Strategy

What follows may be akin to one of those crazy ideas Dick Morris used to come up with in the Clinton White House, only one in ten of which turned out to be workable -- but when they worked, oh man, did they work.

The key fact that sticks out in my mind about Doug Hoffman's incredible momentum in NY-23 is that his election would not have been possible had he been the Republican nominee. The fact that we may be about to elect a non-squish from New York has everything to do with the fact that he is running as a third-party independent, and not a Republican (even if the Conservative Party is an auxiliary of the Republicans in most elections).

Hoffman as a Republican would have been too obvious a target and the subject of a relentless barrage of negative TV, websites, mail, and phones branding him as outside the mainstream, anti-choice, anti-worker, etc. But politically, Hoffman has managed to avoid all that until five days out, when it's now clear he's the frontrunner. And as Chris Cillizza points out this morning, Hoffman's success in the polls is built on the back among strong support among independents and (primarily) not Republican regulars disgusted at Scozzafava.

This got me thinking: How many points is an Independent party label worth, assuming you're able to vie for Republican votes in a general election? 5? 10? We know that in races with a plausible third party, that candidate automatically tends to earn more independent and moderate support even if they are ideologically indistinguishable from a Republican (Hoffman) or a Democrat (Chris Daggett in New Jersey).

We also know from Daggett's run in a strong-party, machine state that American politics is entering a phase of third party strength which we last saw in the early '90s with Ross Perot and culminating in the Republican Revolution of '94.

This led me to tweet the following this morning:

Brainstorm: what if Republicans were to withdraw from a series of hot Congressional races and run as conservative independents a la #ny23?

I am not one to believe that a situation exactly like Hoffman's is recreatable across the spectrum. Certainly, we would not want to have to take out every slightly wobbly Republican nominee (Scozzafava's problem was that she was very wobbly) with a third party conservative. With 435 House races on the ballot in 2010, the conservative movement won't have the energy to concentrate its Death Star gamma ray on hapless local establishments in every district.

But what if it were to happen peacefully? Or as a concerted strategy to gain votes?

What if you were to have promising Republican candidates running in Democratic-lean seats say, a few months out from the election, "Let me tell you something. I'm just as sick and tired of the Republicans as I am of the Democrats. So, from this moment forward, I'm running as a common-sense, Independent conservative for Congress."

From one perspective, this would not be helpful to efforts to tie the Republican brand to a broader sense of popular disgust at the Obama/Pelosi overreach. On the other hand, it might be a way for conservatives to invade the center, and thus control the high ground politically.

If you're a party person, don't dismiss this just yet. Say you're the NRCC and you haven't found a good recruit against a vulnerable House Democrat. Say the Republican nominee is a joke, or the incumbent is unopposed. Three months out, you go to your star recruit who turned you down a year ago and ask him to run as an independent. It's a three month campaign as opposed to an 18-month campaign. They don't have to quit their law practice or small business. They enter in the last few miles of the race, and you put serious pressure on the joke nominee to step aside, or put out word through local media and talk radio that this is the guy.

Now, I know one could raise myriad issues here. Ballot access for one. The reflexive aversion to third parties. The relative infrequency of unchallenged vulnerable Democrats, especially because 2010 won't be 2008 or 2006. And the prospect of bloody intra-party battles after the nomination has been settled.

All of these risks are arrayed against a few salient facts. First, the rising disgust at incumbent politicians that will play out over the next couple of years, accompanied by a "pox on both your houses" sentiment. Second, a proven history of entire party blocs picking up and moving to third parties when they need to (NY-23, or Joe Lieberman's 2006 re-election). There are two possibilities for an ideological third party candidate -- they can either flop and pose no serious threat (which happens the vast majority of the time because the candidates are nobodies) or dominate (if they are credible).

In a handful of races, perhaps in places where we can't win with the Republican label alone, it might be more useful for the general election to be a strong Independent versus a Democrat rather than a Republican versus a Democrat. At one extreme of the Cook PVI, let's stipulate that the general election against Charlie Rangel was waged with a Puerto Rican small business owner running on the No More Corrupt Politicians Party line with behind the scenes, logistical support from the GOP. At a minimum, that person would stand a better chance than a Republican in that district.

