Romney will be the Republican nominee

Right now the four possible Republican candidates for President are Romney, Gingrich, Ron Paul and trailing the pack, Rick Perry. But the recent announcement that Gingrich and Perry failed to qualify for the very significant Virginia primary to be held March 6, 2012 pretty much establishes that Romney is going to be the nominee. Let's look at Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick perry individually.

Ron Paul

Ron Paul has a good chance to win the Iowa caucuses according to Nate Silver. But he isn't likely to be able to build on that relatively strong showing in Iowa. His support is quite strong, but very narrow. Nate estimates that at the very best Ron Paul might be able to get about one-third of the Republican votes.

Nate bases his opinion on a series of polls. But his analysis comes from before the Republican establishment really started going after Ron Paul because he was beginning to appear to be a real threat to Romney. The growing chorus quoting Ron Paul's racist writings in his 1980's and 1990's news letters will lower these numbers. So will wider distribution of his views regarding pulling American troops back to the American shores and entering a new period of American isolationism.

Ron Paul's fervant supporters will keep him in the Republican nomination process until it ends, but I think Nate Silver's estimate as high as one-third of Republican voters is highly optomistic.

Newt Gingrich

The next candidate to look at is Newt Gingrich. Newt's disorganization has jumped up to bite him big time. He has failed to qualify for the Virginia Primary which is to be held on Super Tuesday March 6, 2012. His campaign needed signatures from 10,000 registered voters, including 400 from each of the states 11 Congressional Districts. The Newt campaign could not organize itself well enough to achieve a relatively small admininstrative requirement by the deadline. This failure demonstrates what most observers already recognize - Newt is horribly disorganized.

It will be interesting to see if Newt's secretive backers and their Super Pacs who have funded Newt's recent rise from obscurity to being considered a viable candidate forthe Republican nomination as an alternate to Romney will continue throught the Spring.

Rick Perry

Rick Perry, the only other non-Romney candidate likely to be able to compete into the Spring, also failed to qualify for the Virginia primary. Like Newt, Rick Perry has had the appearance of being a well-funded alternative to Mitt Romney. His series of gaffes in the debates have clearly demonstrated that he is not Presidential quality, but his deep-pocketed funders in Texas have been willing to shell out the money for the primary season anyway. I'm not sure what his funders thought they were going to buy, but it's pretty sure Rick Perry will never deliver to them. America as a whole is the winner here.

Mitt Romney

Given the weaknesses of Romney's three major opponents and the fact that the Republican establishment is circling the wagons in support of Mitt it looks like Mitt Romney will, as previously expected, be the Republican nominee for President.

Is there a chance this line up will change this spring? There's always a chance, but that chance is getting smaller and smaller. Without the Virginia votes on Super Tuesday Gingrich and Perry are very unlikely to be able to effectively challenge Romney. Ron Paul will never get over 35% of the Republicans and I'll be surprised if he gets 20%. The more Paul moves to become a real challenger the more the fact that he is utterly insane will become clear even to the Republican voters. The field of candidates really has winnowed down that tightly.

Both the tea partiers and the evangelical Republicans are going to make a lot of noise objecting to Romney, but as spring moves forward their hatred of Obama and the hope that Romney can defeat him will damp down that noise. As much as the evangelicals dislike Romney's Mormon religion, they hate Obama and the Democrats worse. They will hold their collective noses and prepare to vote for Romney in November.

The media is going to hate this. Where is the conflict that drives ratings and advertising? No drama Obama isn't going to give it to them, and while Romney will try to lure the media in he doesn't have much to offer them until after the Republican convention in August. That leaves the media in about a six months long silly season from Super Tuesday until the conventions. Then it will be Obama vs Romney - just as has been clear since last summer.

Ron Paul, failed Austrian economics, and the GOP

Here's a lesson in Ron Paul's Austrian economics. Paul Krugman points out that Ron Paul has been consistently wrong in his economics, but that for some strange reason the GOP has decided to abandon its earlier good sense and join him in his pit of ignorance.

Mr. Paul identifies himself as a believer in “Austrian” economics — a doctrine that it goes without saying rejects John Maynard Keynes but is almost equally vehement in rejecting the ideas of Milton Friedman. For Austrians see “fiat money,” money that is just printed without being backed by gold, as the root of all economic evil, which means that they fiercely oppose the kind of monetary expansion Friedman claimed could have prevented the Great Depression — and which was actually carried out by Ben Bernanke this time around.

O.K., a brief digression: the Federal Reserve doesn’t actually print money (the Treasury does that). But the Fed does control the “monetary base,” the sum of bank reserves and currency in circulation. So when people talk about Mr. Bernanke printing money, what they really mean is that the Fed expanded the monetary base.

And there has, indeed, been a huge expansion of the monetary base. After Lehman Brothers fell, the Fed began lending large sums to banks as well as buying a wide range of other assets, in a (successful) attempt to stabilize financial markets, in the process adding large amounts to bank reserves. In the fall of 2010, the Fed began another round of purchases, in a less successful attempt to boost economic growth. The combined effect of these actions was that the monetary base more than tripled in size.

