Perry hits the road

Anyone who has watched the Republican debates knows Rick Perry’s most glaring vulnerability — including Rick Perry.  However, he has steadily improved and had a good debate on Saturday, and now he’s hitting the campaign trail in a big way in Iowa.  And rather than playing to his weakness, this plays right into Perry’s biggest strengths, as the National Journal reports:

    Rick Perry has a reputation as a campaigner in Texas: He’s dangerous, but even more dangerous when he’s down. The next three weeks in Iowa will present him with the ultimate underdog challenge as he undertakes a last-ditch, massive effort to save his presidential bid.

    Wednesday marks the beginning of a 14-day, 42-city bus tour that will see the Texas governor traverse the Hawkeye State, logging more than 1,000 miles as he strives to regain his standing among the top tier of candidates for the GOP nomination. …

    His Iowa tour will begin in Council Bluffs, on the western edge of the state, and run in a semicircle across the northern half of Iowa heading east. After a leisurely break for Christmas — Perry has no events planned from the afternoon of the 22nd until the morning of the 27th — the tour will resume with a swing through the southern part of the state and snake back around to the center. Most days follow a pattern: two to four “meet-and-greets,” often at local restaurants or coffee shops, followed by a town hall meeting in the afternoon.

    As he travels through the state, Perry will seek to build a coalition of evangelical and tea party voters, often attempting to pick off supporters from his rivals. He’s shown as much in the ads he’s run in the state targeting those specific groups. His fight for the Christian right, a key voting bloc during the Iowa caucuses, will put him in competition against Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

Assuming his back troubles are behind him (pardon the pun), Perry can be a force of nature in retail politics.  He got off to a good start in Iowa when he jumped into the race, but his immediate rise in national polls took his focus elsewhere.  Now with Iowa the only prize that Perry can reasonably grasp at the moment, he’s going all in — like Bachmann and Rick Santorum, the latter of whom has already visited all 99 counties and has built a surprisingly extensive organization.

Those will be his two main competitors for voters who won’t back either Gingrich or Romney, and of course Perry wants to split social conservatives and Tea Party activists away from Gingrich, if possible.  There is some evidence, although rather thin, that a Perry comeback has already begun.  The latest poll from the American Research Group shows Perry rising to fourth place, but more significantly, into double digits at 13%.  That’s a bounce upward of eight points since last month, trailing only Gingrich’s 19-point rise in the same period.  Ron Paul and Mitt Romney are just ahead of Perry at 17%, putting Perry within reach of a second-place finish.

If Perry can even get to second place in Iowa, it would be a stunning change of fortune and could restore credibility to his campaign.  With conservatives despairing at the prospect of a Gingrich-Romney contest, Perry could steal a march on the Right and find himself very much back in the mix — assuming that Ron Paul doesn’t beat him to it.

Christiane Amanpour out as host of “This Week”? Update: Stephanopoulos in?

As with any dull, lifeless marriage, it’s probably better that this one ends than that they stay together out of obligation.

I want to try an idea out on you, but really think it over before you say no. Okay?

“This Week with Chelsea Clinton.”

    Christiane Amanpour is preparing to leave as the anchor of “This Week,” the Sunday morning news program on ABC, two people with knowledge of her plans said Tuesday…

    Rumors about Ms. Amanpour’s status on “This Week” have swirled for months, and were given more oxygen last Sunday when The New York Post said that ABC News executives were “mulling who might replace” her. ABC did not deny the newspaper’s report…

    At the time she joined ABC, she said she would “focus on the intractable convergence of domestic and foreign policy.” Arguably her biggest scoop on ABC came last February when she interviewed then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak shortly before he stepped down.

    Ms. Amanpour’s tenure on “This Week” coincided with a decline in ABC’s competitive position on Sunday mornings.

Here’s the Post item from Friday alleging that neither side was thrilled with the other and that Amanpour might be angling to go back to the foreign affairs beat at CNN, which makes sense. If you were a journo who’d made your rep in international news, what would you rather be doing these days: Covering Iran’s nuclear progress, Syria’s civil war, and Egypt’s new Islamist government or refereeing ideological slapfights between George Will and Paul Krugman?

Like everyone else in America, I’ve never understood why ABC tapped someone with her resume for a political talk show. The idea, I guess, was to add a foreign-affairs dimension to Sunday morning yakfests, but that’s kind of like hiring a business reporter to anchor SportsCenter. Sure, there’s some subject-matter overlap, but nobody’s watching SC for a panel discussion on revenue sharing or the salary cap. And even if a crisis overseas blows up and dominates the U.S. news cycle, what special insight is Amanpour supposedly bringing to “This Week” by dint of her experience as a correspondent? The Mubarak interview was a nice “get” but (a) it was Barbara Walters, not Amanpour, whom Assad turned to for ABC’s latest big “get,” and (b) if it’s Amanpour’s contacts abroad that are prized by ABC, they should have put her in the field rather than behind a desk in D.C. By making her anchor, they were promising especially penetrating discussions of foreign affairs from week to week. Does anyone think they delivered?

Exit question: Amanpour’s loss is Jake Tapper’s gain, right? He’s delivered for them before, you know.