I'm a strong party guy, but I also believe in Sun Tzu's maxim that you do the unexpected to throw your opponent off balance. Strategically unleashing a swarm of conservative independents may be one such strategy for 2010.

If the public option passes in some form, thank the liberal blogosphere who put pressure on Democratic members of Congress to publicly threaten to derail health care reform if it wasn't included in the final bill.

The specter of Democrats reverse-filibustering their own President's plan is what has kept the public option alive, even if one could argue that "alive" is akin to a persistent vegetative state.

Contrast this to yes-man approach of the Congressional GOP in the early Bush years, and I personally find a lot to like about the Democratic model of the Congressional party serving as a sort of whip against the political expediency that will be the norm in any White House.

In 2005, I thought it would have been a good idea for conservative Republican members to publicly threaten to oppose any Social Security bill that did not include private accounts. There were multiple problems with this, not the least of which that the Congressional leadership was too spineless to bring a bill out of committee. But another was that conservatives in the House and Senate, with no strategic prodding or muscle in the blogosphere and the activist groups, never made the threat that would have rendered a "compromise" bill dead on arrival.

How groups like Open Left and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee are taking on the role of legislative strategy is very smart, and something we can learn from. How the right has fueled the tea party movement to feed into a sense of backlash in the country about the left's total control of government is also very smart, and may have the last laugh in 2010, but will it be enough to deal with the immediate task at hand, derailing a government takeover of health care? I'm not so sure.

Of course, this could all blow up in their faces. Having destroyed any possiblity of compromise, or at least defined "compromise" as something very, very close to an absolutist-left position on health care, the left-blogosphere has ensured that the only alternative to doing nothing at all is a very leftist final bill. And if that's the choice, doing nothing becomes a much, much more palatable option for the Blue Dogs. I'm personally unsure as to how they thread the needle of getting a public option passed with 60 votes.  

Still, it's valuable to understand what the left is doing and how it differs from the Congressional GOP "roll over" strategy on White House initiatives in the Bush years, in which we either actively collaborated on bad bills (Medicare Part D) or didn't make a serious push to make the good bills (tax cuts, Social Security) even stronger.

Whatever the outcome of the health care saga, it seems safe to conclude that the public option is dead. It is worth analyzing its impending demise for what it teaches us about American attitudes towards government, and how political battles are won.

The key fact here is that the public option is not some long-standing, highly pedigreed idea engrained in the liberal psyche, in the way that school choice or private Social Security accounts have been for the intellectual right. In fact, the idea of a public option is very new. It was first raised in 2007 by Berkeley economist Jacob Hacker, and popularized as a device that would "someday magically turn into single payer."

Continues Mark Schmitt at TAPPED:

Following Edwards' lead, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton picked up on the public option compromise. So what we have is Jacob Hacker's policy idea, but largely Hickey and Health Care for America Now's political strategy. It was a real high-wire act -- to convince the single-payer advocates, who were the only engaged health care constituency on the left, that they could live with the public option as a kind of stealth single-payer, thus transferring their energy and enthusiasm to this alternative. It had a very positive political effect: It got all the candidates except Kucinich onto basically the same health reform structure, unlike in 1992, when every Democrat had his or her own gimmick. And the public option/insurance exchange structure was ambitious.

The public option is an idea that was born, literally, in the last Presidential campaign. Even so, it was little discussed in 2008, when the main bone of contention was Hillary's individual mandate to purchase health insurance. A Google News search from the height of the Hillary-Obama primary battle shows two health care-related mentions of the "public option" in January 2008, zero in February, and two in March, one in April, and two in May and June.

That the public option was new and unfamiliar made it easily characterized as a ploy to introduce single-payer in miniature, which it was self-transparently was in the eyes of its originators.

Indeed, reading through the founding documents of the public option is about as damning as if one got ahold of a secret dossier of Milton Friedman's proclaiming school vouchers a necessary "compromise" that would eventually usher in the death of public education in America.

So, the public option was not serioiusly discussed in 2008. It was never seen as central to Democratic demands for health care until mid-2009. Since the failure of Hillarycare, Democrats have continually stressed that they would get to universal coverage by regulating and by building on the existing system. Indeed, for all that Hillarycare was being pilloried as socialized medicine, not even it contained as overt a nod to single-payer as a government-run health care "option."

