So, if you don’t think Brownback has a chance of winning, how is he going to keep Giuliani from winning? Go back over the last 10 or so presidential races-- when did the GOP nominate a no-name? Never. The Dems do it from time to time, but it doesn’t seem to be in the Pubby’s make-up to do so. It’s going to be a race between McCain and Giuliani with Romney maybe nipping at their heals. And I don’t know about Brownback’s money raising capability but Giuliani might as well be an ATM.
Considering all the scorn Gore reaped in 2000 for “not even being able to carry his home state”, I’m surprised that people are even considering nominating a candidate who appears almost guaranteed not to carry his home state. Hasn’t that become practically the definition of “electorally incompetent”?
No need for embarassment. Just strap in and ride that mother all the way to a glorious and bloody finish. Hell, politics is the closest thing I come to a contact sport anymore.
Well, and rugby.
He’s not. Because Giuliani hasn’t a chance in hell of getting the nod. Once more: pro-choice, pro-gay rights, anti-gun, serial philanderer, hair trigger temper. Hell, three of those things would doom a candidate, and Rudy G pulls out all five. And as Kimstu brings up, he won’t even carry his home state. So now he’s up to six strikes against him. Put a fork in his ass and turn him over.
As to Brownback, I never once said that he would keep anyone from winning. Just that he’s tha shizzle amongst a lot of the rock-ribbed, righteously religious parenthetical Rs around here. I can assure you that there is no way in hell that the Republican populace in this area would vote for Giuliani. In addition to all of the other downsides listed above, there are a lot of people who wouldn’t vote for him based entirely on his name. Hard to spell properly and sounds kinda, y’know, ethnic if you follow me here.
Maybe Giuliani could put NY in play, sure. But he’d also put the South and West in play.
Bush Sr’s home state is MA. He did OK in 1988 w/o winning MA. But that really doesn’t matter because you and I are talking about winning the nomination here, not the general election.
What you don’t seem to understand is that Giuliani is the front runner. In order for him to lose, someone else has to beat him. Unless you can propose who is going to beat him, then your argument is empty. Maybe McCain will beat him, but right now no one other McCain is even close. Now, you can fantasize about some possible future candidate appearing out of nowhere, but that’s a fantasy, not an argument.
John, someone is sure to beat Rudy. And it’s Rudy. See: temper.
What are you, jukeboxing cliched right-wing talking points?
No, not all, or even the bulk of the candidates in 2006 were centrist. Many were, in fact, far more leftist than Democrats who had failed to win those seats in previous elections.
And of course, it is a little hard to put any credibility in the opinion of people who declare every year that all the Dems were the most extreme leftists they’d ever seen and then say exactly the opposite, again, every year, whenever those formerly raving liberal Dems win.
He’s gonna lose. Someone will bring up something that he thinks should be off limits and he’ll blow up. McCain probably learned a few bruising lessons from SC in 2000. . .and Giuliani has more skeletons in his closet than a Halloween storage facility. And issues like National Geographic. He’ll blow up all over the pad.
As has been pointed out at least a couple of times, it’s still early. And I was under the impression that it was a time-honored tradition here at The Dope to pontificate as to what might happen and claim that it was as good as in the bag. Evidently, you think that my argument is empty because I’m not saying that McCain is a lock, or Brownback, or Romney or whoever. Tough shit. I will say it once again, it doesn’t matter what the polls are saying in February of 2007 as to who will be the nominee. Giuliani will never. Ever. In any stretch of the imagination. No matter how much someone wants it. No matter how much it looks like it more than a full year out. Hell, I’ll just go out on a limb and say that even if everyone else on the slate gets caught in bed with a dead girl, a live boy, a comatose pony and a rohypnoled pomeranian all while eating a live kitten, text messaging with Mark Foley and sucking Ted Haggard’s cock. Giuliani will never get the nomination.
I will put $100 American on that right now. Do you have that much faith in Rudy G?
I never said he was going to win, I just said he could win. Go back and read my posts. I said it’s either going to be Giuliani or McCain, as far as we can see right now. And since he GOP hasn’t picked a dark horse in the last 40 years or so, the strong odds are on those 2.
Fair enough. I still stand by my claim that there is no way that Giuliani will win the nomination. Too much baggage.
So according to your matrix, that leaves McCain. And he’s got the same temper issues, at least. Not to mention that he’s only recently begun kissing the RR’s collective ass, and they’re a little wary because he’s not been tossing their salad all along. And it sounds like Rudy G has recently begun abasing himself, albeit on a small scale. As much as I’m going to enjoy this election season, I imagine that the RR is gonna get such a stiffy making those two crawl.
I think that’s not a particularly good way of looking at it.
It’s a good way of looking at the prospects of a frontrunner with a demonstrated base of solid support, or one who is a first-term President or second-term Veep. But Giuliani is none of these. He’s the frontrunner of the moment, but for all we know now, he may crash and burn, finish fifth in Iowa and NH, and in that case, the ‘who’ of ‘who will beat him?’ will be immaterial, because a bunch of people will.
It could be McCain, even though McCain seems to be fading, and the religious wingnuts don’t trust him. It could be Romney, despite his problems with being LDS, on the one hand, and having only recently had his road-to-[del]Damascus[/del]2008 moment on gays and abortion.
If the possibility of nobody winning actually existed, it would be possible to envision the GOP rank-and-file rejecting all the candidates who’ve expressed an interest in running, and ceding the 2008 Presidential race altogether. But there will be a GOP nominee in 2008, so somebody’s got to win. But if the GOP primary voters aren’t particularly happy with any of the major candidates, then it creates an opening for one of the white-noise guys, particularly one who can be the religious wingnuts’ candidate, to move to the top tier. Iowa’s still eleven months away, so there’s plenty of time for it to happen.