Austrians, and for that matter many right-leaning economists, were sure about what would happen as a result: There would be devastating inflation. One popular Austrian commentator who has advised Mr. Paul, Peter Schiff, even warned (on Glenn Beck’s TV show) of the possibility of Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation in the near future.

So here we are, three years later. How’s it going? Inflation has fluctuated, but, at the end of the day, consumer prices have risen just 4.5 percent, meaning an average annual inflation rate of only 1.5 percent. Who could have predicted that printing so much money would cause so little inflation? Well, I could. And did. And so did others who understood the Keynesian economics Mr. Paul reviles. But Mr. Paul’s supporters continue to claim, somehow, that he has been right about everything.

So the inflation that Austrian Economics predicts has not happened. Why not?

Because the world is in a massive recession. By definition that means there are unused capital goods and workers who cannot find jobs. Inflation occurs when too much money chases too few jobs in the market.

In that case the excess money has to compete with others who have money to buy capital goods. The competition drives the prices up - meaning competition for capital goods by people who need them and have money causes the price to rise. But prices are not rising. Why?

Because no one has any use for the unused capital goods. The problem is not excess money. The problem is insufficient demand. That means there is not enough consumption to drive businesses to obtain capital goods in the market. Generally they simply use what they have already. They also do not hire more workers, and since workers create 70% of all consumption, demand is not increasing. Without anticipated consumption to drive it, businesses will not invest in more capital goods and will not hire more workers.

Austrian Economics fails again. Ron Paul is, like most of the GOP leaders today, living in a fantasy world of his own making. The Austrian Economics/Libertarian fantasy is being pushed by wealthy individuals like to Koch Brothers through the CATO Institute primarily to weaken the power of the government over corporations, banks, and yes, wealthy families who would prefer to live in a plutocracy where they call all the shots.

Remember the Republican hissy fit when Alan Grayson said their health care plan was "Let them die!"?

Alan Grayson famously said on the floor of Congress that the Republican health care plan was to simply let the sick die. The quote is:

The Republican health care plan for America: “don’t get sick.” If you have insurance don’t get sick, if you don’t have insurance, don’t get sick; if you’re sick, don’t get sick. Just don’t get sick. … If you do get sick America, the Republican health care plan is this: “die quickly.”

The Republican response was "He can't say that about us!!"

Now we have both Ron Paul and the studio audience of conservative Republicans confirming Grayson's statement.



Here is a transcript of the question and of Ron Paul's full response.

An interesting exchange in tonight's CNN Republican debate was prompted by the question to Rep. Ron Paul, R-Tex., about who should pay for medical care of the uninsured.

"A healthy 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides, you know what? I'm not going to spend $200 or $300 a month for health insurance because I'm healthy, I don't need it. But something terrible happens, all of a sudden he needs it. Who's going to pay if he goes into a coma, for example? Who pays for that?" asked host Wolf Blitzer.

Paul, a medical doctor, first responded by saying American society is primed to believe government would pay for it.

"Well, in a society that you accept welfarism and socialism, he expects the government to take care of him,' he said.

When pressed on the question, Paul responded: "That's what freedom is all about, taking your own risks," to applause from many tea party backers in the audience.

"But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?" asked Blitzer, to which several voices in the audience cried out, "Yes!"

"No. I practiced medicine before we had Medicaid, in the early 1960s, when I got out of medical school. I practiced at Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio, and the churches took care of them. We never turned anybody away from the hospitals," said Paul to additional applause. "And we've given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves. Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it. This whole idea, that's the reason the cost is so high. The cost is so high because they dump it on the government, it becomes a bureaucracy," he added.

This small exchange is the key to a major debate going on with regards to health care, both President Obama's health reform law and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's own health reform law that is under attack by his Republican opponents.

Congressman Paul is wrong to assume that "they" simply decided to dump indigent health care on the government and as a result the cost of health care shot up. The fact is that the cost of health care shot up so high that individual hospitals could not continue to bear the burden without help. The result of the increase in health care cost was that the government had to step in and save the hospitals from bankruptcy. Who should fund the costs of someone in a coma kept alive for years? Who should provide the funds to give someone chemotherapy for follicular lymphoma? That costs $50,000 to $60,000 per month for six or seven months, and if successful can provide a person with many years of productive life after that.

No hospital can handle those costs today without assistance, and employers cannot continue to bear the costs of the employer insurance and remain competitive in the international market against foreign employers who have a workforce ensured by their governments. One or two very expensive cases can bankrupt a hospital and shut it down, and there are no health insurers with a large enough risk pool to handle such cases on their own. If hospitals are to be reliably funded and not risk being closed down by one or a few very expensive cases they are going to have to go to the government for financial assistance. There is no other organization large enough to bear the costs of some modern health care treatments.

Apparently Dr. Paul's medical training did not include understanding of insurance principles.

