John Cassidy's Blog, page 106

How Real is the Huntsman Surge?

Jon Huntsman's underdog campaign is rampaging through the state of New Hampshire, from the southern border with Massachusetts to the mountain towns of the North, and he is set to pull off a historic shocker in Tuesday's primary vote.

That's the word being put out by the Huntsman campaign, anyway, and some reporters, understandably eager for a bit of excitement, are affording it some credibility. "After his buzz-worthy showing in Sunday morning's NBC/Facebook debate, Jon M. Huntsman Jr. is suddenly Mr. Popular," the Washington Post reported. Huntsman "is finally attracting crowds and taking the fight to Romney," tweeted Jonathan Karl, of ABC News. "He might just be moving the market."

The crowds at Huntsman's events are real enough, and several new polls show that support for Huntsman is, indeed, rising. Like Rick Santorum in the last few days before the Iowa primary, he appears to be getting some reward for having spent much of the last two months traipsing across the Granite State. Two polls released yesterday showed Huntsman in a statistical tie with Ron Paul for second place.

As I pointed out in my lengthy post on the weekend debates, there are ample historic precedents for New Hampshire springing a surprise, from Eugene McCarthy putting a scare into Lyndon Johnson in 1968, to George McGovern doing the same to Ed Muskie four years later, to Hillary Clinton defeating Barack Obama in 2008. (That post can be found, along with other New Yorker campaign coverage and political content, on our new Political Scene page.) Moreover, the polls show that many voters remain undecided. And—this is perhaps most important—the polls have yet to fully capture any additional bounce Huntsman might be receiving from his strong performance in the debates.

Having said all that, before leaping onto the Huntsman S.U.V. (which he's been driving himself), I'd want convincing answers to three questions:

1) How well does Huntsman have to do for him to emerge as a real player?

2) How badly does Mitt Romney need to do for it to matter?

3) What are the chances of these things happening?

I think that the answer to the first question is that Huntsman would have to come in second, ahead of Ron Paul. Given's Paul's strength on the ground, and the libertarian slant of many New Hampshire residents, that would be a genuine achievement—and a real shock. It's not out of the question. But most of the polls still show Paul with a six or seven point lead over Huntsman. A strong third would win Huntsman some plaudits in the media, but it wouldn't transform his prospects in South Carolina and Florida, where currently he has little presence.

Number two is trickier. For twelve months now, Romney has been leading the New Hampshire polls by between twenty and thirty points. Only Newt Gingrich made a real dent in this lead, and then only briefly. The Real Clear Politics poll-of-polls, which incorporates the new polls and some older ones, still has Romney almost twenty points ahead. (Romney 38.5; Paul; 19.8; Huntsman 11.5.) For his campaign to take a real hit, I think his share of the vote would have to fall well below thirty-five per cent, and his lead would have to fall to ten points, or less. Even then, that might not be too big a problem if Paul were to be the second place finisher—Paul isn't a serious threat for the nomination. What would be truly calamitous for Romney would be for his vote share to drop below thirty per cent and for Huntsman to come in second place, with, say, twenty one per cent of the vote.

What is the probability of this happening? Not very high. Despite the two polls showing Huntsman in second place, most surveys show him still trailing Paul by a substantial margin. For example, in the daily tracking poll carried out by Suffolk University, his support has risen from nine per cent a week ago to thirteen per cent today, and he is seven points behind Paul, who's hovering at twenty per cent. Nate Silver in his latest poll-based forecast is projecting a nineteen-point victory for Romney, with almost forty per cent of the vote. Silver has Paul in second place, with nearly twenty per cent, four points ahead of Huntsman.

And what of the online betting markets? As of 4:30 P.M. on Monday, two of the best-known sites were putting the probability of a Romney victory at about ninety-eight per cent. At Intrade, there was also a market for betting on a second-place finish, and this implied that the chance of Paul coming in this spot was about seventy per cent. But the probability of Huntsman coming in second had risen sharply—to forty-two per cent. (I'm not quite sure how the probabilities can sum to more than one. Perhaps one of the academic defenders of these markets can explain it to me on efficiency grounds!)

Neither the polls nor the betting markets are fully reliable. Unlike in Iowa, I am not making a forecast—not until I see some polling from today, anyway. But Huntsman's late spurt has certainly made things more interesting.

Photograph by Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty Images.

Republicans in New Hampshire: Notes from Pol-Sci Camp

Between August 21 and October 15, 1858, as Newt "The Historian" Gingrich loves to reminds us, Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for an Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate, and Stephen Douglas, the incumbent Democrat, debated each other seven times, with each exchange lasting three hours. This fall, Gingrich has suggested, the two party's Presidential candidates should reprise the Lincoln-Douglas format on live television—a proposal that has been widely ridiculed. In this day and age, the oracles agreed, it was unrealistic to expect the candidates and the public to endure such a lengthy ordeal.

But was Newt's suggestion really so out of line? During the past eight months, he and the other Republican candidates have already eclipsed Lincoln and Douglas, and then some. The two debates in New Hampshire over the weekend, which took place within twelve hours of each other, were the nineteenth and twentieth in a series that began last May. According to my back-of-a-notebook calculations, the candidates have been debating each other for thirty-two and half hours, or thereabouts, which is twelve and a half hours more than Lincoln and Douglas managed. To be sure, this calculation doesn't account for time lost to commercial breaks or the fact that some of the candidates have skipped some of the events. But the debates aren't over yet—not nearly. Between now and the middle of March, another eight are scheduled.

What does this record-breaking gabfest say about the country? Beyond demonstrating that, in a splintered media world, there are endless channels eager for cheap live programming, I am not sure. Setting aside the odd pratfall, such as Rick Perry's infamous "oops" moment, they hardly make for thrilling viewing—and the level of debate is, let us say, not one that Lincoln would have immediately recognized. Although some of the events have achieved surprisingly strong ratings, I doubt that there is a single American who has sat through each one of them, from start to finish, without being paid to do so. (If such a person exists, put him or her in touch with me, and I'll find a good shrink.)

Even for reporters and commentators, it's sometimes tough to keep concentrating. Take Saturday night's yawner, which Al Sharpton and other savants had billed as a prime-time slugfest between Mitt Romney and his trailing rivals. (Pre-debate headline in The Week: "Romney Headed Into Demolition Derby.") After about twenty minutes of non-action, the camera caught Romney, his hands crossed beneath his crotch, smiling quietly to himself while Ron Paul and Rick Santorum bickered over whether the latter was a corrupt Washington insider "with a record of betrayal," which is what one of Paul's ads had claimed.

What had happened to the "beat up on Mitt" session? The other candidates appeared less interested in tripping up the front-runner than tearing down each other and securing a second- or third-place finish in Tuesday's primary. Even Newt, who, according to some accounts, had decided to unleash the lean Doberman Pinscher that lurks inside his soft Pillsbury Doughboy frame, couldn't do better than citing a New York Times article about how Bain Capital had asset-stripped a company, made a fortune, and left seventeen hundred workers unemployed.

ABC's panel of journalists, which was asking the questions, didn't fare much better. At one point, I switched back from the Saints-Lions wild card game to see George Stephanopoulos vainly trying to bait Romney into saying something silly about the constitutional right to privacy and whether it would allow states to ban contraceptives. "Contraception is working just fine—leave it alone," Mitt quipped in what was probably his best line yet.

