GOP duel: the primaries get underway, dominated by two men

National Review, Dec 31, 2006 by Jonathan Martin

THE race for the White House in 2008 was going to be different. For the first time since 1952, neither a sitting president nor a vice president would be on the ballot. With no candidate enjoying the advantages of incumbency, there would be no frontrunner.

That's how it was supposed to go.

But on the Republican side of the contest, the upcoming campaign increasingly appears to be dominated by just two men, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Arizona senator John McCain. Though neither has officially declared his candidacy, the Mormon and the Maverick stand apart in their organizational strength heading into the "invisible primary" of 2007. No other candidate has come close to putting together the team of activists, operatives, consultants, and donors that Romney and McCain already have in place.

Romney and McCain are especially strong in the handful of small states that have early presidential primaries and therefore tend to decide presidential nominations. As early as this spring, both campaigns signed up key operatives to work in these states. Then Election Day came, and two things happened in short order to winnow the field. First, Virginia senator George Allen lost his reelection contest and was thus knocked out of contention for the presidency. A few weeks later, outgoing Senate majority leader Bill Frist took himself out of the running. Though neither, at least by the time he left the race, was thought as formidable as the two front-runners, each had worked the donor-and-activist base of the party almost since President Bush's reelection in 2004. With Allen and Frist gone, McCain and Romney were left as the only candidates who were both clearly running and in the top tier of GOP presidential hopefuls. And only they had begun putting together the apparatus needed to survive the primaries that have largely decided every GOP nomination for the past quarter century.

"I had little or no interest in Senator McCain, but got a call from Terry Nelson," recalls Dave Roederer, President Bush's Iowa chairman in 2004 and an experienced GOP operative. Nelson, an Iowa native and top Bush-Cheney '04 official who will run McCain's national campaign, told Roederer that if he didn't want to see McCain, he, Nelson, would be happy to convey that message to the senator. Roederer, friendly Midwesterner that he is, didn't want to offend McCain, and agreed to the meeting. He came away impressed.

While other candidates who came courting offered "platitudinous stuff on international affairs," McCain knew the field cold, Roederer says. What's more, "even when it wasn't popular, McCain said the president is right on Iraq." This position on the war is why Roederer, though a good party man, will serve in the same capacity for the maverick McCain as he did for Bush.

The Arizonan's team seems to recognize the strength of their chief opponent in the state this time around. "Romney's put a lot of effort into Iowa" and "has got a pretty good structure in place," acknowledges one of McCain's top national strategists. Success in the Hawkeye State for McCain, says this adviser, would be just to "come out of there with one of the tickets" into New Hampshire.

Romney's cultivation of Iowa Republicans has been intense. He visited the state twelve times before Election Day this year, and in June he rolled out a list of some 50 Republicans who form his "Iowa Advisory Committee." "We're working county by county and precinct by precinct, and that's the sign of how serious you are," boasts Doug Gross, Romney's state chairman and a Des Moines lawyer who was his party's gubernatorial standard-bearer in 2002. "It's a grassroots effort that wins the caucuses. You can't come in and do a tarmac effort and win."

To Gross, Romney's distance from the Iraq issue and lack of national-security experience is a plus. "He's a smart guy who can look at foreign-policy issues with a fresh perspective," Gross says, while McCain is hampered by his "years in Washington." Gross engages in the same kind of expectation-setting as the McCain strategist, saying that if Romney were to come out of the caucuses "ahead of the frontrunner" that would be "a huge deal." As for how many "tickets" will be available to go forth from Iowa, Gross says "historically it's three, but unless the dynamic changes it could be two."

The view that McCain and Romney have the superior Iowa organizations is not limited to their partisans. Steve Scheffler, president of the influential Iowa Christian Alliance, has not yet weighed in on the race and is hesitant to appear as favoring any of the candidates, all of whom are seeking his support. But he concedes that it's in the McCain and Romney camps "where most of the aggressive courting is happening." He adds, "The time is coming where candidates better have their act together." If it's not "shortly after the first of the year, they're going to have a hard time catching up." (Bad news for someone like Newt Gingrich, who says he won't make a presidential announcement until the fall of 2007.)