His heart having said “no”, Mike Huckabee is out of the 2012 Presidential race, joining six billion other human beings and leaving only – what, half a billion? – potential Republican nominees. (BTW, I’m declaring my non-candidacy, too.)
I still think that it’s too early to be picking contenders for an election that’s a year and a half away – even worse than the French, who have a July filing deadline for a contest whose first round will take place on April 22, 2012. Nonetheless, I’m going to offer two thoughts.
Number one is that, while any plausible Republican candidate will be better than the hapless Obama, what the country urgently needs is a capable manager. Conservatism is part of capability, naturally; it isn’t the whole. For the moment, I’m putting on the lower shelf all those prospects who have never run anything bigger than their own campaigns. It’s not inconceivable that Michele Bachmann or Jim DeMint has fantastic governing talents. I’d rather not bet the country on it. This is the cycle to look closely at governors and businessmen, not guys/gals with beautiful ideas and no experience implementing them.
Number two is an interesting result I noticed in what is, concededly, an unscientific Internet straw poll. An outfit called “The Liberty Lab” (never heard of them before) bombards my e-inbox with requests to vote in their poll. You’ve probably gotten those solicitations, too (sent via proxies – Red State, Human Events, etc.). It looks like they draw a large response, no doubt heavily weighted to people ranging from myself rightward. Their methodology is a series of random one-to-one matchups among 30 imaginable candidates: Do you prefer Newt Gingrich or Jeb Bush, Jon Huntsman or Paul Ryan, Herman Cain or Donald Trump, George Pataki or Rand Paul, Ron Paul or Hillary Clinton (aarggh! – that was one of my dichotomies), and so on. They then record each prospect’s won-lost percentage.
At the moment when I captured the results (approximately 8:00 p.m. CDT this evening), the top seven places were occupied by figures who either won’t run or have no hope: Paul Ryan (77%), Chris Christie (76%), Michele Bachmann (73%), Jim DeMint (71%), Allen West (68%), Scott Walker (68%), Sarah Palin (67%). Then came, at 66%, Tim Pawlenty, the guy whom polls put in the low single digits. The next best performer among real candidates was Newt ("Win the Future") Gingrich (59%). Figures like Rick Santorum (56%), Mitch Daniels (53%), Ron Paul (47% – amazing that the Paulites haven’t figured out how to spam this poll), Gary Johnson (45%), Mitt Romney (43%), Donald Trump (42%), Jon Huntsman (38%) and Barack Obama (2%, showing that two percent of any group is for anything) trailed behind.
Governor Pawlenty is the only “top-tier” candidate already seeking the GOP nomination, and the principal effect of his efforts so far has been to move him closer to the also-rans. Is it possible that he isn’t quite so weak as he looks?
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