After the end of the debate, which seemed a long time in coming, the various pundits ABC has assembled competed with each other to exhaust the "fat lady sings" cliché. Online, the response was similarly unanimous. Mike Murphy, the veteran G.O.P. consultant, tweeted: "Nothing changed in race. Mitt city." Josh Marshall, the editor of Talking Points Memo, commented: "The entire evening read like the other candidates are either resigned to Romney's expanding lead or were simply unaware of it." Perhaps Romney's campaign had put sedatives in the other candidates' water.

By Sunday morning, when the Facebook/NBC News debate began in the "Meet the Press" slot, the drugs appeared to have worn off. Reversing the old rule for second leads in John Wayne movies—that you fight with the Duke on a night when you've both had a few drinks and make up the following morning—the other candidates tried to dust Mitt over brunch. In response to the very first question from David Gregory, Newt described him as mealy-mouthed Massachusetts moderate, whose economic plan was dead-ringer for Obama's, and who would "have a very hard time getting elected."

Santorum, who had taken a few gentle left jabs at Romney the previous night, delivered a series of bludgeoning right crosses. He accused the Mittster of running to the left of Ted Kennedy in a 1994 Senate contest, chickening out of a 2006 reëlection race for the governorship of Massachusetts, and generally being a big WASP softie. Romney responded with some blather about how politics wasn't a career to him, it was an act of noblesse oblige, but Gingrich wasn't having a word of it. "Can we drop a bit of the pious baloney," he said. And he went on: "Just level with the American people. You've been running since the nineteen-nineties."

After that crunching start, things got a bit more civil, sad to report, but there were still some pointed moments at Mitt's expense. Jon Huntsman—yes, he's still in the race—took great issue with one of Romney's comments on Saturday night, when he had criticized Huntsman for serving the Obama Administration as ambassador to China. (He did the job from August, 2009 until April, 2011.)

To the casual observer, Huntsman is sometimes difficult to distinguish from Romney. They are both rich kids; they both have business experience; and they are both moderate Republicans of the old school. And, of course, they are both Mormons. They even have the same hairdo: a skunk comb over—silver above the ears and dark on top. At this stage, though, they clearly don't like each other.

"I will always put my country first," Huntsman snapped, adding that his two sons, who serve in the U.S. Navy, were doing the same thing. Romney said that putting the country first involved supporting conservative principles, adding that it was reasonable to demand a Republican candidate who hadn't worked for Obama. To which Huntsman, his voice dripping with derision and his finger pointing dismissively at Romney, replied: "This nation is divided because of attitudes like that. The American people are tired of the partisan divides. I say we've had enough."

If there were a centrist third party, or an "Obama 2008 Bipartisanship is Over" party, Huntsman would be well positioned to lead it. As a candidate in the 2012 Republican primaries, he appears to be wasting his time (although, later on Sunday, he would pop up at the Bean Town Coffee House, in Hampstead, N.H. claiming to have spotted a last-minute surge in the polls that nobody else has discerned.) Still, he kept snapping at Romney throughout the debate, as did Gingrich and Santorum.

Toward the end, Gingrich once again asked Romney to disown some of the nasty things his Super PAC had said in its negative ads about the Georgian. Romney duly said that if there were any inaccuracies in the ads the Super Pac should remove them. Only then did Newt confirm that his own Super PAC was busy producing a twenty-seven-and-a-half minute video about Romney's time at Bain Capital. "I hope the Super PAC makes an accurate video about Bain," he said with a commendably straight face.

By the time Gregory wrapped things up, I was feeling a bit better about the marathon series of debates, including the two I had just watched. I felt a bit like a lackadaisical high-school student whose parents had dispatched him to math camp for the weekend. Watching the two debates had been gruelling, and I might have wished to be doing something less taxing with my leisure time, but I'd also picked up some valuable pointers. To wit:

The pundits are right: Mitt is sitting pretty in the battle for the nomination. The main reason for this is a structural one. He has the center ground to himself; the right is divided. Unless and until a dominant conservative emerges, he cannot be seriously challenged.

As long as Ron Paul is in the race, uniting the conservative forces is going to be very difficult, if not impossible. In the words of ABC's Jon Karl, "Paul is a one-man wrecking crew." And he's wrecking for Romney. Back in the summer, he inflicted great damage on Rick Perry. Before Christmas, with help from Romney's Super PAC, he took down Gingrich in Iowa. And now he is savaging Santorum.

Despite his lead, and his campaign cash pile, Romney has some vulnerabilities. With his pro-business rhetoric, he often sounds as if he is speaking to an M.B.A. program rather than the country at large. At various times in American history, babbittry and boosterism have been sound political strategies. If this were the 2000 campaign, or the 1928 campaign, Romney would be wonderfully in tune with the times. But we are living at juncture when Wall Street has disgraced itself, and tycoons, especially financial millionaires, are suspect. Does Romney even realize this?

Despite his weaknesses, Romney is technically a stronger candidate than he was in 2008. For one thing, he is a better counterpuncher. In the first debate, when Huntsman (rightly) described his get-tough-policy with China as a piece of populist nonsense, he criticized Huntsman as an Obama stooge. On Sunday, although he backed down a bit to Gingrich on the negative ads that his Super PAC made, he also took the opportunity to regurgitate several of the charges against Newt, and point out that they were accurate. Having the capacity to do damage to your opponent even when you are on the ropes inspires fear.

Rick Perry is only staying in the race through South Carolina to return a favor to somebody—and he acts like it's somebody in Romney's camp. What other explanation can there be for his presence, and his utterances? On Saturday night, he said: "I would send troops back into Iraq." On Sunday morning, he said: "We have a President who is a socialist."

Right now, I can think of only three scenarios in which Romney can be beaten. The first involves something shocking happening to his vote on Tuesday, which seems unlikely. (In 1972, the New Hampshire primary virtually destroyed the candidacy of Ed Muskie, another candidate of the party establishment, even though he finished first.) In the second scenario, Santorum or Gingrich would catch fire in South Carolina and go onto to win or finish a strong second in Florida. Given the latest polls from South Carolina, which show Romney well ahead, that also seems unlikely. The third, and perhaps most plausible scenario, involves a new, more viable conservative candidate—a Jeb Bush, say—entering the race after the Florida primary with the backing of a big Super PAC. This, too, is a longshot. As campaign followers who don't entirely have Mitt's best interests at heart, we can but speculate and hope!

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

The Mittster and the Job Figures

For a candidate whose entire campaign is built on the idea that he is the one capable of putting America back to work, Mitt Romney was notably quiet Friday morning on the subject of the new job figures, which showed the unemployment rate dropping to its lowest level in nearly three years.

After making an appearance in South Carolina—before the Labor Department put out its report, which showed that employers created two hundred thousand jobs last month—Romney was headed to New Hampshire. By noon, he still hadn't said anything, and neither had his campaign, which is often portrayed as a model of corporate efficiency.

The home page of Romney's Web site featured the headline,"Let Free Enterprise Work," but that didn't have anything to do with the job figures. It was an appeal to people to sign a petition supporting South Carolina's position as a state largely free of trades unions. On the Web site's "News" section, there was a press release announcing that Bay Buchanan—Pat's sister—was backing Romney, and an endorsement from the Lawrence Eagle Tribune, a newspaper that serves northern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, which began: "Our nation remains mired in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Millions are out of work."

