Recently released polls have shown disappointing returns for Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, whose percentage of the vote has hovered around 3 percent since early May, and received no noticeable bump from his June 21 campaign announcement. It gets worse: Only 42 percent of Republicans actually know of Huntsman, 20 percent less than the average candidate. Huntsman’s poll number plateau lends credence to Washington Post Columnist Dana Milbank’s view that Huntsman and his amicable approach were doomed on arrival.

In a “normal” presidential cycle, Huntsman should be polling much better. His ability to test the president in an area of strength, foreign policy, and position as the most moderate candidate should resonate with a larger niche of independent voters allowed to participate in early state primaries like New Hampshire. But campaigning on the moral high road in this Republican Party nomination contest may come with a hefty toll.

Huntsman is mired support levels similar to Newt Gingrich, and has one of the lowest positive intensity scores (the percent strongly favorable minus the percent strongly unfavorable and gage of the “intensity of support among a candidate’s base of followers.”) out of any of the candidates at (+2). The positive intensity score is critical to building up a volunteer base that is eager to engage in critical but mechanical activities like phone banking, and fight harder at early manpower-driven campaign events like the Iowa caucuses.

Herman Cain, who is more in line with the Republican base, has similar recognition levels but higher intensity numbers at (+25). Cain’s fiery rhetoric, not just his policy, drives his positive intensity levels. Herman Cain‘s bombastic language underscores his policy, and reinforces his firebrand image and in-line with the base policies. Huntsman’s politeness pledge lacks the wherewithal to aggressively contrast his positions with the other contenders, coming off as bland and out-of-synch with the Republicans.

Civil campaigns have a three-part cycle: an initial surplus of press, followed by a drastic drop-off of publicity, ending with the candidate languishing in obscurity. The initial glut of press at the onset of their campaign seems like a severance package to compensate candidates for the minimum attention they receive after the initial surge.

Beyond reducing visibility, limited press also restricts a candidate’s number of defining moments. Each moment carries more weight in marking a candidate’s personality – Huntsman’s desire for civility has labeled him boring and uninteresting. Furthermore, the nature of a campaign drives the media’s branding. Huntsman’s tough-guy motorcycle doesn’t help shake his nice guy image and all the connotations and lack of attention such monikers bring. Here’s a striking figure: only five percent of the 42 percent Republicans that know of Huntsman support his candidacy strongly. That’s just 2 percent of all Republican voters overall. Rising above the fray in politics is an honorable notion, but like most things, it comes with a price.

Huntsman’s low recognition is a by-product of his polite campaign. Conflict drives newspapers and the press drives identification. Politeness just doesn’t generate any headlines.

Photo Credit: David Keller

The “invisible primary” of Republican presidential candidates positioning themselves to become the Wingnut alternative to Mitt Romney is now getting close to its first major landmarks: the “closing of the field” when Republicans stop fantasizing about late entries who will shake up the race, and the August 13 Iowa State GOP straw poll, which will likely end the campaigns of poorly financed also-rans who can’t show significant grassroots support in Iowa or other early states.

Although bored pundits will probably continue to offer implausible scenarios for late candidacies by Chris Christie or Jeb Bush right on through the autumn, the only real mystery left is whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry will enter the race. He will reportedly decide for or against by the end of this month.

Meanwhile, several campaigns are holding on by a thread, and will probably be liquidated (or reduced to a platform from which the candidates can make free debate appearances to sell their books or keep their names in the public eye) after the straw poll. The most obvious casualty of earlier events is Newt Gingrich, who never had much of a chance at the nomination even before a series of missteps chased off most of his staff. Rick Santorum’s all-abortion all-the-time candidacy hasn’t gone anywhere. Herman Cain is the candidate most likely to be “winnowed” in Ames. His earlier surge in support in the early states has subsided to a considerable extent. More importantly, his languorous campaign pace, reminiscent of 2008 candidate Fred Thompson, has frustrated his staff and supporters; in just the last couple of weeks, he’s lost his top staffers in both New Hampshire and Iowa. In the latter state, that couldn’t come at a worse time, when he needs the organizational heft to convert the cheers he generates with his stock speech into tangible support in the straw poll. His second quarter fundraising numbers, showing he raised just under $2.5 million, didn’t impress anybody.

