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Giuliani Position Called ‘Extremely Favorable’
By Brent Seaborn
Mayor Giuliani is in an extremely favorable position heading into September - the month that traditionally accelerates the election cycle; by the first of October, the campaign will be in full speed.
We have had a very good summer. Our campaign is operating smoothly, working together and moving cohesively in the same direction. The Mayor and the campaign have been focused on a forward looking agenda with the 12 Commitments and continue to set the tone for discussion with voters. The commitments have successfully provided direction and focus to the national dialogue. Furthermore, the Mayor has performed exceptionally well in the debates. Overall we should be pleased with the state of the race and our position going into the fall.
Our lead in the states with the most delegates at stake is proving to be very solid and sustainable. We are well positioned to compete and win in both the traditional early states, Florida and key February 5th contests. And we prove to be the most competitive and viable general election candidate against Hillary Clinton.
NATIONAL POLLS
Since the start of the year, Mayor Giuliani's national poll numbers have defied both his critics and "so- called" conventional wisdom. Of particular note - the Mayor's national ballot support has been steadily climbing since mid-July. Midsummer, our Real Clear Politics average was approximately 25%, our Political Arithmetik trend was under 25% and our weekly public polling average was 26%. Mayor Giuliani's current Real Clear Politics average has grown to 28%, our Political Arithmetik trend has returned above 25% and weekly averaging is edging closer to 35%.
National major media polls conducted in August report Mayor Giuliani's ballot support posting modest gains and increasing and his lead growing. In a recent CBS poll, the Mayor's ballot share is 38%, up 5-points from the previous CBS poll conducted in early July. Furthermore, we post a 20-point lead over Senator Thompson - a 12-point increase in our lead.
August Polls Reporting Gains for Mayor Giuliani in Support and Advantage over GOP Field
Date 8/22-8/26 8/21-8/22 8/8-8/12
Giuliani 27 29 38
McCain 12 7 12
Romney 15 11 13
Thompson1 7 14 18
Survey Hotline/Diageo FOX News CBS News
Increase in Support +7 +2 +5
Increase in Advantage+9 +4 +12
We are now in our strongest position in nearly 5 months. Not only has our ballot share been on the increase, we have seen our lead over our nearest opponent grow as well. In August, the Mayor's average lead over his closest opponent in major media polls is 12-points. According to the Gallup Poll1, an analysis of elections since 1952 shows that in almost every case, the man to whom Republican voters were giving the highest poll total in the fall before the election ended up becoming the eventual GOP nominee, and in no situation did a strong front-runner go on to lose the nomination. Furthermore, Mayor Giuliani has led every Gallup poll conducted in 2007 and enjoys a double digit advantage over the rest of the GOP Primary field.
National Major Media Polls Conducted in August
Date 8/22-8/26 8/21-8/22 8/13-8/16 8/8-8/12 8/6-8/8 8/3-8/5 8/1/2007
Giuliani 31 27 29 32 38 29 33 30
McCain 12 12 7 11 12 16 16 13
Romney 12 15 11 14 13 12 8 13
Thompson 19 17 14 19 18 22 21 22
Survey Average Hotline/Diageo FOX News Gallup CBS CNN USA Today/Gallup Newsweek
Advantage over 2nd Place +12 +10 +15 +13 +20 +7 +12 +8
FEBRUARY 5 STATES
We are very strong in key states, like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California - states with a total of more than 350 delegates at stake. In New York and New Jersey, we average just under 50% of the vote share and lead our nearest opponent by approximately 30-points. In Connecticut the Mayor has been the frontrunner in every poll conducted and maintains an average lead of more than 20-points. In the last 2 California polls the Mayor has a lead of 20 or more points. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware are "winner take all" states, and will provide 200+ delegates for Mayor Giuliani on that day. Given the complex nature of delegate allocation in other states plus large leads in delegate-rich states like California and Illinois, a triple-digit delegate lead after February 5 is a distinct possibility.
THE EARLY STATES
Florida remains a strong state for the Mayor. Rudy Giuliani has lead essentially every Republican primary poll conducted in Florida in 2007 and after a brief tightening in state polling in June and July; the Mayor has begun to reopen his lead - now more than 10-points on average.
New Hampshire is slowly developing in to a two-way race between Mitt Romney and Mayor Giuliani and our internal average of public polls shows that Mayor Giuliani is beginning to narrow the race. Senator McCain continues to be strong in New Hampshire though.
Despite several lead changes in South Carolina, Mayor Giuliani has been consistently strong. Mayor Giuliani has led 6 of 7 polls in South Carolina this year, and has consistently been in first or second place in South Carolina polling. And Fred Thompson seems to have begun a bit of a decline since late May and early June.
THE FIELD
It is clear that Senator Thompson's indecision may have cost him his best opportunity to enter this race with the momentum he once had. That said, he still has the opportunity to enter this race and regain some of the momentum that he had 2 months ago, but it will be difficult. However, that is not to say that we should not anticipate a bump in the polls for Senator Thompson when he announces his candidacy next week.
To be certain, Senator McCain is still a serious candidate in the race, and he should not be ignored as an opponent for the nomination. Senator McCain has proven himself to be a very good grassroots campaigner, and while his organization has gone through ups and downs, voters still see Senator McCain as a top-tier candidate. Governor Romney has run a textbook campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire and has been slowly building in national polls. In Iowa, Governor Romney began the year with about 7% of likely caucus goers supporting him. Through extensive paid media saturation he has been able to inflate that number to over 25%. Nationally, he began the year averaging about 6% and is now nearing 15% in national polls. And Governor Romney has once again moved into a 4th place average in national polls, surpassing Newt Gingrich.