Congressman Paul and the teabaggers live in the fantasy that America is still in the 1950's. Everything that has changed since then has been a mistake and should be erased. But in those days sulfa drugs were a brand new miracle, the only treatment for depression was psychotherapy or electroconvulsive shock treatment and a diagnosis of cancer was a death sentence. Yeah, I guess that hospitals could deal with telling most of their patients there was no cure for their illness and sending them home to die at low cost to the hospital. Medicine has changed. Apparently, though, Dr. Ron Paul's medicine has not changed.

No wonder Congressman Dr. Paul had to change careers and get into politics. There are no malpractice lawsuits for incompetence against Congressmen.

Ron Paul abandon's Libertarianism for theocratic anti-semitic racist Constitution Party

Ron Paul has shown who he really is. From Ron Chusid :

"Ron Paul has now endorsed Chuck Baldwin, the candidate of the Constitution Party as opposed to Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party candidate. Paul’s statement is available here. Bob Barr differs significantly from Ron Paul, especially in not expressing the racism in Paul’s earlier writings, his repudiation of the support of racists and other extremists which Paul actively solicited, and in not engaging in the nutty conspiracy theories which Paul and Baldwin believe in. While Paul’s decision was based partially on Barr’s refusal to attend his recent third party press conference, It came as no surprise to me to see Paul endorse the Constitution Party based upon the similarity in their views."

Ron Paul has been a fraud since he entered politics, and remains one. His support of the Constitution Party, the vehicle that the Nazi supporter Pat Buchanan threatened to run for President with in 1996 of Dole Chose a pro-choice running mate, makes perfect sense.

More from the unrepentant Free Market Libertarian Republicans

It should be no secret that I blame much of America's current economic woes on the absolute and rigid "free Market" "small Government" "No New Taxes" ideology of the Republican Party. Besides the Wall Street Bankers, the Libertarian Republicans such a Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm, Dick Armey and Grover Norquist are especially responsible for much of the current credit crisis.

Their champion in the Republican Presidential primaries was Ron Paul who consistently drew about 10% of the Republican votes.

So what?

Well, the Republican Party is concerned about the poor showing of the Republican brand name. Too many people blame them for the series of disasters that have characterized the Bush administration. So they decided to write a new Party Platform. But the existing leadership, feeling that they were out of touch with grassroots Republicans, chose to set up a website and ask for suggestions for the platform from grassroots Republicans. That's the current story. From Wired:

Ron Paul supporters have made themselves at home on the the GOP platform site, sounding many of the themes that turned the Texas congressman's doomed run for the Republican presidential nod into an internet cause célèbre.

"Get rid of the unconstitutional Federal Reserve, and go back to a sound gold and silver based currency," wrote Cathy, a contributor from Stevensville, Montana, in a post to the "Jobs and Economic Growth" section of the site. [Snip]

Paul's army of online supporters, who've collectively contributed millions of dollars and thousands of hours of volunteering, are still out there, and they're now working to sway the direction of the party. [Snip]

Says Bob in Clemons, North Carolina: "We need to abolish the Federal Reserve and go back to the gold standard. Not just any gold though, I heard about this stuff, pure-strain gold that has been around since God created the universe. That's what we should base our currency around since it is so close to God." [Snip]

"If the Republican party is to remain a relevant part of America's post-boomer political future, then our position on same-sex marriage must change," wrote another. "As a young person and a 'Ron Paul Republican,' I feel that personal liberties, including the right for any adult to marry any other consenting adult, must be protected. At the very least, the issue should be left up to the states."

"As a paleo-conservative I do not support the current direction of the Republican party," writes "PauPer" in yet another entry. "I think Bob Barr and Ron Paul are the true conservative Republicans. The so-called neo-cons have neglected American Republican values. It's no longer left vs. right, it's state worship vs. individual rights. The feral federal government doesn't recognize state or individual rights, and not doing so make them traitors to American values. Peace out."

Will the Republican party respond to the disaffected online Paulites?

An e-mail to an RNC spokesperson wasn't returned by the time of this posting, nor was a phone call to platform committee chairman Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California).

I guess that the RNC spokesman and the platform committee chairman are hearing more than they really wanted to from the Ron Paul Libertarians. They'll take the Libertarian votes and money, but they really don't want the American public to identify those ideas with the Republican Party.

Can't say I blame them.

Today's primaries

Today we have

• Republican Primary in Kansas (39 delegates)
• Louisiana primary (Democrats - 68 delegates; Republicans - 47 delegates)
• Nebraska Democratic caucus (31 delegates)
• Washington state caucuses (Democrats - 97 delegates; Republicans - 40 delegates)
• Virgin Islands is holding a Democratic caucus worth 9 delegates

[See A list of 2008 state primaries and caucuses for everything this year.]

MSNBC announces that Huckabee has won the Kansas primary with a resounding 60 percent to McCain's 24 percent over McCain. Texas Rep. Ron Paul got 11 percent to maintain his usual showing in the republican primaries. This is the first Republican contest since Romney suspended his campaign.

Obama has won the Nebraska caucus. In Washington State, with 24% of the votes counted MSNBC reports "Obama was winning 65 percent of delegates to Clinton's 33 percent." MSNBC goes on to point out that with both Obama and Hillary seen as offering very similar policies, the issue seems to be a question of which of the two is more likely to be able to defeat McCain in November.