Exactly like the Social Security fight in 2005, liberals hoped that by injecting more government into the health care system they could change the political culture, just as conservatives hoped private accounts would awaken more of us to the rich abundance of the free market.

However, as the economic crisis showed, the political system is only designed to tolerate sudden changes to America's economic model in a crisis atmosphere. We've seen more than a good bit of economic nationalization in recent years/months, but only as a response to a perceived crisis. Could health care in America be nationalized? Sure -- if the pandemic flu struck the United States and was well on its way to killing millions of Americans and private institutions were judged inadequate -- and even then, political leaders would caution that it was a temporary measure. Welcome to the "bailout" school of health care reform.

The problem for Obama is that after months of "crisis" after "crisis", the welcome mat has worn thin. Not unexpectedly, "emergency" moves toward socialism in the auto and financial sectors have sidelined elective moves towards the same in health care.

I am a strong proponent of the idea that candidate recruitment is the ultimate futures market of elections. Collectively, the decisions made by candidates on both sides tell a lot about where politicos on the ground see the political environment headed in the next year to 18 months. It was not surprising that in 2006 and especially in 2008, candidate recruitment on our side sucked wind. Only one Senate race -- Louisiana -- was even remotely considered a Republican pickup opportunity in '08.

For 2010, the story is different. We are by and large getting our top-tier recruits in Senate races, and in more and more House races. And the White House is not getting theirs. The bumper crop of good candidates we had in the 2002 and 2004 cycles appears to have returned. 

Though it's early -- I don't think people thought 1994 could be a really big year until at least February of that year -- I do think we have to prepare for the idea that 2010 could be a big, big year that could put us back within striking distance in both the Senate and the House. Normally, I wouldn't want to raise expectations -- but going back to that candidate recruitment futures thing: if you are remotely thinking of running for office in the next few years, 2010 could be your best shot, and here's why:

• The horrendous 2006 and 2008 cycles have depressed Republican totals in Congress to far below the historical mean. Though the fact that there were two successive 20+ seat losses in the House and 5+ seat losses in the Senate in the House is historically unique,  collectively they equal one 1980 or 1994-style wipeout -- after which Democrats finally began to recover.
• The unique confluence of youth and African American turnout for Obama padded vote totals for Congressional Democrats by about 4 points -- and in a midterm -- I'm sorry -- those votes won't be there. We saw this pretty clearly in the Georgia Senate runoff. In 2012, however, those voters might be back -- making 2010 an opportune moment for a promising Congressional challenger to gain a foothold.
• The Democrats are now clearly responsible for everything, and trying to blame Bush and the GOP wears thinner and thinner by the day. Even if the economy recovers somewhat, and with massive job losses still on the horizon, I don't see people feeling that recovery, let's remember that the economy was in a clear recovery by 1994 but that didn't help Clinton and Democrats.

On a micro-tactical level, Obama may be taking great pains to avoid Clinton's fate on health care, as Ezra Klein details in Sunday's Washington Post, but the broader optics are starting to converge for Obama and Clinton: young, energetic change agents who are being proven ineffective, overexposed, and prone to ADD (Clinton held 38 press conferences his first year, drawing this comparison to Obama's first few days in office).

In many ways, the proving ground for this hypothesis won't be Congress, but the states. There we have 50 distinct political cultures than run in parallel to Washington. And, as Michael Barone notes, the mood there seems to point in the direction of belt-tightening and more humble government, not grandiose new infrastructure or health care schemes.

Jon Henke is obviously a more astute analyst than moi, so I post this with some angst. But I think he is thinking along the lines of French military strategists after World War I,

As historians recall, France was bled dry from fighting a trench war deep in its own terrain. So apres guerre the French decided to build high tech fortifications-- the Maginot Line--along their frontier to cause the war to be fought on the German side of the border and on  French terms.

By 1940, of course, the Me 109 and the Stuka proved to be well able to fly over fortifications and destroy French forces from the air. Oops.

I fear we may be doing to same thing by trying a new and improved strategy to deal with "climate change".  Both the ambient and political climate may not be what we expect.

First, there are two central flaws with the Republicans becoming the champions of carbon taxation. First, it muddles the party's anti-tax message. It's easily trumped politically by the advocacy of economically delusional class warfare.  Instead of arguing taxes in general ought to be reduced or kept from rising, we are left bargaining over what taxes to raise. Is that an argument that is going to win elections?   

