From what I understand he (Kinzinger) has zero plans of pursuing a future in high-stakes politics, but somebody like him could pull us out of this tailspin, right?
Maybe Liz Cheney, or some other (R) that the left could actually shrug their shoulders and say “meh”. I’m so f’ing tired of the talking point of “hurr, durr, how did Biden get 81 million votes, more votes than even Obama, hurr, durr”.
How many votes would President Biden have gotten against Kinzinger in 2020? certainly not 81 million. Same if he’d have gone against Liz Cheney.
It just seems like we’re never gonna “heal” until a “normal”, pragmatic, decent (R) wins the presidency. An (R) just to “check their box” and one that the rest of us can tolerate (if not outright “live with”)
I’m not quite sure what you’re proposing. Yes, if the Republican Party was different, the Republican Party would be different, but “this tailspin” is something they chose. Leaving aside the issue of whether either of those people would be a “meh” president for Democrats, nobody other than Republicans can create a Republican presidency.
Is Kinzinger the one who also voted to impeach with Cheney? Cheney is not someone the Dems should say “meh” too. Other than not actively supporting the downfall of American democracy (like the rest of the Republican party), she’s a straight up hardcore conservative.
The seven year nightmare is all on the Republicans. Why would they deserve the presidency after that? Maybe they could become sane again, not actively work to undermine our democracy, and then make a run?
The Republican Party is a violent, racist and anti-democratic movement that tried to stage a coup. There will never again be a president that has legitimacy in both red and blue Americas, we are on opposite sides.
And the GOP turn toward MAGA proto-fascism is not some sudden event that just happened in 2016; it has been fomenting since the ‘Nineties first given formalism in the Republican “Contract With America”, and stewarded by the Goebbels Chair Emeritus laureate Newt Gingrich with ties going back to champion shit-stirrer Lee Atwater of “N***er N***er N***er” fame. Never mind how they’ve intentionally sabotaged Liz Cheney despite they fact that the bleeds “Conservative Neocon”; they literally censured Cindy McCain—a women with essentially no deep political ambitions of her own—for the offense of being the widow of John McCain in an effort by Republicans to one up each other on how low and fast they could sink, mostly because he was at least marginally ethical enough to refuse to propagate baseless conspiracy theories about his opponents.
I’m not clear on what the o.p. is realistically expecting but “a ‘normal’, pragmatic, decent (R)” has essentially become an oxymoron, and the likelihood of Kinzinger or any over non-autocrat-wannabe winning a GOP presidential nomination is essentially zero given the degree to which the “American Taliban” have not only taken over the national party but entrenched themselves in the legislatures of key states. You might as well wish for the Easter Bunny to fix global climate change.
Well, when they’ve been kicking you in the balls, it’s an improvement when they go back to just smacking you in the head.
It’s like someone said about Clinton, “She’s wrong, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.” Even going back to the Republican shit show of ten years ago would be an improvement.
I’d still prefer Biden winning, though. But if Kinzinger won, I wouldn’t panic. If you look at the list of policies he supports, it’s a mixed bag, but there’s enough positives in there that I could live with him, if it meant the Republicans were finally coming to their senses. He isn’t a knee-jerk supporter of whatever is the current fashion of Republican thought. The fact that he’s clearly done his own thinking on a lot of these subjects shows he might be capable of changing on other issues, if the right argument is put to him.
Of course, all of that means it’s a near-certainty that all the other Republicans wouldn’t vote for him in reality.
What the Republicans need is a candidate who is not batshit crazy or committed to post-truth politics, but who nonetheless can appeal to populist sentiment on the conservative side of the culture gap. I therefore submit a modest proposal: have a candidate who is moderate/ pragmatic/ sane on all other issues but who radically champions the single most populist of all populist issues- namely firearms.
You think that conservative Republicans already do so? At least at the national level, the Republicans are surprisingly tepid on 2nd Amendment issues; the Great Orange Blob himself supported a bump stock ban, a virtual non-issue that did absolutely nothing but disappoint gun owners who decried another prohibitionary precedent. For the most part Republicans’ support for firearms is passive and reactionary, mainly voting against the gun control bills constantly being introduced. As I said, guns are an inherently populist issue, of championing a reduction of government power and control; the politicos know this and so are instinctively disinclined to support it. The attitude in much of the GOP is to take the pro-gun voters for granted as a sewn-up vote because after all what’s the alternative, the Democrats?
But let’s say that a Republican contender comes along who makes Charlton Heston look timid and half-hearted on the subject of Second Amendment liberties. He proposes abolishing all federal firearms laws; you can mail order a belt-fed .30 caliber Browning machine gun if you want, just like in the good old days. Pending congressional legislation he promises to order the BATFE to undo most of it’s regulations and order it to stand down.
So how does this play in Peoria? Well certainly it would appeal to gun owners and constitutional originalists. It would also appeal to the batshit insane paranoids, the people who literally believe that they need guns to stand off the Deep State when it comes for their children to be taken away for mandatory non-binary re-education.
This single issue would cement that candidate’s bona-fides among the Trumpian and MAGA demographic, even if he was “soft” on abortion, immigration, education controversies, the budget, etc. And of course as the Republicans knew for decades pre-Dobbs, it’s easy to make promises when you know you don’t have the majority vote to keep them.
So let’s see a Republican candidate who is actually inverted on the issues from most current Republicans: radical on guns, moderate on everything else.
Yeah. Taking off on that great PJ O’Rourke line, I’d settle for Republicans who were just against what the Democrats stand for, rather than today’s GOP that is against what the United States of America stands for.
Republicans nominated two sane and pragmatic candidates, McCain and Romney, and lost. Then they completely lost their minds. They came up against a once-in-a-generation political star in Obama but misinterpreted the reasons for their failures. A sane, old-school republican like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie or John Kasich could have defeated HRC, but by then it was too late. Eight years of peace and prosperity under a black president was beyond the pale. Madness ensued.
@Lumpy, you’re correct when you say that “guns are a populist issue”, but I think you’re a bit confused about which side is the popular one. A majority of Americans want more gun control. IIRC, it’s even a (slim) majority of Republicans. The gun-grabbers (by which I mean the people who grab guns, in case there’s any confusion) are loud, but they’re not the majority.
To the OP, the only way to restore sanity, at this point, is for the Republican party to be so beat down that we get a solid Democratic majority in all three branches of government, and hold onto that for long enough for the Democrats to split and form a new, actually-conservative party.
I used to live in Kinzinger’s district (before he got redistricted out) and listened to him a lot on the radio (the man loves to be on the radio) and… he’s just a Republican. He voted to impeach and I’ll give him credit for that but he’s really just a standard talking-points go-along Republican who’ll do the same Republican things almost any other Republican would do. It’s a shame that the bar for “good Republican” is now “Not openly condoning violent revolt to seize power” but if you think his term in the White House would cool any passions, you’re mistaken.
Same for Cheney. She’s better than people who think democracy is pretty inconvenient and significantly worse than any Democrat with a shadow of a chance of being president.
Good point. The split might instead need to produce an actually-liberal party.
Unfortunately, I think that gaining power would require us to already have an actually-liberal party. A return to normal would require things like expanding the Supreme Court, which is something that “mainstream” Democrats have decided is too extreme, so we’re stuck with extremism.
