Published for http://online.wsj.com, January, 26,2012

In a rare moment of senior-presidential-adviser-to-senior-presidential-adviser telepathy, I overheard the private thoughts of David Axelrod as he prepared to appear on television Tuesday night, following President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address:

Well, this is about as pleasant as a dentist appointment. Sure hope we’re right that no matter what the question is, all I need to say is, “President Obama believes everyone should get a fair shot, everyone should do their fair share, and everyone should play by the same set of rules.” Say it loud, say it proud, say it again and again.

Speaking of which, I love that line about “asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary.” Sure, the top 10% pay 70% of federal income taxes, so billionaires already pay more taxes than their secretaries, and no one’s really for doubling capital gains taxes. But it sounds so good, and stokes so much anger toward the rich.

I did enjoy how Barack went after Congress. A couple of times it looked like he was going to turn around and slap Boehner for obstructing his agenda. Hope it helps voters forget we Democrats controlled both chambers for two years and got pretty much everything we wanted. Now we have to pretend it never happened.

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Published for www.online.wsj.com, January 19, 2012

Battered but standing, Mitt Romney emerged from Monday’s presidential debate still the front-runner. Newt Gingrich was at the top of his game, likely earning him at least the silver in South Carolina. Ron Paul probably pushed Rick Santorum into third and himself into fourth place by equating Osama bin Laden with a Chinese dissident. In the most volatile Republican primary season in history, Thursday night’s CNN debate still looms large.

If Mr. Romney survives the kerfuffle he created about the income taxes he pays and wins South Carolina after taking Iowa and New Hampshire, he will have gone 3 and 0. No Republican has done that in an open presidential race. Ever.

Still, that alone won’t make him the presumptive nominee. The gaps between the candidates matter. And here the numbers look good for the former Massachusetts governor. The RealClearPolitics average of recent South Carolina polls has Mr. Romney in front by 10.3 points (at 32.3%), followed by Mr. Gingrich who, in turn, leads Messrs. Paul and Santorum by 7.7 points. If this holds up, Mr. Romney would go into the Jan. 31 Florida primary with a hard-to-dislodge lead.

He’s already in great shape in Florida. While voter attention has been focused on the first three contests, Team Romney has been prepping the next battlefield. Since Dec. 12, the Romney Super PAC and campaign have run an astonishing $3 million of unanswered television ads in the Sunshine State.

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2012

In an open race for the GOP nomination, no Republican has won both Iowa and New Hampshire, as Mitt Romney has. No one has come in fourth or fifth in New Hampshire, as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum did, and become the nominee. No one has entirely skipped Iowa, as Jon Huntsman did, and won elsewhere. No one has recovered after grabbing the 1% that Rick Perry received in the Granite State. And no one became the nominee after failing to win one of the first two contests, a position in which Ron Paul finds himself.

All this means history will be made this year, no matter what happens next.

The focus Tuesday was more on the winner’s margin than on the victory itself. Mr. Romney won the New Hampshire primary by an impressive 16.4 points. (The state’s last five contested GOP primaries have seen an average winning margin of 10.5 points.) True to its tradition, New Hampshire paid little attention to Iowa’s big story—Mr. Santorum’s impressive second-place finish. He finished fifth. The candidate who camped out in New Hampshire saw that pay off, as Mr. Huntsman did 17 times as well there as he’s doing in the Gallup national poll, where he’s at 1%.

All six candidates have enough resources to run hard in the next contest, in South Carolina on Jan. 21. Already, five campaigns have placed over $6 million on television in the state, with Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney accounting for over $4 million of it.

It’s important to understand that South Carolina is not quintessentially Southern in the way that, for example, Mississippi and Alabama are. Social conservatives in the upstate region (including Spartanburg) unfamiliar with Mr. Romney’s record might be more willing to support Messrs. Gingrich and Santorum than were their New Hampshire counterparts, who had observed Mr. Romney’s unwavering conservative positions on abortion and marriage when he was governor of neighboring Massachusetts.

