Strategi: Jeb Bush planerar för presidentval!

POLITIK |  Jeb Bush har meddelat att han nu vill bli sitt partis presidentkandidat. Eller som det heter: ”actively explore the possibility”.

Vilket är politikerspråk för att känna av om han har tillräckligt stöd, om han kan attrahera tillräckligt med pengar och om han ens själv känner för det maratonlopp som en presidentvalskampanj innebär.

Bush räknades som konservativ under sin tid som guvernör i Florida. Idag ses han av många inom Tea Party-rörelsen som farligt liberal.

The Economist skriver:

More recently he has been a spokesman for his party’s pragmatic, pro-business wing. He is known for two positions, above all, that enrage conservative hardliners: his support for the nationwide education standards known as Common Core (seen on the right as a liberal plot), and his belief that Republicans must embrace comprehensive immigration reform with enthusiasm and compassion, or face long-term irrelevance.

[…]

Mr Bush speaks sense when he talks of the need for Republicans to compromise occasionally, if they want to govern. A few weeks before Christmas he told a summit of chief executive officers that a Republican presidential candidate in 2016 might have to adopt a “lose the primary to win the general” strategy. That is code for running from start to finish on policies that can win some centrist and independent votes, rather than following the pivot strategy attempted by such figures as Mitt Romney. To win the 2012 presidential nomination Mr Romney declared himself “severely conservative” and called for laws so tough that immigrants would despair and deport themselves. Too late, he tried to tack back to his real interest: business-friendly policies to fix the economy.

Mr Bush’s counsel is brave: many Republican members of Congress, governors and other officials only dare cheer him on silently. But for all that, an unmistakable rebuke lurked in his statement. Put another way, Mr Bush was signalling that the dedicated bands of grassroots activists who decide many party primaries are a menace. Even if he is right, that is quite a box to crack open. Bluntly, many of the business bosses, big donors and establishment Republicans who have spent years longing for Mr Bush to run do not just disagree with the conservative grassroots, they dislike them and resent their influence. The antipathy is mutual: perhaps no other candidate for 2016 so angers Tea Party types.

Att inte stryka Tea Party-rörelsen medhårs är en vansklig strategi om man i dessa dagar siktar på att bli republikanernas presidentkandidat .

Om inte annat för att Bush garanterat kommer att möta motkandidater som har så små chanser att bli nominerade att de inte har något att förlora på att inta ståndpunkter som t.o.m. kan få en Tea Party-anhängarna att tveka.

Det finns alltid gott om kandidater som bara är ute efter att göra ideologiska markeringar eller bara vill höja sin egen profil hos väljarna utan någon tanke på dynamiken i själva presidentvalet.

Risken är att andra kandidater då ser sig tvingade att hänga på för att inte tappa väljare bland gräsrötterna. Tea Party-rörelsen är idag till stora delar gräsrötterna inom det republikanska partiet.

Även om Bush enligt alla objektiva kriterier är konservativ riskerar han i alla fall uppfattas som alltför liberal inom partiet. Ett parti där t.o.m. Ronald Reagan skulle ha haft svårt att bli nominerad.

Men i ett presidentval räcker det inte bara med att tilltala det egna partiets väljare, man måste också kunna vinna över osäkra väljare och väljare från motståndarsidan.

Bild: Tony Gutierrez, AP.

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Politik: John McCain och ”the wacko birds”!

USA | Ännu har John McCain inte lagt av. Trots sin svidande förlust mot Barack Obama i presidentvalet har senatorn från Arizona fullt upp.

McCain, 77 år och senatens nionde äldste medlem, ägnar numera mesta av sin arbetstid åt att kritisera presidenten för hans hantering av utrikespolitiken samt att försöka hindra att det egna partiet helt tas över av Tea Party-rörelsen.

Dessutom har McCain meddelat att han funderar på att ställa upp till återval 2016. (”I am very much considering it.”)

McCain är onekligen en av USA:s intressantaste politiker.

Han är dessutom en av få politiker som fortfarande vågar vara spontan och säga vad han tänker. (“They are lovely, gentle people [the Fijians] even though they used to eat each other.”)