The International Herald Tribune has reported some interesting results from the Louisiana primary, but the winners and losers are not yet known. Louisiana has long been close to evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, but with the loss of over 200,000 people from the Democratic stronghold of New Orleans after Katrina, there is a strong likelihood that Republicans will dominate that state for the foreseeable future.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Blacks were close to half the Democratic electorate, while nine in 10 Republican primary voters were white. As is typical for presidential primaries, men predominated in the GOP electorate while more women voted in the Democratic contest. Close to one in 10 voters in both primaries were under age 30 and one in four were over age 65.

HURRICANE KATRINA IMPACT

One in seven Democratic voters and about one in 10 Republicans said Hurricane Katrina caused their families severe hardship and they have not recovered. About one in four in both parties said the storm caused severe hardship but they have recovered. Two-thirds of Republicans and a little more than a half of Democrats said Katrina did not cause their family severe hardship. There also were early indications from the exit poll that the northern part of Louisiana was a larger share of the electorate in both parties compared to past primaries, reflecting a population decline in New Orleans and other coastal areas. [Snip]

RACE AND GENDER

In the historic Democratic contest to nominate either the first black or first woman for president, about one in five voters said gender was an important factor in their vote and about as many said that about race.

The results out of Louisiana should provide a hint regarding the political future of that state.

Here's one reason for the Ron Paul phenomenon

Taylor Marsh reports discussing why all her Mormon relatives like Ron Paul and detest Mitt Romney. Go read it.

If I hadn't lived in Ron Paul's district for an election, I might have agreed with them. They're right that the speaks his mind honestly. And he has some really good ideas. Unfortunately, he has some ideas that are really screwed up, too. His comments on the American Civil War simply run off into insanity. Not that his approach wouldn't have been far better in 1860 - had it been close to possible, but Jesus, Man, this is 2007!

He is right that it would have been far cheaper to have the federal government simply buy up the slaves and free them, but at the time the Southerners fired on Fort Sumpter and Lincoln properly sent in troops to put down the local rebellion (similar to Shay's Rebellion under George Washington), no one seriously thought combat would last six months or that the rebellion would spread to the entire South and become serious warfare. With that attitude, how could a bill to buy the slaves and free them ever pass Congress? Not to mention the fact that the Southerners could have easily blocked it and certainly would have. Which is entirely beside the point. Ron Paul may think this is 1860, but it's really not. Ron Paul is simply a wack job and a fruitcake. It's just that sometimes only the insane dare speak the Truth publicly. That doesn't make him acceptable as President on all these issues.

Back to Taylor Marsh's relatives, though. They want Ron Paul to run as an independent when the Republicans refuse to nominate him, and Ms. Marsh thinks that if he does he will also get a whole lot of Democrats who are disgusted with the Democratic Party to vote for him also, seriously messing up any predictability in November 2008. I know that my disgust with Harry Reid, Nancy (impeachment is off the table) Pelosi and the Democratic so-called leaders has reached a high level, so that the only reason today to be a Democrat is that the Republicans are headed rapidly towards Fascism, and the Democrats are only assisting them to get there, not actively pushing.

So that's my opinion. Go read Ms. Marsh's article and see what you think.

Break up of the alliance of Repub econo/cold-warriors and Repub evangelicals?

Eric Kleefield over at TPM Election Central writes about how the polls of Republicans in the primary states consistently show a sharp drop for Rudy Giuliani coupled with a rapid increase for Mike Huckabee. When we look at the utter horror the Republican pundits are displaying at the growth of Huckabeemania, then it seems likely to me that we are seeing signs that the traditional econo/Cold-Warrior Republicans and the evangelical Republicans are each going to go their own, separate, way in November 2008.

The Republican Party since Reagan has been an uneasy alliance between the econo-Repubs (which includes the foreign policy Repubs - mostly left over Cold Warriors) and the Evangelists, with the Evangelists generally getting federal judges and a lot of lip service from the party, while the econo/cold-warriors have gotten most of the economic and foreign policy power. This has worked as long as the Republican alliance had a reasonable chance to win the Presidency - that meant both sides got enough from the alliance to be willing to put up with the idiocies of the other side. As long as the followers felt that a Republican win was possible for the Repub alliance, they stuck together.

With the Republican primaries starting in three weeks, the rank-and-file Republicans are taking a serious look at the Republican prospects for 2008. No one thinks that the Republicans can win the Presidency, and the possibility of that Presidential power has been the glue that held the alliance together. So the evangelical followers are looking for someone - a purist - who can represent what they believe. Under the old rules Rudy or Romney, representing the econo/cold-warrior branch, could talk Southern religious racism and the Evangelical leaders could convince their follower that since they have no strong candidate of their own in the fight, the econo/cold-warrior candidate offered the evangelicals their best shot at national influence. But that becomes a much harder sell if the Republican candidate has no reasonable chance to win the Presidency. Why should the evangelical rank-and-file vote for and work for a loser who doesn't even represent the religious values that have motivated them to work in politics in the first place?

