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  The Super Tuesday Showdown: Candidates Invoke Ghosts of the Political Past

The Super Tuesday Showdown Candidates Invoke Ghosts of the Political Past

By Klaus Brinkbäumer and Cordula Meyer

Part 2: Republicans Lack a Candidate Who Inspires Them

It is disconcerting that the Republicans, once the true masters of the political slogan, have managed to come up with nothing more convincing to respond to this challenge than Ronald Reagan. The Republicans, as their tedious and unpopular primaries have shown, still have no idea how the future president will have to think and act. Because they lack a candidate who inspires them, their debates are dominated by a dead man whom they love: Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, a charismatic product of the Cold War, a man with relatively limited intellectual abilities, whose survivors have molded him into the party's great redeemer. No one in the Republican Party wants to talk about lame duck President George W. Bush anymore. Bush has the taint of a failed president, a man now so unpopular that his name alone is treated like a communicable disease -- and rarely mentioned.

It is true that Reagan, almost three decades ago, managed to fuse together society's three conservative wings into an alliance: the proponents of a strong military, the businesspeople who wanted nothing more from a government than low taxes, and the Christians, who were afraid of gays.

Cracks in the Reagan Dream

But the Reagan coalition fell apart long ago. Each of today's contenders for the Republican nomination can only claim the support of one wing -- or perhaps, with a candidate as elastic as Romney, a wing and a half. Romney, a Mormon who made a fortune as a hedge fund manager and is now investing it in his own campaign, is popular with the business wing of the party. He manages to mold his positions to every aspect of the party's agenda. Romney has the support of the Republican establishment, because he is the type of candidate it feels confident that it can mold.

There is only one problem: the voters. Voters find Romney amusing. Voters think it's funny that Romney, who describes himself as a passionate hunter, has only been hunting twice in his life. "The painful truth about his candidacy," writes the Weekly Standard, "is that Republicans and conservatives can't stand him." Every Republican knows that Clinton and Obama would prefer to have Romney as their opponent, and even Huckabee's campaign manager has said that he has trouble developing a strategy against Romney, because he can't stop thinking about knocking his teeth out.

These are difficult times for conservatives. William Kristol, the editor and publisher of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, is already suggesting that his readers lower their expectations. "The conservative debate has been distorted by Reagan nostalgia," says Kristol. But at a time when it isn't easy to think about the threats of tomorrow, the past offers a warmer and fuzzier alternative.

At noon in America, millions of listeners -- sitting on their tractors in Kansas or working in car repair shops in Michigan -- still faithfully tune in to right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh is a corpulent man for whom convictions are more important than facts. He calls McCain an "active promoter of the global warming hysteria" and suggests that if McCain is nominated, it will "destroy the Republican Party."

The fact that McCain, 71, was able to win Florida's 57 delegates to the Republican Party's nominating convention in St. Paul, Minnesota in early September, probably has a lot to do with the doubts, dissatisfaction and collective rigidity within the party after seven years under Bush.

As recently as last summer, McCain was also a faded Republican, both financially and politically. He was so broke that he couldn't even afford the gasoline for his campaign bus. The few journalists who were still accompanying him referred to their jobs as the "McCain campaign death watch."

But McCain is undoubtedly a tenacious man. As a Navy pilot, he was involved in two plane crashes. In an accident on an aircraft carrier off the Vietnamese coast, his plane went up in flames and 134 fellow soldiers died in the ensuing blaze. On Oct. 26, 1967, he was shot down over Hanoi. He ejected from his aircraft and parachuted into a lake, with broken arms and a broken leg. A Vietnamese soldier crushed his shoulder with the butt of a rifle, and McCain was eventually interned in the notorious prison the GIs sarcastically dubbed the "Hanoi Hilton."

When it was revealed that his father was an admiral, the Vietnamese, hoping to stage a propaganda coup, tried to release him. But McCain refused special treatment, insisting that he didn't want to aid the enemy in its propaganda effort. He was kept in the Hanoi Hilton for five years, where he was repeatedly tortured to the point of unconsciousness.

McCain is a tough customer and proud of it, the kind of man his party should in fact hold in high esteem. But it doesn't, because he is rebellious, only religious to a point and even voted against Bush's tax cuts for wealthy Americans. And when Bush announced, in January 2007, that he wanted to increase troop levels in Iraq, McCain said that he was pleased that the president was finally doing what he had proposed long ago. McCain says that the lesson he learned from Vietnam is that if the country goes to war, it should do so with an army that is large enough to win.

McCain has many enemies in Washington. He fought for campaign finance reform and immigration reform, he talks about the dangers of global warming, and he even called televangelist Pat Robertson an "agent of intolerance."