The second sentence is certainly true. According to the new jobs report, there are now 13.1 million people without jobs. But that is down from 14.3 million at the end of 2010. In the past twelve months, the unemployment rate has fallen by almost a full percentage point—from 9.4 per cent to 8.5 per cent.

Nobody should pretend that the Great Recession is fully behind us: it isn't. The unemployment rate is unacceptably high. About eight million Americans are working part-time when most of them would like full-time jobs; another two and a half million people have stopped looking for employment but consider themselves available for work. Counting these people, the level of "under-employment" is still about fifteen per cent. Behind these figures is a great waste of human resources, and a lot of human misery.

But from a political perspective, what really matters is the trend. And that is clearly going in the right direction. When the November jobs figure came out, I said it was dangerous to put too much emphasis on a single month's report. But the economy has now created more than a hundred thousand jobs for six months in a row. And the unemployment rate has fallen for four months in a row.

The Obama Administration, not surprisingly, leaped on the new figures. On the White House blog, Alan Krueger, the Princeton economist who is now chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said the report "provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression."

Romney now has a tricky decision to make. Does he stick to the line that the Obama Administration's spending and regulatory policies are wrecking the economy? Or does he acknowledge that the recovery is starting to pick up strength and argue that he could create jobs and bring down unemployment much faster than the incumbent?

I would imagine he will opt for the first option, at least for now. When you are in a Republican primary race against a bunch of right-wing ideologues, there is very little benefit (and sometimes a large cost) to recognizing reality. Assuming Romney gets the nomination and the current trends in the labor market continue, though, he will have to recalibrate his message, because his current one will become increasingly untenable.

At the core of it is the idea that Obama, as a politician and former community organizer, doesn't know anything about enterprise and creating jobs, whereas Romney, a lion of the private sector, is an employment generator par excellence. Set aside, for the moment, the issue of whether Romney, in his career at Bain Capital, was actually in the business of creating jobs or whether he was primarily engaged in financial engineering designed to line the pockets of himself and his partners. Let's look at Obama's record.

Over the past twelve months, as Krueger pointed out in his post, a private sector that, according to Romney's account, is shuddering under the burden of big government created by Obama's policies, has created 1.9 million jobs—the best performance since 2005. This employment growth has been broad based, encompassing manufacturing, retailing, health care, and transportation.

The big drag on the employment picture hasn't been lack of confidence or "regulatory uncertainty," but the ongoing slump in the construction industry, which usually leads the way during recoveries, and, almost as importantly, budget cuts at the state and local levels. While private-sector firms have been creating jobs, government agencies at all levels have been making layoffs. In the past twelve months, in fact, the number of Americans employed by the government has fallen by 614,000.

What has Romney, who likes to joke that for the past few years he, too, has been out of work, got to say about all this? When I checked the news sites again at lunchtime on Friday, all I could find was a video of him campaigning in South Carolina and talking about how Obama had "never worked in the private sector, never led anything." There wasn't anything new on the campaign Web site, either. Finally, I checked the blog of Greg Mankiw, the Harvard macroeconomist who is one of Romney's top economic advisers. Nothing there except a note from Thursday saying he was off to Chicago, to the annual meeting of the American Economics Association.

He and his colleagues will have much to discuss. Whether Romney likes it or not, the economic narrative for the 2012 campaign is starting to change. If the Mittster can't find a way to turn the altered circumstances to his advantage, he could well end up staying in the ranks of the unemployed for rather longer than he was hoping.

Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

The Race Post-Iowa: New Face, Same Story

Who were the big winners from last night? I would offer up two names. President Obama and Justin Wolfers, an economist and tweeter-in-residence at Wharton business school.

Why Wolfers? On the eve of the vote, Nate Silver, the Internet's polling expert, threw out his own forecasting model, which was predicting a Romney-Paul tie, and offered to bet a steak dinner on Santorum. Wolfers took the bet. Since I'd predicted a Santorum victory a day earlier, for largely the same reason that Silver cited—he had the "Big Mo'"—I offered to match the bet, and Wolfers took that one, too. Doubtless, he is now licking his lips and perusing the reviews of Sparks and Wolfgang's steakhouses at Yelp or Zagat.com.

Why Obama? From a tactical sense, Santorum's dramatic surge to near-victory was significant. It provided the media with a new narrative, effectively saw off Santorum's two rivals on the ultra-conservative wing of the party, Perry and Bachmann, and inflicted perhaps fatal damage on another candidate, Gingrich.

From a strategic perspective, however, not much has changed—and that is the good news for the White House. This is still a race between one candidate who is a suspect vote winner and another who is a confirmed vote loser. That the latter candidate is now Santorum rather than Cain or Gingrich or Paul (or—remember last summer—Bachmann or Perry) doesn't really matter very much. If you put any of these names on the general-election ballot come November, Obama would be a prohibitive favorite to win in a landslide.

In the aftermath of Santorum's big night, he and his backers are trying to pitch him as the next Ronald Reagan—a scrappy self-made conservative of immigrant stock who can win over the "Reagan Democrats," alienated white working-class voters in places like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Will anybody buy this? Another way of describing Santorum is as a rich Washington lawyer who was the G.O.P.'s point man with equally rich K-Street lobbyists, who picked up his roots after being elected and moved to tony northern Virginia, and who is a confirmed union-basher. Evidently, this is how many residents of Pennsylvania view Santorum. In 2006, they ejected him from the Senate by a margin of 59-41, the biggest defeat ever suffered by an incumbent senator in that state.

In Iowa, Santorum picked up some working-class votes, but not as many as you might have thought. Among those who have never attended college, he got just nineteen per cent of the vote, according to exit polls, which was less than Romney and Paul. He did well among voters earning between $50,000 and $100,000 a year: in Iowa that is quite a bit of money.

By far the best predictors of Santorum's performance were ideology and religion. Almost half the voters (forty-seven per cent) identified themselves as "very conservative," and Santorum led this group easily with thirty-five per cent of their votes. He also won easily among strong supporters of the Tea Party. Religion also played a big role. Nearly sixty per cent of the Iowa electorate were evangelical Christians, and in this group Santorum outscored Romney two-to-one.

You can sustain a Republican primary race for quite a while on the basis of ultra-conservatism and religion. In a general election, such a strategy is a no-hoper. Of the Republican candidates left in the field, only Romney could mount a serious challenge to Obama, but he, too, has his problems.

The first, obviously, is his problem with avowed conservatives and born-again Christians. I didn't hear anybody mention it last night, but his Mormonism must help explain why he got just fifteen per cent of the evangelical vote. With the campaign heading south after New Hampshire, this is something he is going to have to confront.

And Romney's issues aren't confined to particular groups. If any candidate is to displace a sitting President, he has to generate some real enthusiasm in his party overall. Ronald Reagan did this in 1980; so did Bill Clinton in 1992. So far, at least, Romney has failed to inspire the same type of support. Beyond the country-club Republican set, nobody seems to like him very much.

In fact, something similar could be said for all the Republican candidates. Perhaps the most notable figure coming out of Iowa was the turnout, 122,255, which wasn't much higher than the total in 2008. Since Ron Paul attracted the votes of many independent voters who weren't previously registered as Republicans, this means that the turnout among established Republicans fell markedly.

Which is why, if you listen carefully, you might be able to hear some glasses being raised at Obama HQ.

