MOBILE — The most common answer, by midsummer, was no answer at all.
Asked whom they supported in the 2008 presidential race, a number of Mobile’s business people, lawyers and elected officials described something closer to a shopping trip that had gone badly: they had examined the merchandise on both sides of the aisle, and nothing fit.
‘None of the current suspects ring my chimes’
Local real estate executive Lee Metzger had recently heard the commentator Chris Matthews handicap the field for a national gathering of Realtors in Washington. After a few days of turning the presentation over, Metzger concluded that the Republican platform remained the better fit for his family. Then came the hard part.
“The problem then becomes, which candidate?” he said. “To this point none of the current suspects — McCain, Romney, Giuliani, Thompson — ring my chimes.” If Republicans failed to find someone with broad appeal and a moderate position on Iraq, he warned, the party could find itself watching Bill Clinton pick out the china for state dinners.
Metzger volunteered a name that was not on any ballot. “I know this sounds odd, but I think Bob Riley has demonstrated the most effective leadership of any politician I have observed in the last five years,” he said of Alabama’s governor. “Just think where Alabama was five years ago when he took office, and look at us today. I am not suggesting Riley as a candidate for President, but we could probably do a lot worse.”
Mobile attorney Jim Frost described the same problem in more analytical terms. “My impression is that if you could take certain candidates and combine them you would have a complete candidate, but that none of them has a complete skill set at this point,” he said. Electability, he added, was something he wanted to evaluate more closely before putting his money anywhere. “Have I dodged the question sufficiently?”
The councilman’s list
Mobile City Councilman John Williams went down the Republican roster with the candor of a man reading a menu he did not much like.
McCain was out: “too wishy washy — not a hero in my book.” Duncan Hunter, James Gilmore, Sam Brownback, Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo and Tommy Thompson he simply did not know. Romney’s Massachusetts address was “kind of scary.” Giuliani’s window, he judged, had already closed.
Only two names drew warmth. Mike Huckabee, the Arkansas governor, “is my kind of candidate — sees the world through the same glasses I do.” And if Newt Gingrich were to run, Williams said, he would likely vote for him “based on his complete knowledge of the system and the world and its issues.” Gingrich, who spent much of 2007 hinting, never entered.
Those who had decided
A few had. Buffy Donlon of Wintzell’s Oyster House was leaning toward Giuliani, citing his stands on crime and terrorism, his record on urban redevelopment and welfare-to-work, and his 2004 convention speech. She noted, too, that his position on abortion was closer to her own than that of the other Republicans in the field — an inversion of the usual reason Alabama Republicans gave for or against him.
Mobile attorney Cecil Gardner had made up his mind on the other side. “I am supporting John Edwards,” he said. “I am convinced that he has the best and most workable plan for universal health care.” Health care was the issue on which Edwards had staked his candidacy, and he had been first among the Democrats to publish a detailed plan.
A former state Democratic administration official offered the most tangled answer of all. “If the election were today, I’d vote for Rudy,” he said — before predicting that Al Gore would enter the race after the summer, win the nomination and be elected president. Faced with that choice, he said, “It would be difficult for me to choose between Gore and Rudy. Couldn’t tell you right now.”
Why the hedging mattered
The uncertainty was not affectation. In the summer of 2007, the Republican field had no incumbent president or vice president running for the first time since 1928, and its front-runner was a socially moderate New Yorker who made the party’s Southern base deeply uneasy. The Democratic field, meanwhile, was dominated by a former first lady whose nomination was treated in most quarters as inevitable.
Both assumptions were wrong. The eventual nominees — McCain, written off by more than one of these voters as insufficiently heroic, and a first-term senator from Illinois who is scarcely mentioned in any of these conversations — would render the whole exercise a period piece within a year. Which is exactly what makes it worth reading now.