Mark Leibovich, ”national correspondent” för The New York Times Magazine, har följt senatorn en tid för tidskriftens räkning:

John McCain is a cliché.

It is not his fault, or not entirely. Many of us become walking self-caricatures at a certain point, and politicians can be particularly vulnerable, especially those who have maneuvered their very public lives as conspicuously as McCain. They tell and retell the same stories; things get musty. They engage in a lot of self-mythologizing, and no one in Washington has been the subject and the perpetrator of more mythmaking than McCain: the maverick, the former maverick, the curmudgeon, the bridge builder, the war hero bent on transcending the call of self-interest to serve a cause greater than himself, the sore loser, old bull, last lion, loose cannon, happy warrior, elder statesman, lion in winter . . . you lose track of which McCain cliché is operational at a given moment. He does, too. “I think I was the brave maverick when I was taking on Bush,” McCain told me, “and then I was the bitter old man when I was criticizing Obamacare.”

Critics will take their shots, he says, it comes with being “in the arena.” That cliché isn’t McCain’s exclusively — it’s the self-consoling Teddy Roosevelt line that politicians are always trotting out. “It’s not the critic who counts” but “the man who really was in the arena.”

McCain has another favorite Teddy Roosevelt phrase, “the crowded hour,” which I have heard him invoke several times over the years. It comes from a poem by the English writer Thomas Mordaunt, and T. R. used it to famously describe his charge on San Juan Hill. In McCain’s philosophy, “the crowded hour” refers to a moment of character testing. “The ‘crowded hour’ is as appropriate for me right now as any in a long time,” McCain told me as we walked through the Capitol. In some respects, this is just a function of public figures’ tendency to overdramatize the current moment and their role in it. But five years after losing to Barack Obama, after enduring the recriminations between his splintered campaign staff and rogue running mate, Sarah Palin, and after returning to the Senate and falling into a prolonged funk, McCain finds himself in the midst of another crowded hour, maybe his last as an elected leader.

Along with his Senate Tonto, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, McCain has been the most ardent critic of the White House’s foreign policy in pretty much every hot spot in the world.

[…]

McCain also finds himself in the thick of the latest “fight for the soul of the G.O.P.” against the Tea Party right, a cohort that arguably would not have the influence it has if McCain had not chosen Palin as his running mate. They are represented in the Senate by McCain’s junior colleagues Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky — or “wacko birds” as McCain has referred to their far-right ilk.

[…]

McCain is sick of talking about Cruz. “We have a cordial relationship,” he insists, which in the Google translation of political code is something between abject disgust and minimal tolerance. Cruz is an upstart, whose goal seems to be to position himself to run for president in 2016. He appears indifferent to the traditional markers of Senate experience and prestige — passing bills, leading committees, dutifully winning the respect of colleagues. “You know, it’s a funny thing about Cruz,” McCain says, and then stops himself. “No, actually, it’s not funny. It aggravates me more than anything else” — the way Cruz called his fellow Republicans a bunch of wimps and talks about “how we’ve been around too long.” Cruz is the Senate’s modern-day maverick, it would seem, while McCain has become one of the institution’s fiercest traditionalists.

[…]

To pass the time on the drive back, I engage McCain in a game of hypothetical-question roulette: If he were a young man living in Arizona today, not a politician, would he register to vote as an Independent? “I would think about it,” he says, but then catches himself and reasserts his faith in “the party of Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.” Would he consider supporting an Independent presidential candidate if Ted Cruz were the Republican nominee? “No, because I have to respect the process.” Would he support his friend Hillary Clinton in a head to head against Cruz? “I will support the Republican ticket,” he says, then adds: “With all due respect, that is a foolish question, my friend.”

Läs mer: “Behind the Cover Story: Mark Leibovich on Checking In With John McCain” av Rachel Nolan på bloggen The 6th Floor.

Tidskriftsomslag. The New York Times Magazine den 22 december 2013.

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Strategi: Kan Chris Christie bli USA:s president?

USA | Allt fler har börjat tala om guvernör Chris Christie som republikanernas självklara presidentkandidat. Om man vill ha en chans att vinna vill säga.