Neither Rudy nor Romney can deliver a Presidency, and Rudy has come to look worse and worse on a daily basis. Romney still isn't viewed as a Christian by a lot of evangelicals, and for a lot of them that is a deal-breaker. Enter Huckabee, a Southern governor who speaks true evangelical as a native language and who has truly awesome political skills.

With nothing to tie the the evangelical followers to the econo/cold-warrior candidates who have severe religious and moral baggage, the evangelical followers are leaving the Repub alliance and moving towards Huckabee. I think that's is what we see in these statistics, with Rudy collapsing, Romney dropping and Huckabee doing a rocket imitation going up.

Does this present an opening for McCain? Maybe with the econo/cold-warriors, but the evangelicals didn't like him in 2000 and the feeling was mutual. The enmity is not something that McCain can paper over by sweet-talking the evangelical leaders, particularly since the econo/cold-warriors are at best luke-warm about him and he has shown no indication that he can win in November. With Huckabee in the race, the evangelical followers are not going to switch to McCain.

I think we are watching the evangelistic Republicans as they decide they have nothing to win by voting for the econo/cold-warrior candidates. If Huckabee gets the nomination (unlikely) the econo/cold-warriors will sit at home in November. If Romney (or, much less likely, McCain) gets the nomination, the evangelicals will sit at home or run a third party in November. If that happens then the Republican alliance will have broken apart by November 2008. The leadership will try to keep the party unified, but without any hope of winning the Presidency, the leadership has nothing to offer their followers.

Then, just for fun, consider Ron Paul. Dr. Paul is running for the Republican Presidential nomination because it allows him to present his Libertarian philosophy on a national scale. When he ran for President as a Libertarian in 1988 no one ever heard of him. His effort this year has made him a household word. But neither the econo/cold-warriors nor the evangelicals are going to vote for Dr. Paul. Dr. Paul is the greatest hope that the Libertarians have ever had. Ron Paul is going to run as a third party candidate. That will split out the Libertarian Republicans from the econo/cold-warriors.

So we are looking at the strong likelihood that the national Republican Party is headed for a major crackup in November.

That makes the likelihood of a strong win for the Democratic candidate for President very likely. He or she is going to have coattails, too. Add the Presidential coattails to the drag Republicans will face from the now inevitable recession and from the continued fighting in Iraq, and it looks like the Democrats can be expected to win big next November.

Would I expect a Democratic win as big as in 1964? I wouldn't bet on that his far ahead of the election, but if nothing breaks favorably towards the Republicans by late Summer 2008, then I wouldn't want to bet on much Republican success next November. I do think, even now, that the Democratic nomination for President will decide who our next President will be.

2008 is going to be an interesting year.

Whither the Republican nomination contest?

Not a single vote has been cast in a primary and the nearest caucus is at least six or eight weeks away, so We have only polls and news reports of isolated comments to base any conclusions on regarding who the Republicans will nominate for President. So such predictions are probably quite risky.

That won't stop me from throwing out my opinion.

Josh Marshall was reviewing some charts of approval polls for each of the Republican candidates for the nomination, and reported his 'epiphany.' [Click through to TPM, click on each of the charts, and then go down to the charts by candidate for the most interesting view.] The polls show that Giuliani has been dropping continuously since 2006, while Romney has been increasing in approval. Josh's 'Epiphany' was that Romney was going to go into the actual primaries with surprising power. Josh considers it most likely that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee.

I don't. I still think it will be Giuliani. Here's why.

I think that the evangelical Republicans will look at the threat of nominating a non-Christian, a Mormon, and as a block, reject him. I think that enough of the evangelicals will shift over to Huckabee to throw the nomination to Giuliani. The New York Times today has a report that the Mormon issue is hurting Romney in Iowa, and the beneficiary is Mike Huckabee, the ordained Baptist minister from Arkansas.

I think that Huckabee will draw enough evangelical votes from Romney to throw the nomination over to Giuliani.

But then Huckabee is going to suffer the same fate as Reverend Pat Robertson did when he ran for President in 1988. Huckabee is going to look good in Iowa, as Robertson did twenty years ago, but when he runs out of evangelical voters and people take a serious look at him he won't go the distance to the nomination. It's still a Romney - Giuliani race. So Rudy is going to pick up the evangelical vote as the least of all evils.

The only other Republican of any interest is Ron Paul. The Libertarians love him, and they have a large on-line presence. Dr. Paul is, however, the favorite of a small constituency, and when they run out he peaks out. The average Republican is not going to vote for him, and he has zero chance at all in any general election. Dr. Paul also ran for President in 1988 and attracted very little interest. He gets more interest today because Libertarians and the Internet seem made for each other, but a quick review of his record of bills presented in the House of Representatives show that he is not a viable candidate for President. I described Dr. Paul as a fruitcake in an earlier post and I stand by that description.