Secondly, if the carbon tax works it will generate progressively less revenue. Since I think the "starve the beast" strategy has pretty well been proved to be a failure in practice (expecting a long term libertarian control for Congress is daft) the result will be progressively higher deficits and demands to raise other taxes. While payroll or sales taxes do penalize "good" activity, they also tend to mirror the overall economy. A carbon tax intended to readjust the economy to lower carbon use will inevtiably reduce its own revenue and plants the seed to bring back other taxes.

That said, I'd rather have the efficient mechanism of a carbon tax than the crony capitalism of cap & trade. But I think we ought to reconsider whether either is inevitble.

I'm a skeptic on global warming, not a denier, but the empirical observable information in the northern US this year puts a real dent in the alarmist camp.  We have yet to see 90 degree weather in CT all summer, and this seems to be the case as well in MN. 

I'm not sure hitching our political wagon to getting huge heat waves in populated areas is so wise.   It's "An Inconvenient Truth" the salience of this issue depends on observable episodes of warm weather.

I also think the based on my read, the salience of the "climate change" issue is focused on a) younger and b) better educated voters.  I suppose a long run argument can be made to address this issue, but in 2010 we are going to be dealing with an electorate which is going to skew older.  Are we better off using limited time and resources talking to 50 year old people who are highly likely to vote than 20 year old voters who may have simply cast an Obama-mania  vote in '08? 

It may be true that the "chattering classes" may think a response on this issue is essential ( see David Cameron, UK) but the cold hard truth is we've already lost virtually every one of the high end House seats where this issue matters (WA 8 and IL 10 the visible exceptions). The low hanging fruit for Republicans in 2010 is likely to be in blue collar places like IN 9 and OH 16 where the cost is obvious and the reward speculative for enviromental legislation.

Now how are the Democrats reponding? And doesn't that say something.

My Congressman, Chris Murphy, who holds a swing seat in a blue state, voted for Waxman-Markey. And how did he justify his vote? Based on the alleged argument the bill would wean America from foreign sources of energy and the cost of inaction was too high. (hmm, open up ANWR, naw!)

As the CT Republican State Chairman pointed out in his weekly e-newsletter.     

But here is the kicker - no where in this entire letter is global warming mentioned or the need to save the polar bears or the quality of our air. In it he simply says, we must rush to placing the development of a new whole technology in the hands of the government, to decide, through taxes, who can use what fuel for what purpose. If it doesn't work out, well, at least Uncle Sam tried.

(IM: Guess it's now not so much fun being Henry Waxman's towel boy, Chris.)

  I think that Democrats have decided that the Global Warming issue is a stone dead loser in the face of the Great Recession. (Yes, the salience of the environmental issue moves in lockstep with the economic cycle).Much like the antiwar movement, this was a useful cudgel against the eveeeel Republicans, but now they are quickly losing their desire to actually have to walk the walk on taxing the crap out of everyone to "save the planet".  Looking at the climate issue through the prism of: a) the 2006 election when the economy was prosperous; or b): the 2008 election with its unusually high youth vote, may just cause us to fight the "last war"; now that we are going to be dealing with the grim economic conditions expected for 2010 and 2012.  Given our opponents were astute enough to win the last two elections, why would we benefit from picking up an unpopular issue they are now either walking or running away from? 

In an op-ed published in Time last month, Republican political consultant Mike Murphy wrote, "[it] was a huge shock to the GOP when Barack Obama won Republican Indiana last year. The bigger news was how he did it. Latino voters delivered the state. Exit polls showed that they provided Obama with a margin of more than 58,000 votes in a state he carried by a slim 26,000 votes. That's right, GOP, you've entered a brave new world ruled by Latino Hoosiers, and you're losing."

I was on the ground in Indiana during much of the 2008 election campaigns working as an Organizing Fellow on the Latino Steering Committee for then-Senator Barack Obama's Campaign for Change in East Chicago. When I began work there in July, many Latino voters were undecided, having supported Hillary Clinton during the long, dramatic Democratic Primary that had opened many wounds.

