Pundits have been dissecting the news of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s decision not to run for president next year. One pundit, the Washington Examiner‘s Michael Barone, takes aim at his counterparts and colleagues’ reactions:
Some of it is nonsense. I read someone earlier this week confidently stating that Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were the only Republicans who can beat Barack Obama because they’re doing better than other possible nominees in polls.
Please. All those polls show is that these two who ran in 2008 have higher name recognition than others who didn’t. Voters will know far more about the Republican nominee in fall 2012 than they know now about any contender.
You can also find lots of articles naming Romney as the frontrunner. Again, please. Most national polls show no one getting as much as 20 percent of the primary vote. That means no one is the frontrunner.
Try applying this test. Make a list of your top 20 Republican elective or appointive officials of the last 15 years who have shown some capacity to be president.
Did you put Romney on the top of your list? I doubt it. You might have put him somewhere on it, based on his one term as governor of Massachusetts and his fine work organizing the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah.
You will hear often that Republicans inevitably nominate the candidate next in line. But “inevitably” covers a very limited number of cases — just six by my count since the primaries became predominant in the 1970s. Serious social scientists resist making generalizations when, as they put it, n=6.