The only other two candidates of any interest, McCain and Thompson, have both seen their campaigns collapse over the Summer. McCain can't interest enough Republican voters favorably to fill a school bus, and his inability to raise money means that isn't going to change. The graph of Thompson's approval shows that the interest in him as a candidate peaked about the time he announced he was going to run and has gone downhill since.

So that's it. The only two real candidates remaining are Romney and Giuliani. Both are acceptable to the Republican money donors but they seem to prefer Rudy. Texas and Southern Republicans already appear to be coalescing around Rudy. Rick Perry, Republican Governor of Texas has come out strong for Guiliani.

If there is to be a real surprise that changes this evaluation, I think it will appear in the South Carolina primary. That primary is going to clarify all the muck and the Republicans will then know who to coalesce around to avoid a brokered convention next Summer.

---

Addendum 6:37 PM CST
Looks like I posted my opinion a few hours too early. From TPM election Central we get a report that Rudy is way down in South Carolina.

"On the heels of polls showing Rudy dropping fast in New Hampshire and out of contention in Iowa, a a new poll finds him sinking fast in a third key state: South Carolina. The Clemson University poll finds Mitt Romney now taking the lead with 17%, followed by Fred Thompson at 15%, Mike Huckabee with 13%, John McCain at 11% — and Rudy at only 9%.

It's definitely not a good result for Rudy, especially in light of recent polls showing him in third in both Iowa and New Hampshire. And it's great news for Romney, who apparently now leads in all three of the key early contests.

So it looks like the winner of Iowa, New Hampsire and South Carolina will be Mitt Romney. Rudy is going to find it difficult to convince Republican voters that they should nominate the guy who lost the first three contests.

I still see the size of the vote for Huckabee to be an indicator of how many evangelical Republicans will sit out the 2008 Presidential Election and not vote at all rather than vote for a Mormon. Also, I still DON'T see the Econo-Republicans supporting Huckabee. They have no hold on him and he is frankly too populist for their taste. Almost any other Republican candidate would be preferable to them outside of Ron Paul. I also see Huckabee as being fatally subject to TV ads that point up his flaws. I previously posted on some of Huckabee's flaws in " Huckabee - from an Arkansas reporter "and "Huckabee - more to confirm Brantley's report", both posted Nov 13, 2007.

Feel free to disagree with me. I'm just trying to read the tea leaves and use the results to predict which way the voters in the Republican primary are currently trending, and which changes are likely to expect. The tea leaves themselves (various news reports) may or may not be good indicators of voter sentiment, so I have to use my judgment to try to "weight" each report for consistency with the others, then see what is suggests.

I have tried to link to the reports I am basing my guestimates on, so go look. Weight them yourself and draw your own conclusions. Then, if you disagree with my conclusions, I have more to learn from disagreement than I do from agreement. Maybe I'll learn to do a better job. (And maybe trying to predict the future is just a fool's game.) In any case, feel free to disagree, but I want to know why. What do you see that I don't. Specifiy if you have evidence, or just a different judgment in weighting the evidence.

And do go look at the charts Josh Marshall refers to. As far as I can tell, that's the best relatively unbiased trend data currently available, all nicely wrapped up in a presentation that permits each comparison between candidates. Note that it does not include data from the last couple of weeks.

Personally, I think that watching politics beats watching a good poker game - and as the war in Iraq has proven, the stakes are a lot higher.

Here is what is wrong with Ron Paul

Dr. and Congressman Ron Paul has been getting a lot of favorable press recently as he stands up and tells Republicans that America should get out of Iraq. OK. Even a blind hog finds an occasional acorn. Dave, over at Orcinus lists many of the most extreme bills he has submitted in the house. What they demonstrate is a man who

• Is an antiabortion and anti birth control extremist.
  
• Wants the definition of human being attached to a zyugote from the moment of conception.
  
• Wants to deny Federal court system from providing redress to people who are discriminated against because of their religious beliefs or sexual orientation.
  
• Wants to stop the use of federal money in enforcing the right to an abortion.
  
• Wants to criminalize the burning or destruction of an American flag, even if you own it yourself. He has proposed a Constitutional amendment to this effect.
  
• Wants to repeal the Occupational health and safety Act.
  
• Wants to decertify unions.
  
• Opposes the minimum wage.
  
• Wants to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act and the Copeland Act which make kickbacks on federal contracts illegal and which mandates that government contracts pay workers the prevailing wage.
  
• Wants to make the Social Security system optional and to freeze benefits.
  
• Wants to repeal the Motor Voter law that has made it easier for voters to be registered (typical Republican voter repression activity) and supports the Electoral College.
  
• Wants to repeal Anti-Trust Laws.
  
• Wants to eliminate federal regulatory agencies and require Congress to pass new law every time a different case is addressed.
  
• Wants to promote greater ethnic and racial discrimination.
  
• Wants to amend the 14th Amendment to the Constitution so that people born in the U.S. are not automatically citizens, and make it easier to revoke the citizenship of anyone the government declares undesirable.
  
• Wants to limit or repeal most environmental laws.
  
