A while ago I said I might post my observations about the various presidential candidates. If I want to do that before the Iowa primary, I guess I'd better hurry up.

Let's start with the Republicans. As I mentioned in a prior post, I'm a Democrat, and it's unlikely I'd vote for a Republican in the general election. But it's not completely out of the question, and I'm sufficiently non-partisan to take an interest in the guys on the other side.

Here's a list of Republicans I'd rather have as president than Rudy Giuliani: John McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Fred Thompson, Tommy Thompson, Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback, Michael Bloomberg, Chuck Hagel, Condoleezza Rice, Newt Gingrich, Jeb Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George W Bush.

That's right: George W Bush. Yes, I know that he is constitutionally ineligible (as is Schwarzenegger). I'm just trying to make the point that as bad as Bush is, it really could get even worse. Among all the candidates, there are some who I think wouldn't be very good as president, but the only one who I think could be really really bad for America is Giuliani.

I try hard not to use the word "fascist" in American politics, since it's so profoundly unhelpful in that context. It's really not a very precise term in any context. Mussolini believed a whole lot of things in the course of his career. You don't have to look very hard to find respectable Italian contemporaries who liked many of the original fascist ideas but then later turned against fascism as the movement evolved. And indeed, it's not hard to agree with them. Then you add the historical accident whereby the label "fascism" was applied Germany's national socialism — a related movement, granted, but still quite different in many small particulars and one very large one (ie, genocide). And now today, you have all sorts of loudmouths on both the left and the right tossing "fascist" out as a crude synonym for "nasty bad guys I don't like" — seriously, "Islamo-fascism"? what the hell can that possibly mean? — and the term may as well be meaningless.

So instead, let me try to spell out exactly what I mean. As argued in this post, I believe that under George W Bush (and to a lesser extent his predecessor), many of the governmental institutions and traditions that have made America great have been severely eroded. One consequence of this erosion, I believe, is that there is a very real risk that under the right sort of pressure, our next president might, Musharraf-like, suspend our constitution altogether and assume authoritarian power. This might be the result of a continuation of the Bush trend of eroding all government institutions that oppose executive power, or it might be an opportunistic reaction to a sudden major crisis.

In either case, it's far more likely under an executive who, even more than Bush, craves executive power, values security above all else, and has little patience for deliberative thought. I believe that Giuliani's history shows him to be such a man. That's why I have argued, and will argue again, that the best vote any American can make in this election is to register as a Republican and vote for whatever Republican is most likely to eclipse Giuliani.

Reading all this, you might well think I'm overreacting and my position is a nutso one. That's your prerogative, but don't make the mistake of thinking I'm exaggerating for effect. I'm not prone to hyperbolic political rants. You can disagree with me, but I really do believe this.

Others like to discuss Giuliani's political positions. Those make little difference to me. I don't care that he is the most liberal of Republicans on social issues. That he might be an enlightened dictator who refrains from criminalizing abortion and homosexuality doesn't appease me. His horrid foreign policy does not bother me per se. Mitt Romney has made pronouncements on the Middle East that are equally asinine, and McCain has joked about bombing Iran. That does trouble me some, but I don't believe either man will subvert American government to the extent as to commit our entire gigantic military apparatus on a cavalier whim or out of personal ignorance. If either of them does start another war, I may very well disagree with the decision, but I at least expect that it would be a decision rationally made. Not so with Giuliani.

You can imagine how pleased I was to see Giuliani's polling decline drastically over the past month from clear front-runner to middle-of-the-pack. Perhaps he was riding on name recognition and the electorate realizes how dangerous he is as they get to know him better. But he's not out yet. Although no one expects him to do well in Iowa or New Hampshire, he's still on top in Intrade's presidential primary bourse. I won't breathe easy until his stock drops to zero.

Many of my readers no doubt expect me to say that my favorite Republican candidate this year is Ron Paul. Dr Paul does amuse me, and I like a lot of the things he says, but no, my favorite Republican is Mitt Romney.

I have two attitudes, sometimes conflicting, toward choosing a president. In both, I see the president as the administrator of the federal government, not as "leader of the free world". I believe that the best thing any U.S. president can do is simply run the government competently and do his best to promote general prosperity for all citizens. On the one hand, I have a pretty clear idea of what sort of approach to economics and government best achieves that goal. [Here I meant to link to the post that explains my grand unified theory of neoliberalism, but if I ever wrote such a thing, I can't find it now.] On the other hand, I tend to think that the president's actual political views make little difference and all that matters is that he's a competent executive.

With Romney, I'm thinking mostly along the latter lines, though he does all right on the former as well. Maybe I'm wrong, but he just strikes me as a guy who'd do a pretty good job running the country and therefore I don't much care about what he thinks on the supposedly important questions that the media (even the smart media) throws at candidates.

None of the negatives said about Romney carry much weight with me. In a Dec 26 opinion column (widely quoted, but every link points back to this page where the full column has been reduced to just its initial paragraph), the editors of the Union Leader complained that they just can't believe that Romney is really the conservative he says he is. Yeah. I'm not convinced either. Except that I don't care.

