Yeah, after predicting a Gingrich win like you did, you deserve to gloat!
[self-centered anecdote]
We lived in the DC suburbs and my mom was a federal employee during the 1996-96 budget crisis. I had just turned 8. Literally my first memories of American politics are my parents endlessly bitching for weeks about Mom’s job and some hated thing named “Nootgingrich” who was ruining the country. My 5-year-old brother didn’t get what was going on any more than I did but figured out that if he walked around the house with random objects perched on his head and announced that he was “balancing the budget,” Mom and Dad would stop being so stressed out and bust out laughing.
I can’t believe this mythical villain of my childhood is a serious contender for president 15 years later.
[/self-centered anecdote]
It just scares me watching these “family values” loving right wing theocrats actually holding Gingrich 2012 sign and cheering until they’re red faced and more dizzy than usual (if possible).
Seriously, do we need any more visual displays of hypocrites?
I am looking for a decent candidate to run against Barack. But so far, my vote will be for Barack for same reasons as all elections I’ve voted in= candidate I despise the least. So, with all the putzses the GOP threw at us, looks like Barack gets the Locrian support again if The Reptile is the candidate.
[NITPICK] Actually The Amphibian. Not as catchy I realize.[/NITPICK]
I said this before in another thread but any member of the Religious Right and/or anybody else who feels the need to preach about “family values” who supports Gingrich automatically forfeits his or her right to speak on the topic without being met with a loud chorus of guffaws.
I think Mitt Romney is in trouble. He has enormous advantages but he isn’t making good use of them. He has made a mess of the tax disclosure issue and it will hurt him till he sorts it out.In December Newt was polling around the same in Florida as he was in SC. If he can come back in SC he can come back in Florida. One silver lining for Romney is that Santorum is still in the race. He was quite effective at attacking Gingrich in the last debate and he will continue doing that.
From the vantage point of two months back, Romney would probably have been pretty happy with finishing second in SC. But the more relevant vantage point is a week back. Mitt had every possible advantage in the state; he had money and organization, he had momentum from Iowa and NH and he had a big lead in the polls. All that evaporated in a week and Romney was at the wrong end of one of the most astonishing turnarounds in primary history. Is that just a South Carolina thing or does it say something about Romney's fundamental inability to connect with the GOP base. IMO it's more of the latter.
Romney can still win and in fact he is still the favorite. However I don't think he can expect to coast to victory based on money, organization and endorsements. He will have to craft a message and a story that actually excites GOP primary voters.Nope, never lived there. My wife lived in Statesboro for a year, though. 
I think of what Newt’s doing more as performance art than anything else. He’s totally cynical, but he completely understands the Republican id, with its belief that academic, bureaucratic, and media elites are running the country, and are tearing down everything Good and True about America.
There’s an apparently common fantasy among wingnuts about a conservative who’s inadvertently invited to a New York or D.C. dinner party chock full of comfortable liberals, and proceeds to demolish all of their shallow arguments without even trying hard.
The right wing in this country seems to have come around to the belief that Newt might be the guy who can do that, only on a national stage - that if you put Newt and ‘Barry’ in a debate, Newt will turn him into chopped liver, and liberalism in America will have a stake driven through its heart.
No, really: that’s what they’re hoping for.
I have said this in other threads here and elsewhere, Gingrich is the best nominee that the Democrats could have put up there. Out of a crowd of seriously crappy choices (Michelle Bachman… come on’ yall!’) the GOP voters in SC have chosen someone who is clearly both an intelligent man and unethical bastard. Seems like a good match for the presidency to me.
He won’t win against the man who shares those same characteristics, but time will tell.
2016 is not that far away.
Imagine who the Democrats will put up for nomination.
It is to laugh.
We live in a nation of fools leading fools.
I despair and genuinely worry that nobody has shown up to lead us.
Mister Obama has done yeoman service.
He got us out of Iraq (thank OG) and he directed the death of the leader who was behind the destroying of two skyscrapers in NYC.
OK, so some of what GWB did was corrected.
But, the USA economy is still rather not what it was 10 years ago.
And people pay attention to that more than foreign affairs.
Honestly, when was the last time any of you argued about Afghanistan, and when was the last time you argued about ‘why can’t we buy milk for the baby’?
Priorities are priorities.
But, curiously, it isn’t Mr Obama’s “FAULT” that we are in this mess.
It can be argued that his policies have helped stabilize the worse economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Would it have been better in a McCain administration?
Mods: Maybe this should be split off.
Sorry for the departure from topic.
See, that’s spoken as one that actually hasn’t been watching Fox News.
Last night, for a while, on Fox News radio, it almost sounded like a eulogy after Newt’s speech. Newt gave a very long victory speech, where he started to kick ass, seize the moment and provide some fuel to go forward, but then started blathering on, referencing Saul Alinsky, and going off the beaten path.
Fox News wants Romney. Fox News CLEARLY wants Romney. To whit, the last commentator referenced a poll of likability and said as much. The second to last commentator said something about how Romney’s going to take the same anti-Obama stance to the power brokers in the party and make a renewed case how he’s better than Newt (Mitt’s run a business, was a governor, etc.) Those Big Business Republicans are not going to stand Newt being the nominee. They also can’t just jump out and say that.
Let’s keep things in perspective: Romney has the money and the support and the organization. Everyone else is scraping cash together to pick states in which to compete.
However, if Newt were to overcome that, it would be an amazing example of people power overcoming money power. In a perverse sort of way. Excuse me, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit there…
I can see it now; A Gingrich/Santorum ticket, the very suicide of the American right. Such a ticket might carry Oklahoma, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arizona one or two other states.
Even more perverse, he won 44 percent of the born again and evangelical vote.
But a Newt nomination has the beauty of plausible deniability [del]if[/del] when he loses. He is not an evangelical, he’s not a Washington outsider, he has promoted liberal issues like socialized medicine and global warming. So diehard Tea Baggers can say the dream lives on, because Newt wasn’t really one of them, just a useful attack dog.
Needs more racial diversity, to counter the argument that Gingrich’s appeal is to racists.
Gingrich/Cain.
“We’re Faithful to America!”
I think the media are making way too much of this win. It’s South Carolina, for cripes sake. Just watching clips of the candidates speaking while the audience hooted and hollered basically confirmed all the stereotypes I ever had about that place. Newt pandered to the audience in a huge way, confirming that he’s a slimy person of little character. I think Newt and the others will be crushed in Florida, especially when Jeb Bush comes out in support of Romney. Florida is Social Security and Medicare central, and any idiot who even hints at messing with either one is doomed from the get-go.
SC has voted for the winner of every modern GOP primary contest. Not that that means Newt will win the nomination, but it does mean SC isn’t some weird outlier in GOP primaries, as your comment suggests.
In anycase, it lets the suspense of the Primary go on a little longer. If Romney had won in SC, the contest would basically be over. So I suspect the media is excited because it gives them something to talk about for another few weeks.
No sense in entertaining that fantasy. That’s simply not going to happen.
Fair enough, I did not predict who would win but when a lot of people were saying Romney was a shoo-in, I had the sense to say let’s see what the voters think.
The thing that really struck me is the huge number of Gingrich voters who decided to vote for him within a day or so of the election. Talk about a late-breaking curve!