Recent News
Some advice for the candidates
My last bit of ghost-writing for a candidate was in 2012, and though my career as a secret scribbler stretches back to Richard Nixon’s The Real War in 1980, I’m pledged to neutrality this year until the GOP has a nominee.
Read More >>Race Heats Up in the Crowded ‘Establishment’ Lane
Although outside candidates have attracted a great deal of attention in the Republican nomination contest – candidates promising to upend Washington, D.C. – there are still a substantial number of voters who are more readily classified as establishment-friendly, or at least not anti-establishment. It seems likely that someone will claim the establishment mantle, and several press reports this morning and yesterday suggest the battle for these voters is beginning to heat up. From The Washington Post:
Iowa emerges as a free-for-all among GOP’s establishment ... Read More >>
Chris Christie’s Path To Victory
Even as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie slowly rises in the New Hampshire polls, he faces deep-seated skepticism from party leaders, pundits, and donors. His relentless focus on the Granite State has left him with bare-bones operations in other consequential states, and few party operatives think his abrasive, tell-it-like-it-is style will play at all outside the Northeast. If he does capture momentum, fresh reminders of his post-Hurricane Sandy embrace of President Obama along with the Bridgegate scandal risk tripping up his campaign yet again.
Read More >>Why Chris Christie Is Showing Up in Iowa
It was lunchtime, a month before voting starts in the nation’s first presidential caucuses. Chris Christie was standing in front of a crowd of about 75 mostly senior citizens in Marshalltown, Iowa. They might fairly have wondered what the New Jersey governor was doing here.
Read More >>A Republican Establishment Divided
After months of obstinate denial and simmering dismay, Republican elites are soberly coming to the conclusion that 2016 may be the year the raucous insurgent faction of the party finally topples the usually sturdy mainstream contingent in the presidential race.
Read More >>Iowa emerges as a free-for-all among GOP’s establishment candidates
Chris Christie is the consummate New Hampshire candidate, all the way down to his silver lapel pin in the outline of the Granite State.
Yet this week the New Jersey governor was in a relative wilderness, caravaning along the slushy roads of eastern Iowa and sporting a different pin on his suit jacket: the Iowa state flag.
Read More >>Choices for the Establishment/Conservative Voter, Part I: Jeb Bush
Conventional wisdom has it that there are four or five “lanes” in the Republican presidential nomination contest, perhaps as many as six, and that candidates usually try first to lock down a base of support in their natural lane before broadening their support by reaching out to voters occupying the remaining lanes.
Here is how Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake described the lanes in a February 2015 article:
Think of the Republican primary field as a series of lanes. In this race, ... Read More >>