Mitt Romney reminds me a lot of Bill Clinton — much more than Hillary Clinton does, in fact. And since I thought Bill Clinton was an excellent president, that's mostly a good thing. I can't say I liked that he would pander and flip-flop on issues in his eagerness to be liked by everyone, but I didn't mind. I thought most of those issues were stupid ones anyway and none of the pandering cast any doubt on his ability to govern from an intelligent combination of leadership and consensus.

A quality I did like in Bill Clinton was his promiscuity with regard to political allies and advisers (a quality his wife does not share, by the way). Of course I had my favored wing of the party, and in 1993 I would have loved to see him pack the cabinet with wonks from the PPI. (Indeed, to this day I still haven't gotten over my disappointment over Donna Shalala at HHS instead of Elaine Kamarck.) But in retrospect, I think it's a great virtue to keep listening to a wide range of voices rather than seclude yourself with your inner circle. I also really liked the way Clinton was able to jettison those cabinet members who were doing a crappy job, a lesson George W Bush would do well to learn. Meritocracy is what drives the free market. Why shouldn't it work within a bureaucracy as well? Jack Welch understands that. President Bush, along with most Republican ideologues in the punditocracy, does not.

The same attitude is what created in the Clinton administration a culture in which those with the best ideas and the best results could rise through the bureaucratic muck and find themselves in a position to make a difference. That's how a guy like Richard Clarke (along with his equally impressive but tragically slain colleague, John P O'Neill) found his way to the top. And — yes, I'll say it, because it's true, and everyone has been scared off this taboo topic long enough — it's why the Clinton administration was better equipped to foresee a preventable major terrorist attack than the Bush administration was. It's also why the Clinton administration, whatever sleazy scandals rocked its executive, did not have the sort of gigantic bureaucratic clusterfucks like Abu Ghraib or the non-response to Hurricane Katrina, in which a large chunk of government goes abysmally wrong and yet somehow no one is responsible.

I know Bill Clinton far better than I know Mitt Romney. Perhaps I'm misreading him — go ahead and try to persuade me if you think I am — but Romney looks to me like the least cliquish of the major candidates. I would expect a Clinton-like culture of government under him much more than I would under any of the other Republicans. It's a big part of why I think he'd be a good executive.

As for foreign policy, I would expect a Romney administration to pursue the same sort of quietly muscular imperialism we saw under President Clinton. No, I don't like that, but realistically I would expect no better under McCain or Obama or Ms Clinton, or for that matter anyone short of Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich. But with Romney at least I'd feel reasonably confident that this imperialism would be pursued with reason and intelligence rather than ignorance or lusty warmongery.

Of course, Romney being a Mormon doesn't bother me one whit. I can only laugh when I see a story like this one breathlessly asking, "Does Mitt Romney really believe Jesus and Lucifer are brothers?"

Um, I've got news for you, guys. To a non-believer who doesn't favor one religion over another, that really doesn't sound any nuttier than the stuff normal Christians believe. I mean, do Christians really believe that Jesus is the son of God but at the same time he is God? Wouldn't that mean Jesus is his own father? Seriously, standard Christian doctrine is pretty incoherent. I don't mean that in a bad way — Christianity's extraordinary ability to rationalize contradiction is one of its greatest strengths — but to attack one sect's peculiar views on grounds of goofiness is awfully Matthew 7:3.

Jesus and Lucifer as brothers actually sounds pretty normal to me. The idea of the evil twin brother (who is of course a doppelgänger) is a staple in literature, and one can easily recall similar examples throughout the canon, from Verdi (Manrico, di Luna) to Star Trek (Data, Lore).

If Mitt Romney reminds me of Bill Clinton, Mike Huckabee reminds me of Jimmy Carter. And no, that's not a compliment. I could fill pages of commentary about presidents whom I think history misjudges (Wilson, Harding, Roosevelt, Hayes...), but Jimmy Carter wouldn't be among them. Although I do generally like Democrats better than Republicans — well, since FDR anyway; before that the parties were nearly reversed, a point lost on so many history-ignorant partisans who try to project their cheering back a century — but I'm not going to join my liberal colleagues in claiming that Carter was a better president than Reagan because ... well, because he just wasn't.

Huckabee seems like a good man to me, just as Carter was and is, but I do sort of have to wonder if he's up to the job. He also holds no appeal for me in terms of political philosophy. On those issues where I do like the traditional Republican view (fiscal responsibility, reducing government, etc) he misses the boat. And then on the issues where I don't like the Republicans, he's happily riding in the boat. So all in all there's really nothing for me to like about the prospect of President Huckabee.

But I'm not really afraid of him either. President Huckabee would test my theory — strongly held prior to 2001 but much shaken since then — that it doesn't really matter much who is president so long as the institution of government remains healthy.