Photograph by Andrew Burton/Getty Images.

Iowa Drama: Santorum Wins Tie With Romney

"It's still way, way too close to call," Wolf Blitzer, the grand old man of cable news, said on CNN shortly before 10:30 last night. Not for me, it wasn't. This was fun! With forty-six per cent of the vote in, Rick Santorum was leading Mitt Rommey by less than four hundred votes; Ron Paul was another thousand or so votes back. About the only thing that was clear was that this was the closest Iowa caucus ever.

Over on Fox, Karl Rove and Joe Trippi were scratching their heads about five counties in western Iowa, from which no votes at all had come in yet. "Whoever wins the majority of voters in those counties is going to win," said Rove. O.K., said Chris Wallace, but who's going to win? Santorum, Trippi replied, adding that his prediction was partly "based on the Ouija board." Rove opted for Romney before quickly qualifying his answer, too.

It wouldn't have pleased my colleague George Packer and others who object to reporters treating politics as entertainment, but the sporting metaphors were coming thick and fast. "We have a horse race," announced Fox's Bret Baier at 10:45. And for the moment it seemed like Romney had got his nose in front. Eighty-one per cent of the vote was in, and the figures had flipped: Romney was leading by close to five hundred votes. Or was he? Before I could write down the exact numbers, news arrived of a big win for Santorum in Sioux City, which is in those key western counties. At 11:00, the Pennsylvania conservative was leading by thirteen votes—yes thirteen: 26,552 to 26,539.

A few minutes later, Ron Paul appeared at a podium to make what could hardly be called a concession speech. "We are all Austrians now," he declared. And he went on: "We need a new monetary system…How long has it been since they took a vote on the Gold Standard?" Despite Paul's promise that his next stop was New Hampshire, it looked like it was going to be a while longer before Americans would get to participate in such a vote. Among independents who had registered as Republicans to participate in the caucus, Paul had gotten close to forty per cent of the vote. Among established Republicans, his performance had been much weaker. In the final days, his anti-war stance had clearly hurt him.

Newt Gingrich was next up, full of nice things to say about Rick Santorum—"He waged a great positive campaign"—and thinly-suppressed anger towards Mitt Romney, who had stood by as Super PACs that support him ran negative ads that crushed the former Speaker's hopes of victory. Even before Gingrich spoke, his campaign had taken out a full-page ad in the New Hampshire Union Leader depicting Romney as "a timid Massachusetts moderate," who, if elected, would "manage the decay" of America. "I think it is possible that a wounded Gingrigh is more dangerous than a healthy candidate," Howard Fineman commented on MSNBC. Al Sharpton, a man who knows a thing or two about combative politics, seconded that emotion, pointing out that Gingrich would now be free to attack Romney in this weekend's television debates in New Hampshire. "Not a good night for Mitt Romney, even though he rolled up to the number one or two spot," averred Reverend Al.

Nobody outside the Romney campaign could argue with that. In 2008, when he placed second to Mike Huckabee, Romney got twenty-five per cent of the vote. Last night, despite a divided opposition, he didn't do any better. "The Romney inevitability story has taken a great hit," noted Bill Kristol on Fox. "He may well be the candidate, but he's going to have to fight for it."

Probably not against Rick Perry, though. Shortly before midnight, the benighted Texan Governor appeared before the cameras to announce he was returning home to "determine whether there is a path forward for me in this race." His tone and his tearful mentions of his wife and kids clearly indicated that there wasn't.

But what of the man of the hour, Santorum? As Wednesday arrived in the East, there was still no sign of him. "This is really a mistake," an agitated Joe Trippi declared. "He needs to get down there and declare victory, say why he won, and get his message out." This was Santorum's big chance to get some exposure, Trippi went on. The Romney campaign would love for the vote to drag on until three in the morning.

As if on cue, word came that Santorum would address his supporters in five minutes. Two weeks previously, polls had shown his support in the single figures. Now, after making more Iowa appearances than any other candidate, he had won twenty-five per cent of the overall vote; among evangelical Christians, according to the exit polls, he had outpolled Romney by two-to-one. And all this with hardly any money and minimal media attention (until the past few days, anyway.) A triumph of circumstance—he truly was the last conservative standing—and shoe leather.

When the man reached the lectern, he looked, as he always does, like a jaycee all grown up: neat parting and comb over; navy blazer, pristine white shirt; red and silver striped tie. "Game on," he declared. He thanked his wife, his God, and his Iowa volunteers. He recalled standing over the coffin of his grandfather, an Italian immigrant who worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines, and noticing how huge his hands were.

After this stirring beginning, Santorum, speaking without a teleprompter or notes, descended into his standard stump speech, talking about freedom, bold ideas, getting people to work, and "the dignity of human life." At that stage, it didn't matter much. The morning newspapers had their front-page photograph. The morning news shows had their sound bite. And Santorum was on his way having confounded the pollsters and established himself as the conservative alternative to Romney—something Romney acknowledged a few minutes later.

"Congratulations to Rick Santorum. This has been a great victory for him and his effort," Romney said, speaking very rapidly, perhaps because his campaign staff had removed his teleprompter. "We also think that has been a great victory for us."

By now, it was after one in the morning. With ninety-eight per cent of the vote counted, Santorum was leading by five votes—yes, five. The vote count ticked up to ninety-nine per cent, and Santorum's lead expanded to eighteen: 29,944 to 29,926. It was a bit like a tight city-council election.

This being a Republican evening, I decided to stick with Fox, where a new pundit had appeared: Ed Rollins, the veteran G.O.P. operative who briefly managed Michele Bachmann's campaign. Rollins wasn't buying Romney's interpretation of the non-result. Santorum was the story of the night, he said. 'He's the guy who took on the front-runner. He clearly comes out as the winner."

There was still no sign of the final tally—an A.P. report that the remaining votes were in the back of a truck somewhere turned out to be inaccurate—but that didn't really matter, either. The pundits, and the race, had already moved onto New Hampshire, and all but the most addled political junkies had gone to bed.

And then, just after two A.M., there was breaking news. Karl Rove, citing a source on the Republic National Committee, said the final votes had been counted and Romney had caught Santorum at the end to win by fourteen votes. Half an hour later, an Iowa Republican dignitary took the stage and confirmed Rove's scoop, declaring Romney the victor, but by just eight votes.

That made it official. The Mittster had won, and lost.

Six Reasons Why Rupert Murdoch Is Tweeting for Santorum

As you may have heard, Rupert Murdoch is now on Twitter. In a series of tweets under his own name over the New Year, the eighty-year-old mogul announced his arrival in the Twittosphere by reviewing his holiday reading (Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist"—"Great Book". Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs—"interesting but unfair"); complaining about how crowded it was in St. Barts; and registering his support for Rick Santorum.

"Good to see santorum surging in Iowa," Murdoch wrote on January 1st. "Regardless of policies, all debates showed principles, consistency and humility like no other." The following day, he followed up with another message: "Can't resist this tweet, but all Iowans think about Rick Santorum. Only candidate with genuine big vision for country."

It isn't every day that the Lord Almighty descends from the heavens and offers running commentary to the masses. (January 2nd: "NY cold and empty, even central park. Nice!") His emergence as an avid tweeter has generated much speculation about his motives: Are they a precursor to buying the social network? Is he sending a message to Fox News to pay more attention to Santorum? It is really him at all—or a News Corp. lackey trying to make the embattled boss look young and hip?