What persuaded many East Chicago Latinos whom I met to ultimately vote for Obama in '08 was that they felt vilified by the Republican Primary's chest-thumping over immigration reform -- led by then-Congressman Tom Tancredo.  East Chicago's Latinos also shared the increasingly widespread disillusionment with the GOP over the Bush administration's two terms in the Oval Office, terms that left a disproportionately high number of Latinos from places like East Chicago dead on battlefields in the Middle East. These were but two of the many, many grievances East Chicago Latinos had that Republican candidates failed to effectively address during the campaign, if they addressed them at all.  

So...why didn't Republican candidates immediately move to evaluate, engage and inspire Latino voters in the aftermath of then-Senator Clinton's withdrawal?  This was a question I asked my fellow "Hopemongers" throughout the campaign.  The most common response I got was that Republican campaigns were catering to ideologues' anti-immigration bravado.  I found this response to be implausible in that it called into question the competence of the Republican Party's strategists, who horsewhipped their Democratic counterparts through most of the last three decades of American politics.  Or to put it particularly, many foul political qualities are now synonymous with Karl Rove's name; incompetence is not one of them.  

A more plausible variant of the "anti-immigration bravado" responses that were occasionally offered was that anti-immigrant ideologues were indispensable in the existing Republican campaign finance structures; but there is little evidence to support this claim.  

Whatever the reason the GOP chose to ignore (and in many cases, offend) the Latino vote, without it, the party's future would appear to be a series of increasingly humiliating election losses.  According to research done by the Pew Hispanic Center, "Hispanics now make up 22% of all children under the age of 18 in the United States -- up from 9% in 1980."  And the majority of these children [read: future voters] are the U.S. born offspring of immigrants.  One can thus surmise that the current and future states of the American electorate is one in which immigration will not be a vague historical statement of "uniqueness", but a flesh and blood reality of a vast, rapidly growing demographic of potential voters.  To continue to vilify the "illegal aliens" as "criminals" is just the sort of messaging that could create at least one generation of Latino voters with a deep-seated tendency to vote for the Democratic Party's candidates similar to the unanimity Ronald Reagan inspired among Evangelical Christians for the Republican Party.  The difference here is that Evangelicals were a noisy fringe of the overall demographic, whereas Latinos are poised to someday replace Caucasians as the majority demographic in the United States.

Murphy suggests that "[a] smart GOP would be deeply in the microloan and free-English-lessons business in immigrant communities," and that it would also avoid seeking the "cheap applause" of the anti-immigration right.  To Murphy, "cheap" is a quantified word.  He "made a career out of counting votes" and thus recognizes that a serious strategic approach to the GOP's future must accept that the electoral value of noisy anti-immigration posturing is plummeting at a rate roughly commensurate with its ability to win national elections. 

Republican Party strategists should take to heart the extreme sensitivity in the media during this week's Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor to any remark that can be spun into an overall ethnic-, "race-" and gender-related diatribe by Republican lawmakers (and therefore, the Republican Party) against all Latinas (and therefore, all Latinos).  This should come as no surprise to today's GOP strategists, as it was their predecessors who perfected the tactics that are now used against them. 

But Obama's in the White House now, and earlier this year the New York Times reported that "comprehensive immigration legislation, including a plan to make legal status possible for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, would be a priority in [President Obama's] first year in office."  While I have my doubts about just how much of a first year priority comprehensive immigration reform will prove to be, it will be a priority during President Obama's first term; and when comprehensive immigration reform happens, the party that calls it amnesty will fare far worse on election day than the one that supports it as necessary, justice, emancipation, etc.  However it's fed to the media, behind closed doors, what Mike Murphy's vote-counting counterparts in the Democratic Party see in comprehensive immigration reform is 12 million potential votes.

Unless the Republicans prefer losing successive elections by increasingly wide margins, they should encourage Republican lawmakers to stand with President Obama on comprehensive immigration reform.  I know.  I know.  But they broke the law!  They steal 'merican jobs!  They don't even speak English! etc.  The fact remains that a most of them are already us, as in We the People, as in citizens with votes to cast.  And many more of them will be of voting age or naturalized into the electoral processes very soon.  Republicans can't prevent this, and Democrat lawmakers are happy to let a Republican colleague look like a "racist" hillbilly asshole for interrupting a Supreme Court nominee during her confirmation hearing.

