Not a debate but more suited for this forum than elsewhere. Apparently Bush is losing/has lost the more libertarian conservatives. The level of acrimony toward the Bush Administration is astounding. This is one pissed off group of conservatives.
Bush never had the support of libertarians. Not from day one.
Pundits have been predicting a “conservative crack-up” for almost a year now.
http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/000156.htm
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9651882/
Maybe the post-Goldwater American conservative coalition is finally ripping apart at the seams. We won’t really know until November.
Not really surprising. Per your own quote:
Were they ever really on board? And now that Bush is on his way out, it’s kind of a moo point (you know, like when a cow says something, nobody cares and it’s a “moo point”). The people who are being talked about as the next GOP presidential nominee are not in Bush’s mold (in either sense of the word).
How does Condi Rice differ from W? (Other than being smarter than he is.)
She’s a Black female?
Seriously, though, Condi isn’t on the list. She won’t be running. She’d be a great VP candidate, but not Prez. And she’s been tempering Bush’s foreign policy more effectively than Powell did. I don’t know much about her fiscal philosophy, but I’d be surprised if she’s a profligate spender like Bush. AFAIK, she’s not a born again Christian, either, which is a big difference (and probably why she’s at least nominally pro-choice).
In short, she really isn’t like Bush at all.
Who is, other than McCain? (Serious question.)
Not really. What the prez does reflects on his party, even after he’s gone, regardless of how much the party itself had to do with it. The Pubs found that out in 1974.
If Bush has caused a “conservative crack-up” to begin – the process is not going to halt when he leaves office. And it might reach crisis point long before that.
Especially as the apparent main causes of that crack-up – the war, and its costs, and the national security state, and an expansion of “big government” on a scale unimagined since the Johnson Administration – are not going away any time before November 2006, and probably not before November 2008.
Giuliani, Allen, Hagel, Romney to name a few. Allen seems to have some heavy-hitting party backers. But my money is still on McCain. The media loves the guy, and he has huge name recognition.
I’ve also seen Kay Hutchenson floated as a possible VP candidate, too.
I think it’s going to be an interesting race. It’ll be nice to have the whole Bush thing off the table.
Well, that’s the point. Bush won’t be in the race, but it will be fought in the world Bush has made. Will any of those you listed, even McCain, really be able to distance themselves effectively from the war, the deficit, etc., etc.? I expect a great many libertarian Republicans, Christian-conservative Republicans, isolationist-paleoconservative Republicans, and most importantly fiscal-conservative Republicans, are just going to stay home on election day in 2008 – unless they’ve got a third-party candidate to vote for.
Maybe. But it depends on so many other things. It depends on who is running on the Democratic ticket. It depends on whether the SD abortion law is struck down. It depends on whether there is another terrorist attack. The libertarian wing is always up for play, but again it depends a lot on who is running.
Just a thought: if it winds up being McCain/Hillary, a lot of liberals will be voting for McCain, including me. Hillary’s a panderer, without, as far as I can tell, any limit to what she will do to get a vote. We know one thing for certain with McCain: like Peter Pace, he won’t stand for torture. At this point, having a Prez with a minimal sense of decency would be a huge relief. Hillary has not demonstrated that she has that. McCain has.
Yes she is a panderer. But so is W. We need someone who actually believes in some darn thing.
Perhaps not as many as you think. To pick up the votes on the right, McCain will probably have to say and do things that will turn off the left. I’m not sure how many liberals will vote for a guy who’s pro-life and supported the Iraq war to the extent McCain did. But time will tell.
We’ve had pro-life Presidents since forever. Anyone who still thinks that makes any difference at all is in denial.
As for Iraq, Hillary supports that at least as much as McCain. Or so she says…
Since forever? This has been a major national controversy for, perhaps, 30 years. We’ve had mostly Republican Presidents in that time, but I don’t see how that makes this issue so easy to wave away. It may be more controversial than ever, and at the moment, it’s not clear that pro-choice Democrats can protect legal abortion. As John Mace says, the outcome of the South Dakota case may make a big difference.
It was a big deal last year that a pro-life Democrat became their Senate leader a couple of years ago. I don’t think liberals are going to go for a pro-life President. They didn’t go for Bush either time out, that’s for sure.
Tell me why.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t think too much of her chances to get the nomination these days.
Either of Maine’s Senators would be Republicans whose hats I’d like to see in the ring.
(They’ve both been getting a fair bit of press in the last 9 months, too)
Not in a Hillary v. McCain world. McCain can say or do what he likes, what are the Republicans going to do, switch to Hillary?
It might be the best possible outcome for the country. It lets McCain get elected without having to completely sell his soul.
I was talking about what will happen during the primaries, when nobody would be able to say that Hillary is the nominee. The traditional strategy is “run to the [in his case] right in the primaries, run to the center during the election.”
Too late, if you ask me. I think that ship sailed when he hugged Bush.