Fitting Room

National mainstream tries 2012 storyline on for size. Stupidly predictable.

Jindal begins to court Texas elite

You don't get to be the Republican nominee for President until you kiss the ring of the Texas GOP elite. If they're not bankrolling your campaign, they're bankrolling one of your rivals. There's some evidence that the wealthiest GOPers in Texas were not and are not particularly enthused about Sarah Palin. They could be looking to stunt her 2012 aspirations early. A good way to do that would be to kiss on the wonderboy from Louisiana and help him build up a massive "reelection" bank account.

The Governor is heading to Houston and San Antonio.

One of the things that's going on here is that the GOP masses love Sarah Palin but the GOP money does not, or at least a significant proportion of GOP elders recognize her various liabilities. During the primary, I thought that the early Huckaboom in Iowa reflected an insurgent streak amongst younger GOP activists. At the time, I thought that it would be powerful enough to drive candidate Huckabee a little bit further that it ultimately did, but the phenomenon is still important to remember. Palin will have better name recognition, more money, and more volunteers than Huckabee did when he started out. I do believe that his success had a lot to do with his policy menu and ability to articulate a vision, things Palin does not have, but the point stands.

The guards and inmates are battling it out for control of the asylum. Political operatives are doing their damnest to dissipate Palin's popularity without burying her or alienating her loyal supporters. Bobby Jindal is uniquely positioned because the establishment will support him and because he passes the evangelical litmus tests needed to be palatable to the a critical mass of the disaffected grassroots.

Jindal Running for President Forever

From WaPo:

She walked back to Jindal, because something had just occurred to her. "So the campaign has begun, huh?" she affably said to him. "2012 has begun."

He smiled. "Oh, no, no, not yet," he replied. No, not yet.

Can't wait!

He's Republicans' "own version of Obama."

Jindal v. Palin I

Jindal's overarching ambition is to get on the GOP ticket one day.

Palin's overarching ambition is to get out of Alaska one day.

Jindal will one day run for President.

Palin will one day have a talk show.

Four Years Wandering: The Ascension of Bobby Jindal

I guarantee an article titled similarly to this one will be written by some reconverted academic conservative at some point on or before election day 2012.

This isn't that article. But it is coming. And you won't like it.

Oyster continues to insist that there will be all kinds of hilarious moments and opportunities for blog snark along the way. He also says that conservative desperation will be such that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal could be prematurely elevated to movement figurehead in 2012, before political opportunity structures - preconditions for GOP victory - have sufficiently developed.

Here's where I think we agree:

1. National political dynamics are such that Republicans can't win anything until 2016 at the earliest, no matter how quickly or effectively the reconstitute their party to appeal to moderates, independents, Latinos, young people, etc OR how effectively they're able to quickly catch up to the Left's emerging mastery of the internet. Nor does the narrative work. As Oyster says, "Running against an incumbent Obama, the whole 'smart, young, fresh face with broad appeal and exciting dose of pigment' angle suddenly has much less traction." He's right. It wouldn't do much against an incumbent Barack Obama.

2. Bobby Jindal is being anointed as the savior of the conservative movement with such repressed fervor that there is little chance he'll be on the sidelines through 2012 even though that cycle may be politically inopportune.

We disagree elsewhere. While we both think that neither he nor any other Republican has a realistic shot of defeating an incumbent Barack Obama, I don't believe that this will truly 'complicate' anything for Jindal over the long term, at least not to the degree that I'm interpreting from Oyster's posts.

He's twice brought up the idea that running for reelection to the Governor's mansion in 2011 would prove difficult when he's spending every other weekend in New Hampshire or Iowa or South Carolina. Here I explained how I believe that assumption misreads the oppressive political opportunity structure Jindal and his GOP bankrollers have cultivated for the native son.

I made this under appreciated joke that John Neely Kennedy would be the only Democrat dumb enough to think he'd be able to compete with Jindal for control of Baton Rouge and I think it still stands. I made that comment before Election Day, which largely turned out to be a bloodbath for Louisiana Democrats. Though Senator Landrieu easily disposed of the anemic JNK campaign, rising star Don Cazayoux was pulled out of Congress and Obama lost ground to the GOP compared to 2004. Though Democrats can name a strong challenger to take on the vulnerable Senator David Vitter in 2010, the GOP establishment will not take Jindal's reelection campaign lightly. The Boysie Bollingers and Joseph Canizaros of the local Swift Boat establishment will see to it that Bobby Jindal has everything he needs. He'll also certainly be able to attract as many $2000 bills from the national base being cultivated on his behalf as he needs to intimidate any big name Democratic thinking of taking a stab.

Shorter: Jindal cruises to reelection. Cruises.

The other half of this is the national conservative movement's search for a savior and what kind of campaign they'll have organized for 2012.

One thing we can safely say since McCain officially went down in flames last week is that conservatives do indeed realize that they have a lot of work to do. They understand that they've cannibalized critical pieces to their past electoral coalitions and alienated key blocs they'll need in future elections. They understand that their organizing infrastructure needs to be revolutionized online.