The candidate most desperately in need of a strong showing in Ames is Tim Pawlenty, who continues to struggle in the polls and whose reported $4.2 million second-quarter haul was even less impressive than Cain’s, given T-Paw’s heavy expenses in Iowa. Anything other than a first or strong second-place finish in the straw poll could kill off Pawlenty entirely, eliminate the prospects of a “consensus” candidate who appeals equally to all of the GOP’s conservative factions, and set up a potentially protracted and divisive nomination contest between Romney and either Michele Bachmann or (if he runs) Rick Perry.

While a Perry candidacy excites a lot of observers, it remains a debatable proposition. Yes, on paper he looks formidable. He’s a candidate equally rooted in the Tea Party Movement and the Christian Right. He’s got a great economic “story” to tell, dubious as his claims really are to have generated Texas’ impressive (if generally low-wage) record of recent job growth. He’s considered good-looking by those who like the rugged Marlboro Man stereotype of masculinity. He’s a good stump speaker who enjoys campaigning far more than governing, and has no moral compunctions about serving up big platters of the rawest red meat. And he’s a proven fundraiser who has the important Republican Governors Association rolodex in his pocket.

On the other hand, a PPP poll just last week showed Perry losing a hypothetical general election contest to Barack Obama in his home state of Texas, performing worse than Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty or Herman Cain (and far worse than Mitt Romney). This sign that Perry has clay of feet in his cowboy boots could be a real problem, particularly if his message depicts him as the economic savior of the Lone Star State, whose residents would normally be expected to toss rose petals in his path to the White House.

Perry also has a timing problem. If he is to compete in the Iowa straw poll, he can’t delay his candidacy much longer. But announcing a campaign this month would significantly undermine the legitimacy of his much-ballyhooed August 6 prayer rally in Houston, dubbed “The Response,” which is reportedly intended to usher in a convergence of Christian Right support for a Perry candidacy. Getting in after Ames could be risky, since it could enable Michele Bachmann to become the celebrity national candidate of precisely the Tea Party/social conservative coalition that Perry would offer to lead.

Meanwhile, Bachmann is riding pretty high at the moment, though her own second-quarter fundraising numbers have yet to be revealed. She has a reputation as a champion fundraiser (she holds the all-time record for cup-rattling in a House race, having pulled in an astonishing $13 million for her 2010 re-election contest). Whatever she’s raised, it is unlikely to match Mitt Romney’s reported haul of just under $20 million. But it will almost certainly be more than her fellow Minnesotan T-Paw, who is presently struggling to get some right-wing leverage from association with their state’s current government shutdown.

All in all, the dynamics of the contest continue to pull the field even further to the Right, as Bachmann, Pawlenty and potentially Perry battle to become the anti-Romney in an atmosphere of partisan meta-conflict in Washington over the debt limit. The two dynamics, moreover, may be reinforcing each other: six candidates, including Romney and T-Paw, have now signed the maximalist “cut, cap and balance pledge” rejecting any debt limit increase that is not accompanied by deep cuts in domestic spending (without revenue measures), a cap on federal spending linked to a low percentage of GDP, and a balanced budget constitutional amendment that includes a super-majority requirement for tax increases. Bachmann is actually trying to outflank cut-cap-balance candidates on the right by demanding repeal of “ObamaCare” as a precondition for a debt limit increase. As we approach white-knuckle time in the shaping of the 2012 field, the GOP is spending little time worrying about how poorly it may be positioning itself to face Barack Obama.

Photo Credit: Iowa Politics

For true connoisseurs of wingnuttery, there’s no one in elected office quite like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). Sure, her House colleague Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia is more regularly dopey, and her close friend Rep. Steve Smith of Iowa can be as shrill, but day in, day out, Bachmann exhibits the glowing heart of conservative extremism in all its forms with impressive consistency.

