Living here in Mississippi for the last seven years, I know people who didn’t vote for Gore because his running mate was a Jew.
What’s that tell you?
-Joe
I don’t think Huckabee wins the nomination. In fact, I think he’s going to start sliding back down pretty quickly now. Attacks like this one are going to really resonate with the Republican rank-and-file. Basically, Huckabee is being painted as a liberal who’s only ‘conservative’ claim to fame is his religion. This will not sit well with independents and moderate/libertarian Republicans.
Moreover, I think people are starting to get the sense that Huckabee would be cannon fodder in the General election.
My money says it’s going to be Romney or Guliani. Romney just got the endorsement of the National Review, which has significant influence. If Huckabee fades back, Romney could surge ahead again.
The longshots are McCain and Thompson, but I wouldn’t count either of them out yet. Thompson is spending the next three weeks on a bus in Iowa, travelling around the entire state and meeting people personally. This has worked for him in the past. He doesn’t have to win Iowa, but if he comes in a strong second, it could give his campaign life and funding and kick it into high gear. And I still think he’s possibly the most appealing candidate of the bunch. He’s both fiscally conservative (almost libertarian), and he’s a social moderate with enough credibility on the social side to keep the fundies at bay. He, Romney, and Guliani are the most electable of the candidates.
McCain would be as well, but I think age is really going to be a factor for him. He’ll be 73 or 74 on election day, which means he’d be 82 if he lasted two terms. I’m not sure the U.S. wants a geriatric president. I doubt it. Reagan took enough heat for being old, and he was only 69 when he ran if I recall correctly.
BTW, Thompson is generally being seen as having won the debate in Iowa the other night.
Here’s what the Des Moines Register had to say:
Thompson dug himself a pretty deep hole up to this point, and you’ve got to call him a longshot. But he’s come from far behind before, and it seems like that’s where he really thrives. It’ll be interesting to see if he can revive his candidacy from this point forward. A second place or even a strong third place showing in Iowa will keep his campaign alive, and in a seaon like this where none of the Republicans have overwhelming support, just staying in the game gives you a shot.
Sadly I live in North Texas. I will vote. But why should I bother? Or read stuff about voting?
Why isn’t Bill Richardson considered a top tier candidate for the Dems? I’ve been wondering that for a while now. Clinton, Obama and to a lesser extent Edwards are widely viewed as the only candidates with a real chance.
I suppose a related question is, why is Edwards a top tier candidate? As far as getting a “safe” candidate goes, Richardson seems to bring much more to the table than Edwards. He’s a governor, and they tend to do better in presidential elections than senators. He’s from New Mexico, which has been a swing state in the last couple elections. He has several terms in Congress, lots of foreign policy experience and an ambassadorship on his resume, as opposed to Edwards’ single term in the Senate. He’s not seen as a “gun grabber,” which would help him the general election among rural swing voters, especially against Guiliani.
The more I look at his resume, the more he seems like the best of the bunch. So why has he never had a chance? Is he a lousy public speaker or something?
I just don’t think Thompson has a presidential demeanor. In my (admittedly biased) view, he comes across as a guy more comfortable with criticizing from the back of the class than teaching it. He seems sarcastic and arrogant. Considering that he, of all the candidates, should at least *seem *presidential, that could be a problem for him. I think this lack of proper demeanor is evidenced by the narrative that he’s lazy. I don’t buy that narrative, but I think the sliver of truth is that he doesn’t come across as a leader. From one of his press releases:
This is one of several similarly sarcastic, arrogant, and largely empty statements his campaign has made in recent days. Does that strike you as a statement a presidential candidate should release after a debate? I can see that they were going for humor, but it’s sort of dickish humor. YMMV.
Yes. Have you seen him in the debates? He’s gotten much better, but he’s still probably the worst speaker on the stage–perhaps slightly better than Chris “Here” Dodd.
He is southern, male, white and charismatic.
Something I was reading said Huckabee was out of money. Does anyone know if that’s true?
He was close a month or two back, before his recent surge.
-Joe
If he wins Iowa, his coffers will fill.