And they're going to slowly work on these things. Here young GOP faithful put forth a plan to make up ground on the internet. RNC leadership is going to work to expand the tent and rebuild grassroots organizational structure in the Ken Mehlman style with either Michael Steele or Newt Gingrich.

Of course these infrastructure improvements take time and cannot compensate for a failed vision or a lack of rhetorical narrative but it doesn't take conservative movement consensus to get the ball rolling on those longer term investments. They can't move whatever message they settle on if they haven't set the train tracks in advance.

Will they have a cogent message for the nation in 2012? Will they be able to articulate a vision?

No. Democrats will trounce the GOP in 2012.

But I do think the GOP nominee can be more than a sacrificial lamb or a placeholder.

Rather, I envision a GOP being able to patch together a fairly responsive 'progressive' platform in which they applaud the competence of the Obama administration while nitpicking away at little differences here and there. The vision I have in my mind is that they'll run against Obama like Al Gore ran against George W. Bush in 2000.

"Actually my opponent and I are not all that different. We both supported the health care bill that passed Congress but I think that it needs to allow for more blah blah blah."

"In fact, we worked together to pass national broad band infrastructure bill X but now he's for blah blah blah whereas I think we really need to get back to blah blah blah."

"There's no question we're winning the war on terror but Obama made a mistake when he didn't blah blah blah."

"Argument is good. Debate is good. We have serious disagreements about how we can continue to solve our nation's problems. They want to do it in a partisan, ideological fashion. We're about reaching across the aisle. We've broken our backs to do so for this administration but we haven't seen the kind of blah blah blah that we need."

"Blah blah blah the next step in healing this economy is small business growth blah blah blah. Obama wants to tax them more but I have a plan at blah blah blah dot com that outlines exactly what I would do"

My opinion is that the GOP will not be able to run a fear campaign in 2012. They're going to need to campaign on some sort of conservative pragmatism platform. Doing so not only puts them in the best position to not make fools of themselves in 2012 but also poises them to take advantage of any Democratic missteps for the 2014 midterms and finally for the 2016 free-for-all.

The GOP won't run further to the right with Palin or some other nutjob in 2012. They'll just repackage what they currently have to draft off of Obama's unstoppable momentum. Jindal will run for President and he'll stump for the type of pragmatic conservatism that I've discussed. Whether or not he wins the nomination, settles at the VP slot, or stays out entirely, his narrative or one greatly influenced by him will ultimately guide the GOP's medium-term trajectory.

He can lose in 2012 without sandbagging his own chances in 2016. If Obama succeeds in enacting his agenda through 2010, the GOP will run an uncharacteristically congenial campaign in 2012, even if it's not any more centrist ideologically. What is your list of viable GOP candidates in 2012? Would any of them represent more of the same tear-down fear-monger style? Could that work against any popular Democratic incumbent?

Here is my list of likely GOP candidates in 2012:

1. Jindal
2. Romney
3. Huckabee
4. Palin
5. Daniels

On that list, only Palin would run a wacko campaign. All of the others would push a more confident, intellectually curious, amicable, articulate, and patriotic GOP.

And as we've seen, party elders have already thrown Governor Palin overboard.

The bottom line is that the mainstream media is already gobbling up the Jindal-as-next narrative. They love the taste of geeky wonky conservatism. Chris Cillizza has written about Bobby Jindal more than I have over the last few weeks. He's going to spend the next 4 years ranking Bobby Jindal in the top 3 on his Friday GOP nomination line. Conservative academia loves him, he passes enough litmus tests of the religious base, and he symbolically represents a 21st Century GOP through his youth and ethnicity.

Oyster thinks it's going to be a lot of fun to watch Jindal run that gauntlet. I don't think it will be a comedy of errors even if he and the GOP in general will continue to flail at a national message. Jindal's strength, in my mind, is that his youth allows him to be malleable on all sorts of Obama initiatives that might garner unbridled popular support without alienating his GOP base.


Update: Something just brought me back to this piece written last May by the Newt. In it, Gingrich expresses the understanding that attack politics couldn't work for Republicans in the current political environment:

The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti- Reverend Wright, or (if Senator Clinton wins), anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail.

This model has already been tested with disastrous results.

In 2006, there were six incumbent Republican Senators who had plenty of money, the advantage of incumbency, and traditionally successful consultants.

But the voters in all six states had adopted a simple position: "Not you." No matter what the GOP Senators attacked their opponents with, the voters shrugged off the attacks and returned to, "Not you."

The danger for House and Senate Republicans in 2008 is that the voters will say, "Not the Republicans."

After that, Newt proposes a new platform of "winning" issues that is impressively narrow and one-dimensional considering the width and depth of our nation's challenges.

