Of course, the GOP may not agree that there is a problem. Or, if there is a problem, it’s because they are not Sarah Palin enough.
Delay draws a line directly from Palin to the tea party to the “carnival show” that is Trump and Carson. The Republicans have now pushed themselves into the red-rural fringe, unable and unwilling to govern and interested only in pushing a hard right agenda that cannot win the majority of Americans.
So, has the GOP slid into Idiocracy land and is Sarah Palin the direct cause of the dummification of the GOP?
I think she’s a symptom more than a cause. I think the downward spiral began with the Southern Strategy. Once they found that racists began to be reliable Republicans, they got in bed with the Religious Right during the Reagan years and the “yes there’s a free lunch and we’re going to eat it” mindset started with Reagan too, along with the hostility to any form of taxation or regulation. Palin was only a symptom of what had been 40 years in the making.
I think Daley is just messing with the GOPs’ heads.
George W. Bush is the reason for the GOP’s current state. The long and expensive Iraq War, which collapsed after his one-state (Ohio), 2.5% pop vote margin, and 17 electoral vote victory (he got 286, 269 woulda given it to a GOP-run House of Reps), gave the Democrats Congress in 2006, and the war as well as economic crisis, associated with his pressuring the Fed to keep interest rates down for 2004 (his dad tried to do the same in ‘92 but couldn’t convince the Fed), gave America Obama. Bush’s “spending” and conservatives’ dismay at that also gave rise to ultra-cons who created the Tea Party.
I think that Delay is saying that, although the GOP paid mouth service to the outlying extreme right wing, they didn’t actually nominate them-- until Sarah. What they used to do was tack right for primaries and then center themselves for full elections. Now they’re all out, well, clownshoes.
Eh, having a centerist, old-warhorse Prez candidate choose a young, up and coming fire-breather as running mate to appease the more extreme elements of his party, who then later turns out to be a terrible choice has a pretty well established history in US politics. Just in recent memory we’ve had Edwards and Quayle, who were chosen under similar circumstances (though neither Kerry or Bush I were quite as desperate as McCain was).
I just had the thought that if Trump manages to get the nomination that he will not give a damn and choose an even more “I don’t give a shit” guy as a running mate.
Problem for him is that by that time most voters will by then mind more about what kind of administration that Bozo Ballot will mean for the future.
Well, the state of the GOP is that it’s very possible they will be controlling both houses and the presidency pretty soon. . . so, no, the ridiculous Sarah Palin has little to do with it.
Emphasis mine. That part is incontrovertibly correct. The rest of it may also be true, and if so, the election of Obama helped to fan the flames of far-right extremism. Since they couldn’t publicly accuse him of what really bothered them, the tea party types invented crazy accusations of “socialism” about a guy who’s so conservative that 30 years ago he could have run as a Republican*.
Kind of reminds me of the '08 campaign where some Republicans accused liberals of attacking Palin because they feared her, such apparently was her potential for greatness. No, liberals attacked her because she was an idiot. The idea that Caribou Barbie is responsible for anything more significant than her own drool is pure fantasy.
Palin got pushed on McCain by Kristol (who was hot for her) and the National Review crowed which she wined and dined. Why McCain did it I don’t know - maybe to keep the right in check.
Quayle might have been stupid, but he wasn’t an extremist. Neither was Edwards. I can’t think of other extremist VP candidates since maybe Henry Wallace. And that is a maybe when he got chosen.
Crazy thing is that there was a time when Southern statehouses were full of Republicans. But they were all freed slaves, and the GOP didn’t want to keep an army down there and protect them. The election of 1877 was so close, that the Southern Democrats pounced on the chance to end Reconstruction in exchange for not contesting the results.
Still, the traditional GOP candidate was a former corporate lawyer who’d gone to Congress, and, in election years when the general population didn’t feel too screwed by the fat cats, offered a respite from the Democrat’s traditional pork barreling. Now they act more like carnival barkers drawing in the rubes.
I also agree. Reagan could throw meat to the extremists while still governing pragmatically. Even Dubya did that - he had a religious advisory board which he seemed to ignore.
I guess it is not so surprising that younger Republicans who bought the Reagan Kool Aid didn’t get what he actually did to govern. I’ve noticed that there is dead silence in response to comments about what Reagan did versus what Reagan said. They quote him about government being the problem - they ignore that he raised taxes and helped to save Social Security.
McCain was (justifiably) desperate, as Bush’s legacy had made his Presidential campaign doomed from the start. Palin looked good on paper, and he figured a young woman candidate with a fairly combatative style might be enouhg of a a Hail Mary pass to save him. They apparently only met twice before the decision was made, and his staff didn’t spend enough time with her to realize what they were buying till after the fact.
I don’t think Palin was anymore extreme then those two, at least before 2008. Her main issues were that she was both inexperienced and not terribly bright, and made up for those facts by offering a combatative word-salad when challenged. She was to the right of McCain, but not anymore than Edwards was to the left of Kerry, and probably less so than Quayle was to teh Right of Bush I.
It absolutely can’t be Palin’s fault, because she didn’t catapult herself into the national spotlight. Even if she were the proximate cause of the subsequent decay, blame would have to lie with McCain for choosing her (and yes, I know that various advisors pushed McCain to pick her. It was still his decision).
Maybe. I just don’t see it. According to Palin, invading Iraq was the right thing to do because that’s what God wanted. Obama pals around with terrorists and is, therefore, by implication, a terrorist himself. His health care reform legislation will bring in death panels and they will kill your grandmother.
These strike me as more the statements of a far-right extremist nutjob than a conservative moderate, though I suppose they could just be chalked up to being the statements of an idiot. But it’s the sort of thing that endeared her to the tea party and other far-right fringe groups, so is there really much of a distinction between the two?
I think Delay’s comments are just an easy cop-out.
One person who ran for Veep seven years ago, and has not held any elective office since, is not a powerbroker in the party.
As others have said, she was a symptom of where the Republicans already were headed. She was popular, not because she brought a new viewpoint, but because she was preaching to the choir of a strongly established sub-set of the Republican Party, and ratifying their views.
Blaming Palin is an attempt to avoid looking in the mirror.