[Peace-discuss] Antiwar sentiment among Republicans

[C. G. Estabrook]

   Antiwar.com Blog <http://www.antiwar.com/blog>

Less Hawkish in the Hawkeye State?

Posted: 14 Aug 2011 12:37 PM PDT

The Ames Straw Poll, which actually has some predictive value 
<http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/why-ames-actually-matters/>, gave 
noninterventionists some reasons to smile. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas placed second 
with 28 percent 
<http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-08-14/republican-presidential-race-is-reshaped-as-pawlenty-exits.html>, 
just behind Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota (29 percent). After finishing 
third with 14 percent, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who may well have 
been the most neoconservative candidate in the race, quit. Sadly, he was 
immediately replaced by his “less boring clone 
<http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2011/08/11/rick-perry-as-less-boring-pawlenty-clone/>,” 
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who achieved 4 percent with write-in votes.

The two worst of the other candidates, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania 
and former Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, finished with 10 percent and 2 
percent, respectively. Among the moderately atrocious, businessman Herman Cain 
and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney also combined for 12 percent. 
Not-entirely-wretched former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman got 1 percent. Former New 
Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson did not participate.

As I noted last week 
<http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2011/08/07/the-ass-saw-the-angel-the-a-holes-reached-for-the-whip/>, 
Bachmann has infuriated some of the right people by being less than reflexively 
bellicose. Whether her deviation on Libya reflects mere opportunism or nascent 
realism is hard to say, though her reported coziness with Frank Gaffney makes me 
shudder. Still, if we place Bachmann in the center of this nonet, with Paul, 
Huntsman, Romney, and Cain to the less-Gaffneyesque side and Gingrich, Santorum, 
Pawlenty, and Perry to the other, we get 41 percent for the former set and 30 
percent for the latter. In the 2007 straw poll 
<http://theiowastrawpoll.org/history.php>, Paul was the only candidate who 
wasn’t running on a Bush-Cheney foreign policy, and he received only 9 percent 
of the vote. The winner that year, Mitt Romney 1.0, was much more belligerent 
than either Mitt Romney 2.0 
<http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/06/16/137218978/republicans-gets-less-hawkish-thanks-to-fiscal-woes-tea-party> 
or Michele Bachmann has been so far. Maybe even the Republican base is inching 
our way.