Gingrich is incredibly conservative and incredibly partisan. A Gingrich-controlled Republican Party would be further to the right than that which John McCain represented this cycle. However, that isn't synonymous with this idea that the GOP would run a more extremist campaign. Rather, I think Newt's article rather bolsters my argument that the minority GOP will run a congenial and unimaginative 'these are our issues' campaign in 2012 that allows them to grope toward a vision and hold the coalition without inflicting further damage to the brand name.

Jindal Career Counciling

Oyster aptly assesses Bobby Jindal's prospects for national office after Mitt Romney fluffs the governor on local radio:

Running for Prez in 2012 would be difficult for Bobby. He'd have to gear up while running for Gubernatorial re-election in 2011, which would be sort of farcical. Also, displacing a sitting President isn't an easy thing to do. 2016 would make the most sense for him. He'd still be young and fresh, but would have more "executive experience"... etc. And after eight years of Obama and a Democratic powergrip on Congress, the GOP will be looking for a political savior to lead them out of the wilderness.

I agree to an extent. The McCain campaign exemplifies an erosion of the Republican coalition and message that will take more than one election cycle to halt. The GOP will have a very difficult go of things in 2012 for a wide variety of reasons. It is a lot easier to picture a successful "savior" campaign in 2016 when memories of recent history have been sufficiently erased.

My disagreement is with Oyster's assumption that the 2012 campaign would complicate his 2011 reelection bid. Running on a 'the work's not done' message would only be slightly more complicated when questioned about his habitual getaways to Iowa and New Hampshire. I do not foresee any challenge that Bobby Jindal's astronomical approval rating cannot withstand. His core donors are extremely wealthy and have been extremely generous on his behalf. While some might tap themselves out propping up the Vitter campaign in 2010 there will be something left in the tank for the Governor, if what I've learned about Vitty Cent's diminished support within the base is true. Plus, given that Bobby Jindal has already being introduced to the national kingmakers, he'll have no problem glad-handing his way to an enormous reelection war chest.

What Democrat in Louisiana will consider it worthwhile to go up against an exceedingly popular incumbent governor with overflowing campaign coffers?

Will the promise of a couple of TV ads worth of "duh, den why he all in Iowa?" be enough to convince a high profile Democrat to go all-in?

For my money, Mitch Landrieu, Charlie Melancon, and Don Cazayoux are the only Democrats with the credibility to run a statewide campaign. Either Melancon or Cazayoux will defeat Vitter in 2010 and the remainders are smart enough to realize that it's much wiser to consolidate Democratic power by locking down and expanding reach into the various congressional seats.

The only democrat dumb enough to campaign for governor in 2011 is John Neely Kennedy.

In other words, Jindal has nothing to worry about if he wants to go all-in for 2012.

However, to go back to the first point about the national political climate in 2012, my guess is that Jindal will go all-in on a bluff. It will be very much worth his while to campaign hard in the early primary states in 2011 in order to build an infrastructure for the real thing in 2016. The other possibility is that the Republican primary voters get it together to nominate somebody with the sense to remake the conservative message. For instance, should Mike Huckabee continue to make a play for young evangelicals with a message of charity, environmental responsibility, and the Earth is 6000 years old. . . well Bobby Jindal might find it helpful to slide into the VP slot. If Rudy Giuliani is the GOP nominee, Jindal might find it helpful to soak in the national security credentials rub.

Whatever the outcome, Jindal will almost certainly have his sights set on the 2012 GOP primary. However, his intention will be to run, not to win. If he is to seek the Presidency in 2016, if he is to even consider it, he'll need to have some semblance of a national grassroots infrastructure already in place. He can afford to prime the pump in 2012 because the 2011 gubernatorial reelection will be nothing more than a pesky mosquito.

Why even bother nailing the coffin?

The GOP is already looking toward 2012.

Oyster long anticipated Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's tiptoe to the Iowa Caucuses. He is now the confirmed keynote speaker for a prominent Christian conservative fundraising dinner, as reported by the Politico's Jonathan Martin.

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza reads into Governor Jindal's last-minute endorsement of dead horse Senate candidate John N. Kennedy, characterizing it as rare partisan foray designed as a test of his power as a kingmaker. Cillizza speculates that if Kennedy somehow wins or loses by a slight margin, Jindal will greatly bolster his reputation on the national level.

The Reduct Box also reported recently that Supriya Jindal has joined John McCain on the campaign trail. I'll add that Cindy McCain indeed gave her a special hat tip during her warm up speech in suburban Philly on Tuesday morning.

But Governor Jindal certainly won't be alone on the campaign trail.

Habitual boogieman Rudolph Giuliani has already opened up JoinRudy2012.com, according to Pandagon. Maybe he'll actually campaign this time.

One could argue that Sarah Palin is only on the ticket as a test-run for 2012 anyway, since she's clearly worthless to McCain this time around. It really is amazing that she finds time to explicitly criticize her running mate's political tactics amidst such a busy schedule of unintentional and embarassing incompetence.