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“Make it on the rocks—Jack on the rocks,” bellows a man seated on a plush couch in the ornately appointed lobby of the Peabody Hotel. Fifteen feet away, under the pale glare of TV studio lights, MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews asks Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist if he’s going to win the presidential straw poll. It’s 2:50 p.m. on a balmy Friday in downtown Memphis, and the Southern Republican Leadership Conference is in full swing. An earpiece-wearing security guard tells the Jack-on-the-rocks group, laughing loudly, to hush.
Such was the mix of spirits, both democratic and alcoholic, at last weekend’s GOP meetup, where Republican faithful from the South and Midwest gathered to imbibe fiery right-wing rhetoric, among other things, and take their first, highly unofficial vote on a presidential nominee for the 2008 election. Nashville native Frist won the straw poll, taking 37 percent of the vote, while Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney surprised everyone by catapulting to a second-place finish with just over 14 percent of the 1,427 ballots cast. (The Hotline, the political newsletter that ran the poll, reported that fully 8 percent of those ballots were somehow “spoiled”—an alarming rate for such an elite bunch of voters.)
Unfortunately, Frist’s victory and Romney’s unexpected second-place finish reflect little more than each non-campaign’s ability to organize its base (or in Romney’s case, the base’s ability to organize itself). The Frist team bused supporters to Memphis from across the state and hosted an invitation-only lunch for them on Saturday at Rendezvous, a downtown rib joint. (Delegates called the pork menu a food faux pas: barbeque was being served at a banquet dinner that night.) A whopping 82 percent of the doctor’s votes came from his home state. Had Tennessee Volunteers not shown up, he would have been left with 97 supporters instead of 526.
Romney, too, owes his strong showing to organizational prowess—specifically the efforts of David and Nancy French, a Columbia, Tenn., couple who started a highly successful “Tennesseans for Mitt” movement. “When we read that Gov. Romney wasn’t going to run for re-election in Massachusetts, we knew it was time to activate,” Nancy wrote on the couple’s blog (www.tnformitt.com). “Would it be possible to actually encourage Romney to run for president of the United States? We began calling people. And emailing. And calling some more.”
In the end, it paid off: at 8 p.m. Saturday, when the straw poll results were announced, the swarm of national media in the back of the Peabody ballroom knew what their narrative would be. “The story’s Romney,” one fast-moving reporter yelled into his cell phone over the din of the crowd. Before Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s band could take the stage, many journalists had written ledes trumping Romney’s surprise placement behind “home-state favorite son” Frist. The ugly alternative to all that faint praise would have been scorn: “Frist fails to win straw poll in home state” could have doomed his campaign before it even got off the ground.
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Not, mind you, that he’s running for anything. For the most part, whether talking to reporters or chatting informally with supporters, Frist stuck to his “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” line: he hasn’t made any decisions about his future, will lead the Senate until his retirement this fall and is only focused on keeping his seat in Republican hands. But on Saturday, basking in the afterglow of a warm reception by his home-state crowd, the majority leader leveled with people. “I guess I really hope I do pretty well here,” he conceded to a gaggle of reporters. “This is my home state, and the fact that we’re in Memphis, Tenn.—of course I’d like to do well.”
While waiting for Frist’s post-event availability, that same posse of reporters—mostly the big-byline national types—agreed among themselves that his speech was seriously bad, a rare combination of poor writing and hollow delivery. On Hardball with Chris Matthews that night, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman called it “one of the worst presidential campaign speeches I have ever heard. It was dreadful,” adding savagely, “If he runs, he will test the proposition you can get elected without being able to give a speech. If they‘re all like that.”
Even die-hard Republican delegates who talked to the Scene afterward agreed that Frist still had a wax-man personality problem to overcome. But all in all, Frist’s supporters—who high-fived each other in the back of the ballroom after the vote—were quite pleased with their man’s big finish. “It’s early yet,” said one young Frist supporter, dismissing the M.D.’s chronic charisma problem.
In at least one way, that’s a fair point. It’s definitely early to be picking the Republican successor to George W. Bush, as midterm elections are on the horizon. Indeed, the official mantra of last weekend’s conference was “Focus on 2006,” recognition that the party in power has more immediate priorities in the short term. (In a surprising political maneuver, Sen. John McCain hitched his wagon to the leaden president, urging his supporters to vote for Bush in the straw poll. The president tied Sen. George Allen for third.) During his speech, Sen. Lindsay Graham apologized for the GOP “going native.” “The temperature of the Republican Party right now is lukewarm on governing,” he later told the Scene. “We need to show we can reform this government, not grow this government.”
In that sense, it may be an uphill battle for any Republican between now and November, never mind 2008. But Frist, who seems to have spent more time in Memphis last weekend than any other potential presidential candidate, got himself off to a pretty decent start with his Southern base. Beyond that simple beginning, however, lie only question marks.
It was a point Sen. Mitch McConnell made well, if unintentionally, on Saturday. “Now, there’s only one other senator who worked his way up to the top job so quickly,” he said in a warm introduction of his colleague, the majority leader. “Lyndon Johnson. And you know where he ended up.”
To be fair, McConnell probably meant the presidency. But intentionally or not, he evoked the specter of a majority leader who became president, inherited his predecessor’s bloody quagmire of a war and returned to his home state a disgraced, one-term officeholder. Though the historical moment is different for Frist, the stakes are no less high. Can he convince rank-and-file Republicans in Des Moines and Nashua and Texarkana that he’s their party’s—and their country’s—best chance at success? And does he really want to?