GOP Leaders Are Laser-Focused On 2010 Elections, For Now

For GOP, No 2012 Frontrunner But No Worries For Now


Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney, the two Republicans taking the most obvious steps toward presidential bids, both skipped the Southern Republican Leadership Conference here this weekend.

And the thousands of Republicans in attendance didn’t seem to miss them.

With GOP leaders and activists viewing the 2010 midterms as a unique, defining chance to stop the hated Obama agenda, the invisible primary appears to be largely on hold, and the presidential field remains wide open.

Only two men are really running so far: Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, thanks to his previous White House run and fundraising capacity, starts off the 2012 race as the nearest thing his party has to a frontrunner, while Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, is working feverishly to boost his profile.

But Republicans - who, this time four years ago, were riveted by the contest between candidates including Romney, former Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist, and Arizona Sen. John McCain - seem in no hurry to focus on the two all-but-declared candidates, or on any of the other figures beginning to position themselves for 2012.

Among the activists, operatives and elected officials gathered for this quadrennial exercise, part political beauty contest and part strategy session, there is little consensus not only who they’d like to nominate but even on which candidates they’d like to see run.

“Don’t get distracted by 2012,” Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told an approving crowd in his speech Saturday.

“People are very excited about our opportunity in ‘10, but more important they think the stakes in ‘10 are incredibly high,” Barbour, who also chairs the Republican Governors Association and could himself seek the presidential nomination in two years, said in an interview. “They think the issues that we’re going to start dealing with in ‘10 really matter to them but also the country’s future. So there is no question, the focus here is almost totally on ’10. If I had my way it would be exclusively on ’10.”

Presidential cycles have in recent years started earlier and earlier, but the race to become the GOP nominee in 2012 seems to be reversing that trend. Less than two years before the first votes are cast in Iowa and New Hampshire, the field generals and their lieutenants in the Republican Party are simply not in a hurry to find a standard-bearer. It’s not for a lack of potential candidates or energy in the party ranks — the GOP has clearly emerged from its Bush-era funk and is confident their string of statewide wins since last November portends good things for this fall.

But it seems highly unlikely that there will be any move to coalesce behind a single figure in the fashion of, for example, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush in 1999.

That’s in part because the various contenders have some elements that seem attractive but no one offers such a complete package that they’re standing out from an unsettled field. Take the two leaders in many early polls: Grassroots activists adore Sarah Palin and nobody else comes close to the former Alaska governor's own-the-room star wattage.

But party leaders, and even some of her rank-and-file fans, have grave doubts about her command of the issues and viability. Romney is just the opposite – he’s unquestionably competent, but a sober Mr. Fix-It isn’t exactly the order of the day at a time when many in the party feel the same sort of mad-as-hell outrage that Palin seems to embody.

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At the core of the 2012 apathy is a larger and more important point about the current mood among conservatives: Republican Party activists have such fear of President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority’s policies that they are intensely focused on the present.

It is, of course, a familiar line, trotted out predictably by politicians at such party confabs as this, that the only election that matters is the next one.

But the GOP leaders stressing the mid-terms here aren’t just doing it to downplay their own ambitions and keep activists focused on the near-term. They’re also doing it because they don’t want to get cross-wise with a base that truly believes, with a palpable urgency, that America as they know it hangs in the balance of whatever the next election is.

In January, that was the special Senate election in Massachusetts, into which poured vast amounts of conservative money and manpower. And now it means this November’s contests.

Using one sports metaphor after another, GOP politicians made that point in New Orleans. Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), a member of the House leadership who is mulling a 2012 run, explained Saturday in his speech how Indiana’s Butler University made its Cinderella run through this year’s NCAA basketball tournament.

“We have just got to focus on the next possession,” Pence said, drawing rousing applause from the floor.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry invoked Big 12 college football, and counseled “keeping the team focused on the game at hand.”

In interviews, top GOP leaders explained why the party was so fixated on the here and now.

“I do think there’s a sense among voters and activists out there that these are important times for our country’s future,” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal in an interview. “That this is greater than just the recession, it’s greater than one health care bill. There are some fundamental decisions we have to make as a country.”

The question, said Jindal, is this: “Do we want to become more like Europe, with higher levels of spending which means higher levels of taxes which means larger, more intrusive government programs or are we going to take back a more limited government? That’s why I think [the moment] is greater than any political party, or movement or particular leader or set of speakers.”

In speaking to a small breakfast of top GOP donors Saturday morning, Barbour urged the moneymen against looking beyond this fall with a folksy aphorism he credited to FedEx CEO and Mississippi native Fred Smith: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

Barbour did his part, as aides made sure to point out, by requesting his name not be placed on the conference’s straw poll ballot.

He wasn’t the only one who got the message: Jindal and Perry also stayed off the ballot.

And, perhaps most telling, the most implicit mention of the 2012 contest during the slew of speeches over the three days may have been when Jindal used his chance on stage Friday to flatly declare he would not be seeking the nomination.

Among party operatives - the types who, like their candidate clients, do think about the next presidential contest but who, unlike their clients, will actually talk about the race - the GOP’s revival at the polls and Obama’s descent into the ranks of political mortals has created a what-me-worry feeling about the White House campaign.

Unlike at the last SRLC in 2006 when the party was consumed with determining who would succeed Bush and what the future direction of a majority party grappling with an unpopular war would be, now party strategists are happy to wait until after what they expect will be a smashing November to let the field take shape.

“Somebody will emerge - somebody we’re not talking about now or who does not want to be talked about now,” said GOP veteran Mary Matalin, following her kick-off address at the conference.

Matalin recalled her own initial favorite - and one of the most-talked-about potential candidates this time four years ago—to make the case for why it makes sense for White House prospects to avoid the spotlight.

“Look at what happened to poor George Allen,” she said, alluding to the former Virginia senator who made little secret of his presidential ambitions only to lose his own re-election in 2006. “He got a big target put on his back. If I were thinking about 2012 seriously, I would lay low.”

But Matalin, who worked for both Presidents Bush, said that the only certainty about the next presidential race is there will be no obvious frontrunner who captures the nomination thanks only to the party’s tradition of political primogeniture.

“Who’s in line? There is nobody in line,” she said.

Jindal said the current levels of grassroots energy will also preempt any crowning of a favored candidate.

“They don’t want to be told who to vote for,” the governor said, referring to the party foot soldiers. “This isn’t going to be a pre-ordained election. There is this reputation in the Republican Party that you wait your turn and then when it’s your turn, you run. I think the voters are saying we want to make the decision, this is democracy, we’ll decide who we want to represent us and lead us.”

“The activists would resist any attempt from party leaders or anybody else to try to pre-ordain a process or a pick,” he added.

The expectation among Republicans is that field will grow - and will include names who haven’t previously been considered.

“Every cycle that happens, there is a surprise,” said Liz Cheney following her own address to the conference.

Or, as Jindal put it: “Who would have thought a year into President Bush’s second term, that Sen. Obama would be the next president of the United States?”


Sources: Politico, MSNBC