• Wants to encourage more off-shore oil drilling, more mining on federal lands, and construct more refineries. Note how this will work with the elimination of federal environmental regulation and the elimination of unions. It would make China's environment something Americans would wish for.
  
• Wanted prevent the ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty.
  
• Wanted to prohibit the dismantling of the missile silos as was done in 2002.
  
• Opposes the International Criminal Court.
  
• Wants to prohibit even consideration of how other nations (except England) apply laws when the Supreme Court deliberates.
  
• Wants to end U.S. participation in the U.N.
  
• Wants to to block U.S. membership in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.
  
• Wants the U.S. to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
  
• Wants to prevent U.S. soldiers from ever wearing the insignia of the UN or any foreign nation.
  
• Wants to reoccupy the Panama Canal and declare U.S. sovereignty over the Canal Zone again.
  
• Wants to eliminate limitations on gun ownership and where anyone can carry guns. This includes allowing criminals to own and carry weapons, repeal the 1968 gun law, and allow guns to be carried in national parks and in school zones. It also includes using federal law to override all state laws that regulate guns.
  
• Wants to abolish personal income, estate, and gift taxes. If he can't get that, he wants to eliminate withholding and make everyone pay taxes every month.
  
• Wants to repeal the power of the Federal Reserve to Print money, replacing paper money with gold and silver coins.
  
• Wants to abolish the Federal Reserve.
  
• Wants the use of corporal punishment reinstated, wants all parents notified if their children request birth control (even the parents who are molesting their children) and wants churches which run social serviced to be permitted to discriminate on the basis of religion and race among other things.
  

All of this comes from the Bills Dr. Paul has introduced in Congress. Does anyone really wonder why I call him a Fruitcake?

Who is the greater fruitcake - Giuliani or Ron Paul?

Actually, the good Dr. Paul is at least the Fruitcake Rudy Giuliani is.

The difference is that Rudy is an meglomaniacal authoritarian fruitcake with severe narcissism and its accompanying grandiosity.

Dr. Paul is an ultra-Libertarian almost Anarchist fruitcake who has been infected by Ayn Rand, Von Mises and Hayek and with his education consisting of nothing more than physician's trade school, he doesn't have the necessary education to understand the fallacies of those writings (and doesn't want to learn.)

While both are fruitcakes, Giuliani is the much more dangerous one. He is the one with no ability to judge people (as a prosecutor he put away high ranking members of the Mob. As mayor of New York he appointed a mobbed up cop, Bernie Kerek, to the top police position in the city after being warned about him), the man who will tell any lie to get higher office and repeats the same lies even after being caught in the lie, and a man whose tenure as New York Mayor was marked mostly by corruption, incompetence, and ignoring the law and legally prescribed procedures.

In comparison, Dr. Paul is simply a passive fruitcake. His idea of the proper jobs for government are ....... (hear the wind whistling through the leaves as you listen for something to be there?)

Amazing - the Libertarian goldbug Ron Paul is the ONLY Republican making sense.

Ron Paul ...is an advocate of states' rights, free trade, fewer taxes, smaller government, strong national sovereignty, and non-interventionism. Paul supports reduced government spending and reduced taxes. As congressman, he claims he has never voted to raise taxes or to approve an unbalanced budget. He has called for the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the federal income tax. He also voted against the USA PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War Resolution, and the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

He also supports a return to the Gold Standard and since he considers spending on the Space Program to be unconstitutional, he always votes against it.

He ran for President in 1988 on the Libertarian ticket, and has not changed his views significantly since that time. He is a doctrinaire free market supporter, opposing any government intervention in the economy at all, to include the minimum wage. He wants to return health care to being paid for by the individual rather then government. He is, as nearly as I can tell, totally ideologically driven, with no consideration given to practicalities. If it is not consistent with his very limited set of ideologies, he opposes it.

Wikipedia lays out his political positions rather clearly, but here is a summary.

"The Ron Paul Freedom Principles" as follows: "Rights belong to individuals, not groups; Property should be owned by people, not government; All voluntary associations should be permissible -- economic and social; The government's monetary role is to maintain the integrity of the monetary unit, not participate in fraud; Government exists to protect liberty, not to redistribute wealth or to grant special privileges; The lives and actions of people are their own responsibility, not the government's."

Wikipedia has a special article just on Ron Paul's political positions. I don't think it would misrepresent his views too much to say that he takes a 19th century pre-Civil War, pre-Industrialism position on Government for America, considers Friedrich Von Hayek,, Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard as his economic guides, and takes a Republican social conservative position on values.

In short, Ron Paul, M.D. is no doubt a charming and interesting individual, but he is the quintessential crackpot. He is the kind of charming eccentric individual that the British have been famous for producing. He starts out from a set of assumptions that a great many of us would agree with, but then carries them to extreme, even irrational positions which he tries to get the government to adopt.

So what does it say about the Republican Party when everyone says he is the only person running for the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination who makes an sense at all on the subject of Iraq?

From Talking Points Memo:


When every leading Republican candidate for the 2008 Republican Party Presidential nomination is a great deal more irrational and extreme than Ron Paul, then the Republican Party has completely gone off the rails.