There’s really two things to watch for here: one is, is the party establishment set on anointing McCain, or are they changing their minds? For this, watch the money, and to a lesser extent, the endorsements of governors and congresspersons. If Romney’s or Giuliani’s warchests start growing a lot faster than McCain’s, then McCain may have been un-anointed. Or they may not be able to come to a consensus of who to anoint. Hasn’t happened in decades, but if there was a year for that to happen, this would be it. That would be very interesting.
The other thing to watch is, will the primary voters decide that they really don’t like what the anointers are serving up? The signs of this would be somebody going up in the polls, yet not having a lot of big money behind him, but getting a lot of small to midsize contributions. This one’s still a longshot, but again, if there was a year for it to happen, it would be this one.
I still say McCain and Romney are both more likely to win the nomination than Giuliani, and I’d say that Giuliani has about twice as much chance as Brownback and Huckabee combined.
BTW, like GLWasteful, I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is, and consider a middlin’ amount of betting action on that basis. Assuming there’s sufficient interest, let’s say a couple hundred total, with the action divided in some equitable fashion among the takers, with a modest preference on my part towards spreading it out somewhat amongst the non-Rudy alternatives I’ve listed.
But unlike GLW’s bet, which is essentially Rudy v. the field, mine’s Rudy v. individual candidates, or in one case, a combination of candidates, so it’s a somewhat better deal for someone interested in getting a bet down on Rudy.
As a democrat I hope that Giuliani wins because I think he can be beat. He’s never been held under a national microscope and I don’t think he’d do well. Unlike McCain’s ex-wife I think Donna Hanover will be all too happy to talk about his cheating and whatnot. I also don’t think his pro-choice, gun control, pro-gay marriage support will go over well.
But what do I know, I can’t pick out a winner on Project Runway. I’d hate the idea of Giuliani winning less than McCain winning. McCain is Bush in a different package.
I don’t know that I’d rule Huckabee out. I don’t think he’ll get the nomination, neccesarily, but he has a shot. He’s charismatic and a good speaker. His big problem right now is that nobody knows who he is.
The one guy who could really take advantage of the GOP field’s weakness is Jeb Bush, if he chose to run. If no frontrunner materializes in the meantime, he could hold off until early fall, and still win the nomination. However, the family name would probably be a serious liability in the general election.
He sounds pretty firm about not running. A draft-Jeb movement in the GOP this spring and summer wouldn’t surprise me at all, but it sounds like he’s even less eager to be drafted than Gore is.
Speaking of name recognition (as John Mace was, a few posts back) we’re probably looking at only the second election since 1948 (1964 was the other) without a Nixon, Bush, or Dole on the GOP ticket.
I agree, although he does have some skeletons in his closet that will make him vulnerable in turn too.
Mainly, I see a big fat opening on the religious/cultural right wing of the GOP - a huge constituency there without a candidate that matches up particularly well with them. George Allen was going to be that candidate, but he’s politically dead. But with Allen out, McCain’s attempt to woo them appearing largely unsuccessful, and the outcome of Romney’s attempt still uncertain but looking iffy, there’s a real opening for Huckabee, Brownback, or someone similar if they can catch fire with voters in one of the early states.
I expect Huckabee to emerge as the dark horse. He will play well among the Republican base. It would not surprise me at all for him to win the nomination. In fact, I would be more surprised if Giuliani hangs in there and wins it.
It’s interesting that Giuliani polls so poorly among New York voters against possible Democratic candidates. Thanks for calling our attention to those polls.
I think the opposite. I think that Giuliani would have a better chance in a general election than he does in the primaries.
OK, there’s a bet I’ll take. Giuliani vs Huckabee. Who gets the most delegates. Are you interested?
The problem many of you has is this absurd charicature of the “religious right” as some monolithic block of voters chasing down candidates with their bibles. That has never happened, even with Bush Jr. He did a lot of pandering to them, but he’s a pretty phony evangelical, if you ask me. But then, I’d better keep my mouth shut now that serious bets are being discussed. 
What caricature? I certainly don’t have anything like that image in my head at all; I’ve got plenty of my own.
I taught at an evangelical college for five years. Whenever I visit the in-laws, I’m surrounded by people who go to fundie churches and vote the way you’d expect from that. I was hanging with people who are now the religious right before they were political, fercryinoutloud. Yeah, I read the stuff aobut them in the papers, too, but I’m also synthesizing it with a long history of close observation of this particular tribe.
I don’t think he’s any more or less phony than the movement itself. As an intertwined religious/political movement, it’s fundamentally a tribal thing, and he’s very much part of that tribe. So is former candidate George Allen. So are many (and it sure seems like most) GOP Congresspersons nowadays, which is one reason why the expectations have changed considerably; this wasn’t true 20 years ago, which is why evangelicals then were willing to settle for a Reagan who spoke their language and shared most of their political goals, but drank and wasn’t a churchgoer, or a Bush Sr. who would kowtow to them but clearly wasn’t one of them.
From here, the Dole candidacy in 1996 looks like the last gasp of the pre-evangelical GOP. After 6+ years of Bush in the White House, and with the Congressional class of 1994 having come to political maturity, if you want to call it that in their case, evangelical conservatives really do feel that the GOP is their party. And while they may just have to settle, they’d strongly prefer one of their own as the Presidential nominee.
They don’t feel they should need to “chas[e] down candidates with their bibles,” they feel the GOP candidate should be one of them in the first place.