what made Thompson think he had a chance for the nomination.

The problems of neo-Reaganism in 2008

Thompson is supposedly the most Reagan-like of the candidates, and Republicans still believe in the Reagan magic. But Weber said that Reaganism “is not something you can just pick up the way it was invented in 1980 and say the same lines all over again.” Weber took apart the three strands of American conservatism — economic, social and national security — that Reagan wove together into a winning coalition, and explained the current Republican challenges with each of them.

On Reagan-style economic conservatism, Weber said the problem was that 40 percent of U.S. households don’t pay any income taxes. It’s hard to construct a tax-cutting message that has widespread popular appeal, Weber said. He mentioned that Huckabee is promoting the so-called “Fair Tax,” which does away with income taxes entirely. But  Weber seems to think that idea is pretty crazy and most people figure this out when they learn that the income tax would be replaced with a 23-30 percent sales tax on everything they buy.

On social conservatism, Weber said he was nervous about Republicans who, as they contemplate the possibility of nominating a pro-choice candidate like Giuliani, say that the social conservatives will have to stick with the Repubs because they have nowhere else to go. Weber said evangelical Christians used to be Democrats.  They became Republicans almost entirely because of the abortion issue. If they decide the party has broken faith with them on that issue, they are not necessarily economic or national security conservatives. Right now they are excited about Huckabee, a Baptist preacher who speaks their language and has been steadfast on the social issues.

“My view is that Mike Huckabee can’t win the Republican nomination,” Weber said, “but Republicans can’t win without those voters.” If Huckabee loses in a way that makes social conservatives feel ignored, disrespected or abandoned, it could be a major blow to the Republican ticket, he said.

Iraq

But the “motherlode” of Republican support over recent years has been the widely held view that Republicans could be trusted to protect the country while the 1972 McGovern candidacy turned the Dems into a party that the public perceived as dangerously weak on military issues, Weber said.

The Iraq War has cost the Republicans that reputation, Weber said. That’s the kind of acknowledgment of painful (but indisputable) truths I referred to at the top that wins Weber points with me for credibility. And he went further during a Q and A with political scientist Larry Jacobs after the talk.

The level of violence in Iraq is down, and is starting to show up in polls, with more Americans saying the war is going well. But Weber said: “I don’t think Republicans should take much solace from the improved polling.”

The poll numbers haven’t improved on the question: Was the war a mistake? Weber’s interpretation: “The country has decided that it wasn’t worth it. They’re saying: ‘Yes, it’s better to win than to lose. But it would have been better not to have done it at all.’”

The only hopeful sign for his party on that score, Weber said, is that the salience of the war as a voting issue seems to be declining. He didn’t say this, but implied that if the 2008 election is basically a referendum on the Iraq War, the Repubs will lose.

But, having presented the Iraq War as a political problem for his party, Weber said two other things that amounted to a half-defense of the war, and a half-prediction that it doesn’t have to sink the Repubs in 2008.

The half-defense was this:

When Jacobs asked him directly whether the war had been a mistake, Weber said that it turned out to be a mistake to topple Saddam Hussein when the Bush administration did it.

If Bush had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction (Weber clearly implied that Bush believed the weapons were there, and wasn’t challenged on that point), it would have been wiser to wait to topple Saddam until U.S. troops were no longer tied down in Afghanistan.

BUT, he noted that Bill Clinton had endorsed regime change in Iraq as a U.S. goal, and that Madeleine Albright had compared Saddam with Hitler. Weber asserted that the sanctions regime that had restrained Saddam over the previous decade was unraveling. Weber said that even the Dulfer Report, the final definitive post-invasion statement of the U.S. government on the absence of WMD in Iraq, had concluded that the acquisition of nuclear weapons remained a priority for Saddam.

The half-prediction was this: The Iraq issue doesn’t have to be a big factor in the election if voters can see through the hype and realize that the concrete differences between mainstream Democratic and Republican position on Iraq are not that big.

The Bush administration is planning to start reducing U.S. troops strength in the spring of 2008 (if only, Weber acknowledged, because the current troops levels can’t be sustained). Top Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are talking about a schedule of 16 months or more to withdraw combat troops. Neither Clinton, Obama nor John Edwards would guarantee to have all U.S. troops out of Iraq during the next presidential term. The Democratic position “is not hugely different from what Bush is saying,” Weber said.

Is this clever spin, wishful thinking or a partial truth? My gut feeling is that it has elements of all three.