Next up in the GOP primary debate schedule, we have the CNN Republican National Security debate tonight at 8pm ET.
8pm ET on CNN – Live Stream
Location: DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, DC
Sponsor: CNN, The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute
Participants: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum
I say:
Tags: Herman Cain, Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul
Posted in Elections 2012, Politics, Republican Party | 292 Comments »
People who assume that because Obama sucks as POTUS he will be easy to defeat are whistling in the dark. All you have to do as the article shows is look at Bill Clinton’s disastrous first term. Yet we nominated the doddering old coot Bob Dole to be our standard bearer and got crushed. The same thing is likely to happen again if we do not get serious.
by Michael Filozof
For some time now, many conservatives have thought that President Obama is the Second Coming of Jimmy Carter. They think that chronic 9% unemployment, creeping inflation, and a foreign policy of self-abasement and weakness will doom Obama to a single term, and that he’ll slink off with his tail between his legs in disgrace, just like Carter did after the election of 1980.
Maybe they should be thinking about the election of 1996 instead.
Does anyone remember the disaster that was Bill Clinton’s first term? The first attempt to put gays in the military, the first attack on the World Trade Center by Muslim fanatics, and the “Assault Weapons” Ban? The proposal to raise taxes, increase spending, and downsize the military? Hillary arrogantly proclaiming that she was no little Tammy Wynette standing by her man and baking cookies? That she would revamp the entire health care system, by herself, in secret, without congressional input? Does anyone remember the Waco debacle, which led directly to the Oklahoma City bombing, and Clinton’s allegation that it was the fault of talk radio? Does anyone remember the landslide Republican victory in the House in 1994, breaking forty straight years of Democratic control — a massive rebuke of the Clinton administration?
And yet…Clinton got re-elected in 1996. He didn’t just squeak by, either — he won a crushing 379-159 victory in the Electoral College and beat the Republican ticket by eight and a half percent in the popular vote.
Conservatives were in shock. How could this happen? Answer: after the 1994 conservative revolution in the midterm elections, the Republican 1996 presidential campaign turned into the Revenge of the Flaming Moderates. The Republican primaries featured banal, milquetoast candidates like Lamar Alexander (whose campaign strategy was to don a flannel shirt and stand in front of a sign proclaiming, appropriately enough, “Lamar!”), Steve Forbes, Richard Lugar, and the doddering Washington insider Bob Dole. Pat Buchanan fought an insurgent battle against the GOP moderates, finishing second in the primaries just to keep it interesting, but he quit the party soon thereafter.
The 2012 crop of GOP candidates is no better; quite arguably, they are a good deal worse.
I’m sure Herman Cain is a great guy and that the sexual harassment allegations against him are either overblown or outright false. Nonetheless, he demonstrated that he’s in over his head the other day when he couldn’t answer a simple question on Obama’s illegal war in Libya. Cain has no political experience whatsoever. A couple of terms in the Senate or a stint as secretary of commerce would burnish his credentials. But frankly, right now, he has none. The last person to become president without having previously held elective office was Eisenhower, and he had “Supreme Allied Commander on the Winning Side of the Biggest War in Human History” on his resume, not “pizza salesman.”
Rick Perry showed some promise early on. As governor of the second-largest state in the country with a healthy economy, low taxes, and fiscal stability, he might’ve been a contender. But he managed to become an example of the left-wing caricature of the Texas redneck all by himself, without the usual dirty tricks from the likes of Dan Rather and the Travis County Democratic Party to set him up. His latest flub — the inability to remember which Cabinet agencies he’d cut — finished him. Never before has the cliché “He shot himself in the foot” been more apropos.
There’s Newt Gingrich, who lost the 1995 budget battle to Clinton. His political negatives were so high that he resigned after only four years as speaker so that the left couldn’t use his own infidelity against him during the impeachment of Clinton. In 2000, two years after Gingrich left office, Hillary Clinton carpetbagged her way into New York and campaigned against the “Newt Gingrich Republicans.” She promised to bring 200,000 jobs to New York. Six years later, the state had lost 50,000 jobs. She was re-elected. Newt hasn’t held office since 1998.
Then there’s Ron Paul — interesting, sincere. Would’ve been a perfect running mate for Calvin Coolidge in 1924.