Oh my: Ron Paul within one point of Gingrich in Iowa?

posted at 3:56 pm on December 13, 2011 by Allahpundit

Hey now. I was writing “Could Ron Paul seriously win Iowa?” posts before writing “Could Ron Paul seriously win Iowa?” posts was cool.

    There has been some major movement in the Republican Presidential race in Iowa over the last week, with what was a 9 point lead for Newt Gingrich now all the way down to a single point. Gingrich is at 22% to 21% for Paul with Mitt Romney at 16%, Michele Bachmann at 11%, Rick Perry at 9%, Rick Santorum at 8%, Jon Huntsman at 5%, and Gary Johnson at 1%.

    Gingrich has dropped 5 points in the last week and he’s also seen a significant decline in his favorability numbers. Last week he was at +31 (62/31) and he’s now dropped 19 points to +12 (52/40). The attacks on him appear to be taking a heavy toll- his support with Tea Party voters has declined from 35% to 24%.

    Paul meanwhile has seen a big increase in his popularity from +14 (52/38) to +30 (61/31). There are a lot of parallels between Paul’s strength in Iowa and Barack Obama’s in 2008- he’s doing well with new voters, young voters, and non-Republican voters…

Simple question: What’s Paul’s ceiling in Iowa? A friend on Twitter was arguing earlier that it’s 20 percent, which is borne out by the polls — so far. If he’s right then Paul can’t win. But … what if Paul’s ceiling is actually 30 percent? Note that his favorables are trending upwards while Newt’s are sinking under the weight of renewed scrutiny of his various conservative heresies. If you’re an Iowan who’s unhappy with the “electable” candidates — Romney for being too opportunistic, Gingrich for flirting too often with activist government, Perry for seeming too darned hapless — then Paul’s an obvious choice for your “none of the above” protest vote. So obvious, in fact, that both Glenn Beck and Joe Scarborough are threatening to back him as a third-party candidate if Gingrich is the nominee. (An interesting footnote in the PPP data: Voters split equally on whether their view of the GOP establishment is favorable or unfavorable, and among the latter group Paul leads by double digits at 34 percent.) If he can pull 10 percent from voters like that on top of the 20 percent who make up his base, then his chances at an upset improve dramatically. And don’t forget, not only is Paul’s base famously enthusiastic and guaranteed to turn out, he’s one of the best organized candidates in Iowa this time. He might be able to get leaners to come out and caucus come rain or shine. Can Gingrich do the same?

I’ll bet Romney’s kicking himself now for not having abandoned Iowa early on. If he had done that, he could have sent his supporters out to caucus for Paul, thereby detonating Newt’s chances; if he tried that now, having competed in earnest in the state, the headlines would be all about Romney’s shockingly poor finish in Iowa, which would actually help Gingrich in New Hampshire even if he finished second to Paul in the caucuses. (On the other hand, per Rasmussen, Paul’s just four points back of Gingrich for second place in New Hampshire too.) Two exit questions for you, then. One: As chances of a Paul upset grow, will Iowa’s Republican leaders swing behind Newt or Mitt? They want the caucuses to remain relevant to choosing the eventual nominee, and if Paul wins, that’ll be two elections in a row where the Iowa winner realistically had no chance. Two: Could a Paul victory achieve a real “none of the above” outcome for the nomination? A brokered convention is unlikely – but, as Sean Trende explains, not impossible if Paul fares well.

    Caucus states are also concentrated in the Mountain West, where his brand of Republicanism holds greater appeal. They’re also front-loaded, meaning that (a) his supporters will be less likely to have been swayed by the “can’t win” argument and (b) the more “establishment” Republican candidates are likely to split the non-Paul votes.

    Overall, 486 delegates will be awarded in caucus states. If Paul picks off a sizable number of these delegates, say a quarter of them, and two other GOP candidates battle to a draw, there might not be a nominee by the end of June. This type of fight could carry over to the convention, since Paul is pretty feisty and is probably the least likely candidate out there to be “bought off” with a Cabinet position or speaking slot.

    If, say, Perry and Gingrich are knotted up with about 1,050 delegates each, and Paul holds the remaining 200 and refuses to budge, you could end up with a deadlocked convention that eventually turns to a dark-horse candidate.

Ron Paul winning Iowa just might mean the GOP nominating Ryan, Christie, or Daniels. Second look at Ron Paul winning Iowa?

Be prepared: Another open registration day coming tomorrow!

After all the fun we had last week in holding our open registration, who wouldn’t want to relive it the very next week?  Our courageous staff support at Townhall has been medically cleared for duty, our systems have been fortified, and mainly we’re all a bunch of masochists.  What could go wrong?

So tomorrow, we will once again hold an open registration for new commenters here at Hot Air, between 9 am and 4 pm ET, when our staff support is on duty to assist in the process.  Just like last week, we will approve new registrants, not process amnesty requests for previously-banned commenters. We’ll have instructions in tomorrow’s post on how this works and what to expect — so please make sure you read those before peppering us with questions we have already answered.

Why hold another right now?  First, we think we fixed the problems that plagued us last week, so it should go much smoother.  Also, we want to add as many commenters as we can in order to increase participation in a new feature we will launch here and at our sister site Townhall — the Hot Air/Townhall Republican primary!  (They’re probably calling it the Townhall/Hot Air Republican primary over there, but what do they know?)  Only registered commenters will be able to vote — so make sure you register tomorrow!