Han har i alla fall en klar fördel framför övriga namn som det talas om (t.ex. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio) och det är att han inte är rädd att ta strid med Tea Party-anhängarnas favoriter.

Detta är om inte annat en nödvändighet om en republikansk kandidat skall ha en chans att locka väljare bortom de egna gräsrötterna.

Här nedan är utdrag från två reportage där man följt guvernören och tagit pulsen på hans möjligheter att bli republikanernas frontfigur.

Michael Scherer, Time, skriver:

The Christie for America 2016 calculation goes like this: All Republican nomination contests usually go the same way. Primary voters claim to be big-C Conservatives, but they vote with a small c. After months of carping and griping, after rubber-chicken dinners, purity tests and endless debates, the party always settles on the most viable center-right option who has earned his place in line—Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney. As Christie might say it, the party decides it wants to win.

Christie’s strategy is clear enough, to execute a political coup de main: to try to clear the field (or his side of the field) by coming on very strong at the outset to take up the Establishment real estate. With four or five others (Cruz, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum and others) battling to become the purist on the right, Christie’s initial goal is simply to be the Electable One. Yes, he may command only 15% of the total GOP electorate at the outset, but in a fractured field, that’s fine with him. If he is lucky, he might win Iowa by a little, New Hampshire by a lot. If he can squeeze by, the big states will love the big guy.

To aid in the effort, Christie will have some significant financial—and logistical—advantages. Sitting governors are much better fundraisers than any other kind of politician. And in a few weeks, Christie is going to supercharge that claim when he takes over command of the Republican Governors Association, which is looking to protect 22 governors who are up for re-election in 2014, including, conveniently enough, the leaders of South Carolina, Florida and Iowa. He will soon be traveling the country, collecting cards and chits and IOUs, all at someone else’s expense. “In the big cities where the GOP money will be raised,” says Wayne Berman, a leading Republican fundraiser and consultant, “Christie is already the default choice.”

From that perch, Christie can raise perhaps $50 million next year and borrow the fundraising networks of every other GOP governor. They will owe him. And together, those networks are worth $250 million. That is Hillary scale, something none of his current challengers can access as easily. And then there is the outside money. In 2012 several billionaires were involved in the draft-Christie movement.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells i tidskriften New York:

We have never had a president as outwardly angry as Christie, but then this country has rarely been as angry as it is now. In the tea-party era, conservative anger has often been channeled by figures such as Michele Bachmann and Ted Cruz into a hysteria over very abstract and inflated threats: health-care death panels, the national debt, the specter of a country overrun by illegal immigrants. Christie’s use of anger is very different: It is much more targeted, and therefore potentially much more useful.

The contrast was on display last week in the fight he picked with Rand Paul. The senator from Kentucky, having watched Christie denounce libertarianism, called him the “King of Bacon,” presumably referring both to his pleas for immediate federal help after Hurricane Sandy and to his weight. Christie had pointed out that New Jersey is a “donor state,” taking only 61 cents for every dollar it sends to Washington, while Kentucky takes back $1.51. (No acknowledgment from Christie that this is owed not to New Jersey’s superior character but to its good fortune of existing next to the great economic buoy of Wall Street, while Kentucky is near no economic buoy at all.) “So if Senator Paul wants to start looking at where he is going to cut spending to afford defense,” Christie had said, “maybe he should start looking at cutting the pork-barrel spending he brings home to ­Kentucky.” For Christie, the villain is always specific: not government, not socialism, not impersonal historical forces, but one moron in particular—the teachers union, or Steve Sweeney, or in this case Rand Paul, the libertarian ophthalmologist, high-mindedly denouncing government while his state is on its dole. “He’s not the first politician to try to use me to get attention,” Christie said later, dismissing Paul’s slight. “And I’m sure he won’t be the last.”

What Christie is doing when he starts arguments with other Republicans—and it is telling that what looks very much like a presidential run has begun with a sequence of fights—is offering his party the chance to preserve its anger, while trading in its revolutionaries for a furious institutionalist.

Läs mer: Blogginlägget ”Vem kan utmana demokraterna?”

