Hewitt Blog

I wil be on the air for six hours today, from 6 PM to midnight EST, with a line-up of guests (see below) which is the rival of any network coverage anywhere.  Listen online via say WRC 1260, 710 KNUS, KKNT 960 or 870 KRLA if you are not in a market carrying the special broadcast.

I will also be keeping open our Salvation Army Red Kettle campaign throughout the six hours to give you one last chance this holiday season to donate to America's most effective anti-poverty agency, and if you wish, to bid for the co-host slot for an entire show which I will tweak to your theme or business.  You want to sell some cars, then sit in for a three hour show and we will plug your dealerships relentlessly.  Want to promote a cause or a candidate, same deal.  Win the auction and you are co-host for a day with a great deal of content control.  I offered one other co-host slot last week and it fetched $15,002 so I hope to beat that record today/tonight, but every dollar counts in the Red Kettle campaign.  (Just hit the banner ad to your right.)

The broadcast today will feature: The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes, Politico's John Harris and Mike Allen, The Washington Examiner's Michael Barone, David Freddoso, and Mark Tapscott, the National Review's Rich Lowry, K-Lo, Robert Costa and Jim Geraghty, The Daily Caller's Mary Katharine Ham, Breitbart's Larry O'Connor, Hot Air's Ed Morrissey and of course Townhall's Guy Benson, repeatedly.  My colleagues Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager and Michael Medved will also be stopping by to offer their analysis of the run-up and the results from Iowa.

Quite a lot of politics, and I hope quite a lot of coin in the kettle for The Salvation Army as well.

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That's the question Politico's Roger Simon poses.

A first or second place tonight makes the former Pennsylvania senator the not-Romney in New Hampshire, and it won't take a lot of money given the earned media to compete there or in South Carolina.  Three strong finishes would give RickSantorum.com the time to build a bank account for Florida via thousands of small donors. 

Money won't decide the GOP nomination.  As always, the GOP primary electorate will nominate the most conservative candidate it collectively concludes can win in November.  This favors previous candidates like Romney (see below) but it factors in ideas, and a Romney-Santorum duel like the Ford-Reagan campaign of 1976 is very possible over many states if Santorum combines a strong showing tonight with another one next week.

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From the Department of Unsolicited Advice.



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Kimberly Strassel's Wall Street Journal column, "Mr. Good Enough," outlines the argument that the GOP is "settling" for Mitt Romney.  She names five other GOPers who might have gotten into the race and beaten Romney --Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio-- and to that list she could have added Sarah Palin, John Thune and Haley Barbour and might also have noted that Tim Pawlenty ought to have hung for a while longer.

Each of those might have won the nomination, but each of them made a calculation that they would not run, and Romney's formidable skills as a candidate had a lot to do with the field being cleared.  Those GOP voters who would have preferred one of the above to run are not going to be as enthusiastic about Romney as they would have been had their own preferred candidate had run, but clearing most of the field of most of the formidable opposition tells us something of Romney's strengths as perceived by his strongest competitors.  They didn't want to get in the ring.  Many had very good reasons not to, but they are professionals, and professionals know when to fold the hand.

I go back to McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt's comment to me in a 2009 interview.

HH: Let me ask you just as a professional, not your hope for, not your wishes and dreams, who would you have to predict right now is going to be the Republican nominee in 2012?

SS: If I had to bet money on it, if I had to bet money on it today, you’d have to say that the people that I think look very good, very strong right now are Governor Romney, Governor Huntsman. I think Newt Gingrich, should he run, is going to be a very formidable, very formidable candidate. But the history of the Republican Party nominating process is that it almost always goes to someone who’s been around the track once before. And in that instance, in this instance, it would be Governor Romney. I thought he was a very scary opponent looking from the other side of the table in that he was almost like a learning organism at the end. He just kept getting better week by week by week, and kept becoming stronger. And I think these national campaigns are very unique, and I think most people learn a great deal with they go through them. And I think one of the reasons that President Bush was able to make it through the process the first time, unlike most people on the Republican side, is because he had been up close and personal through a couple of national races. And I think Mitt Romney is a candidate, is a far stronger candidate, prospectively, for the ’12 race because of his experience in ’08 than he was heading into the ’08 race.

If he wins tonight, Mitt Romney will almost certainly be the nominee.  Indeed if he finishes in the top three and wins next week in New Hampshire, he will almost certainly be the nominee.  And far from being merely "good enough," there are reasons to believe he will be an enormously effective candidate and an accomplished president.

The best reason to conclude that: All along Team Obama has most feared a Romney candidacy, training almost all of their firepower on the former Massachusetts governor in the hope of denying him the fall showdown with President Obama.  "Mr. Good Enough" to some GOPers is "Mr. Worst Case" to the president.

