It’s even worse when you understand it. No, sir, for reasons with which you of all pols should be familiar, an ordinary working American cannot usefully “fire” his/her health insurer. :mad:
Perry is apparently seeing some backlash for attacking Romney on his Bain Capital dealings:
In the Republican party, this angle of attack on Romney may just gain him as much support as he loses.
There was more talk on the radio this morning about how the attacks about Bain are backfiring on Perry and Gingrich (and Santorum and Paul are wise enough to avoid them). Of all the other things they could go after Romney on – his record on abortion, gay marriage, health care mandates, publicly distancing himself from Reagan – they pick the one where he actually acted like a Republican.
While I hate to defend Mitt, I <i>think</i> he was saying that his new plan would make that possible. That’s assuming he actually has a new plan.
“Backfiring” in the sense of the Koch brothers telling him to cut it out, lest the serfs get restless. Which, when it comes to the GOP, is all that matters; without their regal blessing, who would dare hire Gingrich as a historian to not-lobby for them?
Depending on who you’re listening to, I’d take what the talk show hosts are saying with a grain of salt. Bain Capital owns Clear Channel and Premier Radio Networks, where Limbaugh, Hannity, and some of the other usual suspects make their home.
This might actually be backfiring for them, I don’t know, but I’d be wary (well, more so than usual) about listening to what the talk show hosts are saying.
This is the weakest slate of Republican candidates that I have ever seen.
Mr. Obama will be reelected. And I say this as an independent.
Whether the result will be good or bad is yet to be decided.
You can say a lot of good things about our current POTUS, and not much about the other guys.
But this isn’t a freaking football game, y’all.
It MEANS something.
I think the point is that they are in fact distinguishable. Mitt Romney might be closer to Obama on things like Abortion, Universal Health Care, and Gay Marriage than someone like Michele Bachman but there are still huge differences between the two. Obama supports these things, Mitt will support them if it will get him elected.
And in a year of populist sentiment, Obama is more appealing than Romney on THAT front.
+1
It is not intrinsically wrong to seek profits but it is not intrinsically virtuous either. And noone does it to create jobs, if they can make more money by cutting payroll, why the hell wouldn’t they, they’re not a charity.
I keep trying to gain some traction on this point but, lets not forget he found out where Osama was in August and his military advisers were recommending an air strike that would have killed Osama just before the 2010 election and instead he took longer to pull off an something you wouldn’t believe if you saw it in a movie and crippled al qaeda in a way that an air strike might not have.
I keep waiting for the Koch brothers to some out and endorse Ron Paul. After all, they are Libertarians verging on John Birchers and Ron Paul is the closest you can get to that. Plus he’s from Texas.
You can’t be saying that you are only three years old! Oh, I get it…you were out of the country in 2008.
I think the Republicans were just as bad in 80, and in 88. Can’t remember a lot, but, Bush the father came out pretty virulently against Reagan, and everybody was pretty nasty. Again, same in 88.
The Democrats are always just as nasty when they’re fighting it out in the primaries…it’s just that now, they have a clear front runner for the party, and probably the national elections, so, they don’t want to upset the apple cart. Say, for example, Obama were to freak out and decide to quit the job, and run away with Monica Lewinsky-do you think that the Democrats would be one big group of sweethearts and good ol’ boy backslappers with the other Democratic Presidential contenders?? If you do, well, don’t.
I think Satan would regret pissing off Gingrich.
The candidates in 2008 were not great, although McCain could’ve been a formidable general election candidate if he’d connected with the party base better and been nominated earlier. But yes, this group is worse. In another year Gingrich wouldn’t have gotten a look - he’s way past his sell-by date and left Congress in disgrace a decade ago, and in a cycle with a credible religious conservative nobody would have given serious consideration to Santorum either. Nevermind that for a brief period, people were seriously talking about nominating Herman Cain.
2008 was just a really bad year to be running as a Republican. 2012 SHOULD be a great year to run as a Republican but everyone is so busy trying to outcrazy each other that its almost over before it starts.
I think that Obama is not nearly as vulnerable as a lot of people say he is, simply because he’s not nearly as bad a president as a lot of people say he is, and that is coming clear and will be more clear as November elections approach.