---

Paul Berman writes in his excellent book Terror and Liberalism, that the many wars of the twentieth century have been one long battle between the freedom of Liberalism and a series of irrational, even insane, organizations which all take on totalitarian methods to enforce their forms of insanity. Those insane organizations arose in Europe many years ago as a reaction to Liberalism, and spread to the Muslim world.

It looks to me as though the American Republican Party has been taken over by one group which is insanely reacting to Liberal freedoms. It consists of economic free traders who detest any government enforcement of their responsibilities to society, allied with fundamentalist religious extremists who want to gain control of government to enforce their religious beliefs on everyone in the nation.

The free traders consist of two largely corrupt sets of business people, one group which sees government as a large pot of money to be skimmed from for their own benefit while the other is a group of business persons who consider society to be best served if it is nothing more than a set of commodities (land, labor and financial capital) which they are totally free to exploit is whatever ways make them more wealthy and powerful. Any restriction on their absolute Right to pay as little as possible for commodities and charge as much as possible for their products prevents the best of all people, Entrepreneurs, from ruling society as they properly should.

The financial Entrepreneurs demand the greatest freedom from government control, since frequently the products they create and trade in change extremely rapidly, and the first to market during each change makes the largest amounts of money. These financial Entrepreneurs, like the bankers, high interest lenders and owners of payday loan operations, want to be left alone to farm consumers of their cash. The latter groups are perfectly happy, however, to get the government certify their products like insurance so that customers have less fear of being ripped off, and to let government enforce their usurious and misleading contracts while passing laws that make it difficult for defrauded customers from suing over the fraud.

The current crop of potential Republican Presidential nominees are the most recent and most blatant examples. They are the modern "movement conservatives."

Congressman and Dr. Ron Paul fails to join the rest of the so-called movement conservatives who have taken over the Republican Party because they are outcome driven. They will for the most part take any position, idea or action that will lead to the destruction of Liberalism's government-enforced freedoms and protections against personal exploitation. Thus the movement conservatives could advocate reducing the size of government in the past while lauding the way their party has presided over the largest expansion of the Federal government ever seen during the Reagan - Bush 41 - Bush 43 years. Contradictions? Not a problem as long as they change society to increase their own wealth and power.

Dr. Paul, however, demands consistency with his ideology above all else. His set of positions is ideological rather than outcome based, and his methods of decision demand logical and rational consistency with the ideologies he starts from. The result is that while the rest of the Republican Party repeatedly demonstrates its insanities, Dr. Paul comes across as a very rational and (in comparison) sensible man.

Movement conservatism is pushing America rapidly towards being an authoritarian nation run as a plutocracy. The fact that Dr. Ron Paul can stand up in front of America and appear to be the most sensible man running for the nomination for President in the Republican party demonstrates how very UnAmerican and dangerous the Republican Party has already become.

NRO lauds Ron Paul for espousing the "Old Time Conservatism"

John Derbyshire at NRO boosts Ron Paul for his efforts to promote a conservatism that the young William F. Buckley would have very much agreed with.

Look at those policy positions! Abolish the IRS and Federal Reserve; balance the budget; go back to the gold standard; pull out of the U.N. and NATO; end the War on Drugs; overturn Roe v. Wade; repeal federal restrictions on gun ownership; fence the borders; deport illegals; stop lecturing foreign governments about human rights; let the Middle East go hang. What’s not to like?

We-e-ell. We all have nits to pick, though we wouldn’t all pick the same ones. The gold standard? Wasn’t it going off the gold standard that gave us full control over the wilder swings of the business cycle? Which was, like, a good idea? I am by no means as willing to surrender to the collective wisdom of modern economists as Bryan Caplan wants me to be, but — the gold standard? Come on. And stopping the War on Drugs? Where would that take us? — Philip Morris brands of crack cocaine available over the counter at Walgreens? You pick your own nits.

That’s not the point, though. Nits aside, the broad outlook there is conservative in a way we don’t often see from a presidential candidate. It is, in fact, conservatism of exceptional purity. Reading through those policy positions, an American conservative can hear the mystic chords of memory sounding in the distance, and hear the call of ancestral voices wafted on the breeze: Hayek, von Mises, Rothbart, Nock, Kirk, John Chamberlain... Unlike the product in that automobile commercial, this is your father’s conservatism — the Old-Time Religion. What is there among Ron Paul’s policy prescriptions that the young William F. Buckley would have disagreed with?

Go back to my earlier post showing how the Bush administration is enacting the core elements of the John Birch Society platform. The central beliefs they were pushing, and what Cheney has enacted are:

1. The abolition of the graduated income tax.

2. The repeal of social security legislation.

3. The impeachment of various high government officials,

4..The end to busing for the purpose of school integration.

5. The end to U.S. membership in the United Nations.

In other words, these are the people who want to take America back to the days of the robber Barons, segregation enforced by law and by KKK terrorism, and repression of labor. If they could, they'd go back to before the Civil War. Keep them in office and they will.