Governor Romney's spending in Iowa has been remarkable. By most estimations, he has spent at least $5 million dollars in Iowa this year and has the poll numbers to show for it. His grassroots organization does not appear to be quite as strong as many had thought - he only turned out 4,500 votes in the Ames Straw Poll (at a cost of about $880 a vote).
We assumed, with no top-tier opposition, he would consolidate a lot more of the votes and would at least match President Bush's 1999 winning effort. In fact, his organization did not even match Steve Forbes' 2nd place effort of 4,921 votes. Governor Romney has spent a great deal of money in an environment that has been a vacuum and without any real competition. Therefore, despite his tremendous spending, large staff and double-digit lead, the relative weakness of Mitt Romney's Straw Poll victory seems to leave him open to defeat in Iowa in the caucuses. Despite large field organizations and having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on television in South Carolina and Florida, Governor Romney has not made real progress like he has in Iowa or New Hampshire. In South Carolina Governor Romney has been unable to keep support consistently above 10%. In Florida Governor Romney has leveled off with about 10% of Republican primary voters supporting him - placing him and Senator McCain in a tight battle for 3rd.
In all, Governor Romney has spent millions of dollars on cable television and broadcast communications and has seen a fair return on his early investment.
GENERAL ELECTION
While it is early to look ahead to the general election, recent polls question the viability of Mitt Romney in the 2008 general election. In 13 of 15 polls conducted this week by Survey USA, Mitt Romney was the weakest Republican candidate tested against presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Even in Massachusetts Governor Romney was a weaker general election candidate against Hillary Clinton than Mayor Giuliani.
According the a recent Pew Research Center survey, Mitt Romney would enter the general election with more voters having an unfavorable opinion of him than voters have of Hillary Clinton. Any Republican entering the general election with higher "unfavs" than Hillary Clinton will find it very difficult to win.
It is too soon to assess the general election viability of Fred Thompson. We have yet to see if Fred Thompson will be able to carry a Republican message nationally or will have to focus on a smaller, regional base.
CONCLUSIONS
Overall our operations and poll numbers are strengthening in Iowa and New Hampshire. The Mayor continues to do very well in South Carolina and Florida. (With Michigan moving its primary to January 15th, I suspect the Mayor will enter that race in a very strong position).
Our advantage in states with the most delegates is proving to be solid and durable. We are positioned to both compete in and win the traditional early contests, Florida and key February 5 states. Furthermore, public polling continues to prove we are the most competitive and viable general election candidate against Hillary Clinton.
Brent Seaborn is the strategy director for the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee.
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National Review: The Coming McCain Moment
Taking a second look
By Ramesh Ponnuru/ National Review
"I got some encouraging news this morning in the USA Today," says Sen. John McCain, holding a copy of the paper with his picture on the front page. "McCain firm on Iraq war," it says above the fold. He flips it over to show the rest of the headline: "despite cost to candidacy." "I can't worry about it," he says. "With something like this, you just can't let it concern you. The issue is too important."
Actually, McCain's campaign is doing better than it seems to be. It is true that the unpopularity of the Iraq War, and specifically of the surge he has long advocated, is dragging his poll numbers down. It is true as well that in many polls he is now behind Rudolph Giuliani.
But Giuliani is a useful opponent for McCain. The good news of the senator's season is that another rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, has so far failed to unite the Right behind him. In a McCain-Romney race, Romney would have most conservatives and portions of the party establishment behind him - and might win the nomination.
Giuliani is a different story. He supports taxpayer funding of abortion, sued gunmakers for selling guns, and went to court to keep New York City from giving the names of illegal immigrants to the federal government. Polls show that many Republican voters are unaware of these aspects of the former mayor's record. It is hard to see how he wins the nomination once they learn about them. In a three-way race, some people who prefer Romney to McCain will nonetheless back McCain to head off Giuliani. This year, then, a real threat to McCain has failed to materialize - and a fake one has replaced it.
McCain's apostasies from conservatism, unlike Giuliani's, are well known. The mayor's polls form a ceiling. McCain's could be a floor, if conservatives are willing to reconsider their view of him. If they do, then the current Giuliani moment will be succeeded by a McCain moment. I think conservatives will give him a second look - as they should.
It has become common to complain about the weak Republican field. Actually, it is a strong field. The three leading contenders are smart, competent, serious, articulate, and accomplished. (So is Newt Gingrich, who ranks fourth.) In some of these respects they exceed the incumbent. It just isn't a very orthodox field.
Romney, at least in his 2007 version, is the most conventionally conservative. If elected, he could make a fine president. But he has a big disadvantage as a presidential candidate: He is a Mormon. In December, a FoxNews poll found that 32 percent of voters would be less likely to vote for a candidate if he were Mormon. Speculation about the effect of Romney's Mormonism on his chances has centered on evangelical Christians' theological differences with him. But evangelicals were only slightly more hostile to Mormon candidates than the population at large. Democrats were much more hostile. So even if Romney's conservative social positions get him through the primaries, his religion is a liability in the general election. (It may be that many secular-minded voters consider Mormonism particularly alien and threatening.)
This is unfair to Romney, and to his coreligionists. But this country has elected a non-Protestant president precisely once in its history. If the Republicans were going into 2008 with a large margin of error, it might be worth finding out how voters would react to a Mormon candidate. But Republicans are not going into this election in a strong position. Nominating a Mormon is too risky.
RUMBLES LEFT AND RIGHT
Most of McCain's conservative detractors concede that he would be a formidable candidate in November 2008. They question his ideological bona fides. But it would be a remarkably narrow definition of conservatism that excluded McCain.
"I think the important thing is you look at people's voting record," says McCain, "because sometimes rhetoric can be a little misleading." Over the course of his career, McCain has compiled a pretty conservative voting record. Neither Giuliani nor Romney, as McCain implied, has a record to match. An objective observer looking at Bush and McCain in 1999 would have had to conclude that, based on their histories, McCain was the more conservative of the two.