Tidskriftsomslag: Time (amerikanska utgåvan), 18 november 2013 och New York, 12 augusti 2012.

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Strategi: Hur man vinner i politik och förlorar vänner!

WASHINGTON | Tea Party-rörelsens politiska strategi i Washington har lyckats långt över förväntan.  Men det har inte gjort dem populärare. Snarare tvärt om.

Idag är det deras representanter i det republikanska partiet som sätter agendan i både kongressen och inom det republikanska partiet.

Peter Coy, ekonomisk redaktör i Bloomberg Businessweek, skriver om hur deras framgångar har fått partiets opinionssiffror att störtdyka.

It’s that sense of being on the brink of disaster that feeds Tea Partiers’ determination to fight to the end. For them, the debt-ceiling deal reached by the Senate on Oct. 16 is merely a cease-fire.

But the Tea Party’s belief that things are slipping away is misplaced. Obamacare aside, events have actually gone the movement’s way ever since Republicans wrested control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections. Discretionary spending has been falling. Federal-employee head count is down. And since 2010, deficit reduction has been more rapid than in any three-year period since the demobilization following World War II.

Discretionary spending (i.e., spending excluding transfer payments and interest) will fall even more in the decades ahead if the laws that the Tea Party helped get on the books stay there

[…]

That victory, however, has come at a high price. The Tea Party pushed for heavy spending cuts when the economy was weak, needlessly depressing output and keeping the unemployment rate high. The International Monetary Fund, which supports long-run deficit reduction, declared in June that the U.S. program was “excessively rapid and ill-designed.”

[…]

In political terms, the Tea Party’s scorched earth strategy has produced some impressive legislative wins but damaged the movement’s popularity. Now its blunt tactics threaten to make deficit reduction seem like a fringe issue, one of concern only to extremists.

[…]

The federal government really does need to tighten its belt eventually, but not with the scale and immediacy the Tea Party insists on. Tea Partiers are in no mood for nuance. They fear that the Republic is in danger from wily liberals who are skilled in the art of brinkmanship. Democrats are “very good at this. We’re obviously very bad at it,” Michael Needham, chief executive officer of Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, told the Wall Street Journal this month.

In fact, the Tea Party is all too good at brinkmanship. The true believers are winning their battles in Washington. It’s the rest of the country that continues to lose.

Tidskriftsomslag: Bloomberg Businessweek den 21-27 oktober 2013.

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Politik: Vem kan utmana demokraterna?

VAL 2016 | Jakten på nästa republikanska presidentkandidat är redan i full gång. Förutom Paul Ryan finns idag bara två riktigt starka förhandsfavoriter.

Chris Christie, som är guvernör i New Jersey, porträtterades i Time av Michael Crowley:

For much of his governorship, Christie’s unfiltered persona has been a mixed bag. His willingness to snap back at questioners in public forums has at times seemed fearless but has also carried a nasty whiff of New Jersey Turnpike road rage. Christie recently expressed regret for calling one ­aggressive ­questioner—who turned out to be a former Navy SEAL—an “idiot.” Still, it was part of his charm that Christie could be candid about his shortcomings, ­talking freely about his weight. (“Man up and say I’m fat” was his response to a 2009 campaign ad by his rival that featured a veiled reference to his mass.) With buzz that he might run for President in the air, Christie even told an interviewer in 2010 that he was “not ready” to be President. While endearing, talk like that has led some Republicans to wonder whether he is disciplined enough to complete a White House run.

But what many Americans have seen in Christie is what they don’t see in Obama: someone who is decisive and unfiltered and doesn’t think the world is an impossibly complex place. He may be wrong, he may be right, but he’s never in doubt. It was Sandy that evoked the best part of Christie’s raw persona. If he could be an overbearing bully in political arguments, he was an open hydrant of empathy in the wake of disaster. In the days after the storm, Christie toured nonstop among downed power lines and wrecked boardwalks, doling out countless bear hugs to shattered survivors. It helped a lot that his connection to the devastated areas was authentic. “The pier with the rides where I took my kids this August before the Republican Convention, where I got into that famous yelling match with the guy who was buying an ice cream cone?” Christie reminded reporters. “Those rides are in the Atlantic Ocean.”