The evidence suggests that it is indeed Murdoch himself availing the world of his unfiltered views, or some of them. On January 1st, he briefly posted a message that said, "Maybe Brits have too many holidays for broke country!" The message disappeared not long afterwards.

The Murdoch tweets touting Santorum survived. I can think of at least six reasons why:

1) They are both conservatives. Although he has tacked this way and that over the years in his support of candidates, Murdoch remains fundamentally a conservative. He isn't as right wing as Santorum on abortion, homosexuality, and other social issues, but he shares his views on foreign policy, economics, and terrorism.

2) Romney isn't Murdoch's type of candidate. Whether it is on the right (Mrs. Thatcher/Ronald Reagan) or the center left (Tony Blair/Paul Keating) Murdoch tends to go for what he sees as conviction politicians and anti-establishmentarians. Mitt doesn't fit that profile.

3) Shared religious convictions. Santorum, who hails from Italian and Irish stock, is a lifelong Roman Catholic of the Opus Dei/Pope Benedict XVI variety. Murdoch started out as an Episcopalian but began attending Catholic mass with his former wife, Anna Murdoch Mann, and did so for many years. (It isn't clear whether he ever formally converted.)

4) A Santorum surge is a good story. Like many journalists, Murdoch gets bored easily. If Romney skates through Iowa and New Hampshire, the Republican race could get tedious mighty quick. A Santorum victory would spice things up—and it wouldn't do the ratings of Fox News any harm either. (Santorum used to work for Fox as a political
commentator.)

5) It's a welcome diversion. Over the past few months, hardly a sentence has appeared in the media about Murdoch and News Corp. without the words "News of the World" and "phone hacking" attached to them. This provides reporters with something else to write about.

6) It will increase his number of Twitter followers, which after just four days is already up to 90,000. (That's another thing about Murdoch; in anything he does, he's competitive.)

Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

Handicapping Iowa: Here Comes Santorum!

Romney, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, Paul, and Romney. No, that's not a new Republican law firm. It's the list of candidates who have led the opinion polls in Iowa during the past six months. After all that, we seem to be back to where we started: with Romney at the head of the pack. In six polls taken since Christmas Day, he has been leading (or tied for the lead) in five of them.

The lead is narrow, however: less than two points over Paul in a simple poll-of-polls I created by averaging the six post-Christmas surveys. (Statistically speaking, the two leaders remain tied.) And my poll-of-polls doesn't really reflect the big story of the past few days: a strong surge by former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. A Des Moines Register poll released on Sunday provided the most dramatic evidence yet that Santorum is gaining support from many conservative voters who had previously been leaning towards Paul, Gingrich, Perry, or Bachmann.

During the four days that the paper carried out its polling, Tuesday to Friday of last week, Santorum's numbers jumped every day. On Tuesday, he was in fourth place, with just ten per cent of the vote. By Friday, he was in a statistical tie with Romney at twenty-two per cent. (Romney edged him by one point that day.) If this momentum is real and sustained, Santorum could snatch a dramatic victory.

If you regard each day of questioning as a separate survey, which is what I'm doing, the new poll's sample size is too small—about a hundred and fifty likely voters each day—to be fully reliable. Other recent polls show Santorum gaining, but not as strongly. Most polling experts are still predicting a victory for Romney, with Paul holding onto second. (Nate Silver, for example, is predicting a five-point Romney victory.) The online betting markets—Intrade, Betfair—also have Romney as the firm favorite. By Sunday night, however, Santorum had moved past Paul to become the second favorite on Intrade. (On Betfair, Paul was still in second place.)

In the spirit of making a sporting wager rather than a deadly serious prediction, I am going out on a limb and prophesying a narrow victory for Santorum. The Iowa polls have been fluid all along, and Romney has always been vulnerable to conservative voters coalescing behind one candidate. Santorum's surge has come late enough that Romney and his Super PAC, which killed Newt with a barrage of negative ads, can't really do anything about it.

Most of the handicapping sheet is self-explanatory. The polls on which I've relied are listed at the foot of the article. The "probability of winning" figures are based on predictions in the political betting markets. I took them from the website PredictWise, which averages the latest figures from Betfair and Intrade on Sunday night at 10:30 p.m. EST.



Rick Santorum (nickname: "The Real Deal")

Post-Christmas Polling Average (per cent): 14.3

Probability of Winning (per cent): 23.6

Momentum Factor: Strongly positive

Money and Organization: Negative

Prediction: Wins with twenty-three per cent of the vote

Analysis: In my youth, when I used to follow the ponies, I was partial to closers (horses that lay off the pace and finish fast) and steamers (horses whose betting odds shorten dramatically just before the start of the race). Santorum is a closer and a steamer. Right now, he is also benefitting from positive feedback, which can be just as powerful in elections as it is in physical systems and financial markets. As he rises in the polls, more conservative voters are switching to him because they think he can win.

With a victory (or even a strong second) on Tuesday, he would emerge from Iowa, like Pat Robertson in 1988 and Mike Huckabee in 2008, as the choice of evangelicals and social conservatives. But unlike those two candidates, whose campaigns faltered pretty quickly, Santorum also has an economic message—rebuild American manufacturing—that could resonate elsewhere.

Mitt Romney (nickname: "The Mittster")

Latest Polling Average (per cent): 21.8

Probability of winning (per cent): 50.4

Momentum Factor: Positive

Money and Organization: Positive

Prediction: Second with twenty-two per cent of the vote

Analysis: Although he didn't spend very much time in Iowa, Romney invested a lot of money and resources there, especially in the last couple of weeks. With the conservative opposition to him divided, and Gingrich providing a convenient focal point for the attack ads, the conditions were greatly in his favor. If he holds on and wins, it's onto New Hampshire with the "Big Mo" at his back. If he doesn't, expect to see more questioning of his likeability and electability.

Ron Paul (nickname: "Dr Bong")

Latest Polling Average (per cent): 20.0

Probability of Winning (per cent): 28.7

Momentum Factor: Negative

Money and Organizational: Positive

Prediction: Third with twenty per cent of the vote.

Analysis: This time last week, Paul looked like he might win. His young supporters had been in Iowa for months banging on doors, trimming their beards, and denying that they were only in it for the legalized pot. With fewer than a hundred and twenty-five thousand voters likely to go to the polls, Iowa is one of the few states where a strong local organization can tip the balance. But charges that his newsletter promoted racist groups, and—more importantly—attacks from other candidates on his anti-war stance, appear to have cost him some support among Republican voters. If he gets less than twenty per cent of the vote, the narrative in the mainstream media will be that he has peaked, and is, therefore, primarily interesting as a possible third-party candidate.

Newt Gingrich (nickname: "The Historian")

Latest Polling Average (per cent): 13.5

Probability of Winning (per cent): 1.2

Momentum: Negative

Money and Organization: Negative

Prediction: Fourth with fourteen per cent of the vote

Analysis: The conventional wisdom is that Newt is toast. I'm not quite so sure. In the past couple of days, he's picked up a couple of valuable endorsements, and his poll numbers have stopped dropping. Expectations are now so low that if he comes in third or fourth with, say, fourteen or fifteen per cent of the vote, he could spin it as a decent result and vow to mount (another) comeback in South Carolina. But without much money, and with Santorum on a roll, it's hard to see.

