"Romney's doing it the right way, in my view," Keene says over lunch at the Palm. "My view's colored by history, and these other guys seem to be betting that history doesn't matter, and I'm not sure that's true. If you win the first contest, and they're close enough to the second contest, you get an enormous boost. And the idea that the onrush of big primaries makes those early contests unimportant may be 180 degrees wrong."

"If you assume for a moment that the propaganda from the Romney camp is accurate and the polls are right, he is in fact in a position that he could conceivably win Iowa, New Hampshire and then South Carolina. In that case, all these national polls showing him behind are completely irrelevant."

"But when you start talking to people out there, you find that while the other candidates are sort of running a national media campaigns, Romney's on the ground and organizing. That gives him a tremendous opportunity, particularly against Rudy."

...

"It's hard to see Rudy pulling it off, unless he organized as well as Romney, and I don't see him doing that," Keene says. As a result, "Romney's in the best position to get ahead when the contest actually starts. Giuliani has got his poll lead, but I don't know what else he has."

"Thompson could get back in it if he gets his act together," Keene says. On the other hand, the idea of a resurgence for John McCain is totally unlikely, he says. "McCain is just coming up to a level of support he had in the past," Keene says. "He can't get beyond that."

"Given the current state of attitudes about President Bush and the Republicans, Hillary ought to be 15 to 20 points ahead," Keene says. "The fact that she's just four or five points ahead and is hovering mostly below 50 percentage points in the polls means she's in deep trouble. She can win, but it's not going to be easy for her. And that means that the Republican nomination is worth a lot more than what the common wisdom would suggest."

Labels: acu, american conservative union, dave keene