Within days, Obama visited the state. Although Christie had delivered the keynote address at the Republican National Convention and campaigned for Romney, Christie and Obama seemed to bond, flying over storm-ravaged areas in Marine One and exchanging robust compliments. Romney campaign aides fumed that Christie was allowing Obama to play the part of nonpartisan crisis manager just days before the election, and Rupert Murdoch warned on Twitter that Christie would have to “take blame for the next four dire years” if Obama was re-elected. But at home, Christie was celebrated for putting the state’s need for swift aid from Washington ahead of campaign politics.

Ett annat stort namn bland många republikaner idag är senator Marco Rubio från Florida. Han har fördelen att tillhöra en familj med immigrantbakgrund.

Dessutom bor han i ett område med immigranter och är gift med en kvinna med en liknande bakrund.

Bättre kan det inte vara för ett parti som är av desperat behov av att bygga upp förtroendet bland USA:s minoriteter. Inte minst den snabbt växande spansktalande minoriteten.

Michael Grunwald, skriver i Time:

But while Rubio is a child of immigrants, he’s also a child of the conservative movement, an ambitious ideologue and former political operative who speaks partisan Republican with the fluency of a native. (Romney, by contrast, spoke it as a second language.) Like Paul Ryan, a potential 2016 rival, he’s part of a new generation of lean and hungry conservatives who grew up in the antigovernment Reagan era and entered politics after the scorched-earth Gingrich revolution. Bipartisan compromise is not usually his thing.

So he’s navigating a borderland of his own. He has endorsed a path to citizenship that he once derided as “code for amnesty,” risking a backlash from many loyal supporters who see los pobrecitos as freeloaders. But he has also pushed to make that path more arduous, demanding much tougher enforcement first, insisting he won’t get into a who-can-be-nicest bidding war with Obama and pledging to walk away from reform if the final legislation doesn’t reflect conservative principles. In an hour-long Feb. 1 interview with TIME, he emphasized that the undocumented have no right to stay in the U.S., vowed to oppose any bill that rewards them for breaking the law and defended the motives of hard-line “shamnesty” critics who say illegal immigrants are taking taxpayers for a ride. “Someone’s violated the law, and they’re receiving taxpayer benefits? That’s a legitimate reason to be upset,” Rubio says.

It’s a thin, hard line to walk: between the Republican establishment and the base, between compassion and the rule of law, between family and politics. And Rubio is walking it on an issue no politician has cracked in nearly two decades while testing the support of the grassroots Tea Party conservatives he will need if he seeks the White House in 2016. So far, though, he seems to be succeeding. After helping to craft bipartisan reforms in the Senate, he has served as their chief spokesman on right-wing radio and Fox News, getting remarkably sympathetic hearings from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other talkers whose antiamnesty crusades helped kill similar efforts in the George W. Bush era. Almost all of them have praised his courage—Limbaugh called his work “admirable,” like a Pope granting absolution—and the backlash has yet to materialize. “I don’t know anyone else who could have broken through the conservative sound barrier on immigration,” says American Conservative Union chairman Al Cardenas, a Miami lawyer who gave Rubio his first job as an attorney. “Marco can do left brain, so you get the logic, and he can do right brain, so you feel it in your heart and soul.”

Bild: Ovan ser vi tidskriftsomslag från den 21 januari respektive 18 januari 2013.

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Politik: Efter Mitt Romney kommer Paul Ryan!

ANALYS | Som det ser ut just nu vinner Barack Obama valet. Frågan är bara hur stor segermarginalen blir.

Oavsett vilket kommer segern att få stora konsekvenser för republikanerna.

Vilken ideologisk väg partiet borde välja har varit en het potatis åtminstone ända sedan John McCain valdes till partiets presidentkandidat.

En (av många) anledningar till Obamas stora seger 2008 var att republikanernas kärnväljare såg McCain som en typisk ”RINO”, d.v.s. ”Republican In Name Only”.

En RINO är en karriärpolitiker som anses har förstört både partiet och landets ekonomi genom att anpassa sig till den liberala politiska agendan i Washington.