Well, I’m one person who IS bothered by Obama’s drug use, and it has nothing to do with his being black. Privileged thoughtless kids like him coming into my city and buying drugs helped make my teenage years a hell of a lot harder than they should have been by skewing the economy of poor neighborhoods in a way from which they still haven’t recovered, leaving us natives to deal with the social and criminal costs while he skipped off to law school. He’s only a few years older than me, so it’s not a generational thing.
I’ll hold my nose and vote for him if he’s the nominee, but until then I’m sticking with Hillary.
As for Rudy, I for one thought he was a fine mayor (the broken windows theory alone was soooo right) but showed a certain paranoia and inflexibility that would be a disaster on the national and world stages.
Since Obama was not particularly privileged growing up, and grew up in Hawaii, your criticism seems to apply to him only abstractly. And you have a little bit of a point (except that neither marijuana nor powder cocaine are the drugs wreaking the most havoc in poor inner-city neighborhoods). But to the extent you have a point, it is a much greater criticism of the drug war generally–and those who have strongly supported it.
Your description of him “skipping off to law school,” however, is very misleading. Obama has done faaaaar more work for inner city neighborhoods than Hillary Clinton (if that’s your criteria), both before law school as a community organizer and after law school as a civil rights lawyer. He was the President of the Harvard Law Review–he had his pick of plum jobs and clerkships–and he turned it all down to go work for civil rights in Chicago. So criticize him all you want for the drug use, but don’t paint him as a privileged kid who “skipped off” to privileged work. That’s just objectively false.
What I mean is that he left NYC after graduation with no stain on his record, while thousands of kids less lucky or privileged than him got stuck at Riker’s.
Drug dealers have terrorized entire neighborhoods of my city, and Obama’s money helped fund them. It just bugs.
It’s nice that he made some amends for his behavoir after he graduated law school. And however you feel about the “drug war” (which I didn’t mention), the fact remains that it was and is an obviously illegal activity to buy and use such drugs. I’d like to know from him at what point he stopped patronizing the drug dealers; until then I have trouble supporting him.
I think Guliani is the proverbial hammer. He’s great if the problem happens to be a nail. But his flaw is that he treats all problems like they’re nails because he’s such a great hammer.
You did mention the drug war. It’s all over this post and the last one. It is the drug war that causes all this havoc. Your complaint reads to me like someone blaming prohibition-era drinkers for mafia violence. It’s far too attenuated, applies to most Americans, and misunderstands the problem.
“Lucky” and “privileged” applies to most of both parties’ candidates, and I’m sure many of them experimented with drugs when younger.
Oh, definitely. One reason I support Hillary, aside from her biography being so close to mine, is that she didn’t indulge, even during the late 60s.
Anyway, I didn’t want to hijack the thread; just wanted to throw in that it’s not just The Dread Republican Attack Machine that may have problems with some of the Dem candidates. I don’t like Edwards either for reasons entirely unrelated to narcotics.
Of course, I live in NY and have no idea who’ll still be in the running by the time we scraggle in on Superduper Tuesday. In 2004 I wistfully voted for Lieberman.
Being an Obama guy, I thought I’d direct your attention to an awesome article about him in Rolling Stone. My friend says that this guy’s political commentary is really good. It’s not only about Obama, a lot of it has to do with the state of politics in general, so I’d heartily recommend it. I really enjoyed, it.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/17652931/obamas_moment
Huh? The only candidate of theirs I find particularly desirable is McCain. And he drank Bill Kristol’s Kool-Aid.
Romney’s an upward-climbing wad of plastic, Huckabee’s underqualified, Rudy’s a thin-skinned egomaniac, Tancredo & Hunter are hatemongers, Thompson’s sleepwalking through the process, & Ron Paul is–well, as a Libertarian, he’s a pretty good Religious Right Republican; as a Pub, he’s still a Libertarian.
Any hypothetical worthy candidates in the GOP (except McCain & Liddy Dole) threw away any chance at the Presidency in 2000, letting W Bush take it; now presumably they know they’d lose, since W, Delay, et al, ruined the GOP’s reputation for a generation; alternatively, they don’t actually exist in the first place (except McCain & Liddy Dole).
If the GOP want me back, nominating Christie Whitman for POTUS & excommunicating the nativists from the caucus would be a mere start.