McCain Does It Again

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 30, 2008 9:11 AM

The journalistic betting heading into last night's Florida cliffhanger was that the winner would go on to the Republican nomination, and Rudy was toast.

Now that John McCain has eked out a victory, the pundits are still arguing over the first proposition, and Mark Halperin was the first to report--29 minutes after the polls closed--that Rudy Giuliani would back Mac today.

Had McCain lost, I think he would have had a hard time competing with Mitt Romney's wealth next Tuesday. Now that he's won, he still faces a big obstacle: The conservative establishment, and especially the conservative media establishment, can't stand him. So for them, Romney becomes the stop-McCain candidate.

Romney's problem is that except for his quasi-home state of Michigan and the largely uncontested Nevada caucuses, he hasn't won a head-to-head contest with McCain. And unlike in New Hampshire and South Carolina, where McCain was buoyed by independents, Florida was a straight-up, GOP-only contest.

How badly do National Review, Rush and other elements of the right want to stop Mac? What if polls show him a much stronger candidate against Hillary/Obama? At what point does the party coalesce around him?

For the moment, McCain needs a cash infusion. Winning South Carolina and now Florida should help. Having Rudy's backing, if it comes, should help in New York and New Jersey. And a press corps that generally likes the senator, and likes the comeback story, doesn't hurt. Whereas Romney's press relations are symbolized by his snapping at the AP's Glen Johnson, seated on the floor of Staples, over the role of lobbyists in his campaign.

A word about projections: This is the second time this season that the three cable networks followed the AP's projection within minutes. In fact, political director Chuck Todd was explaining how NBC's decision-makers were isolated and wouldn't follow the pack when Keith Olbermann broke in to say the network was calling it for McCain. Nice try, Chuck. So much for independent decision-making.

Rudy's Florida flameout? The pundits are saying he dropped in the polls wherever he campaigned. Having spent time with Giuliani in New Hampshire, it was clear he wasn't connecting. He never seemed to go beyond his initial talking points. He's not a press-the-flesh candidate. He took few questions and summoned little passion, making a no-nonsense case like the prosecutor he once was. Voters want to bond with a potential president. Rudy campaigned like he wanted to get home and catch the Yankee game.

Does it matter that Hillary Clinton won Florida? It was a non-event with no delegates in which no candidates campaigned. On the other hand, everyone was at an equal disadvantage.

The Hillary spin, naturally enough, is that a win is a win, and she sorely needs a positive headline in the wake of South Carolina, Hurricane Bill and the Kennedys. The Obama spin is that it's meaningless. I got this "breaking" Obama e-mail at 8:01 p.m.: "Obama and Clinton tie for delegates in Florida. 0 for Obama, 0 for Clinton."

Hillary seized the microphone -- and, briefly, the television spotlight -- to announce that she is "thrilled" by "this vote of confidence" (notwithstanding the fact that she hadn't stepped foot in the state). It was kind of a Kabuki moment, and the cable nets soon broke away.

My view is that Florida is something of a footnote for the Democrats. Clinton is entitled to brag, but a victory is only a victory when the media say it is.

Romney was still hitting his anti-Washington notes last night (and attacking "Hillarycare," despite his Massachusetts health insurance mandate). But hasn't that message failed to sell? Maybe voters don't blame McCain, so often at odds with his party, for the mess in Washington.

Romney will stay in, among other reasons, because these guys have really come to despise each other.

The bad news for Romney, whose strength is as a businessman, is that McCain won among those for whom the economy was the top issue. I find that surprising, since Mac has always stressed the war above all.

McCain's speech was okay--he's no Barack Obama at the microphone--and contained just the briefest allusion to his time as a POW. He conveyed a sense of optimism about the country. The bigger news was the reported Rudy endorsement, and the sense that McCain is one step closer to the prize that eluded him eight years ago.

Now, you think the journalists who declared McCain a basket case last summer are suitably embarrassed? Or shall we remind them one more time?

"I think McCain is too classy to play back to reporters all those soundbites about him dropping out of the race. At the convention." So says Ana Marie Cox.

Boston Globe: "John McCain's second consecutive victory in a closely fought primary puts him in the best position of any candidate to take control of his party's presidential campaign next week, when states containing half the country's population go to the polls."

L.A. Times: "John McCain now has a pathway to the Republican presidential nomination. The question is whether he can put his fractured party back together.

"The Arizona senator, long the bane of the GOP establishment, showed in Florida that he could begin cobbling together a new Republican coalition -- attracting enough support from all corners of the party base to give him a plurality in the biggest and most diverse state to vote so far in the 2008 campaign."

New York Times: "Senator John McCain's victory in the Florida primary came in the face of considerable odds and suggests that his chief rival here, Mitt Romney, faces tough going in what has effectively become a two-person Republican field."

Washington Post: "With his victory in Florida, Sen. John McCain of Arizona took control of the battle for the Republican presidential nomination -- a prospect that seemed almost unthinkable just a few months ago."

Chicago Tribune: "McCain's victory seemed due in part to the ability of Mike Huckabee to siphon votes of cultural conservatives away from Romney. It is a win, to be sure, but one that was not the exclusive product of support for McCain."

Slate's John Dickerson:

"Now McCain can expect an influx of money from supporters and a hail of attacks from that portion of the GOP establishment that despises him . . .

"There was a cost to the McCain victory. He hurled his toughest and most distorted charges at Mitt Romney in the final days of the contest, claiming Romney had supported a withdrawal from Iraq in April 2007. The charge had only passing acquaintance with the truth and obscured McCain's true point, which was that Romney was trying to proceed gingerly at a politically delicate time rather than taking McCain's aggressive forward posture about the surge."

