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Sam Brownback, we hardly knew ye:
Republican Sam Brownback will drop out of the 2008 presidential campaign on Friday, people close to the Kansas senator said Thursday.
Trouble raising money was a main reason for his decision, said one person close to Brownback, who requested anonymity because the candidate had not yet announced his plans.
Brownback, a lesser-known conservative contender, is expected announce his withdrawal in Topeka, Kan.
This is relevant to Matt's post below about social conservatives threatening to make a third party run in the event of a Rudy Giuliani nomination. Running a hard-core, social conservative platform does not (fixed) appear to have a huge popular backing. Brownback was consistently at 2-3% in Iowa over the past few months, and lower elsewhere. Figuring out where his support goes will be like splitting a pringle, as Adam B once coined it.
Personally, I think Brownback's run was finished before it began, when Tim Tagaris and I uncovered the self-deification artwork scandal in Brownback's Washington Senate office back in January 2006:
Yep, that is a huge painting of Brownback superimposed over an American flag and the Capitol. Man, that is humility. And check out a close up of the bottom of the painting:
Yes indeed, those are angels with black wings, or fallen angels:
A fallen angel in Abrahamic traditions is an angel that has been exiled or banished from Heaven. Often such banishment is a punishment for disobeying or rebelling against God.
The best-known fallen angel is Satan. According to some traditions, fallen angels will roam the Earth until Judgment Day, when they will be banished to Hell.
The angels are looking up toward Brownback. I guess this is because they want redemption and Brownback is God.
As silly as it seems, this post actually resulted in the painting being removed from his Senate office in Washington, and prompted a statement from a Brownback staffer.
There was something just so profoundly weird and inept about the whole Brownback artwork scandal that led me to think he wouldn't be a very strong campaigner. After 129 campaign trips in Iowa, and very little support to show for it even though he comes from a nearby state, even conservative Republicans must have received a similar vibe. This is actually going to be a problem facing any conservative third-party run: finding someone who isn't so easily mockable. Conservatives unleashed and off message are a frightening group, as Tim and I had shown a year earlier when we captured Rick Santorum supporters chanting "hey-hey, ho-ho, Social Security has got to go" outside of a forum on Social Security at Drexel University. Without their precious message machine, even other social conservatives don't like social conservative leaders. It took Tim and I about thirty minutes and no budget to damage those two-imagine what can be done with a full-fledged campaign with regular media coverage. As such, any third-party conservative run might end up splitting the pringle, too.
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