Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. Are you all sleeping off your Valentine’s Day hangover? What else is on your mind today?
Nate Silver takes a look at the public polling about the potential Republican presidential candidates and finds the field is extremely weak. The field is weak even compared to losing candidates from previous elections (weaker than John Kerry in 2004).
That brings us to this year’s Republican field. Here are the current favorability numbers for 11 potential candidates who (i) have not denied their interest in the presidency and (ii) have been polled enough times for Talking Points Memo to have generated a LOESS regression trendline based on recent favorability surveys:
As compared to the other examples that we’ve looked at, there’s an awful lot of red in that chart — meaning, candidates whom the public views more unfavorably than favorably. Two exceptions are Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, who are slightly into positive territory. On the other hand, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have especially poor ratings.
Several other candidates, like Mr. Thune and Mr. Pawlenty, are not yet terribly well-known — which means that they have plenty of room to grow. Nevertheless, their numbers were worse than someone like John Kerry, who was also not all that well-known, but who elicited favorable (rather than ambivalent) reactions from those voters that did know him.
So it does look like Republicans have some legitimate reason to worry. In the previous five competitive primaries — excluding 2004 for the Republicans, when Mr. Bush won re-nomination uncontested — each party had at least two candidates whose net favorability ratings were in the positive double digits, meaning that their favorables bettered their unfavorables by at least 10 points. All five times, also, the nominee came from among one of the candidates in this group. Republicans have no such candidates at this point in time.
If current trends continue, President Obama will have an easy re-election. The strongest candidate, Mitt Romney looks like he’ll have trouble in the primaries and there’s multiple rumors that Huckabee won’t run. Of course, 2012 is a long way away.
Haley Barbour’s presidential aspirations may be DOA, and it’s not because of his Jim Crow history revisionism. His career as a lobbyist may come back to haunt him.
Barbour may be eager to showcase his record, but one of Barbour’s foreign lobbying clients could cause him some troubles in the 2012 Republican primary, if he decides to run. According to a State Department filing by Barbour’s former lobbying firm, The Embassy of Mexico decided to retain Barbour’s services on August 15, 2001, to work on, among other things, legislation that would provide a path to citizenship for foreigners living illegally in the United States—what opponents of immigration reform call “amnesty.”
“Haley Barbour and I will lead the BG&R team,” wrote Lanny Griffith, Barbour’s former business partner, in the filing. According to subsequent filings, Barbour’s work included “building support in the legislative branch for passage of a bill related to Section 245(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.” As part of that work, Barbour’s firm arranged meetings and briefings with “Senators, members of Congress and their staffs, as well as Executive Branch Officials in the White House, National Security Council, State Department, and Immigration & Naturalization Service.” Barbour’s firm charged Mexico $35,000 a month, plus expenses.
At the time, Mexico was seeking an extension of a provision that allowed undocumented immigrants living in the United States to receive legal visas or green cards without returning to their country of origin, provided they pay an additional fine. In practice, the provision generally helped out undocumented family members of legal immigrants or undocumented immigrants who were eligible for visas based upon certain job skills. Without the provision in place, undocumented immigrants who received legal papers had to return to their country of origin, for three or 10 years, before returning to the U.S. The Congressional Research Service estimated that an extension would benefit about 300,000 undocumented immigrants.
Oh noes! Haley Barbour may recognize undocumented immigrants as humans. Buh bye presidential aspirations!