The senator's reputation changed during his exciting, disastrous 2000 presidential campaign. During the previous years, he had become a true believer in campaign-finance reform. His attack on monied special interests, and his bitterness at the Bush campaign's attacks on him, seemed to pull him left across the board: on tax cuts, on the environment, on health care. The effect was to enhance McCain's standing with independent voters and journalists while repelling conservatives. What further soured conservatives was that they were then starting, for the first time, to take a strongly negative view of campaign-finance reform, hardening into the conviction that it was an assault on free speech (and particularly on conservative organizations).
Independent voters and Democrats gave McCain some primary victories, but without Republicans he could not win the nomination. Still, he was America's most popular politician, and for the next few years he continued to play the "maverick" Republican - and to reap the rewards in his press clippings, which annoyed conservatives at least as much.
From 2004 onward, however, McCain has been moving rightward again, emphasizing his support for the Iraq War and the War on Terror. So far, this move appears to have cost him support among independent voters and reporters without buying him many friends on the right. Conservatives still have the impression of him they formed when he was tacking left. Besides, even in the last two years he has taken some stands to which a lot of conservatives object.
The good news for conservatives is that some of McCain's un-conservative positions concern trifling subjects, and some of them have little ongoing relevance. (Some of them are important, though, and I'll get to them later.) After 9/11, McCain shepherded a bill to federalize airport security through the Senate. That's not an issue that's going to come up again. The corporate-accounting scandals gave McCain an opportunity to rail against malefactors of great wealth, which he took. He zinged Bush's Securities and Exchange Commission for its inaction and urged more transparency in executive pay. But he gives no sign of itching to impose more regulations now. He supported a scheme of taxes and regulation to fight smoking. His bill didn't become law, but it is no longer an issue since most of its provisions were adopted by the states.
Even campaign-finance reform isn't the issue it once was. President Bush signed McCain's bill, and the senator says he doesn't want any more legislation. "I think that we need to give this law a chance to work." He doesn't think the Federal Election Commission needs any new powers, although, like most Republicans, he does want it to crack down on "527 groups" that fund political ads.
McCain supported a "patient's bill of rights" that would regulate HMOs. But that bill has gone nowhere, and even if it passed it would not be a large step toward socialized medicine. It was small change compared with the gargantuan Medicare prescription-drug entitlement of 2003. (President Bush, and many conservative congressmen, supported that bill; McCain voted against it.)
McCain wants to make people who buy guns at gun shows pass a background check, ending what he considers a loophole in current law. Gun-rights activists have strong objections to this proposal. But they will have to measure his offense against Giuliani's past, and never-repudiated, advocacy of licensing gun owners.
Some conservatives hold McCain's participation in the "Gang of 14" against him. In 2005, most Senate Republicans, frustrated by unprecedented Democratic filibusters against judicial nominees, wanted to change the rules to prevent such filibusters. Seven Democrats and seven Republicans reached an agreement: The Republicans would leave the rules alone so long as the Democrats used the filibuster only in "extraordinary circumstances." There were good arguments for and against the deal, although there were no good arguments for the preening collective self-regard with which the 14 senators announced it. McCain notes that months after his intervention, the Senate confirmed both John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He thinks it "would have been almost impossible" to confirm them in the aftermath of a bitter fight over a rules change. "That's why they called it the nuclear option, the Senate was about to blow up." Conservatives might disagree with that assessment, while still regarding it as the type of prudential calculation on which allies can disagree.
In 2005 and 2006, McCain differed with the Bush administration about how to interrogate suspected terrorists. The senator, having survived torture himself at the hands of the North Vietnamese, understandably wanted tough anti-torture language put into law. The administration worried that such language, particularly if susceptible to creative interpretation, might make it impossible to conduct coercive interrogations even if they fell short of torture. In the end, Republicans reached a deal that preserved tough interrogations while addressing McCain's concerns.
That leaves three substantial issues between McCain and conservatives. The first is global warming. McCain has been a believer throughout the Bush years. Most conservatives have associated the fight against global warming with environmental zealotry and overregulation. But McCain has tried to come up with a free-market solution, and he is now emphasizing nuclear power as a way to fuel this country without emitting greenhouse gases. "I don't often like to imitate the French," he says, but France is right to use nuclear power. His proposal, with Joe Lieberman, may not get the balance exactly correct, but right now it looks as though McCain was more prescient than most conservatives.
McCain was one of a few Republicans to vote against Bush's tax cuts. He said that the tax cuts were fiscally reckless and too skewed to the rich. But he now accepts those tax cuts as a done deal. Reversing them now, or allowing them to expire, would constitute a tax increase, and McCain has never voted for a general tax increase. When I ask him whether there were any circumstances in which he would accept a tax increase, for example to get the Democrats to agree to spending cuts, he says, "No. None. None." It seems pretty clear that a President McCain would seek spending cuts before tax cuts. But if you take him at his word - and he is a man who takes honor seriously - he won't raise taxes.
Finally, there is immigration. McCain sees eye to eye with Bush on this issue. He thinks a guest-worker program would reduce illegal immigration, and that we should give illegal immigrants already here a path to citizenship since we aren't going to deport them all. A lot of conservatives want tougher border security, period. Nothing McCain can do now will please some of his critics. But if his bill passes this year, he may try to move on. Or he could try to mollify his reasonable critics by supporting an amendment. Last year, Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia proposed that the bill's border-enforcement provisions go into effect first, and be shown to work, before illegal immigrants could start on their path to citizenship. McCain is open to the concept.