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2012

Not long ago few thought Mitt Romney could win both the very conservative Iowa caucuses and then the quirky, slightly contrarian New Hampshire primary. If he did, most assumed he would have a lock on the Republican nomination. For understandable reasons: No other GOP presidential candidate in an open race has achieved back-to-back victories in these first two contests.

By this time next week, we’ll know if Mr. Romney is 2-0. If so, he becomes the prohibitive favorite.

The other big Iowa winner is former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Iowa does winnow the field (as it did with Wednesday’s departure of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann). But it also gives unheralded contenders like Mr. Santorum a chance to jump into the spotlight. And in spectacular fashion, he did. He essentially tied the GOP front-runner, leap-frogging the governor of the second-largest state (Rick Perry) and the former speaker of the House (Newt Gingrich).

Mr. Santorum shouldn’t kid himself; he faces huge obstacles. He’s spent a year making Iowa his second home. Now he’s in less friendly, less familiar terrain. He hasn’t had to endure withering scrutiny but will shortly. His chief opponent has tremendous organizational and financial advantages and has been through the rigors of a presidential primary race. Still, Mr. Santorum has a shot, and that’s all he could have hoped for.

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2011

As New Year’s approaches, here are a baker’s dozen predictions for 2012.

• Republicans will keep the U.S. House, albeit with their 25-seat majority slightly reduced. In the 10 presidential re-elections since 1936, the party in control of the White House has added House seats in seven contests and lost them in three. The average gain has been 12 seats. The largest pickup was 24 seats in 1944—but President Barack Obama is no FDR, despite what he said in his recent “60 Minutes” interview.

• Republicans will take the U.S. Senate. Of the 23 Democratic seats up in 2012, there are at least five vulnerable incumbents (Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Pennsylvania): The GOP takes two or three of these. With the announcement on Tuesday that Nebraska’s Ben Nelson will retire, there are now seven open Democratic seats (Connecticut, Hawaii, North Dakota, New Mexico, Virginia, Wisconsin): The GOP takes three or four. Even if Republicans lose one of the 10 seats they have up, they will have a net pickup of four to six seats, for a majority of 51 to 53.

• Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Harry Reid or both will leave the Democratic leadership by the end of 2012. Speaker John Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell will continue directing the GOP in their respective chambers.

• This will be the fourth presidential election in a row in which turnout increases. This has happened just once since 1828, from 1928 through 1940.

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2011

This month, during a speech in Osawatomie, Kan., and in an interview on “60 Minutes,” President Barack Obama laid out the broad contours of his re-election strategy. Republicans would be wise to examine his words and prepare accordingly.

Mr. Obama will frame this election as a fight for the middle class. He told his Kansas audience that America was once a place where “hard work paid off, and responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried.” Now, as he informed “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft, “the rules are rigged” against “middle-class families.”

The president’s tack is, in part, a reaction to his precarious standing among voters with high-school education or less. In a Gallup poll of Dec. 18, for example, his job approval with these voters—usually described as blue-collar workers—was 40%, down 26 points from January 2009. He can’t win if his numbers in this group stay so low.

Mr. Obama will make “fairness” a major theme. He declared in Kansas that his goal was to “restore balance, restore fairness,” and he then told Mr. Kroft that a “balanced approach” to the nation’s deficit crisis required “everybody to do their fair share.”

But resentment is not an effective political appeal. Americans tolerate unequal outcomes if they believe people have equal opportunity. Crude class warfare like Mr. Obama’s has never been successful in presidential campaigns (consider candidates Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry). In fact, a Gallup poll of Nov. 28-Dec. 1 shows that fewer Americans (45%) now believe income inequality “represents a problem that needs to be fixed” than believed that in 1998 (52%).

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2011

‘Sloppy looking . . . hack . . . bad person . . . so-called pundit.”

What sin prompted these classy insults from Donald Trump? I objected to him moderating a televised Republican presidential debate. Originally scheduled for Dec. 27, it has now been canceled (after only Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum had agreed to participate).