Någon större entusiasm kring kampanjen blev det därför inte förrän McCain utsåg Sarah Palin till sin vicepresidentkandidat. Palin var också Tea Party-rörelsens favorit.

Efter McCains valförlust blev det Mitt Romneys tur. Och många såg även hans nominering som ett tecken på att det liberala partietablissemangets återigen hade fått den kandidat man önskade sig.

Detta i kontrast till gräsrötternas önskan om att få se en genuint konservativ kandidat som skulle våga tala sanning om behovet av att rensa upp i både Washington och i det egna partiet.

Precis som med McCain var det först när Romney utsåg sin vicepresidentkandidat som man kunde börja ana ett ökat intresse bland de republikanska väljarna.

Paul Ryan har lyckats inspirera kärnväljarna mer än Romney lyckats med. Även Romney själv har framstått som mer entusiastisk när Ryan har stått vid hans sida.

Att Ryan är de konservativas favorit går inte att ta miste på.

Ett stående inslag när han kampanjar är att framhäva att dagens ekonomiska kris är resultatet av år av misskötsel från både demokrater och republikaner i Washington. Detta genererar alltid applådera från publiken.

En valförlust innebär slutet för Romneys politiska karriär. För Ryan däremot kan det vara början på hans försök att erövra partiets presidentnominering.

Mark Leibovich skriver i The New York Times Magazine:

To many, Paul Ryan was a key figure — if not the key figure — in that future. In fact, his selection as running mate instantly mollified two basic insecurities that had been nagging at the conservative establishment for some time: one was that their standard-bearer, Romney, was a closet moderate who could not win over the hard-core “movement conservatives”; the other was that the fervor that animated the Tea Party movement had acquired a dangerously anti-intellectual strain, embodied by the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain. When I asked Ryan if today’s Republican Party was more “idea based” than it was two years ago, he squinted his intense eyes, nodded hard and said yes. I then asked his opinion of the more, let’s say, knowledge-averse bent of some conservative populism, mentioning Palin and Bachmann while understanding that he obviously couldn’t outwardly offend them or their supporters. “I have my poker face on,” Ryan said before letting slip with a tight grin.

In the midst of Romney’s deliberations, Ryan was the clear running mate of choice among the right-wing commentariat. (“The Republican Party’s intellectual leader,” wrote The Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes and William Kristol, who is partly credited with “discovering” Palin during a cruise to Alaska hosted by the magazine in 2007.) Ryan was considered a long shot among several contenders — he was too young, too conservative and too potentially offensive to older voters because of his plan to overhaul Medicare. Another knock was that he was too cerebral, or “wonkish,” to win broad appeal in a general election. This is one of those backhanded criticisms that in fact flatter. He was “too smart,” “too substantive,” in other words, for the sound-bite shorthand of the campaign trail.

[…]

Ryan is gifted at shrouding a cutthroat ambition in sheepish nonchalance. It is a key political skill — trying constantly to impress without looking as if you’re trying — and one that has eluded many politicians past and present. He is also deft at conveying precision and specificity without being the least bit precise or specific. He has honed his image carefully and promotes it relentlessly on the stump. In late September, Ryan introduced a slide-show demonstration to his appearances. “I’m sort of a PowerPoint guy, so bear with me,” he said the first time he did this, in Orlando, Fla., by way of apologizing for his apparent inability to communicate without his security blanket. Though his PowerPoint presentation is an extremely basic four-slide tutorial that shows how much the national debt has risen since World War II — something that many fifth graders could grasp — his home crowds invariably nod and praise him for his faith in their ability to grasp hard truths.

[…]

If Romney loses, the recriminations play out in two predictable ways among Republicans. Some will say that the party must attract a broader base of support among independent and moderate and nonwhite voters, which would argue for the less severely conservative tone that Romney adopted right after his first debate. They might even point to the presence of Ryan on the ticket as, ultimately, a negative, that his selection did nothing to move national polls in favor of Romney and possibly even scared off potential voters.

