The GOP Race: None of the Above

By MICHAEL DUFFY

Republicans normally pour the same amount of uncertainty into picking a presidential nominee that Buckingham Palace puts into its Changing of the Guard. That is, as little as possible. Republicans prefer to find a brand-name, big-state governor, surround him with the same right-thinking brains on taxes, foreign policy and the New Testament, back him with all the cash he will need to corner TV time in New Hampshire and then run the nominee through a quick gauntlet of primaries before anyone else has a chance at the prize. The whole thing makes for more of a ritual than a race, but there's no doubting that the formula works. In the past seven presidential elections, G.O.P. nominees have lost only twice.

But these are not normal times for Republican Party satraps, who can be best described these days as dispirited, confused and just plain tired. Their presidential nominating race has less clarity today than it did a year ago, less even than it did three months ago. Polls point to the political equivalent of a total solar eclipse, with three different Republicans leading in three of the initial primary and caucus states: Mike Huckabee in Iowa, Mitt Romney in New Hampshire and Rudy Giuliani in Michigan. None of these men, at present, would beat Hillary Clinton in a general-election matchup, and each would fare little better against Barack Obama. "If somebody could run as None of the Above," says former McCain campaign chief John Weaver, "he would be the front-runner."

Watching the G.O.P. search for a nominee has been a little like going to dinner at one of those mock medieval-jousting shows, where knight after knight appears in shining armor, only to be knocked rudely off his horse and into the dirt. Early White House favorites George Allen and Bill Frist quickly fell by the wayside in 2006. John McCain -- too much of a maverick to ever be a G.O.P. favorite, and yet a year ago the presumptive front-runner -- crash-landed his campaign this summer and is only now showing signs of an unlikely resurrection. His friend Fred Thompson materialized in midsummer to catch McCain's crown, but he fizzled fast. Romney became the party's default darling, spending his way to the top of several polls. But now he too has taken hits for being slippery, and what counts as momentum has passed to Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher from, of all places, Hope, Ark. The way the recurring nightmare has been going, Huckabee is likely to be unhorsed right about ... now.

Even Giuliani, the national front-runner -- a title that normally means something in a G.O.P. race but this year is the equivalent of "honorary chairman" -- is slumping in polls. Republicans have no experience with chaos like this, except in history books. "It is without a doubt," says G.O.P. strategist Ralph Reed, "the most unpredictable roller-coaster ride we've seen in a Republican primary since the rise of the primary in the 1960s." Party-history buff Newt Gingrich went further: he called the G.O.P. contest the most wide-open race the party has held since 1940 -- the year Wendell Willkie needed six ballots to capture the nomination before losing to F.D.R. in a third-term landslide.

It's improbable that someone named George Bush, the most visible beneficiary of the G.O.P.'s longtime bias toward primogeniture, would be responsible for bringing its era to a halt. But he is chiefly to blame for leaving the party of his father and grandfather without a healthy male heir. Bush tapped Dick Cheney seven years ago to be his Veep in part because he did not want a Vice President whose loyalties were divided between the Oval Office and the Des Moines Register. Cheney ran once before and could have jumped in again (he will be only 67 in January) had things gone differently. But Cheney is even less popular than Bush, whose ratings move in a narrow band between the high 20s and mid-30s and have been dragging down fellow Republicans. Even if the war in Iraq continues to simmer down or the economy firms, Republicans aren't likely to get much credit.

The disarray can't be blamed on Bush entirely; he may even deserve credit for postponing it. Some students of the G.O.P. have argued that the revolution that brought the party to power in Congress in 1994 was pretty much a spent force by 2000. Under this theory, Republicans should have lost that election but survived thanks to Bush's qualities, the butterfly ballot and five Supreme Court Justices. Then 9/11 happened, which enabled Bush to win reelection, despite the fact that the G.O.P.'s sell-by date had long since passed. The past seven years, in this view, were an anomaly that postponed the reckoning and made the G.O.P. crash even more severe.

Still, it is hard to overestimate the moral and intellectual power outage that now darkens the G.O.P.. Long out of step with a majority of voters on such secondary issues as outlawing abortion and narrowing stem-cell research, Republicans have more recently managed to get themselves on the wrong side of popular trends on what were once old reliables: foreign policy, economics, energy, even health care. Iraq is still somewhat taboo in Republican debates, so fearful are the candidates that the situation in Baghdad might again deteriorate. Thanks to Katrina and several war-contracting scandals, the party has squandered its bragging rights on running a more efficient government. "We've lost, clearly, some of the moral high ground on the larger issues of taxes and spending," says South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

On one issue that might favor them next year -- immigration -- the leading Republicans have had to scramble to realign themselves with voters in their base. Bush came into office in 2001 in favor of a pathway to citizenship for some illegals, only to discover that his party's right flank opposed it. Giuliani, McCain and Romney, all of whom to varying degrees once backed that approach, have recalibrated their positions so that they share the public's desire to secure the borders before granting aliens any legal rights to put down roots. The party's nativist temptation is already having an impact: almost 6 out of every 10 Hispanic voters now call themselves Democrats or lean that way, according to a new Pew Center study -- a shift of 13 points in party ID in the past year alone.

