God, I hate when that happens! I know yesterday I said how tired I was of primary diaries, but the Republican primary race remains the damndest thing I have ever seen. I just can’t help myself. It must be something in the water.
I’ll get back to the book stuff tomorrow. I swear! It’s just, competing with the Hawkeye Cauci seems...well, impossible. And if I’m going to have to talk about it anyway, I’d much rather talk about how bad things are for the other side.
Unlike a lot of folks (apparently), I don’t really care who wins the Democratic primary. Whoever it is gets my vote, and whoever it is will have a serious homecourt advantage over the eventual Republican primary winner. I say this in all confidence because the Republican Party is tearing itself to pieces, and whoever wins their nomination will alienate some sizable segment of their political base.
After tonight it is likely that one if not two Republican candidates will be dropping out of the race, starting with perennial nutjob Ron Paul. An expected 5th place finish will convince Ron to run as an independent, and the Silly Party is always looking for semi-viable candidates to put on the ballot next to the late Lyndon LaRouche.
Wait a minute...[puts finger to ear]...I’m just being told that Lyndon LaRouche is not dead. Sorry about that. I could’ve sworn he’d snuffed it. My bad. Back to the primary.
So, Ron Paul takes his pile of crazy money and goes to find a new home. The second candidate who will probably drop out, as noted earlier by kos, is Fred Thompson. On the surface you could say that the Thompson campaign was doomed from the start owing to the fact that Fred was a lazy campaigner, acted like he didn’t want the job but was entitled to it, and looked physically like grilled meat that hadn’t been properly thawed. All true, but there’s a more interesting subtext to Thompson’s failure –
it proved that Fox News is more powerful than right-wing talk radio. Lemme ‘splain.
Rush Limbaugh boasts an audience of 20 million listeners. Talkers magazine, a trade publication, puts him at 13.5 million, which is still a hell of a lot of listeners. Fox News averages around 3 – 3.5 million viewers, or around a quarter of Rush’s audience. So, on paper, you’d think Rush would have a lot more pull than Fox News.
I was listening to Rush yesterday, and my ears perked up when I heard him make the following comment:
"There's a bunch of these guys running around saying they're Reagan. None of them are. There's not one Reagan conservative -- well, I can't say there's not one, there may be one."
Interestingly, Rush doesn’t elaborate, primarily because he says he "doesn’t endorse primary candidates." Like a lot of stuff he says, this is B.S. Oh, he may not officially come out and say "vote for this guy," but he damn sure will say "if you vote for this guy you’re not a conservative." Take, for example, Rush’s thoughts on Mike Huckabee:
"Now, my friends, I'm sorry here. I haven't spent a lifetime, and particularly the last 23 years on radio, advocating conservative principles only to throw them away to embrace some candidate. I don't support open borders and amnesty, as does Governor Huckabee. I don't support the release of hundreds of criminals. I don't support repeated increases in taxes. I don't support national health care. I don't care what you call it, whether it's in the name of the children or not. I don't support anti-war rhetoric that sounds as if it was written by Nancy Pelosi. And yet I'm being asked to put all that aside in the midst of a Republican primary. As I've tried to point out countless times, a primary is a time to sort these things out. Now, I, speaking for myself, am not going to put aside my principles to accommodate a single politician or campaign operative, period."
Or John McCain:
"Let me ask the question again I just asked about Senator McCain. If somebody told you that a conservative was someone who supported amnesty for illegal aliens, who supported limiting free political speech (McCain-Feingold) who embraced the ACLU's brief for terrorist detainees getting US constitutional rights. If someone told you that a conservative is someone who opposed tax cuts during the Bush administration, and has recently confirmed he would do it again, what would you say? Most likely you would say, "Hell no! That's not a conservative." Yet I just described to you several of Senator McCain's positions over the years. Now, the idea that he's a great conservative in this race is an affront to conservatives."
Or Ron Paul:
"It's not my job to support these guys and give them a boost. Their job is to go out and get the support. Their job is to go out -- and they're the ones hunting for votes. I'm just going to be honest with you. I don't think Congressman Paul has a snowball's chance."
So, okay, maybe he doesn’t endorse candidates, but he damn well negatively endorses them. And that’s why I think it’s odd that if there’s a potential Reagan candidate, why wouldn’t Rush say "look, this guy is as close as we’re going to get." In Rush’s world, "this guy" by all appearances is Fred Thompson. Rush is Fred’s one and only true cheerleader in the right-wing media. Take this exchange with a caller from yesterday’s show:
"CALLER: Well, anyway, here's the gig. The reason -- the reason I actually called, I think -- I think that Huck is getting held to a fairly high standard compared to the other candidates out there. I started paying attention to Huckabee, oh, back in November, as I'm looking at the field and trying to figure out what am I going to do? I mean, my guy was going to be Fred Thompson and he came in with a big flop, and so I started looking around, and --
RUSH: Wait a second.
CALLER: -- I read -- read an article by Dick Morris. Go ahead.