2012 therefore is not a good year for Republicans because they’ve painted themselves into a corner. Obama, they say, is the worst, most radical, most socialist, Islamic yet Marxist, fascist yet liberal, incompetent yet shrewd, cynical and conniving, anti-white, out-of-touch with America President ever, and they say defeating Obama is more important than anything else, including working with him to get the economy on track, approving his nominees for almost anything, and so on. The GOP doesn’t want to compromise because that might make Obama look good, and they’ve staked their entire political fortune on defeating him. They’d say green is orange and up is down if it might make Obama look bad. But see, therein lies the problem. A majority of reasonable people can see that what the conservative pundits have been saying since the moment Obama took office has been exaggeration at best and outright lies at worst. And the few times they’ve played chicken with Obama, for example about the debt ceiling, Obama came out looking rather better than they did.
In a nutshell, the GOP for four years has staked its political fortune on something that is basically a transparent lie to anyone with a brain who isn’t obtusely partisan, and what they say is not something the majority of American people will believe about Obama (worst, socialist, fascist, Muslim, etc.) People may disagree with specific Obama policies, but to reasonable people it is clear Obama is not the evil anti-Christ the GOP makes him out to be.
A centrist individual might point out this was similarly true of W. Bush when he was reelected. Bush simply wasn’t as bad as extremists on the left made him seem. He was pretty bad, to be fair, but not bad enough to fail to get reelected, especially with a Democrat candidate of marginal appeal and political talent.
I’m not saying Obama’s got this without having to break a sweat. He and his supporters are going to do a lot of sweating. But he’s the incumbent, and he’s the favorite to win. He is a good president, and a majority of voting Americans are going to agree with me when the time comes.
It might be less unfavorable than 2008 because there isn’t a Republican incumbent presiding over a faltering economy and two unpopular wars, but it’s not that favorable. If it was, they would probably have an easier time coalescing around a centrist approach instead of moving farther and farther to the right. The economy is going to be the main issue of the campaign, and while it’s been weak for years, right now it’s the best it has been in Obama’s term and it looks like the situation will continue to improve. The Tea Party lost steam after the budget fight because the brinkmanship of House Republicans struck a lot of people as crazy, and I don’t think their haggling on issues like unemployment benefits made anybody happy. So it doesn’t look like Republicans will have the edge in enthusiasm that people might’ve expected. The withdrawals of soldiers from Iraq happened on schedule. The list goes on and to hear some of the Republican candidates tell it, this should be the best year ever to be a Republican candidate. But when you look at where things actually are and the very difficult balancing act they will have to do to keep the far right on their side as they try to appeal to more moderate voters, it’s not that great.
Sure, but that still leaves Romney and, like him or not, he’s not the inert clown that McCain was. Not to mention, McCain was 150 years old. I’m not justifying Romney, because I don’t vote, and I try my best not to read up on any candidates very much, and I don’t even know anybody’s stand on any issues, so I don’t know about any of the big scandals unless they’re juicy. (See Herman Cain.)
But, even if Romney has a big one, (scandal, that is) that doesn’t really mean much unless it’s earth shattering (Remember Clinton/Monica). A good spin can put it into the ground. Many of the candidates being fringe used to mean something, but, I think that anything is possible with a fringe group and elections nowadays. See Jesse Ventura. Also, Cain may/may not be a joke, but I don’t think that he should be considered anything other than an outlier, so I wouldn’t put him in the crowd. Whole point being, with John McCain in the 2008 elections, it’ll be another 100 years before the Republicans reach that low into the barrel again.
He’s got less personality and less evident integrity, and while his campaign operation is good, his campaigning frequently isn’t - which is why he’s had problems with Gingrich and Santorum. I’m not aware of any huge scandals involving Romney. There’s just a lot of stuff about his background - mostly his wealth and how he made his money - that people are uneasy with and which he doesn’t deal with very well as a campaign issue.
For the sake of argument we’ll pretend Romney didn’t lose to that “inert clown” McCain just four years ago. 
He’s not an outlier-- There’s also Trump. There have been something like ten different Republican front-runners in the past year, and two of those are businessmen with no prior political experience.
Ron Paul was born a year before John McCain. So if McCain was 150 years old four years ago, what does that make Paul?
You can hate McCain as much as you want. But you’re simply wrong that the slate of candidates, including McCain, four years ago was worse than the pack this year. I’ve been watching presidential races since 1968 and nothing comes within hundreds of miles of the current crop, most of whom have been considered actual leading contenders at one point or another. This election will be in every history book as the outlier of all outliers.
That also means I don’t think that this election foretells what future elections will be like. In 2016, I believe the Republicans will run a group of respectable contenders, none of whom are running this year.
Math? What are you, some kind of snob who went to college?