Elections 2008: Weekly Scorecard (12/31)

In a week in which voters were largely distracted by holiday celebrations with relatives and friends, the presidential campaigns couldn’t afford to take any time off with the voting in Iowa and New Hampshire just around the corner. Yet this week, both the GOP and Democratic campaigns temporarily froze with the news of the assassination of former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto. The crisis abroad provided the first real test for the candidates, and not all were up to the challenge.

For the GOP, Giuliani was quick to view the assassination through the prism of, what else, 9/11. Romney fought a two front battle with negative ads against Huckabee and McCain (see below). McCain and Huckabee seemed to tag team their counter-attack against Romney.

Among the Democrats, the timing of the Pakistani crisis seemed ideal for Hillary just as she was emphasizing the importance of her experience with voters. Meanwhile, Obama stumbled, and Edwards’s domestic-focused populist message grew faint. How this will play out in Iowa later this week will be known soon enough.

So as I sit here typing on New Year’s Eve, let me boldly predict the Iowa Caucus results as follows: Huckabee beats Romney by nine points, and Obama beats Hillary by 9 points, who finishes in third place one point behind Edwards… (Ok, I admit it, I added that prediction on Jan 3rd after the Iowa results came out, but you were impressed for a second, weren’t you?)

With that teaser, here are their weekly grades (in order of most likely to succeed in getting nominated):

THE REPUBLICANS

John McCain:

McCain has caught a wave, and it’s cresting at the right time. As discussed below, it was not a good week for his two key rivals, Romney and Huckabee, and with Romney taking on water, McCain is increasingly becoming the last real alternative to Huckabee. That’s an ideal place for McCain as the race turns very quickly to large and diverse states where Huckabee’s base of evangelical supporters will be a smaller percentage of the voters. The assassination of Bhutto gave McCain an opportunity to remind GOP voters that he has over 20 years of national security experience, in stark contrast to Romney, Huckabee and Giuliani, who have none. The injection of global events into the race may be just what McCain needed to push him into a surprise finish in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

Grade: A-

Mike Huckabee:

Huckabee may have peaked too soon, because this was not a good week. While Romney’s attacks were largely more flattering than harmful, some of the charges began to stick as the MSM focused more critical attention on his record in Arkansas. But the worst part was how his reaction to the Bhutto assasination demonstrated his inexperience in foreign affairs and national security, just as such issues were elevated in importance. He didn’t know that Pakistan had lifted martial law, whether Pakistan was to the east or west of Afghanistan, and he misstated the levels of Pakistani immigration in a clumsy effort to change the topic to his domestic border security policy. More important than these specific gaffes, the Pakistani crisis drew attention to Huckabee’s complete lack of foreign policy experience. By the end of the week, he was sounding defensive and less confident, including during his grilling on MTP by Tim Russert.

Grade: C+

Mitt Romney:

Romney also had a bad week. The week started with the unusual “undorsements” by both the moderate Concord Monitor and the conservative Manchester Union Leader, both of which labeled him as a phony opportunist. He then took the risk of running negative ads against both Huckabee and McCain.

Romney’s Anti-Huckabee Ad:

Romney’s Anti-McCain Ad:

This allowed both of his targets to tag him as desperate and mean-spirited. But Romney had no choice – Huckabee had already solidified his hold on the social conservatives and McCain was gaining momentum in New Hampshire, a state that knows McCain well. Meanwhile, the MSM dug deeper into his claims of marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. and found Romney guilty of fibbing.

Of course, the real issue at the heart of the MLK flap was whether Romney shared his church’s former policy on race, which apparently excluded African Americans from membership until 1978. He raised the MLK marching story to prove he was no segregationist, but the questions of his story’s accuracy metastasized into feeding the “phony” narrative. Like Edwards in Iowa, Romney cannot afford to lose his backyard state of New Hampshire.

Grade: C-

Rudy Giuliani:

Just before the NIE on Iran was released in November, Rudy put out a campaign ad in which he exploited the Iranian hostage crisis to tout his own vision to combat terrorism. Making Iran the a new bogeyman was the advice of his dangerously loony neocon advisor, Norman Podheretz, who has also been beating the drums to bomb Iran. Unfortunately for Rudy, the thrust of the NIE’s finding – that the U.S. intelligence community believed Iran had abandoned building a nuclear weapons program years ago – conflicted with this fear-mongering strategy, and gained no traction with GOP voters.

Now, in an effort to stem the hemorrhaging, Rudy released another ad with patriotic imagery and visions of 9/11 to describe the threat of Islamist terrorists “coming to take our freedom.” He also built on this theme on the campaign stump by trying to simplify events in Pakistan as an example of Islamic terrorists trying to crush democracy and freedom. The problem here, of course, is that Bhutto’s assassination arises from decades of political intrigue and retribution in Pakistan, beginning with the killing of Ghandi in 1948 at its birth as an independent nation, to the assassination of its prime minister in 1951, to the unsolved assassinations of Benazir Bhutto’s father and two brothers. There are few signs of stability returning soon to Pakistan, with Benazir’s inexperienced 19 year old son taking over as head of the Pakistan People’s Party, Musharaff remaining in complete control and the prospects for fair, democratic elections looking increasingly remote.