RUSH: Wait a second. Thompson may come in third in Iowa tomorrow.
CALLER: He may. He may ultimately, but he's
RUSH: Well, that's not flopping.
CALLER: No.
RUSH: In fact, Thompson's running around saying, you know, "I hate campaigning. I want to be president, but I hate campaigning and I'm not going to do it the way everybody else is doing it," and he's trying to appeal to people on the substance of issues with 17-minute videos. He's trying to appeal to people in a way that is different. I don't know if it's going to work, but he may show up in third place, which is not a flop."
This is, charitably, a reach and uncharitably delusional. Currently there are 5 people with a chance at winning the Republican nomination - Romney, Huckabee, McCain, Giuliani, and Thompson. Giuliani didn’t run in Iowa, focusing instead on New Hampshire and South Carolina. So finishing 3rd in a field of 4 candidates should, in fact, be considered a flop. In fact, if leaked info is true, such a finish would all but end Thompson’s run for the Presidency.
And thus we come to why Rush is being so coy about who the Reagan candidate is. If he were to come out and say "hey, I think Thompson is the Reagan guy," and Thompson loses then Rush has to explain why Ronald Reagan couldn’t get his party’s nomination. Fred knows why he couldn’t get the nomination, and that brings us back to the thesis of this little exegesis, Fox News.
"WALLACE: Well, can I just — may I just finish my question? Then you can say what you want. It’s not just the numbers. I want to show you what two conservative commentators had to say about your campaign this week. Here it is.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FRED BARNES, WEEKLY STANDARD: It’s the wrong message and a weak messenger. Other than those two things, it’s a great campaign.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, COLUMNIST: Thompson offers the folksy manner of a consistent conservative, but there’s not anything there. And in the absence of something, he can’t win.
(END VIDEO CLIP) WALLACE: Senator, I suspect you’ve gotten a few bad reviews for movies or T.V. shows in the past, but that’s pretty tough stuff. How do you respond?
THOMPSON: Yes. It’s a lot of the same kind of stuff that I heard when I first ran for office, when I was 20 points down. And fortunately, I wound up 20 points ahead on election night.
This has been a constant mantra of Fox, to tell you the truth.
[Snip]
THOMPSON: But you have the right to put in your one side, and put in the Fox side, and I have the right to respond to it. And thankfully, you’ve given me that opportunity."
The last time someone had the balls to call out Chris Wallaceon the air?
"So you did Fox’s bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me."
Things are not going well for you as a conservative on Fox News when you sound like Bill Clinton (and please forgive any inadvertent equating of Fred Thompson’s milquetoast interview to Bill’s smackdown of Chris Wallace).
So who’s the Fox News candidate? Glad you asked...
Mr. Giuliani’s on-air time on Fox was 25 percent greater than that of his Republican competitor Mitt Romney, and nearly double that of Senator John McCain of Arizona.
It's no secret that Sean Hannity, the conservative Fox News commentator, has helped to raise Rudy Giuliani's profile - but now he's helped the former mayor raise money, too.
In a little noticed event this month, Hannity - co-host of Fox News' "Hannity & Colmes" and host of a popular WABC radio show - introduced the Republican front-runner at a closed-door, $250-per-head fund-raiser Aug. 9 in Cincinnati, campaign officials acknowledge.
Cavuto (to Giuliani): Maybe cancer is just afraid of you.
Extended coverage? Check. Fundraising? Check. Ball massaging and shaft work? Check. Looks like Fox News has their guy. And what possible motive might Fox News have to support Giuliani?
"In 1996, when Mr. Ailes and Rupert Murdoch started Fox News, Mr. Giuliani intervened as mayor after Time Warner cable refused to carry the new station in the city. Time Warner, which had 1.1 million subscribers in the city, said it had room for only one more news station, which it had just awarded to MSNBC.
Fox accused Time Warner of trying to protect CNN, which Time Warner was buying. On Sept. 20, 1996, Mr. Ailes called Mr. Giuliani to ask for help. A flurry of meetings followed, but Time Warner did not budge. Three weeks later, the Giuliani administration said it would broadcast Fox News on a municipal-run station, citing the benefits of offering diverse news sources and protecting the 600 jobs Fox had created."
Quid Pro Quo, Clarisse. Rudy scratched Fox’s back, and now Roger Ailes returns the favor. And thus, to use for the last time one of the clichés retired in 2007, we have the perfect storm of Republican discord. Fox News supports Rudy, Evangelicals support Huckabee, Rush backs Thompson, and moderate Republicans keep their fingers crossed for McCain - and Romney steals a little bit of support from all of them. He’s the one Republican candidate without a core backing, and thus the most likely candidate to win their primary.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens tonight, but whoever the Republican nominee is they come out of this primary fight like Hillary Swank at the end of Million Dollar Baby. Rudy and Romney alienate the Evangelicals, and Huckabee and McCain alienate the dittoheads, and Thompson alienates... the living? The conscious?
So as the h-bombs fly tonight over what the results on our side, just take a moment to remember how much better It is to be us than them.