How Republicans Will Lose

Unless things change radically on Super Tuesday, the main story of this election year will be how the Republicans lost.

I know, I know, I'm supposed to be a common-sense conservative, and the Republicans are supposed to be my party. Supposed to be.

But for each of the major candidates, it's much easier to paint a scenario where a seemingly great candidate manages to lose a winnable race. Let's examine the first victim of this phenomenon, Fred Thompson.

Fred Thompson was the conservative's darling back during the summer of 2007. He promised a no-nonsense candidacy that would put the liberals back in their place. When Fred finally officially announced, he was instantly in the race. He had nearly $12 million dollars overnight and poll numbers putting him instantly into national contention. Fred Thompson should have been the Republican nominee.

Instead, he squandered $12 million and 20 percentage points in the polls and comes away as the first major candidate to leave the race. Deciding to skip the first three debates he could have been in, Thompson never seemed to know how to campaign. He took a winning proposition and turned it into a massive waste . And his is only the first story.

Next we see the story of Rudy Giuliani. The man to beat, Rudy was seen as the presumptive nominee. Getting an early start with a nice warchest, Rudy took the lead in polls, and never looked back. Rudy Giuliani should have been the Republican nominee.

Yet, the mantles of fiscal conservatism and national security were not enough to hide the fact that he was a social liberal, totally out of touch with most of his party. And with a puzzling campaign strategy that ignored some states and made him invisible during political media frenzies. Another one bites the dust.

Mitt Romney is another nearly perfect canidate who will lose. Mitt brought the biggest war chest an incredible business record into the race. With no hint of scandal around his candidacy, and a squeaky clean good-guy image, Mitt Romney sculpted his message to appeal to the Reagan coalition of social and fiscal conservatives, and national security hawks. Mitt Romney ought to wind up as the Republican nominee.

He won't. Simply because he did sculpt his message, the coalition didn't coalesce. His packaged presentation designed to unite a divided party failed because it was simply too packaged. Romney failed to sell himself as a genuine conservative, because he has not been one. And Republican voters saw through it. Mitt Romney will bite the dust.

The next man likely to lose is Mike Huckabee. If anyone shouldn't be on this list, Mike is the man. Mike never was supposed to get this high. Defying conventional wisdom, his message and retail political style catapulted him into the elite first tier of candidates. In a tremedous campaing, he won a David vs. Goliath battle in Iowa. Mike Huckabee should be the Republican nominee.

Yet, two fatal flaws have hamstrung this brilliant campaign and will likely be the death of it. First, Mike's fundraising machine was simply non-existent. Without much needed cash, Huckabee was forced to make critical cuts at terribly wrong times in the campaign. Secondly, the potential free media given by conservative talk radio that Huckabee should have recieved, turned into a feeding frenzy. For some strange reason, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and their ilk decided that Mike Huckabee was not conservative enough and decided to kill his campaign. Now that it isn't far from dead, the talkers will have to live with their creation: a likely McCain candidacy. Huckabee's lack of the ability to connect with these talkers probably killed his campaign.


This leaves us with the obvious: someone's got to win. But even the one remaining candidate is likely to be a looser. John McCain will be the default nominee; the last one standing. In a year when voters are seemingly screaming for change, the GOP will offer its usual strategy: give it to the guy who's next in line. John McCain has reversed a dysfunctional campaign and lagging poll numbers with a debt-ridden campaign that has managed to make something out of everyone else's mistakes.

By playing old-school attack politics better than the man who started it, McCain took Romney's negativity back to him, and beat him. He picked up Huckabee's slack in South Carolina and Guiliani's in Florida. By riding the divide better than anyone else, he has managed to (seemingly) be the last one standing. John McCain will likely be the Republican nominee.

John McCain's victory will result in his loosing the race to the Democrat in the fall. Despite the current poll numbers to the contrary, his droning stump speech will not match the aggression of a Clinton, nor the energy of an Obama. As the oldest candidate, and the one with the longest history in Washington, he is clearly not what the general electorate want. Only able to trump the Democrats on national security, he will be fresh meat for the energized Democrats.

The next question is....

Does it really have to be this way?

To be continued