Newt Gingrich is in the presidential race; a cartoon in USA Today had him throwing his three (one would assume wedding) rings into the hat.
Does he have baggage? Not as much as you would think. Other than his martial troubles (he was having an affair with Wife #3 while still hitched to Wife #2, among other things), he seemed to be getting into trouble for doing too many things at once in the md-90s, running a non-political education outfit and a state-level recruitment PAC and writing books and being a congressman all at the same time; sloppy accounting between those various hats seemed to be the lion share of the problem, if you follow the old adage to not chalk up to malice what can be better attributed to stupidity (or sloppiness).
He's got double-digit support. He's an idea guy, sometimes too much so. He also tends to be a loose cannon who will give bulletin-board material for oppo teams on a regular basis. With no one cracking 20%, that's enough to be in the conversation. Probably not enough to win, but someone has to win this.
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On to the governors. Mitt Romney was trying to distance himself from the "Obamacare" Sr. that he signed into law in MA back in 2006. This is likely the issue that will keep him from the nomination; Republicans are likely to want someone who can make the case against the health care bill, and this doesn't help Romney with that crowd.
Jon Huntsman was in the news this week, especially as Red State's Erick Erickson was giving him both barrels for being disloyal for being Obama's ambassador to China while doing the background work for a GOP presidential run. It's probably more his loyalty than his disloyalty that will get him into trouble with primary voters; anyone Obama would trust to be his envoy to China would have a hard time getting the trust of conservative primary voters. Somehow, I think that's more what Erickson was after, although your mileage may vary.
Unlike this time four years ago, Mike Huckabee is in the lead pack and actually leads in many polls. He also has a lot of lucrative media gigs that he'd have to take a leave of absence from were he to join Newt in throwing a ring into the hat. He's supposed to make an announcement on his Saturday night Fox News show tomorrow. Given that using Fox airtime to make a presidential announcement would be of questionable propriety, the CW is that he'll be announcing that he's not running.
However, he could also announce that he'll be winding up his show shortly, effectively announcing a presidential run without announcing it on the air on Fox's nickle.
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Huckabee isn't well liked by the dynamist wing of the party, but might be a good consensus candidate. He's still my first choice of the folks not yet out of the octagon (let's get our metaphors into the 10s) but he'll have to expand his appeal outside of evangelical voters in order to get a plurality of the vote. Herman Cain looks intriguing after his showing at the SC debate last week, but he has some work to do to get into the lead back.
I don't see a Huntsman nomination; he flunks the bumper-sticker test big time and is too moderate for the modern GOP.
Mitt... he has a lot of establishment support, but will be a hard sell for Tea Party voters.
The problem with the current race is that you can see a lot of people getting 20% of the primary vote on a good day (Palin, Huckabee, Romney, Pawlenty, Daniels, Cain, even Ron Paul) but have a hard time seeing them getting to 35%. All have their strengths and all have their weaknesses.
Pawlenty is in.
Posted by: alan | May 23, 2011 at 11:33 AM