That leaves us with the blow-dried Janus, Mitt Romney. Romney is from a high-tax liberal state and has backtracked on almost every position he’s ever taken.
[…]
Not only is the Republican field extremely weak, but it has little appeal to the average voter. Tea Party activists — whom political scientists refer to as “attentive publics” — are not average voters. The average schlub will vote for the most ubiquitous political face he sees while channel-surfing between the football game, the porno channel, and Judge Judy after yet another trip to the refrigerator. That means for Obama. Beyond that, the primordial concern of the average American is “What kind of government freebee can I get, and who’s going to give it to me?”
A recent Bloomberg News article by Brian Falter stated that “a record 49% percent of Americans live in a household where someone receives at least one type of government benefit, according to the Census Bureau.” Forty-nine percent! All Obama has to do is get another two percent, and he’s in for a second term.
[…]
I sincerely hope I’m wrong again. But I doubt it. Instead of Obama looking like the Second Coming of Jimmy Carter, it looks like Romney may be the Second Coming of Bob Dole.
Read the rest: Prepare yourself for Obama’s second term
Tags: Bill Clinton, Herman Cain, Michael Filozof, Rick Perry
Posted in Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Mitt Romney, Republican Party | 100 Comments »
Tonight the GOP Presidential Debates will be held at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. The CNBC “Your Money, Your Vote” debate will last for 90 minutes. CNBC should live stream, and here is a handy dandy channel finder as well.
Participants: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum
On the issues: Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum
(Funny thing, everyone has an “issues” page but Newt has a “solutions” page, lol)
Tags: Herman Cain, Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul
Posted in Blogmocracy, Economy, Elections 2012, Politics, Republican Party | 247 Comments »
The Harriet Miers of 2012 is Mitt Romney. Romney is about as conservative as George H.W. Bush and Colin Powell. I usually give Republicans from blue states some slack (see Scott Brown) because they all need to get reelected and cannot go full bore conservative if they hope to keep their jobs but the Republican Establishment foisting this guy on us four years after the McCain debacle is unforgivable. One of the commenters on Erick Erickson’s Red State has noted that if Obama wins he will replace Ginsburg and Breyer on the Supreme Court with 50-something even more liberal versions of those two who will remain on the court for a quarter century. Elections have consequences.
h/t – Boker Tov, Boulder!
by Erick Erickson
Mit Romney will not go on Special Report with Brett Baier to answer the tough questions as the other candidates have done. No worries. Conservatives will bitch and moan for a few days and Romney will claim it was a scheduling issue, he’d always meant to go on, and he will go on.
Should Mitt Romney win the Presidency, conservatives will find this pattern play out repeated. Romney will head in a direction conservatives do not like and they will bitch and moan repeatedly and maybe, just maybe, he’ll part his hair in their direction.
We’ve seen this play out over and over. Jon Huntsman comes up with the best economic plan of all the candidates, Herman Cain follows up with 999, Perry comes out with a flat tax, and Romney refuses to do anything. Until he does something.
Mitt Romney is not the George W. Bush of 2012 — he is the Harriet Miers of 2012, only conservative because a few conservative grand pooh-bahs tell us Mitt Romney is conservative and for no other reason.
That is precisely why Mitt Romney will not win in 2012. But no worry, once he loses, Republican establishment types will blame conservatives for not doing enough for Mitt Romney, never mind that Mitt Romney has never been able to sell himself to more than 25% of the GOP voters. It’s not his fault though, it is the 75%’s fault.
[……]
Why Romney Will Be The Nominee
Mitt Romney will be the nominee because the other candidates, right now, are a pretty pathetic lot.
The base will not forgive Rick Perry his immigration sins. In fact, that has hurt him far more than his debate performances, but his debate performances have hurt him badly. Perry, who came out principled and fiery with a record others could only envy, has left others with the impression that he’s a poor man’s version of the village idiot, which in the SEC we call “Aggies”. Maybe he can turn it around.
Newt Gingrich will not be the nominee because, despite his daughter’s rebuttals to the horror stories of how Gingrich divorced his first of three wives, Jackie Gingrich told the Washington Post on January 3, 1985, “He walked out in the spring of 1980 and I returned to Georgia. By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery. The two girls came to see me, and said Daddy is downstairs and could he come up? When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from the surgery.”
Gingrich went on to cheat on the second wife with the third. Regardless of the actual facts or even the spin, he won’t win women.
