I don’t have a cite, but Buchanan was polling those numbers before voters got to know him. No way that Bachmann has 44% of the GOP voters. Not even close.
When has the GOP nominated someone that was “too conservative” to get elected President? Goldwater in '64? Other than that, I’m drawing a blank as to what lesson needs learned. Reagan and Bush II were very conservative (at least as candidates) and that didn’t seem to hurt their chances at all.
85 million a quarter isn’t going to erase the fact that the man has made this country economically miserable for all of us.
Unless the GOP establishment gets its way and foists the Android from Kolob on us, then he will win.
No, what we need to do is stop trying to make your side like us.
That was the mistake with McCain. We listened to you guys who spent 8 years whinging, “Well, If Republicans were more like John McCain” or “Gee, I wish McCain had won instead of George W. Bush” and we fell for it and nominated McCain. (The fact no clearly conservative challenger was out there didn’t help, either.)
The voters picked Obama over McCain because
None of these factors will be in play in 2012. So the GOP might as well go for broke and nominate a conservative they can be excited about.
A couple of reasons.
They bought into the LIE that maybe liberals might support a GOP candidate who was more moderate. They didn’t, and a lot of conservatives stayed home.
Really, there was no clear conservative alternative to McCain. The Android from Kolob was clearly a phony. Huckabee was socially conservative but he was a big-spending, nanny state liberal on economic policies. Fred Thompson said all the right things, but he wasn’t running a serious campaign. (I suspect today that Thompson was just out there as a stalking horse for his good buddy McCain.)
The unfortunate reality of the nominating process is that we give too many votes in it to blue states that we are never going to carry or even waste time in. Take a look at the Super Tuesday States - New York, California, Illinois. There aren’t enough Republicans in those states to really make a difference, but there are just enough moderates to tip the nominees, especially if you don’t allocate the delegates proportionately.
None of these are reality-based opinions.
And of course, none are really about Romney. Will all understand by now your fictional version of the economic boon of late 2008 and the quick, single handed destruction of the US by Obama. At this point you can just understand that although we might reject these fictions, we DO know that YOU believe them. You don’t nee to keep repeating it in every thread.
You mean the ONE speech where he actually says secession would be a bad idea, but he understands why people are angry?
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I think Bachmann is the Howard Dean of this cycle. She excites the idealogues, but they’ll settle for someone more mainstream.
Romney has a much bigger problem in that he’s a Mormon. But more on that later.
At the end of the say, you guys still have Mr. 9.2% as your candidate, though.
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Actually, Romney is the one guy the GOP could nominate who would be a sure fire loser.
Here’s an interesting tidbit I found wandering hither and yon…
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/gallup-22-say-they-wouldnt-vote-mormon_574967.html
Now consider that. 18% of REPUBLICANS say they will not vote for a Mormon. While some might consider that “bigotry”, I attribute it not enough people realize what crazy stuff Mormons actually believe or that number would go up. I also suspect the real number is higher, because there are those who wouldn’t want the pollster to think they are prejudiced or something.
What I’ve noticed is that while the MSM is attacking every possible aspect of Bachmann and Palin (who isn’t even running) and Perry (get off the fence, already!) they are largely leaving Romney alone.
Which just tells me they are hoping he gets the nomination, and then well get a bunch of stories telling us about Magic Underwear, dark skin being a curse from God, the Planet Kolob, and all the other kookie stuff Joseph Smith was making up.
IOW the speech where he mentions it as a realistic possibility. Come on now. :dubious:
Guess what? Dean was and is in the mainstream of the DP and the US. Bachmann is firmly in what now passes for the mainstream of the GOP.
The flipflopping/pandering problem, the empty-suit problem, and the class-warfare problem have always mattered far more, and will continue to do so.
It’s always a realistic possibility. We are the United States. That implies that someone might want to leave the Union. But Perry specifically stated that despite the abuses from Washington, that would be a bad idea.
Depressing isn’t it?
I see Romney as a candidate with a lot of problems, but for me, the Mormonism is the deal killer. I was able to hold my nose and vote for Dole (Tax Collector for the welfare state) and McCain (Never saw a knife he didn’t think would look good in someone’s back). So, yeah, if he didn’t belong to THAT religion, I could probably hold my nose and vote for him.
Of course, as a side note, when I’ve been enthusiastic about a candidate, he wins, when I’m holding my nose, he loses.
The only one I see myself voting for enthusiastically for this time is Perry.
