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Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton Hardly Inevitable

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 18, 2007

WASHINGTON - Americans say they are weary of political polarization and pugnacity. If so, the current situation in presidential politics is unstable: The leading Democratic and Republican candidates, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, are the most polarizing and pugnacious candidates, respectively. Hence Barack Obama and Mitt Romney might be stronger than national polls suggest.

James Carville, political consultant and aphorist, says: Nothing validates a candidate to voters as much as other voters. If Romney wins Iowa and New Hampshire - no Republican has ever won both - and then Michigan, where his father was governor, he will reach South Carolina very validated indeed.

Giuliani has a double-digit lead in Florida, but if he wins the nomination after starting the delegate selection events 0-4, he will do something not done since prehistoric times. In 1952, Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson was nominated by bosses, an extinct species, who would not countenance the candidacy of Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver. The New York Times of May 11, 1952, proclaimed:

KEFAUVER WINS VOTES

BUT NOT PARTY LEADERS

Kefauver had won every primary except Florida's, where he narrowly lost not to Stevenson but to Georgia Sen. Richard Russell.

Giuliani's strategy might be shrewd. Before Florida votes on Jan. 29, only 154 delegates will have been chosen. Florida, where Giuliani leads by 17 points, will allocate 57. Seven days later, 20 states vote, including California (173 delegates), where Giuliani has another double-digit lead. Romney's campaign serenely notes that in 2004, when John Kerry won Iowa and New Hampshire, he shot from about 9 percent to 52 percent among Democrats. That is validation.

An Obama victory in Iowa might be initially injurious to Romney, but beneficial to him four days later in New Hampshire. If Romney, who leads in Iowa, wins there and Obama beats Clinton, the latter story will overshadow the former. But an Obama win in Iowa would radically raise the stakes of the Democrats' New Hampshire primary. The aura of inevitability that Clinton's campaign has cultivated carries an unpleasant aroma of entitlement. This is grating to Iowans, who feel entitled to a role grander than that of ratifying a preordained outcome.

Conservatives should think: Although Republicans have much to fear in 2008, they might have less to fear from her as a candidate and, if she wins, as a president, than they would from Obama.

Carville, who studies Republicans with the detached condescension of an anthropologist among primitives, notes that former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida is admired by social conservatives everywhere and by residents of his electorally crucial swing state (he left office with a 63 percent approval rating). Carville believes that if Bush's last name were anything else, the Republican nomination would already be effectively his. And he is just 54.

But before shuddering at the prospect of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton-Bush, take heart: The third Bush is not running, and the second Clinton is hardly inevitable.

George Will's column is distributed by Washington Post Writers Group

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