Rick Perry (nickname: "Oops")

Latest Polling Average (per cent): 12

Probability of Winning (per cent): 1.0

Momentum: None

Money and Organization: Positive

Prediction: Fifth with nine per cent of the vote

Analysis: Perry's campaign has been a disaster from start to finish. Despite spending the last month busing to every decent-sized settlement in Iowa (and many indecently small ones, too), Perry's campaign never took off. With the backing of Texan Super PACs, he still has plenty of money, but even before the first voter has voted the recriminations are beginning over what went wrong. The short answer: pretty much everything, beginning with the fact that every time the candidate opened his mouth he made another gaffe. As I think I've said before, the real question Perry's campaign raises is this: How did such a bozo win re-election three times as governor of the second biggest state in the country?

Michele Bachmann (nickname: "Ms. Ames")

Latest Polling Average (per cent): 8.7

Probability of Winning (per cent): 0.3

Momentum: Negative

Money and Organization: Negative

Prediction: Sixth place with seven per cent of the vote

Analysis: Back in August, with the backing of many Tea Party activists and a first-place finish in the Ames straw poll, the Minnesota congresswoman looked well placed to become the conservative "Not Romney." Perry's splashy entry into the race upended her campaign in Iowa and other places, and it never recovered. Lack of money and a perceived lack of gravitas were her major weaknesses, but she didn't do too badly in the debates—not nearly as badly as Perry. Given her history as an evangelical Christian, a pro-life activist, and a supporter of charter schools, it's bit of a mystery why she didn't retain more support among Iowa conservatives.

Jon Huntsman (nickname: "Jon Who?")

Latest Polling Average (per cent): 3

Probability of Winning (per cent): 0.2

Momentum: None

Money and Organization: None

Prediction: Last place with three per cent of the vote.

Analysis: Months ago, Huntsman decided to sit out Iowa and make his stand in New Hampshire, which votes on January 10th. The wisdom or folly of that strategy won't be clear until later this week, when the attention of the national media attention switches to the Granite State. If, despite his absence, he could somehow sneak up on Bachmann and avoid a last-place finish, it would provide him with some momentum. But of such an outcome, there is little sign.

(Here are the polls I included in my poll of polls, with the dates of each survey: PPP, December 26-27th; NBC News/Marist, December 27-28th; Insider Advantage, December 28th; Rasmussen Reports, December 28th; We Ask America, December 29th; Des Moines Register, December 27-30th.)

Obama's 2012 Prospects: Now for the Bad News

A few days ago, in the form of a faux Christmas memo from David Axelrod, I laid out the optimistic argument for President Obama securing a second term. Political strategists are paid to be upbeat. The facts and figures I cited, including the polling data, were accurate, and the basic thesis in support of which they were presented is incontestable: during the past few months, Obama's prospects have improved substantially.

Of necessity, the evidence I cited was somewhat selective. Today, I will try and redress the balance by focussing on some of the factors I left out or minimized. For comparison purposes, I'll use the same framework I used in the original post:

1) The Polls: Yes, Obama's approval rating in the closely watched Gallup tracking poll has rebounded from the lows it plumbed during the summer debt-ceiling crisis. But it hasn't risen nearly as much as he would have hoped—or would need if he's to win come November. Even when there is good news for him, such as the killing of Osama bin Laden or the recent capitulation by Congressional Republicans on extending the payroll-tax cut, the political payoff he receives tends to be temporary.

Take the payroll-tax showdown, which came to a head on December 22nd, when the Republicans caved. For the period from December 21st to December 23rd—the Gallup poll is based on a three-day moving average—Obama's approval rating was forty-seven per cent and his disapproval rating was forty-five per cent. Hallelujah! On Tuesday morning, I drafted a short piece pointing out this development. Just as I was about to post it, a sharp-eyed editor spotted that it had disappeared. Tuesday's update from Gallup, which was based on sampling carried out between December 23rd and December 26th, showed Obama's disapproval rating once again topping his disapproval rating: forty-eight per cent to forty-six per cent.

In the past couple of days, the gap has widened against Obama. As of Thursday, his disapproval rating was fifty per cent, and his approval rating had fallen back to just forty-one per cent. This latter finding might be an outlier. The poll has a margin of error of three per cent, and it is a mistake to put much emphasis on any given day's numbers. As with any tracking poll, the trend is what matters. But even with all of those qualifications, the message for Obama is hardly encouraging. A week after one of the biggest political victories of his Presidency, his approval rating, at least according to Gallup, is still stuck in the low forties.

How bad is this? Since the Second World War, only two Presidents elected to office have been voted out when seeking reëlection: Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. In December of his third year in office, Carter's approval rating in the Gallup poll was fifty-three per cent; Bush Sr., at the same stage, had an approval rating of fifty-one per cent. Obama is running well below these two losers. If he can't get his approval rating to stick in the high forties, at a minimum, it is hard to see how he can be competitive come next fall.

2) The economy: Setting aside the weaknesses of the Republican candidates, the recent uptick in the recovery is the best thing Obama has going for him. In comparison to some worrywart economists, I am optimistic it will continue and, quite possibly, accelerate. (If you are wondering why, click here.) But it would probably be folly to bet a large sum on this outcome.

For the past few months, the economy has been expanding at an annual rate of about two per cent. The Federal Reserve and most other professional forecasters see that figure picking up a bit in 2012, to about two and half per cent. In normal times, this would be a respectable growth rate. For an economy still pulling itself out of a deep hole, with an unemployment rate of 8.6 per cent, it is pretty feeble—too feeble to support a sustained drop in the jobless figures.

From Obama's point of view, the unemployment rate is close to everything. Ever since the start of 2009, when two of his economic advisors, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, said it wouldn't rise above eight per cent, his opponents have been ramming the jobless numbers down his throat. Unless things change dramatically in the next few months, the Republican candidate will make this his main line of attack, and it might well work.

It worked for Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979, when her campaign was largely based around Charles Saatchi's famous poster that showed a long line of people outside an unemployment office under the headline: "LABOUR ISN'T WORKING." It worked again in 1992, for Bill Clinton, who accused George Bush of failing to get the economy going after the recession of 1990-91.

As a factual matter, Clinton was wrong. Revisions to the national income accounts show that the U.S. economy was growing rapidly throughout 1992: in every quarter of the year, the G.D.P. rose at an annual rate of more than four per cent. But that wasn't how people saw it at the time of the November 1992 election. Unemployment was still stubbornly above seven per cent, and exit polls showed that three quarter of Americans believed the economy was in bad shape.

What really matters in Presidential politics is not raw economic statistics but what the Brits call the "feel good factor." As of today, there is still little sign of that picking up. In its daily tracking survey, Gallup also asks people to describe the economic conditions in the country. The choices are "excellent," "good," "only fair," and "poor." In the most recent survey period, which was December 26th-December 28th, fifty per cent of respondents said "poor." Just eleven per cent said "excellent" or "good." Somewhat surprisingly, popular feelings about the economy appear to have deteriorated during the last year. For the same three-day period in 2010, the Gallup poll results were: "poor"—thirty nine per cent; "excellent" or "good"—sixteen per cent.

These figures are doubly bad news for Obama. They confirm what many other polls are saying: most Americans think the economy is still in poor shape. Additionally, they suggest that even if the recent pick-up is sustained it will take some time for voters to recognize it: the "feel-good factor" is a lagging indicator. If it lags by too much, Obama could find himself in the same awkward position as Bush Sr.: trying to persuade a skeptical public that things are better than they seem.