Herman Cain won’t be the nominee because he can’t win women either. Regardless of what you think of the Politico story, Cain’s handling of the story has been an epic disaster. He’s down at least 10 points with women in Iowa. He’s falling even further and doesn’t even realize it. He’s largely been emboldened by a conservative media that is so used to standing by its men that too few are telling Herman that he is now at the point where he must actually sit and answer questions whether he wants to or not and whether he feels maligned or not and whether I think he should have to or not. If he loses women by as big as he is starting to lose the women, he cannot win.
[……]
Why Mitt Romney Will Not Beat Barack Obama
You’d think that given the economy, jobs, and the present angst about the direction of the country that the GOP would have an easy path to victory. You would be wrong.
You forget the electoral college. The vote is coming down to a handful of states and Barack Obama still maintains the advantage of incumbency and not terribly terrible polling in those swing states.
Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is a man devoid of any principles other than getting himself elected. As much as the American public does not like Barack Obama, they loath a man so fueled with ambition that he will say or do anything to get himself elected. Mitt Romney is that man.
[…..]
Republican billionaires have a fantastic track record of getting Republican opinion leaders to support them and an even better track record at losing elections. Mitt Romney will be no different.To beat Barack Obama, a candidate must paint a bold contrast with the Democrats on their policies. When Mitt Romney tries, Barack Obama will be able to show that just the other day Mitt Romney held exactly the opposite position as the one he holds today.
Voters may not like Barack Obama, but by the time Obama is done with Romney they will not trust Mitt Romney. And voters would rather the guy they don’t like than they guy they don’t trust.
Why Conservatism Will Die
Conservatism is already dying. Republicans on Capitol Hill are about to raise taxes on the American people with this Super Committee, but they’ll say they are just “raising revenue,” not taxes. Conservatives will give them a pass as they have on virtually every other major issue. Conservatives keep giving passes to people who shouldn’t be given passes because conservative in Washington have been there so long, they’d much rather get invited to the cocktail parties and avoid awkward encounters.
Washington, D.C. conservatives will also rally around Mitt Romney, just as they kept doing over and over and over with George W. Bush even after steel tariffs in Pennsylvania, No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, the GM Bailout, and TARP. At some point the public will cease taking conservatives seriously when the most prominent conservatives — those in Washington who pose as the faces, voices, and writers of the conservative movement at large, keep throwing their lot in with a guy who keeps selling out the very principles conservatives claim to hold dear.
Some conservatives, of course, will not go all in for Romney. These conservatives will be blamed by major Republican and “conservative” mouth pieces for not doing enough to help Mitt Romney. They will be alienated, blamed, and made the scapegoat for the failures of the establishment GOP.
[…..]
Hell, he can give the base Marco Rubio as the veep nominee, just like McCain did with Palin — a token for the base. But don’t delude yourself into thinking he will seriously take conservatives seriously. He got the nomination without them and he’ll only use them when it is opportunistically convenient for him.
Conservatism itself will not really die. But it might as well be dead as even conservatives in the heartland of the country stop taking Washington conservatives seriously.
The Contrast To Be Drawn
It is striking to me that in 2012 there is broad based popular angst against Wall Street and Washington and the Republican Party is on the verge of nominating a multi-millionaire scion of the Rockefeller Wing of the Republican Party whose closest encounters with the common man are accidentally touching one of the many hired hands in one of the many rooms of one of his many mansions. But then many of the DC-NYC Republican “conservatives” who support Romney are the same, only coming into contact with regular people when they are served their breakfast by a steward in the first class car on the Acela Express.
Neither Romney nor the Washington GOP crowd who loves him have very much at all in common with fly over country conservatives who see the GOP and Democrats both as out to lunch tools of K-Street and Wall Street. The party that could lead a conservative, populist campaign against Wall Street and Barack Obama, the former getting fat off the latter, will instead nominate a guy more at home on Wall Street than Main Street.
[…….]I’m starting to think I need to walk it back on my rejection of Jon Huntsman. Because I’m starting to think even he would be more faithful in his conservative convictions than Mitt Romney.
Tags: Erick Erickson, Herman Cain, John McCain, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin
Posted in Barack Obama, Conservatism, Elections 2012, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney | 82 Comments »
The Diary of Daedalus