I'm not sufficiently partisan to feel schadenfreude at the fracturing of the Republican party. The Republican writers I'm more likely to read — those more inclined toward fiscal restraint as well as more likely to hang around on the Web reading and writing political commentary — like to characterize the schism as the "real" Republican Party horrified by the power of the religious-populist monster it has created. But this is a skewed view. The religious populists are real Republicans, too. Any coalition party that joins ideologies that have little or nothing to do with one another is bound to fracture eventually. We've been through it on our side as well.

I know little of Fred Thompson. Several months ago, before he had officially declared his candidacy and when he was being mooned over as the great savior of the GOP, I happened to catch him on C-Span giving a generic speech. My reaction was: What's the big deal? He just sounded like an ordinary run-of-the-mill Republican. I liked a few things about him, the sort of things I liked about the Republicans in the 1980s; and likewise I disliked the things I've traditionally disliked about Republicans. But I couldn't see what was so special.

Now I see that's exactly his (limited) appeal. Thompson appeals to those who want to hold off the disintegration of the party just a little bit longer. ("Like post-Tito Yugoslavia", as I felicitously wrote, nearly four years ago.) For those who want to believe the traditional Republican coalition is still intact, Fred Thompson is the closest they can find to an answer.

(And are people still pretending Thompson is charismatic? Because he's not. OK, so he's tall and he has a deep voice. But he's ugly, and that deep voice mumbles a lot. Maybe I just can't see it because I never watched those Law and Order shows on TV.)

John McCain I like all right, but I think much of his reputation is undeserved. I don't quite understand why he is perceived as Mr Clean. Is it just because he was slimed so badly by the Bush machine in 2000? Is it all thanks to his sponsorship of campaign reform legislation?

McCain has been a member of Congress for 25 years. How long can you be part of the system and pretend that you're not? Sure, he's not rotten to the core like Ted Stevens or Mitch McConnell, but he's not exactly pure either. Has everyone forgotten he was one of the five who lobbied for Charles Keating, the notorious crook of the savings and loan scandals of the 1980s? I don't mean to impugn McCain. I don't think he's any worse than a typical veteran U.S. Senator, and I don't take it for granted that all long-time members of Congress are hopelessly corrupt. But I don't see him as being anything special in that regard either.

I'm also unimpressed by his reputation for independent thought. I don't really see what is so maverick about McCain. Sure, he's often found speaking out against his party, but when I look at the individual instances of that, I don't see anything suggesting it comes out of genuine independence of thought (like Hagel or Feingold), nor genuine pursuit of common interest (like Obama or Snowe); rather, I think it's just McCain's instinctive comfort in the role of the contrarian within his group (like Lieberman). Sadly, the media loves this much more than real centrism or independence.

All that notwithstanding, I think Sen McCain is a fine man who would be a decent president, and I would be content if he were to win the nomination.

Who's left? Ron Paul will have to wait for a separate post, I'm afraid. I know next to nothing about Duncan Hunter, Sam Brownback, or Tom Tancredo. (The latter two have dropped out anyway.) Years ago I got a positive impression of Tommy Thompson. My vague sense of him puts him in the category of those like Romney or Richardson whom I would expect to be a good executive, but I don't even remember why, and he's dropped out, too.

Did I mention Chuck Hagel? Of the various individuals whose names were thrown around enough that they had to specifically announce that they're not running, he's the one who most intrigues me. On the whole, I think his views are probably more conservative than I'd like, but I do believe he is a genuinely independent thinker who speaks honestly, and that has a great appeal to me. He's best known for opposition to the war in Iraq and his frank disgust with the Bush administration, but it's not just that. (Wikiquote has a short and readable collection of Hagelisms.)

But I suppose what I really like about Hagel is that he gave the best speech on the Middle East generally and Iran specifically that I've ever heard (read, actually) from a member of Congress. Now perhaps that's my failing. Heavens knows I haven't read every speech every given by every senator. It's probably parochial of me, too; Iran is a pet topic of mine, and if some other senator showed unusual wisdom about, say, Nigeria, I probably never would have noticed. But I do read a lot, especially on Iran, and I haven't accidentally stumbled upon any other member of Congress showing the common sense and basic awareness that Hagel shows here.

Hagel spoke last February at a mostly unheralded foreign affairs conference at his alma matter in Nebraska. It's pretty basic stuff, but at the same time it's marvelous. On the one hand, there's nothing really novel in there that makes me say, "Wow, this is the answer that no one else has ever thought of." On the other hand it most certainly makes me say, "Well, yeah, that makes sense," and then, "Why the hell don't other members of Congress every talk like that?" I don't know why, but they don't. (Also, unlike virtually every American political pundit, he seems to actually be familiar with the Iranian constitution.)

There's a whole lot of crazy-ass talk out there about Iran. I know I'm considered a bit of a loony myself — seeing Iran as a natural ally of America and wishing for détente as I do — but if I had to get behind somebody's foreign platform on Iran (and the Middle East generally), I could happily back Hagel's. I like it better than anything I've heard from any of the other candidates, in either party.

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