A SOCIAL CONSERVATIVE
McCain gets a bad rap from social conservatives. He opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment on the theory that states should set their own marriage policies. But he opposes same-sex marriage, too, and says that he would support a constitutional amendment if the federal courts ever tried to impose it on reluctant states. As a practical matter, it is hard to see how any president could get such an amendment enacted without that type of provocation.
The senator has been rock-solid on abortion. Unlike anyone else in the race, he has a pro-life record stretching back to the early 1980s. Like President Bush, he says that the Supreme Court made a mistake in Roe; he goes further than Bush when he adds that the Court should overturn it. He voted to confirm all of the sitting conservative justices, plus Robert Bork.
McCain muddied the waters with one foolish remark in 1999. He was trying to make the point that the country is not ready for abortion to be prohibited, but in the course of trying to say that he said that the country wasn't ready for Roe to go. He corrected himself quickly, but that lone remark has been used to portray him as a secret pro-choicer or a flip-flopper.
He really has broken ranks with pro-lifers twice. In the early 1990s, he voted to fund research using tissue from aborted fetuses, and he now supports federal funding for research on embryos taken from fertility clinics. But he draws the line at stem-cell research involving cloned human embryos. He says that he would prohibit that, even mistakenly claiming that he has co-sponsored legislation to that effect.
Social conservatives think that Republicans have repeatedly betrayed them. At the highest levels of national politics, that's not true. The reason that social conservatives haven't achieved many of their objectives even though they have helped to elect a lot of Republicans over the last generation is that those objectives are hard to achieve. It has been slow work to fight the pervasive liberalism of the elite legal culture. But when President Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy and the first President Bush appointed David Souter, they weren't trying to betray conservatives; they didn't know how those justices would turn out. McCain thinks that type of mistake can be avoided if presidents pick nominees who don't just say the right things, but have track records of judging soundly. He's right. Conservatives' reception of McCain shouldn't be colored by historical mythology.
For some conservatives, these discrete issues matter less than what they say about McCain's instincts. His friendly relations with journalists - one of his campaign aides was only half-joking in 2000 when he called the media McCain's "base" - often make conservatives suspicious. But McCain's steadfast support for the Iraq War, and his advocacy of the surge, belie the claim that he will do anything for good press.
Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who has long clashed with McCain, says that the senator is worse than a flip-flopper: By voting right, tacking left, and then tacking right, he has shown himself to be devoid of principle. But as the foregoing review of his record suggests, most of McCain's zigzags have been matters of tone and emphasis, not changes of position. He hasn't switched his views as much as Romney or even Giuliani.
There are genuinely disconcerting elements to McCain's politics. He talks about cutting spending, but he rarely connects limited government to individual freedom. He is an inveterate moralist, which eludes many observers because he is concerned about honor rather than virtue. In many of the cases discussed earlier, his moralism slid very quickly into support for regulation: of campaign contributions, of tobacco, even of boxing. At times, his rhetoric about the need for individuals to subsume themselves in the life of the nation verges uncomfortably close to idolatry of the state.
But McCain's merits are considerable as well. He has been tough on spending, and been willing to ally with the most conservative members of the Senate to fight earmarks. He has been a stalwart free trader: "Since Phil Gramm left, there's no greater free-trader in the Senate than I am." (McCain supported Gramm's presidential campaign in 1996, and Gramm is supporting his now.) Curbing the growth of entitlements, he says, will be one of his top priorities as president. He has long supported personal accounts.
Leave all of that aside for a moment. For a lot of conservatives, the War on Terror is paramount. That's why some of them are willing to overlook Giuliani's faults. But if toughness on terrorism trumps everything else, with toughness defined as competent execution of the administration's basic strategy - and that's the way it has to be defined for this argument to work for Giuliani at all - then McCain is hands down the best candidate. He has better national-security credentials than Giuliani, having been involved in foreign policymaking for more than two decades while the latter has barely been involved at all. More than any other candidate, he has shown a commitment to winning in Iraq. He has supported it, indeed, more vigorously than Bush has waged it, and he has put his career on the line.
McCain has the moral authority to get a country that has grown tired of the war to listen to him, an authority President Bush has seen slip away. That isn't just because he is a former prisoner of war with one son serving in the Marines and another in the Naval Academy - although that helps. It is because he is not seen as playing politics with the war, as most Democrats and Republicans are, and he never will be.
Conservatives may need to reach some understandings with McCain before throwing their support to him: on the vice-presidential nominee, on immigration, maybe even on the number of terms McCain will serve as president. (He is 70.) But he can win both the nomination and the election. He is plenty conservative. And he deserves a long second look.
March 9, 2007
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Republicans Must Claim Mantle Of Reform
Editors Note: The following remarks were prepared for delivery by U.S. Sen. John McCain before the Oklahoma State Legislature.
By John McCain
Oklahoma City -- When our founding fathers signed the document that declared our independence from Great Britain, they risked more than their lives and property for the cause. They pledged their most cherished possession their 'sacred honor.' Today, the phrase seems little more than a reminder that, once upon a time, we judged public officials and they judged themselves by the sincerity with which they put our nation's interests before their own.
Americans who expect their elected representatives to execute the responsibilities of our office with competence and integrity are often disappointed. They are disappointed by our failure to address the big problems facing our country, and make the necessary changes to government to meet those challenges. They are disappointed by politicians who value incumbency over principle, and by partisanship that is less a contest of ideas than an uncivil brawl over the spoils of power. And t hey are disgusted by the disgrace of public officials who trade their integrity for personal gain and advantage.
I am a conservative, and I believe it is a healthy thing for Americans to be skeptical about the purposes and practices of public officials, and refrain from expecting too much from government. But it worries me when healthy skepticism becomes widespread cynicism bordering on alienation; when the people come to believe that government has become so dysfunctional that it no longer serves basic constitutional ends; our politics have become so polarizing we're incapable of addressing national priorities; and their elected leaders so devoted to their personal interests they ignore the public's.