To some extent, Bachmann’s notoriety flows from her willingness to say outrageous things for which she has absolutely no evidence. The Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking service PolitiFact has rated 23 Bachmann statements since 2009. Sixteen were either “false” or “pants-on-fire” false. Another six were “half-true” or “barely true.” And that’s aside from her frequent gaffes, most notably her relocation of the Revolutionary War sites of Concord and Lexington from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, and her proud claim just yesterday that John Wayne hailed from her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa (as all Iowans are taught from birth, the Duke was from Winterset).

But what makes Bachmann most distinctive isn’t her fast-and-loose connection to facts, but the fierce ideology that underlies her interpretations of reality. She has staked a claim in her presidential candidacy of being the sole “constitutional conservative” in the field. That term is perhaps the mother of all wingnut dog whistles, connoting a belief that liberalism of any sort is not simply in error, but is fundamentally incompatible with the laws and traditions of the Republic, and indeed, with the Divine Plan for the nation and the universe, which requires absolute private property rights, the “right to life” for the unborn, and state recognition of absolute moral values as reflected in a conservative take on Christian scripture. It’s no accident that Bachmann first achieved national fame in 2008 for suggesting an investigation of Members of Congress to determine how many of them were “anti-American.” Instead of just a slip of the tongue, the remark reflects an intense counter-revolutionary conviction that extraordinary action is necessary to save America from the socialists and secularists who are consciously plotting its ruin. She is standing at the crossroads where the overlapping tribes of Tea Party folk and old-fashioned Christian Right activists meet, smiting the godless foe on behalf of the righteous.

Bachmann’s extremism on specific issues reflects her zeal. She made her bones in Minnesota politics fighting for “traditional values” in school curricula and against recognition of same-sex unions. She has long exemplified the determination to purge her party of anyone who doesn’t share a hard-core conservative ideological outlook. She has eagerly embraced any number of peculiar conspiracy theories, including the claim that the Census is intended to give the community-organizing group ACORN sinister access to personal information about its enemies, and the suggestion that AmeriCorps is a Hitler-Youthish indoctrination program. She has flatly attributed the entire housing meltdown and financial crisis to poor and minority people who aren’t “creditworthy.” She was the first member of Congress to make total repeal of “ObamaCare” a precondition for any vote for any fiscal measure. It goes on and on.

Her personal background strongly reinforces her character as perhaps the most extremist politician to run a viable presidential campaign in recent memory. As a student at Oral Roberts University’s law school (subsequently relocated to Virginia to become part of Pat Robertson’s Regent University), one of Bachmann’s mentors was John Eidsmoe, a leading theoretician of neo-theocracy. Back in Minnesota, she and her husband (now the proprietor of a “Christian counseling” facility) founded a charter public school that immediately ran afoul of church-state separation principles. She is almost certainly the first candidate for president to have spent some time on the sidewalks outside abortion clinics protesting their existence.

So why my focus on Bachmann right now? Aside from the rave reviews she received for her performance in the first 2012 Republican presidential candidate debate in New Hampshire on June 13, Bachmann has vaulted to the front of the pack in Iowa, achieving a statistical tie with Mitt Romney in the first Des Moines Register poll of likely caucus-goers. Herman Cain, who had created some early buzz among the Tea Party faithful in Iowa, is now far behind Bachmann (at 10 percent, as opposed to her 22 percent and Romney’s 23 percent), and more importantly, Tim Pawlenty, who has devoted enormous resources to Iowa seeking to become the “conservative alternative to Romney”, is mired in sixth place at six percent.

With Romney having already announced he would not compete at the August 13 Iowa GOP Straw Poll, the table-setter for the Caucuses, Bachmann becomes the odds-on favorite to win that contest, which typically winnows the field. Pawlenty’s organizational strength in the state could still save him, or at least give him a respectable showing in the Straw Poll, but the intensity of Bachmann’s support—in a state where conservatives are uniquely obsessed with Bachmann’s signature issue of opposition to same-sex marriage—will make her formidable.

It’s unclear at this point which phenomenon is more remarkable: Bachmann’s sudden viability, or the fact that the entire field is taking positions similar to hers on the big issues. Either way, it continues to be a very good year to be a wingnut.

