It’s either this or reflection on the end of the Packer season, and this happened first (besides, I’m more-apt to put the latter over at TheWisconsinSportsBar, and my fellow bartenders pretty much already summed it up complete with expletives). First, let me state for the record that I’m nowhere near a professional political operative (the rambling nature of this post ought to be a dead giveaway), and that while the anticipated pronouncement that the boat is below the waves is tomorrow, it isn’t official yet.
A lot of people are saying and are going to say that Fred Thompson got into the race too late. If by late, you mean he got in later by an “absolute” calendar standard than successful candidates got in previous cycles, no. If by late, you mean he got in after everybody else did, yes. The “buzz” in politics, specifically press coverage and fundraising, is much like the time near the end of a race at Darlington, with only one green-flag pit stop left to go (I’ll ignore that Darlington tends not to have a lot of long green-flag runs). For those of you not familiar with NASCAR or Darlington Raceway, the surface at Darlington is very abrasive, and cars with a fresh set of tires turn laps that tend to be at least 2 seconds faster than cars that are at the end of their runs.
Yet, that was not nearly the fatal blow. Thompson did get a lot of buzz, especially in the conservative blogosphere, and more than enough cash to compete with at least John McCain and Mike Huckabee once he got in the race. Morever, all of the states had significant moves in support well after Thompson got into the race, so the “late” argument doesn’t exactly hold a lot of water for me.
That “late” argument does not explain why Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo, both of whom ran credibly on what was supposedly the number one conservative issue in 2007 (opposition to illegal immigration) and both of whom entered the race at the same time as everybody else, never gained more than token support and ultimately dropped out. It also does not explain why Mitt Romney, who poured a lot of money and time into every pre-Florida state and who ran to the right of Rudy McCabee for much of the pre-primaries/caucii portion of the campaign, essentially collapsed in every state contested by any third of that three-headed monster. I know, Romney did take a contested Michigan; however, there are a pair of mitigating circumstances. First, the Romney name is still remembered fondly in the state across the lake. Second, Romney went away from his previous broad-based conservatism message, especially in the economic department.
I’m left asking the same question the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute asked last April in “Wisconsin Interest” (Volume 16, Number 2), “Is conservatism out of gas?” I’m now leaning more toward my very-pessimistic Wisconsin-specific answer than my somewhat-more-optimistic national one, with the further revision that there are no gains to be had by focusing solely on social conservatism. Indeed, I’m almost ready to ask the follow-on question of whether conservatism is dead.
I’m also just about ready to ask and answer the question on whether the right-of-center part of the blogosphere has any actual influence. That really deserves its own missive, but I’ll give the upshot now; whatever influence we have is with the politicians themselves, not with the masses.
Ultimately, it was a combination of the cumulative effects of 70 years of almost-unchecked liberalism and complete chaos that was the Thompson campaign that doomed Thompson to the scrap heap of political history.