If I'm privileged to serve our country as President, I will hold my administration to standards of conduct that will strengthen rather than diminish the people's faith in our integrity. I will not tolerate influence peddling or self-dealing of any kind. No one who wishes to use his or her office for personal gain will have the privilege of holding office in my administration. I'll make sure that all officials in my administration have their interactions with lobbyists fully disclosed to public view. Lobbyists have a right to petition government on behalf of their clients. I've never believed lobbying is an inherently corrupt profession. Like any profession, its members include many people of sterling character who play a valuable public role, and a few whose qualities are less admirable and whose purposes are less honorable. We need not slander the reputation of the many by finding fault in the character of their profession rather than in the character of the few who dishonor themselves.
But it is right and necessary to ensure the public's right to know as well as anyone's right to petition the government; to respect the ability of lobbyists to advocate their client's cause as well as the need for truthful disclosure; to strengthen our ability to govern and the imperative to keep it free from corrupting influences. In my administration, public disclosure will be constant, timely and widely available. Ethical standards will be subject to frequent review. Every inspector general in every department of government will have direct access to the heads of their departments and cabinet secretaries. And I'll hold those senior officeholders directly responsible for taking the necessary corrective measures to ensure the integrity of the departments they lead.
I will encourage Congress to toughen its enforcement of ethical standards. I am proud to serve in Congress, and I know the vast majority of members to be decent, conscientious public servants. But the few who have traded favors for personal gain have shaken the public's faith in the institution. Indeed, I'm afraid such scandals contributed significantly to the defeat Republicans suffered in the last election. Congress has taken some steps to address the problem, but did not do enough to repair the damage done by those members who disgraced themselves and the institution. Much more is necessary, including the establishment of an Office of Public Integrity that moves swiftly to investigate complaints of ethical violations by members and their staffs, and its conclusions should be subject to an up or down vote by all members.
I am a Republican, and I believe it is essential to our party's success, and to the nation's honor that we claim sincerely the mantle of reform. We were elected the majority in Congress thirteen years ago for that reason more than any other: to reform the way government is funded and structured, and to hold it accountable for its ability or inability to address the serious challenges of our time. We lost sight of that principle, and our partisanship, which should be the way in which we compete for the right to advance our principles of smaller, more efficient government, became more concerned with the preservation of our power than with honoring our principles.
We became paralyzed by the demands of competing special interests and the narrow, selfish partisanship of both parties has crippled our efforts to reform government and face squarely the problems the people expect us to fix. We need to reform and modernize our transportation system, our energy use, our public education; our tax code; our health care system; our telecommunications laws; the way we assist displaced workers; respond to emergencies; even the way we defend our national security. We need to balance the federal budget and stop spending money on things that are not the business of government. We need to repair Social Security and Medicare now, not when they're completely insolvent and some unluckier generation of Americans is stuck with the problem. None of these daunting challenges can be addressed without genuine and lasting reform. It is essential to our security and our continued economic vitali ty. And beyond providing more choices in the marketplace; or a secure old age; or enhanced security; reforming government so that it meets real needs with basic competence will help restore America's pride in the way we govern ourselves, and remind us all, those of us lucky enough to serve and those who elect us, what a special thing it is to be an American.
Last month, Americans filed their tax returns. The government collected over $2.4 trillion in total revenue for 2006. Do you think you are getting $2.4 trillion worth of value out of Washington?
As president, I'll hold the agencies of the federal government accountable for the money they spend, and work with members of Congress who are serious about reform, like my friend, Tom Coburn, a man of principle who sought office for no other purpose than to get things done for his country. And I'll make sure the public helps me. We're going to make every aspect of government purchases and performance transparent. Information on every step of contracts and grants will be posted on the Internet in plain and simple English. We're not going to hide anything behind accounting tricks and bureaucratic doubletalk that a linguist with a PhD in accounting couldn't decipher.
Every federal agency is going to have goals set at the beginning of the fiscal year, and they'll have to issue public progress reports at the end of the year on how well or poorly they met them. We'll find some good performers, and I'll be proud to recognize them. But when we do not, performance will determine whether they are funded the next year. Government programs will be judged for the success they've had in meeting a need that people can't be expected to meet for themselves.
If programs have a good record, and serve a purpose that the private sector can't, they will receive continued funding. But we're not going to spend more money on them just because they have been around for a long time. If they're not giving Americans good value for their tax dollars, they're going to have to change or they're going out of business.
Before disaster strikes, natural or man made, we will make sure that clear procedures and lines of communication exist between government and private industry to maximize response and recovery efforts.
America has many of the best run businesses in the world. Yet we fail to take full advantage of their know-how and entrepreneurial spirit when catastrophe strikes. For example, UPS, FedEx, and Wal-Mart can tell in real time where a package is anywhere in the world, but FEMA, despite its multi-billion dollar budget, couldn't track many of its assets during its Katrina response, needlessly delaying help to our citizens. Wal-Mart responded more quickly to the victims of Katrina than did the federal government. We need to ensure that FEMA adapts similar technology and processes that are employed by America's best run companies.
Government-run Emergency Operations Centers should include a Business Operations Center to allow for proper coordination between the public and private sectors to maximize the surge of manpower, equipment and material.
And federal law should provide sufficient liability protections to encourage more companies to act as a 'force multiplier' for the government during disaster response and recovery efforts.
Another responsibility of the federal government that cries out for reform is how we buy the weapons systems used by our military. We are at war. Our servicemen and women who risk their lives for us deserve a procurement system that is lean, agile and efficient not a system that is ponderous, ineffective and susceptible to mismanagement and even corruption. Every dollar we waste on unnecessary or too costly weapons is a dollar less for the men and women who stand a post for us in harm's way.