But a far more vocal — and probably bigger — group on the right will maintain that the ticket was not conservative enough. They will insist that Republicans need to stop nominating the next establishment guy in line. They will say Mitt Romney ran a lousy general election campaign, except for his finest act, the elevation of Paul Ryan, who was a very good Boy Scout and who waited his turn.

Övrigt: Tidskriftsomslaget är The New York Times Magazine den 21 oktober 2012.

(Inlägget publiceras även på Makthavare.se.)

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Kampanj: Är Mitt Romney ”the last man standing”?

VALPROCESS | Republikanernas sätt att välja presidentkandidat har ofta liknats vid tronföljden i ett kungarike.

Den republikan som uppfattas stå på tur blir också nominerad. Och i år ser det ut att vara Mitt Romneys tur.

David von Drehle gör samma liknelse i senaste numret av Time.

So can anyone stop Romney? As first Bachmann, then Perry, then Herman Cain, then Gingrich, roared past him in the polls, it seemed that everyone could beat Romney, but no one has. Now the answer depends on whether the GOP, after its tempestuous Tea Party uprising, has turned a new page or is back to the same old nominate-the-next-guy story.

[…]

That’s Romney, who finished the 2008 campaign season behind John McCain, who finished in 2000 behind George W. Bush, who never had to finish behind anyone because he was the second nominee named George Bush, who finished in 1980 behind Ronald Reagan, who finished behind Gerald Ford in 1976. The house of Windsor is more unpredictable than the House of Reagan.

[…]

The struggle to be the most conservative in the bunch left everyone wounded – but Romney perhaps least of all.

[…]

Romney slipped through an interminable series of debates with few bruises as the others battled for a chance to fight him. He wasn’t flashy, but he wasn’t foolish either. He set out from the beginning to be the last man standing.

Övrigt: Både tidskriftsomslag och text är hämtat från Time  den 16 januari 2012. (Texten endast i pappersupplagan. Omslaget är den amerikanska upplagans.)

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Kampanj: Därför vann Mitt Romney i Iowa!

IOWA | Mitt Romney vann Iowa med åtta (!) röster. Romney fick 30,015 röster medan Rick Santorum landade på  30,007. På tredje  och fjärde plats kom Ron Paul respektive Newt Gingrich.

Och varför vann då Mitt Romney?  Tydligen för att både de kristet socialkonservativa och Tea Party-anhängarnas röster splittrades upp på flera olika kandidater.

Så här skriver Ronald Brownstein på The National Journal:

In recent years, though, the most important divide in Iowa Republican politics has been the distance between voters who identify as evangelicals and those who don’t. Evangelical Christians, according to the exit poll, comprised almost exactly the same preponderant majority of voters here as in the 2008 contest: 58 percent this time, compared to 60 percent then.

Romney slightly improved his 2008 showing among voters who don’t identify as evangelicals: he captured 33 percent then, and drew 38 percent this time, according to the exit poll. Romney actually managed even less support this time than last among those who do identify as evangelical Christians: he won 19 percent last time, but was polling only 14 percent in this round of the exit polls.

That could presage a lasting headache for Romney with those voters, many of whom question his Mormon religion or his commitment to socially conservative causes, or both: evangelicals cast about 45 percent of the total vote in the 2008 GOP primaries, according to a cumulative analysis of exit polls conducted by ABC News. But Iowa also hints at the potential saving grace for Romney with those voters. In 2008, Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister himself, captured 46 percent of Iowa evangelicals, enough to power a solid victory in the caucuses.

To a far greater extent, those voters divided this year. Santorum captured the most of them, according to this round of exit polls, but only reached 32 percent. After that, Iowa evangelicals split between Paul (19 percent), Gingrich and Romney at (14 percent) and Perry at 13 percent. (Michele Bachmann, who ran a campaign aimed heavily at those voters, won just 6 percent of them.)

[…]

It was a similar story among the most ardent tea party activists, who have consistently expressed skepticism about Romney in national and state polls. Among the nearly one-third of caucus-goers who identified as strong tea party supporters, Romney attracted just 14 percent. But those voters again divided, with Santorum leading among them with a modest 30 percent. Voters who described themselves as somewhat supportive of the tea party fractured into a three-way split, with Santorum slightly leading Romney and Paul. Meanwhile, Paul and Romney held a solid lead over Santorum among the roughly one-fourth of caucus-goers who said they were neutral on the tea party.

