Critical Mistakes by GOP Candidates

One way to assess the 2008 presidential campaign is in terms of the mistakes made by the candidates—and there have been plenty of them, according to Republican pollster Bill McInturff. He says the failure of any candidate so far to bring the GOP together as a party is partly a result of these errors.

In an interview with U.S. News , McInturff said the GOP is in some ways a "southern, religious, right-to-life party," and its presidential candidates ignore that reality at their peril. McInturff, a former adviser to John McCain and still a McCain supporter, acknowledged that McCain has taken on new life with his victory in the New Hampshire primary but says McCain couldn't have gotten there without some serious errors by his competitors.

"We're watching the extraordinary comeback by John McCain on the back of other campaigns' screw-ups," McInturff said.

McInturff argued that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani miscalculated when he decided not to seriously compete in the early nominating contests and to wait until the Florida primary on January 29. This has kept him mostly out of the news cycle for two crucial weeks.

Fred Thompson could have been a very strong candidate but missed his chance by entering the race too late and failing to be aggressive enough, McInturff said.

Mitt Romney has spent millions of dollars of his own and raised additional millions from supporters and so far has lost Iowa and New Hampshire, although he won Wyoming. Voters "haven't bought the product," McInturff said, partly because they haven't developed an emotional connection to Romney. Winning tomorrow's Michigan primary, where the former governor is neck and neck in the polls with McCain, will be crucial to keeping his presidential bid alive.

Mike Huckabee is doing relatively well, according to McInturff. Huckabee has emerged as a religious, antiabortion conservative, and that gives him a genuine opening for the nomination. He won the Iowa caucuses, turned in a respectable performance in New Hampshire, and is a contender in the South Carolina primary this Saturday. Huckabee has done "a really good job with what he had," McInturff said.

As for McCain, he made the mistake of spending much of 2007 as the "de facto spokesman for the Bush administration" on the Iraq war, which hurt his image as a maverick, said McInturff. More recently, McCain has been convincing many voters that he is more independent than they thought. McCain argues that even though he backed Bush's surge of troops into Iraq (now widely considered a success), he had earlier criticized the administration for mismanaging the war and failing to send enough U.S. forces into the war zone. McCain has been having success in billing himself as "not the typical U.S. senator" and as a man who won't fall in lock step behind anyone, McInturff said.

—Kenneth T. Walsh