3) The Republicans: With Mitt, Newt, Ron et al. busy slugging it out in Iowa, it is easy to dismiss them as a very weak set of candidates. That judgment may well be accurate, but it doesn't account for some of the Republican Party's built-in advantages, the main one of which is that America, at least in the judgment of most Americans, remains a center-right country.

Consider yet another survey from Gallup, released on Thursday, which examined the ideological views of about a thousand people, who were roughly equally divided between Democrats, Republicans, and independents. (Actually, there were slightly more independents.) Despite this relatively even partisan split, forty-two per cent of the respondents described themselves as "conservative" or "very conservative." Thirty-seven per cent described themselves as "moderate," and just nineteen per cent described themselves as "liberal" or "very liberal."

If you think this sounds promising for the Republicans, I would agree with you, especially since fifty-seven per cent of the respondents described President Obama as "liberal" or "very liberal" and only twenty-three per cent described him as "moderate." (Another fifteen per cent described him as "conservative" or "very conservative.") When asked to categorize the Republican candidates in turn, the overwhelming majority of people described them as "conservative" or "moderate." For Romney for example, the figures were forty-five percent and twenty-nine per cent. (For Gingrich: they were fifty-five per cent and eighteen per cent.)

The headline that Gallup placed on its news release about the survey did a good job encapsulating its message: "Americans See Views of GOP Candidates Closer to Their Own." Of course, this doesn't mean Obama's position is hopeless. Back in 2008, the Gallup analysts pointed out, most Americans regarded him as pretty liberal, but that didn't stop him getting nearly fifty-three per cent of the vote. However, on that occasion he was facing an aging, ill-defined opponent, and he was armed with the strongest campaign slogan that any candidate can have: it's time for a change.

This year, a Republican candidate will be repeating that message ad infinitum. As of now, it's looking like it will be Romney. To be sure, he has some potential weaknesses, and the well-financed Obama campaign will seek to exploit them in the coming months. But as a candidate who is avowedly of the center-right, he starts out from an advantageous position. And for what it's worth, he is now ahead of the President in the polls—or one of them, anyway. In a Rasmussen survey that was also released on Thursday, Romney was leading Obama in a head-to-head matchup by forty-five per cent to thirty-nine per cent. That's not a huge lead—it's not much outside the poll's margin of error—but for Obama it's a worrying one.

Why Ron Paul Isn't Just Another Right-Wing Nut

With six days until the Iowa caucus, which marks the official opening of the 2012 election, all signs point to victory for a man who wants to abolish five government departments (Commerce, Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and Interior) slash the federal budget by a trillion dollars, eliminate the income tax (and the taxes on inheritances and capital gains), abolish the Federal Reserve system, restore a gold standard, end foreign aid, repeal the "Brady Bill" and the ban on sales of fully-automatic assault weapons, gut labor unions, repeal Roe v. Wade and pass a "Sanctity of Life Act," pull the United States out of the United Nations, give big tax breaks to homeschoolers, and repeal Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and Sarbanes-Oxley.

Is this a big deal? Not according to many big-name political pundits and political strategists. If recent polls from Iowa showing Ron Paul ahead prove reliable, and he finishes at the head of the Republican pack in the caucuses there on Tuesday, it won't mean very much at all, say these authorities, most of whom regard the spindly, seventy-six year old Texas congressman as some sort of novelty act. The savants have already moved past Iowa, and past New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, and the other forty-six primaries, too. Whether they've said it publicly or not, and some of them have said it, they agree with the unnamed Romney operative who remarked to New York magazine's John Heilemann: "I don't see any scenario where we're not the nominee."

That's it, then. To save the other candidates and the American public the bother, and to preserve the sanity of writers (myself included) who would otherwise have to spend the next six months covering a contest with a preordained result, we might as well call the whole thing off and hand the nomination to Mitt. (It would be doing him a favor, too. Just think—no more rope lines or meet and greets where he has to think of something to say to folks who can't afford to bet Rick Perry ten thousand dollars and who might consider it cruel to strap their Irish setters to the tops of their cars.)

Wait a minute, though. Out there in Iowa, thousands of Paul supporters, many of them young and enthused, seem determined to go ahead with this meaningless exercise in democracy. They are busy putting up posters, making phone calls, knocking on doors, and packing the candidate's appearances in places like Sioux City and Maquoketa. In a primary in which many of the other candidates have largely forsaken one-on-one campaigning in favor of televised debates and television ad blitzes financed by super-PACs, Paul and his supporters represent a reassertion of old-fashioned shoe-leather politics. The other candidates have campaigns: Ron Paul, for good or ill, has a movement.

What sort of movement? From a brief reading of the national coverage of Paul's campaign, you might be driven to the conclusion that his support is largely made up of racists, gun freaks, isolationists, homeschoolers, and Friedrich Hayek enthusiasts. Certainly, there are some of these. Paul's decision, back in the early nineteen-nineties, to try and move beyond his econo-libertarian base by embracing other right-wing groups, including some linked to militias and neo-Nazis, is rightfully coming back to haunt him in the form of front page articles in the Times and elsewhere. When Newt Gingrich, as he did yesterday, describes the views of a fellow conservative as "totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American," you know there is a problem.

But many of Paul's supporters, particularly the younger ones, can't be categorized as traditional right-wing extremists. What draws them to his campaign isn't his views on welfare-dependency, Israel, or monetary policy, but his reputation as an outsider, a plain speaker, and a scourge of the political establishment. In a piece in the Des Moines Register a few days ago, the reporter Mary Stegmeir, who has been covering the Paul campaign, quoted some of them:

Patrick Batey, a twenty-seven-year-old from Mount Pleasant: "He doesn't have that glossy sheen that all the other candidates do. I guess I don't feel like he's trying to deceive me."

Micah Stolba, a thirty-two-year-old from Cedar Rapids who recently completed three years in the Army: "What he says makes sense. People in the military, especially, they have to think about our foreign relations with countries."

Danijel Pejkanovic, an eighteen-year-old student from Kalona: "He's real. That's what makes the difference for me."

In one of the latest polls from Iowa, which has Paul leading Romney by four points and Newt Gingrich by ten points, confirms that Paul is attracting support from across the political spectrum. Indeed, many of his supporters, far from being right-wing Republicans, aren't even Republicans. (In the Iowa caucus system, independents and even Democrats can register as Republicans on the night of the caucus and vote.)

Here, courtesy of Public Policy Polling, are some of the key findings:

Paul's strength in Iowa continues to depend on a coalition of voters that's pretty unusual for a Republican in the state. Romney leads 22-20 with those who are actually Republicans, while Paul has a 39-12 advantage with the 24% who are either independents or Democrats. GOP caucus voters tend to skew old, and Romney has a 34-12 advantage with seniors. But Paul's candidacy looks like it's going to attract an unusual number of younger voters to the caucus this year, and with those under 45 he has a 35-11 advantage on Romney.

The fact is that many of the young activists backing Paul have more in common with Occupy Wall Street demonstrators than they do with Texan anti-Semites and Wyoming militia men. Back to Public Policy Polling's take on its latest findings: "The independent/young voter combo worked for Barack Obama in securing an unexpectedly large victory on the Democratic side in 2008 and it may be Paul's winning equation in 2012."

