Another Entry, but Still a Jumbled GOP Race
The Top Contenders, All Seen as Flawed, Struggle for a Message

By Dan Balz and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 16, 2007

The contest for the Republican presidential nomination remains without a clear front-runner in a field of candidates still scrambling to find a message.

The entry of former senator Fred D. Thompson (Tenn.) has done little to clarify the race, according to strategists inside and outside the campaigns. His mediocre reviews have added to the perception that all of the leading candidates must overcome evident flaws to win the nomination.

If anything, the race is more competitive than it was in midsummer, when Thompson's entry was eagerly anticipated, as the two nominal front-runners have failed to break away from the pack.

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has seen his significant lead in national polls shrink dramatically, and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has yet to translate support in Iowa and New Hampshire into broader backing across the country.

Thompson has jumped to second in national polls but still faces the challenge of living up to advance billing as the candidate who could excite a lethargic and demoralized Republican base. Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) is trying to revive his campaign with undaunted support for President Bush's war policy.

The convoluted contest has left many Republican strategists concerned and questioning whether any candidate has found a voice and vision that can carry him to the White House.

"I don't think that any of them have really put forward a vision for how they would lead our country to Republican voters," said Terry Nelson, a veteran of Bush's 2004 campaign and the McCain campaign's former manager. "I believe that successful campaigns for president have a positive vision for where they want to lead."

The leading candidates have begun to carve out distinctive niches. Giuliani has seized on the fight against terrorism and on his performance in New York after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. McCain has made Iraq his defining issue. Romney has sought to project himself as the candidate of competence. Thompson poses the question, Why can't things be better?

But none, said former House speaker Newt Gingrich, has defined his candidacy in a way that represents a genuine break with the Bush presidency or the status quo, a requirement he called crucial to the GOP's hopes of holding the White House.

Instead, said other Republicans, the candidates are running traditional campaigns on traditional Republican issues -- a play-it-safe strategy designed to get them through the primaries but not necessarily to the White House.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has been trying to steer a path in that direction, casting himself in debates as a conservative with a fresh vision. But his under-funded campaign must overcome four candidates who are far better known.

"The race for the nomination is very much up for grabs," said Scott Reed, who ran Robert J. Dole's 1996 presidential campaign. "Each of the major four candidates have some flaws, and while the campaigns have had some good moments over the summer, they're all starting about in the same place."

At this point, the campaigns are focused on strategies built around the demands of a complex and heavily front-loaded calendar of primaries and caucuses.

Romney advisers are banking on an early-state strategy that assumes their candidate will win in Iowa and New Hampshire. They hope the resulting attention will rocket him into the lead nationally in January and propel him to victory in the succeeding states.

"When do the national polls move for us? They move for us after we win," said Tom Rath, a longtime New Hampshire strategist working for Romney. "This is the hardest time to stay focused, because there's nothing for us to win right now. We've got to stay disciplined."

Giuliani has staked less on those two states and more on later contests, particularly the big round of primaries on Feb. 5. But his campaign also hopes to embarrass Romney by outdoing him in one of the first two states, with New Hampshire the prime focus.

Giuliani's team has felt the effects of Thompson's entry, with the former mayor's poll numbers sagging though still bigger than those of the rest of the field. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Giuliani at 28 percent, Thompson at 19 percent, McCain at 18 percent, Romney at 10 percent and Huckabee at 5 percent.

Had Thompson entered earlier in the summer, he might have contributed to a knockout punch on McCain. Instead, his announcement appears to have continued the deflation in Giuliani's standing.

Giuliani moved aggressively last week to endear himself to Republican voters by challenging the Democratic front-runner, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.). He attacked her questioning of Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and called on her to denounce a newspaper ad by the liberal group MoveOn.org that called Petraeus "General Betray Us." Giuliani's campaign bought its own ad in the New York Times to go after Clinton and MoveOn and began airing an Internet ad criticizing Clinton.

GOP strategists said Thompson's long and rocky campaign rollout, a testing-the-waters period that went on for months and saw several staff members depart, might have robbed the former senator of a bigger boost once he announced his candidacy on Sept. 5.

Thompson's natural strength is in the South, and he appears to have good support in South Carolina, the first of the Southern states to vote in January. His advisers see Florida as another potentially strong state for him.

Thompson aides said he hopes to be competitive in Iowa, but they are less sanguine about New Hampshire. Thompson did not help himself by skipping the Republican debate there in favor of an appearance on Jay Leno's television show.

The strategy for Thompson is to survive Iowa and New Hampshire and then do well in South Carolina and Florida. But Thompson aides say there are too many unknowns about the primary calendar to know for certain how the race will play out.

Beyond the calendar, though, Thompson's top strategists think that their candidate will appeal to voters who make their choice based simply on whom they like. They believe a strong personal appeal could be more important than finding the marginal differences between the GOP candidates on policy issues.

"Most of the polling has shown that the most important personality traits that Republican voters are looking for are honesty and authenticity," said Thompson spokesman Todd Harris.

In a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll completed Wednesday, Thompson ran second behind Giuliani and was seen as a real conservative by more GOP voters than any of the other candidates. But he ran behind Giuliani and McCain on experience and trailed far behind Giuliani on leadership.

Republican strategists think that the state of the nomination contest will not begin to become clear until later in the year -- once Giuliani and Romney are challenged more aggressively on their greatest vulnerabilities. For Giuliani, that is his support for abortion rights and gay rights. For Romney, it is the fact that only a few years ago his positions on those issues were more liberal than they are today.

"Until the debate intensifies and there's a real back-and-forth and Giuliani and Romney have to deal with those issues in a campaign environment, the state of the race is really going to be unknown," Nelson, the former McCain campaign manager, said.

But Rath, the Romney adviser, underscored the other unknown, which is whether any candidate can offer a message strong enough to carry through the primaries and into the general election -- one that will galvanize a party deeply worried about the election.

"The key to our nomination -- out of these four guys -- is who is able to capture a message and convey it that gives hope to this party," he said.