Problems in defense acquisition are well known: undefined or poorly defined and ever-changing requirements for weapons systems; long delays in delivery, cost overruns, and a lack of accountability for recurring failures. More than 100 studies have identified the same problems over and over again for many years.
Why has a broken system endured for so long when everyone's well aware of the problem? It is the product of members of Congress who are more concerned with their re-election than national security; bureaucrats who place individual and parochial service priorities above national defense priorities, and defense contractors more concerned with winning the next contract than performing on the current one.
If I'm elected President, I intend do something about that.
I won't tolerate congressional earmarks -- which have encouraged not only additional wasteful spending but public corruption, and led to the depressing spectacle of members of Congress being led off to prison. Nor will I allow other procurement tricks that divert funds from national priorities. I will expand the use of fixed price contracts to enforce discipline in the procurement process and ensure that clearly defined requirements are fulfilled, realistic schedules are kept, and costs don't exceed the promised price. Too often, contractors underbid to 'buy into' a market with little expectation of delivering on schedule and within budget.
At the same time, the government's cost estimates are often unrealistic. The Navy's new Littoral Combat Ship was supposed to be a model program. In the end, it cost twice its projected price, and the Navy had to cancel purchase of third ship because of the cost overruns. Fixed price contracts based on realistic cost estimates with clear, consistent requirements will ensure that the contractor pays for cost overruns, not the taxpayers. We must also limit sole-source contracting and make cost discipline a priority using market competition to keep costs down and innovation up.
Our defense industries make the finest weapons in the world but are not incentivized enough to keep costs down. That must change. When a company delivers the promised products and controls costs, it should be rewarded.
When it doesn't, it must pay the price in its bottom line.
We must set clear expectations and requirements at the outset of an acquisition program, and stick to the plan throughout the life of the program. But we must be prepared to make tough decisions, decisions that are routinely made in the private sector when a product does not meet the demands of the market. We shouldn't move automatically from research and development to procurement either. This critical decision should be made in a transparent process -- and we must be willing to pull the plug before sinking more dollars into weapons that do not provide what our warriors need for the conflicts of today and tomorrow.
These reforms and many others will not be easy, but they are necessary. And so is reforming our entire federal workforce.
We must streamline our workforce, demand high standards of behavior, promote excellence at every level based on merit and accountability, and not let good workers be crippled by the fine print of the latest union contract.
If I'm elected President, I will say to the best people outside Washington who have proven their worth by setting goals and achieving them whether it's running a Fortune 500 company in Silicon Valley or a smaller enterprise in America's heartland: you have done well for yourself and your shareholders, now come serve your country. I want people who know how to run things:
efficiently, ethically, and successfully.
Our public and private sectors have produced thousands of men and women, many now retired, who have served their country and their community with distinction. I want to recruit some of them for an Executive Search Leadership group to help my administration find the right people for the right executive jobs. If there's a body armor expert in Kansas City who can help us find better and more efficient ways to protect our troops or a company executive who turned around a bloated corporate bureaucracy, I want to know their names and their willingness to serve, not whether they contributed to my campaign. I will demand that every resume matches the qualifications needed to get the job done. When it comes to competence and integrity, there should be no reservations, and no surprises.
Within the next 10 years over 40 percent of the Federal workforce will likely retire. This is an opportunity to reorganize the entire federal workforce. We can instill in the next generation of public servants higher aspirations and a greater sense of purpose. I'll devote the necessary resources to it. We can use this opportunity to make sure that government pay scales allow us to attract the finest public servants, equip them with the newest technologies, target replacements judiciously, and change government to make it smaller, less expensive, better skilled, and more dedicated to the national interest.
Employees in the private sector know that if they don't do their job right they will lose their job. Competition and consequences are the driving force of excellence. Taxpayers deserve the same commitment to excellence from their employees. There must be a new bargain with federal employees, one that is worthy of the American people and mindful that public service is a privilege and a responsibility not a right.
The civil service has strayed from its reformist roots and has mutated into a no-accountability zone, where employment is treated as an entitlement, good performance as an option, and accountability as someone else's problem.
Our current system isn't fair to the many good workers who must pick up the slack of those who aren't doing their jobs. The failings in our civil service are encouraged by a system that makes it very difficult to fire someone even for gross misconduct. Due process should not be the ally of bad behavior. We must do away with the current system that treats federal employment as a right and makes dismissal a near impossibility. If a federal employee is removed the decision should be reviewed swiftly by an independent board to be sure that it's not motivated by political or personal animus, but it should not trigger an endless process of appeal that mocks justice and accountability.
I know these reforms won't be easy. An entire bureaucracy has grown comfortable in its cocoon of rules and regulations and is not about to change its habits without a fight. But I don't seek the presidency to do the easy things. I seek it to do the right and necessary things. I'm not running for President to be somebody, but to do something: to protect our country and defeat its enemies; to make the government do its job, not your job; to do it better and to do it with less.
I have held a public trust all of my adult life. I have never lived a single day, in good times and bad, that I haven't thanked God for the privilege.
America and her causes are a blessing to mankind and they honor all of us who work to make our country an even better place and America's example a greater influence on human history. It is all the reward any of us should need. 'Honor,' Abraham Lincoln said, 'is better than honors.' I'm running for President to make sure Americans have a government that reflects the priorities and the honor of the great nation it serves. Thank you.
Arizona U.S. Senator John McCain is a Republican candidate for president.
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For Conservatives, There’s Much To Like About John McCain
“Our party needs to resurrect the passion of Teddy Roosevelt and the vision of Ronald Reagan . . .”