When the debate was announced, I suggested Mr. Trump was unlikely to be an impartial questioner. He had already said he would be “probably endorsing somebody right after” the debate and was already “leaning” toward one candidate. He had also threatened to run for president as a third-party candidate. It would be folly, then, for the GOP to lend credibility to a prospective spoiler who, if he entered the race, would split the anti-Obama vote.

I added that it wasn’t wise for Republican presidential hopefuls to associate with someone who began his own (aborted) bid for the GOP nomination by declaring Barack Obama ineligible to be president because he wasn’t born in the United States—an opinion he still holds today.

Mr. Trump’s reaction simply reinforced my points. But this kerfuffle obscures larger questions about the merits and shortcomings of this year’s GOP debates. A dozen have been held so far this year, with another being hosted Thursday night by Fox News.

On the plus side, the debates have allowed every potentially serious candidate to be seen by large audiences (an average of 4.5 million people have tuned in to each one). They have helped candidates sharpen sound bites and flesh out images. And they’ve kept alive candidacies that might have otherwise died due to lack of interest.

For the most part, the debates have been helpful. Before them, the “generic Republican” never led President Barack Obama in any Gallup survey. Since early July, the generic GOPer has often been leading Mr. Obama. The debates likely contributed to this shift.

Still, there can be too much of a good thing. Debates have nearly crippled campaigns, chewing into the precious time each candidate has to organize, raise money, set themes, roll out policy and campaign.

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Published for The Wall Street Journal on December 8, 2011

With the Iowa caucuses just 26 days away, the Republican presidential contest is now a two-man race. According to this week’s Gallup poll, the two candidates with the broadest appeal to GOP voters are former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Asked who would “be an acceptable nominee for president,” 62% said Mr. Gingrich and 54% named Mr. Romney. The only way anyone else becomes a serious contender is through a surprising finish in the Iowa caucuses or New Hampshire primary.

Mr. Gingrich has become the fourth front-runner in this year’s contest, displacing businessman Herman Cain and now leading Mr. Romney in the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls, 31% to 20%.

Mr. Gingrich rose as Mr. Cain declined because of charges of sexual harassment and infidelity. He benefited largely on the strength of his debate performances. In the Nov. 30 Des Moines Register poll, 50% of Iowa Republicans said Mr. Gingrich was the best debater. Mr. Romney was a distant second with 14%.

While the race remains fluid (two-thirds of Iowa Republicans told CBS pollsters they could still change their minds), the former House Speaker has the advantage of the calendar. There are roughly two weeks until voters lay aside the campaign to focus on Christmas. Absent something extraordinary, after Dec. 21 the campaign will be influenced less by news stories, ads or debates and more by conversations around the dinner table and at holiday parties.

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Published for The Wall Street Journal on December 1, 2011

The president will mix FDR and Truman campaign rhetoric. But 2012 is not 1948, or 1936.

According to a recent New York Times article, President Barack Obama and his aides believe he can win re-election mostly by mixing “the combativeness of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 drive” with the “anti-Congress zeal of Harry S. Truman’s 1948 campaign.”

Mr. Obama will find it easier to invoke these past presidents than to replicate their electoral successes. In many ways, his situation is significantly different than that of his Democratic predecessors.

For one thing, a year out from the 1948 election, Gallup measured Mr. Truman’s job approval at 54%, whereas Mr. Obama’s is 43%—substantially lower than any president who has won re-election. (Gallup wasn’t yet polling job approval in 1935, the year before FDR’s landslide re-election win, but it’s reasonable to assume he was far more popular than Mr. Obama is at the same point in his presidency.)

For another, Mr. Obama lacks the record on jobs of either Mr. Truman or Mr. Roosevelt. Unemployment was at 7.8% when Mr. Obama took office. It’s 9% today and is forecast to remain there through 2012. For FDR, unemployment was 17% in 1936—very high, but down from 20% the year before and 25% at its peak in 1933. In 1948, unemployment was 3.7% when Truman won.

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