So what's left to talk about? Peter Wehner, who worked for Bush in the White House on strategic initiatives for more than six years, wonders if the candidates' repeated calls for an era of Reagan-like optimism aren't anachronistic. "Some have lifted a script from the past," he says, "without realizing the setting on the stage has changed." The intellectual fatigue guarantees that the Republicans will fall back on the one issue that unites them: the Democrats. Giuliani has led the charge here, repeatedly naming Hillary Clinton in debates as the real threat facing the nation. But Sanford warns that there are limits to this approach. Sounding the alarm about Democrats may not work, he says, because the electorate is "fairly ticked off at Republicans." But he adds that Republican self-doubt is so marked that if Jesus came back as a candidate, "people would say, 'You know, I don't like his beard.'"

That skepticism extends to nearly all the candidates as well. A Republican governor put it this way: "If you took any one of these guys and held them up against the light and said, 'Could this guy be President?' you'd say, 'I don't think so.'" While they are, on paper, a distinguished group -- a living hero and sitting U.S. Senator, a former Senator and popular actor, two former Governors and a prosecutor turned mayor of the nation's most populous city -- each has handicaps that are limiting.

McCain, already 71, would be the oldest President in history. Giuliani has so far tiptoed around the subjects of his ex-wives, his alienated children and questions about his business practices. Romney has been elected to office exactly once, has a record of changing his positions on an unusually wide range of issues, and just announced that he's a Mormon to a nation that might not otherwise have known or even cared. Though as smooth as corn syrup on the outside, preacherman Huckabee is low on cash, light on organization and may not be able to fill the pews in New Hampshire the way he did in Iowa. And then there's Thompson, who has not found the transition from Hollywood's low-lit soundstages to politics' brighter lights as forgiving as many had hoped. Staffers have fled his campaign in horror throughout the fall, complaining that the candidate listens only to his wife. Thompson's condition was summed up best by a New Hampshire woman who, when asked in a rival campaign's focus group for her impressions of all the candidates, responded to a picture of the TV actor by saying, "Is he still running?"

Romney could be speaking for the entire field when he says, as he has done, "I'm not perfect." But one longtime political operative explained that the flaws are grander and gaudier this time, and so the question for voters becomes not whom do you like, but who can win. That means, he says, that what the Republicans are mounting in 2008 is not a race of passion or principle but simply one of pragmatism. It may also explain why the party's normally ferocious enthusiasm is so far absent in every poll.

And that problem brings up one other development in the race, something Republicans haven't encountered since they locked arms with the Moral Majority in 1979: the party's evangelical base has declared independence from its leaders. This fall, the Old Guard of the Christian right serially christened their preferred candidates. The Rev. Pat Robertson went for Giuliani; the National Right to Life Committee came out for Thompson; Bob Jones III and Paul Weyrich endorsed Romney. Few believed that Huckabee, the ordained Southern Baptist who actually seemed to be one of them, could win. And then, lo and behold, rank-and-file Evangelicals went off and lined up in unexpected numbers for the former Arkansas Governor. The falcons heard the falconers -- and then flew off in a different direction. It's another sign of a party whose power structure has uncoupled from the people who put it in power in the first place.

This predicament cannot last forever -- but it can go on for a while yet. Normally the G.O.P. comes to a decision quickly, and the Democrats stretch the process into the baseball season, bickering over delegates, platform planks, rules and speaking rights before everyone swears loyalty to the long-settled nominee. All that, and possibly more, could happen on the other side this time. But Republicans have at least one organic strength that will help them weather this confusion: they are tops in a knife fight. So uncomfortable is the party with anything that resembles an unsettled race after New Hampshire that its armies typically loose upon one another every nasty charge and attack ad they can afford, desperate to slice the field down to one or at the most two remaining contenders. This stage of the race is under way. It will be up to the lucky survivor to put the pieces of the party back together.

Who benefits, in the meantime, from all this upheaval? Every campaign has its constantly adjusting story line, how a win here by one guy or there by another benefits its man. McCain's team thinks the party will come to its senses and rally around the veteran. Romney hopes to emerge as the least objectionable choice everywhere. Giuliani's entire campaign is predicated on chaos lasting until late January, when he thinks he can clobber his rivals in Florida. And Huckabee is hoping for a miracle. Only one thing is guaranteed: some candidate, however bruised and battered, will survive this gauntlet. John Sears, the master G.O.P. strategist who worked for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and is watching the demolition derby, calls the race "a record setter." But he notes that someone will win it. "All politics is about," says Sears, "is being a little better than the other guy."

With reporting by James Carney and Karen Tumulty/Washington and Nancy Gibbs and Andrea Sachs/New York