And so here I come to cheer you up. For all is not lost.
The shocking thing about that TIME Magazine poll is that the two leading Republican presidential candidates—Sen. John McCain and Mayor Rudy Giuliani—defeat the two leading Democratic candidates—Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama—in hypothetical match-ups. As Carney writes, "[i]n our poll, Hillary Clinton loses to John McCain, 42%-48%, and to Rudy Giuliani 41%-50%. Even though Clinton maintains a 7% edge over Obama among Democratic respondents, Obama fares better in the general election matchups. It's so close that it's a statistical dead heat, but Obama still loses: 43%-45% to McCain, 44%-45% to Giuliani."
Let me bottom line this for you: Two pro-victory Republican candidates for president who have relatively close ties to the Bush administration (though, to be fair, each is distant from the Bushies in his own way) would defeat two defeatist Bush-haters if the election were held today.
But Rudy and Johnny Mac are hardly the right wing's idea of a dream team, you say. Perhaps so. Mayor Giuliani is famously out-of-step with social conservatives, but he has recently attempted to tack rightward in this regard and he had a heck of a week on the fiscal conservative side of the ledger. Let us just say that at the very least America's Mayor is right-of-center on a sufficient number of issues to qualify easily as a "Republican in Good Standing."
As for my candidate (and client) John McCain? Yeah, yeah; I know he's a "maverick" and all, but he is a right-of-center maverick, whose credibility on issues of national security is a powerful asset to the war effort. What is more, once he got out of Washington, his campaign took on a second lifethat cannot be replicated by any other Republican candidate at this time.
A close friend of mine in the conservative blogosphere says, "unless Reagan's corpse enters the race, I don’t know what I'm going to do." This is the kind of frustration TIME magazine is playing into. But I think it is misplaced. If you are a right-of-center Republican who supports victory in Iraq, you should be delighted about the GOP's prospects for 2008.