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

It’s a nostrum of American politics that presidential candidates do best by first playing to the party base in competitive primaries, but then “moving to the center” to appeal to swing voters in close general elections. As a result, one of the strategic pitfalls for candidates is to go “too far” in the primaries in a way that makes “moving to the center” impossible.

Given the radicalization of the Republican Party by the Tea Party Movement (itself, I would argue, mostly a radicalized subset of the same old conservative “base” that has dominated the GOP for three decades), one of the big imponderables for the 2012 GOP field is how many general election risks they are willing to take to establish conservative bona fides in a very demanding and competitive environment for Wingnuttery. Last week we witnessed three examples of candidates going pretty far down the rabbit hole.

Most notably, Tim Pawlenty released an economic plan—a first in the field—which begged for mainstream media and “expert” mockery, but aligned T-Paw with an assortment of useful intra-party themes and pet rocks.

Do conservatives believe, to a theological degree, tax cuts for the wealthy will produce hyper-growth, generating revenues that largely pay for the tax cuts? Pawlenty promised to achieve growth levels exceeding anything in the go-go early 1980s or late 1990s, which is good, because it would take that kind of miracle to even come within shouting distance of the eleven trillion dollars in lost revenues his tax cuts would produce over ten years, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Do conservatives tend to think of federal budget deficits as caused by “waste, fraud and abuse” and excessive benefits for poor people? Well, T-Paw offered up a magic stew of symbolic, pain-free (to Republican voters) gestures in the direction of massive spending reductions, including a balanced budget amendment, vast new appropriations impoundment powers for the president, and implementation of the Lean Six Sigma process beloved of the management consultants of yesteryears.

Have conservatives recently lurched in the direction of Ron Paul’s monetary theories, redolent of the deflationary gold bugs of the late nineteenth century? Pawlenty’s plan lurches in that direction, too, raising alarums about “runaway inflation” and demanding the Fed do nothing but focus on fighting that phantom menace.

T-Paw’s not the only one using rather over-the-top methods to send up ideological flares. Michelle Bachmann is known primarily as a social conservative (her roots are definitely in the Christian Right) and as a partisan bomb-thrower, not as much a sober economic conservative. She addresses that perception by submitting to a public inquisition in the Wall Street Journal by self-appointed ideological commissar Stephen Moore (best known as founder of the Club for Growth):

Ms. Bachmann is best known for her conservative activism on issues like abortion, but what I want to talk about today is economics. When I ask who she reads on the subject, she responds that she admires the late Milton Friedman as well as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. “I’m also an Art Laffer fiend—we’re very close,” she adds. “And [Ludwig] von Mises. I love von Mises,” getting excited and rattling off some of his classics like “Human Action” and “Bureaucracy.” “When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises.”

Reading Austrian economics on the beach sounds pretty elitist to me, but it’s important for Bachmann to build her credibility in that area, regardless of how it all might sound to swing voters or just regular folks.

Herman Cain pulled a much easier stunt to gain attention as a wingnut zealot: promising not to sign any congressional bills that were longer than three pages. This rule, of course, would have made impossible most of the significant legislation in U.S. history, but that’s not important to a candidate trying to convey his populist contempt for the pointy-heads trying to pull a fast one via too-demanding reading material.

Exercises like this illustrate the extent to which the 2012 presidential field seems to think there’s very little risk in primary-season extremism; certainly no one among them is going to oppose it. During last night’s first major presidential candidate debate in New Hampshire, candidates were given every opportunity to point and hoot at the growth rate assumptions of Pawlenty’s economic plan, but no one would go there. In sharp contrast to debates in 2008, no one rolled their eyes when Ron Paul went off on one of his patented tirades on monetary policy. And no one spoke up for the proposition that just maybe there was some economic peril involved in taking debt limit legislation hostage.

What made this atmosphere most interesting is that it occurred in New Hampshire, the place in the early caucus-and-primary season that is supposedly least dominated by social or economic policy ultras and most open to a “moderate” like Jon Huntsman. Such terms as “moderate” really do have to be used sparingly, if at all with respect to the 2012 GOP field, as the candidates themselves would probably protest the title. For Republicans in 2012, truly, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. The rest of us should get used to it; we’ll be hearing it in many debates.

Photo Credit: Grace Skidmore