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Strategi: Hur en elefant räddade Newt Gingrich!

KAMPANJ | När det såg som mörkast ut för Gingrichs kampanj räddades han av Elefanten Ellis – huvudpersonen i fruns barnbok Sweet Land of Liberty.

Denna lustiga detalj kan man läsa i Matt Bais intressanta personporträtt i The New York Times.

“One of the things that actually saved us,” Gingrich told me, “in addition to Callista’s stubbornness, was Ellis the elephant.”

I checked to make sure I heard this right. […] In what way had a fictional elephant salvaged his presidential campaign?

“Happy, positive,” Gingrich replied, searching for the right words. “Interesting. Creative. It gave you an oasis psychologically. Literally, Ellis was sort of a ray of light.”

Men Newt Gingrichs topposition bland de republikanska presidentkandidaterna beror nog mer på hans starka insatser under de många tv-debatterna.

Han har gjort en dygd av att vara den intellektuella kandidaten som inte bryr sig om sådana världsliga ting som kampanjfinansiering och organisering.

Gingrich says now, in what may be a characteristic bit of revisionist history, that it was clear early on that he needed to break free of his highly paid and conventional consultants, and that he and his wife, Callista, actually took their much-maligned Greek vacation last June — a pleasure trip in the middle of what was supposed to be his ramp-up as a candidate — in order to provoke a confrontation with the campaign’s leadership. (Gingrich later added that he really needed to see the Greek fiscal crisis up close.) If so, it worked, because the entire senior team quit en masse when he got back. Thus cast out into the campaign wilderness, Gingrich persevered through the summer and early fall, despite the mockery of those who considered it a sad final act. A few times, he now admits, he considered quitting.

[…]

Gingrich’s strategy is clear enough. He wants to be the last guy standing against Romney after the first few contests — something that could be achieved just by finishing strongly enough in the early states to garner some attention while, one by one, his rivals run out of reasons to stay in the race. Gingrich knows he isn’t any social conservative’s dream, and maybe the Tea Party types are put off by his personal life or his ties to big business. But he’s betting that they like Romney even less and will rally behind him in a two-man race. “This is the classic fight between the moderate Republicans who try to get to the middle by compromise and the conservative Republicans who try to create a new middle by driving the left away,” he said.

This seemed as plausible as any other theory of the moment, although the last few days in Iowa had left me somewhat dubious. Several of the voters I met at Gingrich’s events seemed to be reluctantly getting their heads around voting for Romney. It wasn’t that they appreciated his less-confrontational brand of Republicanism any more than they did six months ago. It was that they had heard out all the other candidates, and they were starting to think that Romney was the only guy who could actually get himself elected.

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Kampanj: Kan Newt Gingrich besegra Mitt Romney?

USA | Newt Gingrich leder i en rad opinionsundersökningar efter att tidigare ha varit helt uträknad. Och idag släpper han sin första tv-reklam.

Trip Gabriel och Jeff Zeleny i The New York Times skriver:

Surging in polls is one thing. But as Newt Gingrich seeks to turn his impressive performance in surveys into votes, he is scrambling madly to build the kind of organization that Mitt Romney has methodically put in place for a year, one that will let him compete through all 50 contests, often in multiple states at once.

Upending expectations, Mr. Gingrich has taken a decisive lead in new polls in several early-voting states, benefiting from the drift of Herman Cain supporters even before Mr. Cain suspended his campaign on Saturday. But as an adviser to his skeletal Iowa operation admitted, “The reality is we’re flying by the seat of the pants.”

[…]

Mr. Romney’s team has said all along that it has expected a tough battle for the nomination, and it has sought to emphasize that point in recent days with its new “earn it” rallying cry for volunteers and other supporters. But Mr. Gingrich presents an especially difficult rival for them, one who is showing signs of corralling support from the Tea Party movement and other grass-roots conservatives while also being able to point to his governing experience.

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