Is McCain a masochist? He constantly supports policies that, for the remainder of the party, are as Obama-esque as they are Clinton-esque -- the stuff of the devil for Republicans. But he has a knack for talking like the people and, more important, with the people. At his town hall meetings, which can go on for hours, people sit around him in a circle, and sometimes the doses of truth he dishes out during these sessions are borderline suicidal. When laid-off autoworkers in Michigan asked him what he planned to do to fix their disintegrating world, McCain responded: nothing at all. The jobs, he told them, are gone, they're not coming back, so get out there and learn new skills!

McCain has never quite fit in. His mother said that when he was two, he would go into fits of rage until he lost consciousness. She was concerned that he was ill, but it turned out that the boy was simply holding his breath to get candy. A doctor recommended placing him into an ice-cold bath the next time he had an attack. The mother followed the doctor's advice, and today McCain jokes that his Vietnam experiences are not the real reason that he is the only Republican candidate who has spoken out against the use of any form of torture in the name of the United States.

But now McCain says that he supports Bush's tax cuts after all, prompting liberal commentators to accuse him of flip-flopping -- one of the most serious charges anyone can make against a political candidate in the United States. Of course, everyone knows that if he hadn't changed his position on the tax cut issue, he might as well have left the party.

But McCain's strongest argument in his favor is one that no one can ignore. The Democrats and the battle between Clinton and Obama have dominated the campaign until now, and a Democratic victory in November seemed inevitable -- until McCain appeared on the scene. According to opinion polls, he is the only Republican contender who stands a chance of beating both Clinton and Obama.

Are the Clintons their own Worst Enemies?

The polls currently suggest that a Clinton-McCain duel is the most likely scenario come November. But it's still a tight race between Clinton and Obama, and if Obama ends up being the Democratic candidate, the Clintons will have been their own worst enemies.

Anyone who follows the Clinton clan through America these days is witnessing a hyperventilating campaign. Hillary is still ahead in the big states, but Obama has accumulated more elected delegates so far, and Clinton now appears to be genuinely concerned about her rival. While Obama has consistently articulated the same message, Team Hillary seems to change its strategy daily. One day Hillary is the stateswomen, the commander-in-chief the next day and the mother of the nation on the day after that. In the space of a 20-minute speech, she manages to alternate from shrill to soft to loud to razor-sharp and back again. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, is at her side one day and gone the next, attacking Obama with one breath and praising him with another.

The Clintons seem to change with the results of each new opinion poll, so much so it seems valid to ask: Who are the real Clintons?

Obama's claim that he is campaigning against two Clintons is no longer true, because Hillary -- very much in the spotlight after his win in New Hampshire -- has disappeared behind Bill's shadow once again. To promote Hillary's campaign and the glory of his own dynasty, Bill Clinton has long since traded in the role of the world statesman eager to save the planet for that of a partisan who is ready to get his hands dirty.

Of course, the Clintons are still popular, and they still enjoy widespread support and benefit from a seasoned campaign team. But there is something manic about the whole thing, almost as if they believed that they were entitled to the White House, and as if Bill couldn't stand the thought of a black man with an outlandish name depriving him of the finale in his own unique biography.

One of Bill Clinton's comments was well beyond the pale of what is still considered acceptable in American politics. When Obama won the South Carolina primary, Clinton compared his success to civil rights activist Jesse Jackson's in 1988. The comment was more than perfidious; it was about skin color. What Clinton was really saying was that Obama isn't Kennedy after all, that he is in fact more like Jackson, and that while blacks can certainly win a primary, the party's nomination is a different story.

There are some in the party who say that the Clintons are destroying everything -- the euphoria and the freshness of the campaign -- with sentences like this. According to the Clintons' critics, the approach may help them beat Obama, but in the end they will lose the support they need to defeat McCain, who only ends up looking morally superior.

"Thank you, from the bottom of my heart," McCain said in Miami late Tuesday evening, and then he slowly lowered his head. Perhaps it was in that moment that he caught sight of the world's ugliest tie, blue with bright yellow stripes. Then he looked up again, and his next words were surprisingly contemplative. "This was a hard-fought election, and worth fighting hard for, but I've been on the other side of such contests before, and experienced the disappointment," said the Arizona senator, who knows what defeat feels like. The rest of his speech was full of praise, for Mitt Romney, who had given his all, and for Rudy Giuliani, who came in third place in the state to which he devoted practically his entire campaign -- and who took the logical next step on Wednesday, when he dropped out of the race and endorsed McCain.

What remains for Super Tuesday are two duels, a true semi-final: McCain versus Romney, and Clinton versus Obama.