The NYT dances on Rudy's grave over "a free-fall so precipitous as to be breathtaking . . . Many advisers and political observers point to the hubris and strategic miscalculations that plagued his campaign. He allowed a tight coterie of New York aides, none with national political experience, to run much of his campaign."

As for the Democratic side, Newsday reports: "Barack Obama dismissed Tuesday's Florida primary as a 'beauty contest' but Hillary Rodham Clinton's landslide victory provided ugly omens for his quest to build a broad, multiracial coalition to defeat her on Feb. 5 . . .

"As in South Carolina and Nevada, the results divided sharply along racial and ethnic lines, with Clinton solidly supported by whites and Hispanics, while Obama benefitted from overwhelming backing from African-American voters."

Lots of chatter about a John Fund report in OpinionJournal that McCain told someone he didn't want to appoint judges like Sam Alito who wear their conservatism on their sleeve. McCain denied saying this in a call with conservative bloggers, and National Review's Jim Geraghty is skeptical:

"One other . . . odd thing about the Fund column -- and I don't want this to be interpreted as questioning Fund's reporting, because he's a pro and I trust him. But if a potential GOP presidential nominee said that he was kind of iffy on Alito, one of the few true clear-cut victories for conservatism in recent years, wouldn't you think that by the time McCain finished the following sentence, everyone in the audience would have already typed into their Blackberries, 'U WON'T BELIEVE WHAT McC JUST SAID' and begun preparing their furious denunciations? Wouldn't the conservatives who heard it be knocking people over in order to get in front of a camera to rip McCain for saying that? . . .

"Flip side -- if you look at McCain's statements, you'll notice he and his campaign are careful to not come out and say, 'Fund and/or his sources are damn liars.' This is a stunningly damaging quote, with little detail on where and when it was said."

Marc Ambinder questions the message of a McCain radio ad:

" Mitt Romney thinks he can fool us. He supported abortion on demand, even allowed a law mandating taxpayer-funding for abortion. He says he changed his mind, but he still hasn't changed the law. He told gay organizers in Massachusetts he would be a stronger advocate for special rights than even Ted Kennedy. Now, it's something different.

"That's a McCain robo-call, confirmed by the campaign. Is this gay-baiting? Or making the point that Romney flip-flops on social issues?

"Raising the specter of scary homosexuals and their 'special rights' is a time-honored last-minute trick, and what qualifies for the label of 'gay-baiting' -- a harsh label, to be sure -- is often in the eye of the beholder."

Conservatives are grappling with the meaning--and electoral threat--of Obamaism. Most don't criticize him personally, but make clear that he'll be branded with the L-word. Rich Lowry sees a return to leftist politics:

"Within the party, Clinton represented a turn away from old-style Michael Dukakis liberalism. Obama now seeks to upend the Clinton ascendancy. With an overwhelming South Carolina victory fueled by revulsion with the Clintons' tactics, Obama is explicitly seeking to defeat Clintonism forever as a dominant force in national Democratic politics.

"Long before Obama came on the scene, Democrats had tired of centrist-oriented Clintonian Third Way politics. The approach didn't survive Al Gore's campaign in 2000, when the vice president ran as a left-wing populist. John Kerry reprised Dukakis in 2004, and all the energy has been on the left of the party since then. Even Hillary has abandoned her husband's moderation on trade.

"Obama reflects this return to liberal orthodoxy. What makes him different -- besides the historic nature of his candidacy -- is his stylistic contrast with the Clintons. He promises a politics that is more civil and straightforward, less partisan and bare-knuckled. Nearly every passage in Obama's stirring victory speech in South Carolina was a slap at the Clintons' hardball politics, framed in inspirational liberal terms. Obama might as well of intoned, 'We shall overcome -- the Clintons.' . . . Obama's is a liberalism without guilt."

But if you're going to rip Obama as a lib, argues Andrew Sullivan, the question is, "compared to what? It seems to me that any Republican cavilling at Obama's incremental liberalism who has not exploded in rage during the last seven years has no standing to debate this question. No conservative who has not gone nuclear at the Bush administration's Medicare bill, or its doubling of federal education spending, or its adding $32 trillion to unfunded liabilities, or its long record of nanny-state initiatives, or its trampling of states rights in education, drug laws, marriage laws, and on and on . . . has much of a leg to stand on when complaining - now- about big government liberalism. In many ways, it's much worse coming from the Republicans, because Bush and his cronies have legitimized left-liberalism in ways that even Clinton could not (and did not) . . .

"Let's be clear here: Compared to Bush, Obama is a conservative. He is promising nothing like the expansion of government or debt that Bush pushed through in eight years."

Obama talks to Jewish journalists about Israel and Farrakhan.

Some on the right are scratching their heads over the hype surrounding the Teddy Kennedy endorsement. "Maybe I don't get it, or maybe I don't get the liberal mindset, but why would this guy's endorsement matter?" asks Bull Dog Pundit. "He's been an embarrassment for years. Yeah, it may help him with some goofy liberals, but let's say he wins the primary, how is he going to distinguish his politics from that of Ted Kennedy, who is viewed as one of the most liberal people in America, even by Independents.

"Well, the truth is that Obama's policies are no different than Ted Kennedy's, and that's the really scary part."

Captain Ed is puzzled by Kennedy's call for change:

"Huh? No one represents 'old politics' better than Ted Kennedy. In fact, Bill Clinton's ascension in 1992 came in large part from a push by the Democratic Leadership Council, which formed as a means to promote a new center-Left direction to abandon the hard-Left policies that had begun to marginalize the Democratic Party, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ted Kennedy served as the epitome of the Old Guard that opposed the DLC's rejection of traditional Democratic populism."

On the other hand, both President Bush (on education) and John McCain (on immigration) have worked with the scary Kennedy in recent years.