WP: Conservatives look for winning hand
Lack of candidate to rally around has key GOP constituency feeling glum
By Michael D. Shear and Anne E. Kornblut
The Washington Post
Updated: 6:45 a.m. ET March 3, 2007
WASHINGTON - Each year for more than three decades, a handful of icons of the American conservative movement have met for a friendly game of seven-card stud in a Washington hotel suite the night before the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.
This week, according to several participants, the mood around the poker table could hardly have been more glum.
"Nothing focuses the mind like an impending hanging," said longtime conservative fundraiser Richard A. Viguerie, paraphrasing the English essayist Samuel Johnson. "And Republicans feel an impending hanging with Hillary looming on the horizon."
The possibility of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as president was bad enough. Even worse is the absence of a Republican candidate to rally around.
The movement's leaders "are all pretty much agreed that there is no clear conservative choice," said the game's host, David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union. "Or even an unclear conservative choice."
Is ‘Republican brand’ down?
The apprehension of Keene and his poker partners is shared not only by the more than 5,000 activists on hand as the conference began yesterday. It is mirrored across the broader constituency of the Republican Party.
Between the war in Iraq, President Bush's low approval ratings, the recent midterm defeats and a void at the top with neither the president nor the vice president in the race, several Republican strategists said the mood is drearier than it has been since 1992.
"There's a sense that the Republican brand is down and it needs to come back up again if there's going to be a chance," said John Feehery, who served as communications director for Tom DeLay when the Texan was House majority leader.
Even among White House staff members, there are frequent morbid jokes that the next occupant will be a Democrat, and there has been no mass exodus of Bush administration officials to Republican campaigns as there might have been during a more optimistic time.
Polling data, though an unreliable predictor of an election 20 months away, suggest Republicans have as good a chance of keeping the White House as losing it. Republicans are marginally ahead in many of the hypothetical head-to-head contests, suggesting that the country as a whole is divided down the middle when it comes to choosing a president.
Still, the party's mood is shaping the contest, and even leading Republicans are not overly optimistic. "I'm confident that we'll do fine," Sen. John McCain of Arizona said with uncharacteristic caution last week when asked to gauge the party's chances in the next presidential campaign cycle.
McCain, considered a front-runner for the GOP nomination, said his belief is that the country is still a "right-of-center nation, and the Republican Party is still a right-of-center party," adding, with a broad grin, that the GOP nominee can win "if the guy's not too big of a jerk."
Other Senate Republicans dodged the question. Sen. John E. Sununu of New Hampshire said last week that he is not a good person to ask about the party's prospects next year. Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, who has endorsed McCain, waved away a question about 2008.
"It's going to be bad," a senior aide to a Senate Republican said, "but maybe we've maxed out, and the only place to go now is up."
That sense of foreboding has helped propel several of the campaigns, particularly that of former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who in another season might not have stood a chance among Republican voters. Now, fearing they may lose, some Republicans have said they would be willing to consider someone more moderate if that is their only chance of retaining control of the White House.
"I think there's concern because the president's numbers are down and we just came off a bad election," said Warren Tompkins, a prominent Republican operative in South Carolina who supports former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. "People are still a little down and a little shell-shocked from what happened in the last cycle."
One force who could revive the party is Clinton, Tompkins said, if she wins the Democratic nomination. "She will awaken us and get the party out of the doldrums, especially in my world," Tompkins said, referring to the South.
Polls give that theory credence, and they also suggest that either McCain or Giuliani would have greater luck drawing away independents and Democrats in a general election than the Democratic front-runners, Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), would have in attracting Republicans.
A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Republicans having much more negative views of the Democratic contenders, particularly Clinton, than Democrats have of the Republican candidates.
Making their pitches
Between pep talks from conservative leaders, activists at the CPAC yesterday listened to a series of Republican candidates -- minus McCain -- who trouped before them in hopes of sparking interest from the party's most committed base of supporters and a key part of the primary electorate.
The activists do not like Giuliani's support for abortion rights, gun control and gay rights. They are suspicious of Romney's positions on social issues given his more liberal pronouncements as governor. And they are wary of McCain, who did not help himself by skipping the convention. To express their dissatisfaction, some attendees wore stickers that said "Rudy McRomney" in a circle with a slash through the words.
Giuliani and Romney commanded huge crowds, many of them college students waving signs. But Giuliani's low-key speech had less partisan red meat than did Romney's, and the crowd reacted accordingly.
Giuliani gave only a glancing mention to social issues, emphasizing instead the areas of agreement. "I don't agree with myself on everything," he joked. He talked about the need for leadership, improving education and aggressively fighting terrorism.
Romney described having "stood at the center of the battlefield" on social issues as governor. "I fought to protect our family values," he said. He promised to appoint conservative judges and carry on the fight against terrorism.
The lesser-known candidates drew smaller, but often intense, crowds. Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas fired them up with vows to oppose same-sex marriage and bring faith "back to the public square."
"I don't think these people reflect my conservative beliefs," said Kyle Bristow, 20, a sophomore at Michigan State University and a supporter of long-shot presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, a congressman from Colorado. "Conservatives will lose if we're going to nominate liberals."
Viguerie, the movement veteran, said that he is not optimistic about victory in 2008 and that he tells conservatives to focus on the long term. "I think it will be '012 or '016," he said.
In the meantime, he suggested that conservative Republicans withhold support from McCain, Giuliani and Romney -- at least for the time being. "I don't think it's worth the conservative energy right now," Viguerie said.
© 2007 The Washington Post Company
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