Therefore, Republicans should go out of their way to make comprehensive immigration reform as painless as possible.  Obama has mentioned having illegal immigrants pay a fine, as criminals.  Republicans on Capitol Hill could oppose this aspect of the reform bill as a show of good faith to the demographic at the heart of their landslide losses last fall.  Furthermore, Republican Party messaging has always revolved around the rhetoric of the "bootstraps" party of self-determination, manifest destiny, and the importance of family.  Well, these are the very principles that brought successive generations of Latino immigrants to the United States. 

Finally, when their man from Oklahoma, Senator Tom Coburn, interrupts a Supreme Court nominee by attempting to get on television with an innocuous "You'll have lots of 'splainin' to do," call him on it.  Blog, tweet, phone, email, etc. to let him know that interrupting a Supreme Court nominee with a wisecrack--any wisecrack--is not what he's paid to do during a Supreme Court nomination hearing, especially a wisecrack Time can easily interpret as "invoking a phrase familiar to fans of the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy, on which Lucy's long-suffering husband Ricky Ricardo (Cuban-American Desi Arnaz in real life) would often utter the refrain in exasperation at his zany wife's antics."  But before any of this can happen, Republicans must first recognize that the rise of the Latino voter is as inevitable as a naturalization process for the suspected twelve million undocumented immigrants in the United States.  Failing to do so is to insist upon the Republican Party's indefinite political irrelevance.

Republicans have fought cap and trade wrong, and they're going to lose because of it.  If the bill passes, they've lost a policy fight; if the bill fails, Republicans will not get credit for lower prices, but they will be blamed (fairly or not) for obstructing progress on environmental problems.

Let's stipulate a few political realities: (a) the public generally agrees that something must be done about climate change, (b) cap-and-trade is expensive, complicated, inefficient, unpopular, subject to industry gaming and political manipulation, (c) cap and trade is widely regarded (including by environmentalists) as inferior to a carbon tax, but (d) Democrats are pushing for cap and trade anyway, because it is "politically possible."

What should Republicans do instead?  Propose a carbon tax. 

But, instead of a straight tax increase (as Democrats want), Republican should propose a carbon tax that replaces the payroll tax.   That is revenue neutral, meaning there is no total tax increase.

There are many reasons this works.

• Environment: Republicans would be offering the most pro-environment solution to climate change. 
• Cost: A Carbon-for-Payroll tax would address the climate change problem without imposing any additional tax on Americans (unlike cap and trade).
• Externalities: The payroll tax disincentivizes positive externalities - labor and employment.  The carbon tax disincentives negative externalities - congestion, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions/climate change, dependence on foreign oil, money sent to tyrants and enemies, foreign debt, the trade deficit, price volatility.
• Tangibility: A carbon tax is a consumption tax (e.g., a gas tax), which consumers feel in a tangible way and can adjust behavior to optimize their exposure to the tax. Payroll taxes is money they never see, so the cost is much less noticed.  The more sensitive the public is to the price they're paying for government, the more rational they will be about government spending.

Finally, the key: The idea of swapping the payroll tax for a carbon tax was proposed by....Al Gore.  So you've got a coalition composed of environmentalists, foreign policy hawks, the Chamber of Commerce (and businesses in general), Exxon, the auto industry and Republicans who want to stop higher taxes.

Republicans should be offering The Al Gore Amendment to every piece of energy/environment legislation in sight.  And if Democrats oppose it, then the burder is on Democrats to explain why they refuse to support the most pro-environment and pro-economic growth proposal to address climate change.

That's good policy and good politics.

At about this time every three months, we have to endure the typical quarterly fundraising roundups. This one from The Hill shows the problem with the genre, headlined "FEC reports show Crist the man to beat in Florida." This in response to Crist raising an eye-popping $4.3 million in the 2nd quarter, against Marco Rubio's $340,000.

Crist may be a slight favorite in the Republican primary, but money will have nothing to do with why.

I bang this drum pretty often, but ask presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney how far early, high dollar bundler support got them. Or Virginia Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe on how much a 10-to-1 cash advantage is worth.

Underfunded candidates like Rubio don't need more money now. The need an argument. A bulletproof argument from a plausible candidate is worth tens of millions of dollars in any primary, overwhelming a financial advantage of any magnitude. While frontrunners confuse high-dollar fundraising for actual grassroots support, a conclusion that headlines like The Hill's do nothing to discourage, smart underdogs would do right to focus on building an impregnable message advantage. Because that's the part that counts for 90% in any electoral victory.

