The Alternative Brownback Obituary

The conventional wisdom says that Sen. Sam Brownback will drop out of the race for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination Friday because he ran out of money. While this is true — the Kansas Sen. was running on fumes at the end of the third quarter FEC filing deadline — the root causes of the candidate’s failure are strategic, not financial.

Brownback’s handling of expectations may caused him the most damage. His third place finish at the Ames Straw Poll may be the most noticeable example. Leading up to the event at Iowa State University, the Brownback campaign gave commentators many reasons to believe that their candidate would succeed, claiming to have reserved nearly as many buses as Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign to bring in supporters, claiming to have a better barbecue restaurant catering their tent than the Romney tent, and spending significant amounts of time stumping around the state and courting social conservatives in the weeks leading up to the event.

At the event itself, Brownback’s was the only campaign with an air conditioned tent, big name bands for entertainment, and a long, well produced promotional video. Gov. Mike Huckabee, who ended up beating Brownback in Ames, paid for no buses for his supporters, had a meager tent area and stage (his entertainment was his own band), and had no catered barbecue.

Brownback’s third-place finish would have been nothing to sneeze at for a candidate who did not appear to have the resources to compete in such an expensive event (at that point, he was polling in the low single digits anyway), but Brownback made every attempt to look like he had put absolutely everything he could into performing well. So it was a major loss, not a major victory.

Beyond the Straw Poll, a series of unfortunate subconscious comparisons may have doomed him. The man who holds former Sen. Bob Dole’s old Senate seat is no Bob Dole. The man for whom Alveda King campaigned is no Martin Luther King, Jr. The man who is one of the strongest allies of religious conservatives in Washington, DC, is no preacher.

Of course, the most explicit comparisons Brownback faced were to Huckabee, whose social conservative credentials are very similar. Some claim that charisma caused social conservatives in states like Iowa to break more in Huckabee’s direction than Brownback’s, and that may well have something to do with the course of events. But there are real differences between the two of them on matters ranging from fiscal policy to endorsements that may have helped nudge Iowans towards Huckabee.

And knowingly or unknowingly, Brownback’s campaign had used fairly dirty tactics up until the end. Before the Straw Poll, the pro-flat tax Club for Growth ran TV ads attacking Huckabee — the first attack ads of the campaign — in an effort to help Brownback. Emma Nemecek, a volunteer Brownback operative, embarassed the campaign after forwarding emails to influential social conservatives attacking Romney’s mormon beliefs. His official campaign blog features a page dedicated to “Mitt-Flops,” documenting in detail — and with graphics — how Romney has switched positions over the course of his political career. Credible rumors indicate that this hoax email from last week originated from operatives connected to the Brownback campaign, as well.

The race won’t be the same without Sam Brownback.