By Ric Keller
WASHINGTON -- From among the top-tier Republican candidates, the best choice for conservatives like me is Senator John McCain. During his career, Arizona's senior Senator has consistently fought to cut government spending, advance strict constructionist judicial nominees, and support the pro-life movement.
In this time of testing, Senator McCain is uniquely qualified to lead our country. The challenges our country faces both at home and abroad demand that we seek character that is strong and leadership that is proven.
In the aftermath of 9/11, national security remains our highest priority. Most Americans would agree that this election is about choosing the candidate who is most qualified to prevent any future disaster from happening because the stakes in today’s world are simply too great.
Senator McCain has been a recognized leader in foreign policy and defense issues for more than two decades. He understands warfare and possesses the ability to bring factions together in order to diffuse threats. This is a skill McCain has tirelessly demonstrated throughout his career in military and elected service.
And that critical ability to form coalitions is urgently needed as our country works to create the essential stability we need in the Middle East. Without stability in the Islamic world, Americans will be forced to continue to react to tragedy rather than experience security.
Simply put, our security at home starts thousands of miles away and no one is more committed to that truth than John McCain.
He was sent to Washington when Ronald Reagan was working to make it the charge of our government to reduce its reach and cut its waste. And from day one, McCain has picked up the torch, proposing forward-thinking reforms to cut spending, eliminate earmarks, and expose pork-barrel spending.
The Economist magazine wrote in a May 2006 issue: “[McCain] is a budget hawk who has done more than any other senator to crusade against ‘earmarks,’ pork-barrel spending and the lobbying industry …”
McCain earned a 91 percent rating from Citizens Against Government Waste and introduced The Pork-Barrel Reduction Act, focusing on government transparency and restraint. McCain is also consistently hailed for taking principled stands against government waste.
Senator McCain is also a staunch supporter of the Legislative Line Item Veto Act which provides the president the ability to remove wasteful spending. True conservatives are excited about the prospects of a McCain Administration and the fiscal healing our country would begin to experience.
John McCain has been steadfast against higher taxes, and if a Democrat Congress tries to send him tax increases, he can be trusted to reject it. He strongly supports extending all tax cuts and making them permanent. McCain understands that the key to unleashing the innovation of our entrepreneurs is keeping taxes low. Working families need a conservative in the White House who will protect their wallets and their values.
With respect to John McCain’s agenda on social issues, he is the best equipped top tier candidate to protect traditional conservative values. He has a consistent record of supporting judges who strictly interpret the constitution and will not legislate from the bench.
Unlike McCain’s most competitive primary opponents, he has supported and voted to confirm conservative judges like Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia. He is also the only candidate for President that stood up against harsh Democrat opposition to vote to confirm conservative jurist Judge Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Senator McCain has a consistent 25-year record of supporting sound pro-life policy in Congress. NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood have given him 0 percent ratings. Senator McCain has never wavered on his commitment to faith, service, a culture of life, and personal responsibility.
In Arizona, Senator McCain campaigned in support of the initiative to amend the state Constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman. He voted to support the federal Defense of Marriage Act which protects states from federal courts focused on usurping the wishes of individual states.
John McCain believes in the Republican Party and its core values. Our party needs to resurrect the passion of Teddy Roosevelt and the vision of Ronald Reagan, and in my mind, there is no better candidate than John McCain.
Ric Keller is a Republican U.S. Representative from Florida.
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Why Fred Thompson Is Electable
“I'd just say the flies get bigger in the summertime. I guess the flies are buzzing.” -- Fred Thompson
By Florida Insider
Fred Thompson’s weakness could be a strength, and that’s what makes him a Republican that could be elected president in a supposed Democratic year next year.
The former US senator from Tennessee sometimes looks as if he lacks the colossal political energy deemed necessary for a presidential race, say party insiders, including some we know who have attended recent Thompson campaign stops. He also sometimes sounds aimless in his stump remarks, they say.
But the reluctant warrior is often the storied one. Because Thompson doesn’t project fire-in-the-belly ambition and corporate polish, he could be the personality that sheds the perceived GOP armor of self-serving phoniness that so many voters say they’re weary of.
Most people will vote for president next year based on party affiliation and personality, and not on the incomprehensible details of particular policy proposals.
The eventual Republican nominee won’t be able to do anything about being a Republican. So personality becomes doubly important. That personality must embrace the core beliefs of the conservative party, while also somehow deflecting the million caveats that will be thrown at the GOP. Thompson is better suited than other top Republican candidates to do that because his vocal and visual mannerisms are oblique – he’s gritty and wry, and his experience as a TV actor provides him with a sense of verbal timing and dry delivery.
Oppose that to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who too often appears as a genetically engineered perfect Republican – a kind of Zig Ziglar of conservatism. Americans are world weary of the type.
Thompson has raised some eyebrows of doubt from observers who say his shrugging off of his Senate career is a sign that he lacks the taste for more major political combat. But Thompson apparently left the Senate because he was impatient with its bombastic protocols and glacial pace in passing laws.
Don't most Americans feel the same? And doesn't Thompson appear to convey that sense of weary impatience?
In TV debates so far, many of the Republican presidential candidates have tried to assume the mantle of Ronald Reagan by mentioning him and themselves in the same breath. They sound like preachers who talk Jesus but clearly want to walk on the water themselves.
They make the mistake of trying to slip on someone else’s personality like a pair of creased slacks. It’s like the football coach who follows Bear Bryant or Steve Spurrier: They make the fatal error of trying to model themselves on someone they can never match, when the better strategy would be to act the opposite of the coaching greats so as to avoid comparison.
