Detroit Free Press Brian Dickerson: "Dems Chaos Could Infect GOP."

BRIAN DICKERSON

Dems' chaos could infect GOP contest
October 10, 2007

BY BRIAN DICKERSON

FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

If you've ever dialed a telephone number and forgotten, just as the other party answered, who you were calling, you may understand how Republican presidential hopefuls felt as they made their first live TV connection to Michigan voters Tuesday.

A month ago, when they accepted invitations to Tuesday's nationally televised debate in Dearborn, the candidates were facing a Jan. 15 primary in which Michigan's conservative Republican base figured to call the tune.

But that presumption was thrown into doubt just hours before the debate when U.S. Sen. Barack Obama and four other Democrats announced that they were pulling out of Michigan's Democratic presidential primary, currently scheduled to take place on the same day as the Republicans'.

The withdrawals also raised the prospect that Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents would boycott their party's devalued presidential contest in order to kibitz in the Republican primary, introducing more uncertainty into the already unpredictable GOP race.

A wider audience

In an eyeblink, Republican presidential candidates who'd come to Dearborn to court the GOP base -- the same hard-core conservatives who chose Dick DeVos as their party's gubernatorial standard-bearer in 2006 -- found themselves confronting a diverse primary audience that might also include liberal supporters of Obama and John Edwards, independents turned off by the reduced Democratic field and mischief makers determined to sow confusion in the Republican camp.

So who, exactly, were the candidates supposed to address when someone asked them a question about corporate taxes, universal health care or energy conservation?

The leading candidates stuck mostly to the standard GOP gospel of lower taxes, free trade (except for farmers) and supply-side solutions to everything from energy independence (more ethanol and domestic oil drilling) to health care (expanded private insurance and tax deductions for all medical expenses).

Borrowing from Granholm

But several, including front-runners Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, emphasized the need for tougher trade agreements. Michigan native Romney got in an early jab at Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm, saying he feared she would levy a tax on the GOP debate. But his insistence that federal trade negotiators needed to "level the playing field" for U.S. manufacturers was right out of the playbook Granholm used to defeat DeVos, a dedicated free trader whose company prospered in China.

It's hard to know which Republican would benefit most from a significant infiltration of Democratic and independent voters. U.S. Sen. John McCain was the beneficiary of the last such migration, when crossover votes lifted him over George Bush. But McCain's support for the military escalation in Iraq has alienated moderates who supported him in 2000, and crossover voters may be drawn instead to mavericks like Ron Paul or Tom Tancredo.

All that's certain is that continued upheaval on the Democratic side is bound to make the Republican primary more interesting -- and more difficult to handicap.




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