This hasn’t been a realistic possibility for 146 years.
Except that what if a state votes to leave the union? Are we going to invade them to keep them in? Frankly, I’d be happy if certain states left the union. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
The ironic thing about the Civil War was that the South was in the right legally. They had a right to leave the union if that’s what their people wanted them to do. Of course, they did it for the wrong reasons, and that was probably good enough to let Lincoln get away with making war on them.
:rolleyes:
I’d go with 
Why would we have to invade them, when we can crush them economically, and simply wait for them to beg to be let back in? Border and coastal states might last a bit longer, but landlocked states like Kansas could easily be blockaded and simply starve them out.
That’s what we did last time. And, yet again, they’d be seceding over something the rest of the world thinks is stupid and wrong, so, once again, we’d win.
Yes, I know Arkansas seceded. But that was because of those flatlanders down in South Arkansas. We hillfolk didn’t want or need slaves.
What class-warfare problem does Mitt have?
:dubious: For some values of hilllfolk I suppose. I’m from the Missouri side of the Ozarks, & there are some number of good ol’ boys who seem to think they are Southern Rebs. Then again, I’m from the western edge, so maybe not real hillbillies.
Cite? That was debated for years with no really clear answer. I’m not sure how you can make such an unqualified assertion. The case of Grant v. Lee, 1 U.S.CivWar. 1 (Appx. 1865) put that to rest.
Neither side pretends that their candidate will draw many voters from the other side’s base. What they do is try to pick a candidate who will outdraw the other in the pool of “independents” who haven’t already made their minds up a year-and-a-half before the election. I’m putting “independents” in quotes because they are anything but. Every survey shows that the majority are uncaring, ignorant, or apolitical, who get swayed at the last minute. Obviously, people online who declare themselves independents will object to this characterization, but by definition if they are actually posting about elections and politics they are not representative of the whole.
This group does tend to care very much about not supporting the extremes. They look to candidates who appear to be less extreme than the others. That’s why American presidential candidates always wind up running to the middle. They try to less extreme the opposition. It’s invariably successful. The middle always decides presidential elections.
Both McCain and Obama seemed to be less extreme than most of the others running in their parties. The problem that McCain faced was that he wasn’t getting much traction in the middle, so he took a gamble on trying to get his base more fired up. Polls showed a short uptick after he picked Palin and then a long fall. Independents wound up going heavily for Obama.
No objective look at Obama’s presidency can call someone who’s endured two years of his base screaming at him in disappointed fury an extremist, even though the Republicans will try to paint him as such. The only question is whether the Republicans will pick the right-of-center candidate who might appeal to the disaffected or a far-right-of-center candidate who will fire up the base. Since the base is at best 30% of the electorate and probably a lot lower, that makes the battle for the nomination interesting. The base may be a majority of primary voters, though probably not in the larger, more urbanized states.
But if the right-of-center candidate has a poor chance against an incumbent president, the base candidate has none. Again, this has nothing to do with appealing to the liberals. It’s all about appealing to the independents. And they won’t go to an extremist. (For a historic example, look at how fast and far the numbers for Ross Perot dropped after he started looking like a nutty extremist in 1992.)
Two main things:
He has used his inherited wealth only to increase it, via buying companies, milking them, laying people off who needed those jobs, then walking away and letting them die rather than rebuilding them. His claim to business acumen is not based on job creation, but the opposite.
He has come out in opposition to universal health care nationally, thereby supporting Big Insurance and Big Health instead of the people.
A wealthy person who has not recognized and followed noblesse oblige is always susceptible to that problem in public life, but he’s done worse than that, and has no pro-people accomplishments he can point to other than the Mass health care program he now does not support (which is the heart of his flipfloppery, of course). Kennedys and Rockefellers, even Bloomberg, could have taught him something about that if he’d been interested in hearing it.
Not that either prevents GOP partisans from the usual “No, the DEMS are the real class warriors, for even claiming that’s what we’re doing! Just like the *real *bigots are people who *decry *bigotry!” Same tactic.
Strange how quiet he has been lately. There has been a huge todo over the debt ceiling and he has been in the Mittless protection Agency. Not a peep. I give him credit. he understands the Repubs are nuts and does not want to be part of exploding the economy for political reasons.
He sat by and let Gov, Goodhair and Blechmann get momentum. That may not have been a wise move. It was important enough to get Plawenty to quit. Yet Romney hid like he did during the debt ceiling debate.