John McCain's campaign was defunct and broke at this point in the race, without money to pay a pollster. Mike Huckabee had no money. Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani spent $60 million plus to win a single delegate, attending fundraisers when he should have been in New Hampshire. A leading Republican strategist recently told me that he wonders whether money doesn't wind up making our campaigns worse while the lack of money makes them better and more focused. Look at McCain with no money, vs. McCain with money (pre-implosion and general election).

Crist's fundraising aside, he's still a relatively popular governor with 100% name ID, and so still the "man to beat." But fundraising trophies don't make it so. Complacency is his biggest enemy.

Crist's campaign is the antithesis of Rebuildness. Of Crist's $4.3 million how much was online? How much came from donations of $100 or less? How many people have signed up on his e-mail list since he announced? How many of his supporters would crawl on glass to see him win?

In running a campaign, that latter kind of support is the kind I want, and I think Rubio has it.

And not only that, but he's a particularly strong and plausible kind of grassroots candidate. He's no Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul. Had Crist not stepped in, he'd be considered a top recruit and a rising star. Rubio would easily beat Kendrick Meek in a general election.

We have two uniquely talented people running for Senate in a seat we will probably hold in Florida. Instead of elbowing one aside, we should be grabbing the popcorn and watching this one go the distance.

The primary will be close. Among voters who know both, Crist and Rubio are tied. Crist's money will not buy him more name ID or goodwill; only his bully pulpit as Governor can do that, and he's surrendering it. Meanwhile, Rubio's talents as a candidate, his crossover potential, and his appeal to grassroots conservatives mean he has nowhere to go but up. I still think Crist narrowly wins absent a massive screwup, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Recent elections have not been kind to moneyed "frontrunners."

An essay on how to prevail in arguments against the Left, entitled "The Right Way to Argue: How Conservatives Can Prevail in On-Line Debate" can be found at  http://liberty-resource-center.blogspot.com

When the #AllBarackChannel realizes something is going wrong, it's probably time to pay attention:

Obama's spending proposals and a record-breaking national debt inherited from President Bush that is projected to grow could be Obama's political Achilles heels, and one reason he often underlines fiscal prudence as a top priority.

The percentage of people in a Pew Research Center poll out today who expressed approval for the way Obama is handling the economy slipped to 52 percent from 60 percent in April.

Recent NBC/Wall Street Journal and CBS/New York Times polls showed that nearly six in 10 people said the Obama administration is not doing enough to reduce the deficit, and the Pew poll showed about the same percentage disapprove of the government spending billions to keep General Motors and Chrysler in business.

"They worry that government is going to be too involved in the economy and the everyday lives of the American people," said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

Obama faces this conundrum: while the country voted resoundingly for a political change from George W. Bush, Obama continues to preside over a country that is fundamentally conservative not simply in the center-right political sense, but in its skepticism of big structural changes to the basic nature of the economy.

When hopeandchange is inextricably tied to disturbing and unsettling changes like auto nationalization and mountains of new debt, the whole "change" mantra tends to lose its luster.

The fear right now is not that the government will do too little, but that it will do too much. Popular resistance to any action to support the domestic auto industry runs counter to the natural political instinct to "do something" to help the little guy keep his job. The American people are way out ahead of Obama and the Republicans because of a basic sense that nationalizing industry is just not something we do here in America, not even temporarily. This is that basic don't-rock-the-boat mentality speaking, I think.

Furthermore, what if health care is effectively tied in to this? The proposition that the President is going to do for health care what he's doing for the auto industry seems pretty toxic, and has a kernel of plausibility, in that new government-owned entitites are springing up all over the place competing in the private market. It's not a huge narrative leap to suggest that neither the government standing behind your new muffler nor it competing in the health insurance market are particularly well-advised ideas.

It is here that I think the seeds of a Republican political recovery in 2010 are born. Republicans don't need to convince the electorate that Obama is the second coming of Karl Marx. They need merely to establish that if one has any doubt that the stimulus, or Government Motors, or health care will work out exactly as planned, the only prudent thing is to vote Republican as a hedge. There has been sweeping economic change these last few months, some of it created by the previous Administration, and little of it good. Sorting out the mess will require a huge national effort, not just one party. And times of sweeping change require accountability, not its complete absence.