Thompson is the anti-Reagan Reagan. Where the Gipper was embarrassingly upbeat, Thompson is deadpan and dry as husk. He’s somehow positive and cynical at the same time. He somehow gets away with what should be impossible in the electronic age: tossing around barnyard maxims like Abraham Lincoln. (“I'd just say the flies get bigger in the summertime. I guess the flies are buzzing," Thompson was quoted by the AP as saying recently in response to revelations that he once lobbied for a pro-choice organization.)
His gruff delivery is a sort of bluff. He can say things other Republicans can’t say because he carries a sort of wink-wink gravitas that lets him get away with it. This allows him to stare at the world and dare it to universally condemn America. Or to lob brick bats at the female Hillary Clinton and come out clean because the insults sound half in jest.
He can also pull the entertainment-media card usually marked only for Democrats. Internet be damned – the media of our day is still television, and Thompson understands it. That’s as opposed to Hillary Clinton, who, for all her political experience and relentless drive, still sometimes seems to bring a meat cleaver to the tube when a stiletto is called for.
Newspaper media – whose headlines provide the cue for other media – haven’t yet figured out how to dissect Thompson for the purpose of devouring him. But they will. Right now, they are in the customary stage of propping him up to later knock him down. But Thompson may have the kind of undershirt aura off of which at least some of the hurled insults of the media mob may fall to the carpet.
This appeal to the gut and not to the gray matter may help Thompson with Republican voters as much as with Democratic and independent ones. This is critical for the GOP because it could get an electable candidate past the red-meat gatekeepers in the Republican primaries.
Media will skewer Thompson for his immoderately moderate voting record in the U.S. Senate in an attempt to alienate him from the Republican base. But Thompson’s personal bearing may ride to the rescue again. He seems to possess the low-key dramatic skills necessary to persuade the faithful that he can win. To that effect, media attacks have the potential to actually help the Republicans win the November 2008 general election – providing Thompson is the nominee.
Most of the above is intuitively understood by whatever voters are paying attention to the presidential race this early. More critically at this stage, it’s understood by at least some key Republican Party organizational movers and financial shakers, including in Florida.
The gravitating to Thompson’s campaign by Randy Enwright and the Enwright Group in Tallahassee indicates either confidence that Thompson is the answer to the question of what the hell the GOP is going to do next year; or that none of the other major candidates has a prayer.
It may amount to the same thing – “Thompson or Bust in 2008.”
Florida Insider http://www.flinsider.com is published by the Internet News Agency. FLORIDA OFFICE: Florida Insider, 1320-207 Hendrix St., Tallahassee, FL 32301 Phone: 850.656.9088
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Let The Bombardment Begin
By Cathy Abernathy
BAKERSFIELD, CA -- An editor posed the situation: “The bombardment has started… just when we thought it was safe to go outside”. ….meaning the voters are, or have a right to be, tired of political debate and campaigns.
I wonder. Americans thrive on political debate, don’t we? We know that Saddam Hussein had another way to ”get elected”-- so did Stalin. Those guys avoided the bombardment of political ads /signs/ debates/ voting machines. But we Americans love politics, so on to the ’08 elections.
I suggest the No. 1 issue in ’08 is figuring out how to stop Islamic terrorists from getting into our country and killing us. President Bush has sent forces into their hideouts to bring these terrorists to justice but has found the going tough. Is there on the horizon a politician who can rise above the “Neville Chamberlain Club” at the New York Times and convince us to stiffen our backs and fight off our would-be assassins? If so, that candidate is going to be the winner in 2008.
Another issue is ‘lower the price at the pump!’ – that’s the simple part that voters want to hear. (Actually, in constant dollars, a gallon of gasoline is no higher than it was 50 years ago.) What we really need is more energy independence.
Seventy years ago Lenin told us that communism would bury capitalism and that “you will sell us the rope that we will hang you with." Lenin turned out to be wrong but our new executioners are already selling us rope . We’re paying for terrorists’ bullets every time we gas up. Four out of 10 gallons we put into our tanks come from OPEC . Energy independence has such practical appeal-- disarming our enemies, improving our balance of payments and cleaning the air-- that some presidential candidate in ’08 will lay a “put a man on the moon” challenge at the feet of the American people and hit a vote-rich gold mine.
A third issue is health care, starting with the cheap shot in the health care debate: ‘Let’s have the government pay for everyone’s health care!’ That approach , “Hillary Care," helped give the GOP the majority in ’94; it didn’t sell then and it won’t sell now . Congressman Bill Thomas succinctly describes the fault line : “People will consume as much health care as someone else is willing to pay for."
Some astute candidate will note that the answer to soaring health costs is not to feed the dragon, but to have educated consumers put the dragon on a diet. A million smart choices daily by educated consumers acting in their own self-interest will drive quality up and prices down. Health savings accounts ( HSAs) are a good start.
The “next big thing “ in political interest groups will be the young Social Security payer. The retirees will still have the upper hand in this next election, but those who are getting their pockets picked are soon going to wake up and vote.
If you’ve made a bet on this next election, your money is probably on Hillary and McCain because they lead in every poll. Yet there’s a long shot who might move up, Newt Gingrich , so far the only candidate talking frankly about where we’re going and how to get there. A Democrat long shot? Illinois Senator Barack Obama; Obama is unknown but he is a media darling .
Too early to be talking about presidential candidates? Remember we are just 13 months away from New Hampshire and Iowa. No Democrat candidate has ever won Iowa and New Hampshire and failed to win the nomination . The Republican nominee may have to wait another month. But after the first week of March, the GOP candidate can polish up the acceptance speech.
Issues facing America, and the world we influence, are grave and far-reaching and worthy of serious debate. In just 14 months much will be settled—we’ll be down to a choice between two.
Let the bombardment begin.
Cathy Abernathy owns a government relations firm and lives in Bakersfield, California.
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