How is Rudy’s repeated invocation of 9/11 remotely relevant to the nearly six decades of internecine political intrigue in Pakistan? How does his simplistic notion of “playing offense” foster a stable democracy in Pakistan, currently controlled by a government that in 2005 struck a non-aggression pact with the very terrorist they have alleged to be the assassin? In addition, as a prosecutor, he should know better than to rush to judgment given that there is continued uncertainty of who committed this crime or, even if terrorist elements were ultimately responsible, whether the Pakistani government was complicit by deliberately providing inadequate security for Bhutto, as she alleged after the failed assassination attempt against her when she first returned to Pakistan.

The most biting criticism of Giuliani this week came from McCain, who said he while liked Giuliani and respected him, Giuliani’s “post-crisis” experience in dealing with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York really had “very little to do with national security issues,” compared to McCain’s 20 years of such experience. McCain managed to put Giuliani’s 9/11 experience in the box in which it belongs – managing a crisis effectively after the event occurs, which has nothing to do with foreign policy — while he reminded voters that behind the curtain, Giuliani is just a former prosecutor and mayor with no relevant global experience to lead the free world.

By the way, if it’s true that Mayor Bloomberg will enter the race, it will hurt Giuliani. Bloomberg would bring attention to his own success as New York mayor in further reducing crime and rebuilding lower Manhattan post-9/11, and running the city without antagonizing residents as Giuliani did. The contrast will dilute the significance Giuliani’s experience as mayor, since Bloomberg can say he has the same mayoral experience, significant business experience, but comes without Giuliani’s odd personal baggage of three marriages, alienated kids, the adultery-expensing scandal, and nasty temperament.

Grade: D+

THE DEMOCRATS

Hillary Clinton:

Like McCain (and at the risk of being crass), the events in Pakistan happened at an ideal time for Hillary’s campaign. She had just begun to pound the point home that she is the more experienced and less risky choice than Obama when the Bhutto assassination gave her a chance to speak of her personal relationship with both Bhutto and Musharaff, her travels to the region and knowledge of the region’s political dynamics. She spoke thoughtfully of the need for an independent investigation of the assassination and critically of the administration’s unflinching support of Musharaff.

Meanwhile, Bill was effective on the stump persuading audiences better than she could why she is the best choice. Several polls show Obama slipping and her rising, suggesting that she may be cresting at the right time. The benefit of this late change for the better is now her strong performances will beat the expectations game and be framed as a comeback kid story.

Grade: A

Barack Obama:

In response to Bhutto’s assassination, Obama’s campaign chief committed an unforced error when he clumsily implied Hillary’s vote on Iraq was to blame for the assassination since the Iraqi war caused the US to take its focus off Afghanistan and Pakistan, and such neglect led to the assassination. Regardless of his actual intent, it was a terrible comment on many levels, and left Obama on the defensive for the remainder of the week, including when subjected to the interrogation of Tim Russert on MTP. The event brought new attention to the fact that as a member of the Senate subcommittee on European affairs, he never visited Europe except in a brief stopover in London.

Obama’s initial counter-argument to Hillary’s “experience” was to belittle her experience as first lady, but that seemed to gain little traction. This week he gave it a little tweak by suggesting Hillary was a tired Washington insider and his advantage was that he was a fresh outsider poised to bring a new approach.

The weakness of Obama’s argument in a world facing difficult choices and tragic crises was more poignantly made by this author than I ever could. I frankly have found the “globally transformative candidate” argument of certain Obama supporters, particularly supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq like Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks, to be highly suspect and condescending, as this author notes. To suggest that the youth of the Middle East and other developing countries will, upon the election of a person of color with an Arabic sounding name as president, drop all their objections to U.S. foreign policies and immediately embrace the U.S. government in an everlasting kiss is folly. If that were true, then why don’t a few GOP appointments of African Americans like Alan Keyes, Condi Rice or Clarence Thomas cause most African Americans to immediately drop all policy objections and join the GOP? Perhaps, just maybe, it’s because like anyone else, African Americans aren’t conned that easily.

Grade: C+

John Edwards:

Although Edwards got credit in the MSM for reaching out to Musharaff by phone on the day of the assassination, the event itself drowned out Edwards’s populist and domestic policy-focused “closing argument” that he was the one prepared to fight aggressively against corporate greed. That message was lost amidst the chaos abroad, and notwithstanding his chat with Musharaff, he’s not going to catch Hillary if the dominant issue is on her turf: foreign policy/national security. He needed a great week to leapfrog both Obama and Hillary in Iowa, and he can’t afford to lose Iowa if he’s going to have any chance at the nomination. It was not the great week he needed, and he will not win Iowa.

Grade:B-