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Mitt Romney using duct tape to fix vent on campaign bus.



 

Let the unsolicited advice begin! My new Washington Examiner column (to be posted later today) lays out ten suggestions for Team Romney to ponder should the former Massachusetts governor's momentum hold up through January and he becomes the presumptive GOP nominee in February.

Over at Article VI Blog there are a set of predictions for Iowa, and don't miss John Mark Reynold's letter to Iowa Evangelicals.

And the Frenches show off their new running gear while also testing a new slogan for Romney "A Yankee governor with southern values."

Now it is a day for The OSU to sink some Gators, and then for the mini-OSU to show off WR Justin Blackmon in their trouncing of Stanford who looks very likely to end up in a Cleveland Browns uni after April's NFL Draft.

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An annual outburst of speculation, but this year they seem to have got the sports stuff correct.

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The four days before an actual election represent the moment when promises either become reality or excuses.  For many years the GOP held an edge across the country in the work of getting voters to actually show up.  One thing the next few days in Iowa and New Hampshire will show is whether there is the beginnings of an organization to rival President Obama's.  All the organization in the world cannot make up for a lousy candidate, but a handful of states in November may come down to a few thousand votes, votes which turn out because of organization.

With so many reporters in Iowa even brief stops at the cable channels between football games are amusing as journalists compete with each other to say the same five or six things.  Absurd mini-stories like Newt's heartfelt tears and whether Romney tweaked him about them --the Twitter class decided late in the day yesterday that Romney hadn't been tweaking Newt but just noting his own widely known capacity to tear up when talking about his own parents-- spring up and pass away.  Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina used a "tone of outrage" (how did Politico's Alexander Burns write that without cracking up?) to object to Matt Romney's joke about releasing his dad's tax returns when the president released his birth certificate and transcripts.  (I think every time you see a story that mentions "Romeny's tax returns" you should substitute "Obama's transcripts" for fun.) Campaign autopsy reports are being prepared and political obits put in the can.  It is a wild time for the campaigns and the media.  Fun to watch and comment on from a studio, but a pain in the New Year's neck in Iowa.  (We will be broadcasting a six hour show from 6 PM to midnight Tuesday, FYI, with all the usual suspects from The Weekly Standard, Politico, The Washington Examiner and Townhall).

Amid all the repetition there are a lot of funny one liners --Twitter is amazing for this period of time and will be forever during run-ups to elections-- there is very little being written that is actually worth a serious read, but one such offering is Timothy Dalrymple's "Myth Romney v. Mitt Romney."  Dalrymple is one of the senior editors over at Patheos.com which will mature in 2012 into one of if not the most influential portal in the online world of faith --it is also the blogging home of three other of my favorite online authors Mark D. Roberts, Nancy and David French and the Anchoress, Elizabeth Scalia-- and Dalrymple is also a serious evangelical scholar.  Like the folks at Evangelicals for Mitt and Article VI Blog, Dalrymple is a talented and increasingly influential new media voice on the intersection of faith and politics that most of the MSM haven't heard of much less read closely.

It isn't hard to stay ahead of the herd, but reading Dalrymple this AM makes it easier still.

And for Guy P. Benson's sake and all other Northwestern alums desperate to avoid a thrashing in Houston, Go 'Cats!

Follow Guy on Twitter at @guypbenson for real time exposure to the approach and consequences of football despair. 

The Daily Caller's Jeff Poor picks up on one of the key exchanges from my interview with Mitt Romney yesterday, one that won't be winning him many friends at Foggy Bottom.

Most of the MSM are out chasing polling stories while the candidates are actually saying very interesting things.  The complete transcript and audio of the Romney interview from Thursday is here.

Today's and Monday's show is the rebroadcast of Dr. Larry Arnn's history of western ideas.  The president of Hillsdale colleges spends all six hours with me in a mini-introduction to what makes the West the West.  Perhaps it can be piped into any remaining Occupy encampments where Western Civ didn't seem to be on many resumes.

To support Hillsdale with year-end giving, or to just sign up for its free and very wonderful speech digest Imprimus, visit the college's website.

And the auction for a one-day co-hosting opportunity to benefit the Salvation Army continues through Tuesday.  The first of two co-hosting slots went for a contribution of $15,002 to the Salvation Army on Thursday.  The bidding starts there for the second three-hour slot.  Imagine, if you are a car dealer, what three hours of a nationally syndicated radio does for your dealership?  If you are a candidate, well, just think about it?  Or anyone with anything to sell or promote.  For the good of the Salvation Army, I will be shameless in advancing your cause while turning you into a radio host.

If you want to make a bid, send me an email at hugh@hughhewitt.com.

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