The comparison with Obama is telling. At this point in 2007, the young senator from Illinois seemed to many Democrats to be something thrillingly fresh: an independent-minded figure who would challenge a stale and corrupted politics. Paul doesn't have Obama's youth or his charisma, which was partly based on the anticipation of seeing a whip-smart black man in the White House. But a surprising number of disillusioned Americans find in Paul, for all his impractical proposals and extremist baggage, a similar hope for a new type of politics: one that isn't beholden to the two major parties.

That is why Paul is important. Even a big victory for him next week won't necessarily tell us much about the ultimate outcome of the Republican race: the pundits are right about that. It is virtually impossible to see Paul emerging as the nominee. But his popularity tells us something deeper about American politics and the popular alienation that now attends it—on the left and the right. As 2012 proceeds, this disgust with the two parties could well give birth to a third-party candidacy, quite possibly in the person of Paul himself. Even if that doesn't happen, the growing alienation from mainstream politics, especially among the young, is something the next President, be it Obama, Romney, or A. N. Other, will be forced to confront. And it won't be easy.

Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images.

Obama 2012 Prospects: A Christmas Memo

Over the holiday, I somehow came into possession of what appears to be an informal campaign memo to President Obama from David Axelrod, his senior political adviser. I can't vouch for its authenticity, but before somebody sends it to Wikileaks I thought I'd post it anyway. It's dated Friday, December 23rd, the day the President signed the payroll tax extension and flew out to Hawaii, where he is spending the Christmas break with his family.

Hey Boss,

Great job smacking down the evil ones. (Once I saw Karl Rove on Fox saying it was time to cut bait, I knew we had 'em whipped.) I thought I'd put down a few thoughts for you to read on the flight to Honolulu. It's been a long year, but we are coming out of it in better shape than most people expected, myself included. We all know it's going to be a close one in '12, especially if, as we've always planned on, Mitt is the Republican candidate. But politically and economically things are moving in our favor.

Let's start by going back to my Labor Day memo, when things were looking decidedly grim. After the debt ceiling fiasco, your approval rating had dropped into the thirties; Gene and the economics team were worrying about a double dip; and some of the talking heads were comparing you to Jimmy Carter. As I said at the time, things weren't quite as bad as they seemed. But it wasn't good.

So what's changed?

1) The Polls. In the Gallup tracker, which is the external survey we follow most closely, your approval rating is forty-four per cent. That's not great: historically speaking, it is poor. Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton were all in the low fifties in December of their third year in office. But none of them had to deal with a recession as deep as the one we inherited. And things are going in the right direction. Back in August, we bottomed out in Gallup with an approval/disapproval balance of negative fourteen. (Approval thirty-nine. Disapproval fifty-three.) Now, we're back to negative four. (Approval forty-four, disapproval forty-eight.)

We need to move that number into positive territory, and I think we can do it. Our internal numbers are encouraging, and so are some of the other polls. As I said in the daily briefing the other day, the latest surveys from CNN, ABC News/Washington Post, and CBS News all show your approval rating higher than your disapproval rating: forty-nine-forty-eight, forty-nine-forty-seven, forty-seven-forty-four. (The differences aren't statistically significant, but what the heck.)

If we can get the Gallup approval number into the high forties by next October, we are in with a fighting chance. Ford lost in '76 with a forty-eight per cent approval rating; Bush won in '04 with a forty-nine per cent approval rating. Anything in the fifties and we'll be looking very good. Truman was at fifty per cent in '48 and crept home. Clinton was at fifty-five per cent in '96 and won easily. (Nixon, '72, and Reagan, '84, were both in the high fifties when they won their landslides.)

2) The Economy: I'll defer to Gene on this, but ever since September the figures have been coming in a bit better than expected: GDP, consumer spending, business investment, and employment are all showing modest growth. Hardly anybody is talking about a double dip.

The big news in our favor, of course, was that the unemployment rate fell from nine per cent to 8.6 per cent in November. The December figure will be out on January 6, and we'll see if that was a blip or the start of something bigger. For what it's worth, the weekly figures for unemployment claims are still moving in the right direction—down—but we've learned before not to read too much into them.

There's also been a bit of good news on the housing market—and not a moment too soon, you might say. Housing starts jumped up in November, and the number of new building permits is also rising. As the economics team has frequently pointed out, the big thing that has been holding back this recovery is a lag the construction industry, which usually leads the way. Maybe this is changing, at least a bit.

If we go into the spring and summer with unemployment trending down and the housing market showing signs of life, it will greatly strengthen our argument that you've seen the country through a historic crisis and now things are improving. (A campaign slogan: "Things are getting better. Don't let the Republicans mess 'em up again." Not bad, huh?)

Reagan '84 is our model here. At the end of '83, the unemployment rate was nearly nine per cent, and his re-election prospects were looking iffy. But the unemployment rate fell sharply in '84—on election day, it was under 7.5 per cent. Our economy today isn't growing nearly fast enough for that to happen again, but getting down the rate close to eight per cent isn't out of the question. And the really important thing is the trend.

Of course, the whole thing could go belly-up if the Europeans don't get their act together, and the world blows up, but Tim and the other guys at Treasury are cautiously optimistic on that one. Apparently, the French and the Germans have privately agreed on a back door bailout, wherein the European Central Bank lends the banks gazillions of Euros to buy up the bonds of countries like Italy and Spain and Portgual. The details went above my head, but the new head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, is apparently an ex-Goldman guy who will do the right thing. (You won't read about this deal in the newspapers, so don't bother looking. Merkel's terrified that the German burghers will march on Frankfurt if it gets out.)

3) The Republicans: On the Washington end, we are in good shape. Congress's approval rating is down to eleven per cent in the latest Gallup poll, the lowest figure ever. God knows how Boehner got himself into this latest mess, but from our perspective it's all to the good. The folks at the DNC are getting more hopeful about holding the Senate, and Steny Hoyer reckons we've even got a chance of retaking the House, especially if its Gingrich or another right winger at the top of the ticket.

Of course, we aren't expecting that. Christmas came too early for Newt. If Herman Cain had blown up a few weeks later, he could conceivably have ridden his surge to victory in Iowa, come in a strong second to Mitt in New Hampshire, and swept the field in Florida and South Carolina. But the combination of Mitt's money and the attacks from Paul/Bachman/Perry have done him in.

So, it's back to "Plan A": take down Mitt. On Intrade, the probability of him being the candidate is back to seventy per cent. Who knows what will happen in Iowa, but if Mitt wins easily in New Hampshire, and he's still way ahead in the polls, it won't matter much.

The good thing about Mitt is we've had plenty of time to prepare for him. With our recent pivot to a more populist line, we are now well placed to attack him as the embodiment of Wall Street greed, rising inequality, and lots of other bad things. Newt made a good start along those lines, before being silenced by the party hierarchy, and the press is starting to dig in. But in the end it's going to come down to a lot of paid media, so, if you have a bit of spare time on our way back from the sun, perhaps you could stop off at a couple of more fundraisers in L.A. and N.Y. (It's dirty work, boss. But somebody has to do it.)

Best from Chi-Town, where, for some reason it's still forty-five degrees. Maybe Al Gore was right about global warming after all. (Don't let that one get out. We'll have the environmentalists after us again for caving on the ozone standards!)

Yours,

Axe