I was reading the latest Palin thread, and it got me thinking. None of the current leading Republicans really shine, not from here on the other side of the Atlantic anyway, and many have significant issues. So I’m wondering if the Republicans might settle behind Scott Brown for 2012?
He’s very much in the mould of Obama. He ran a stonking campaign, winning a traditionally Democrat state. He ticks all the right boxes - handsome, military service at home and abroad (albeit JAG in National Guard), male model, intelligent, down-to-earth, etc. In addition, he also appears to have Clinton’s charm.
And funnily enough, his memoirs are coming out next year.
The Republicans need to find a peachy clean white guy, a WASP. Someone who is going to play to white voters. Mitt Romney fits the bill nicely.I don’t know Scott Brown, but why not? By 2012, he will have more experience in national politics than Obama.
It would be kind of strange to have two REPUBLICAN candidates from Massachuttes.
I don’t think Obama is going to win in 2012. I just don’t see it, and I can see white voters turn out in droves spurred on my evangelicals and tea partiers. The wars will still be going on, the economic problem is not going to go away. Obama has aged about 10 years since he took the job. Now, he is on “The View” because the job is easier and the pay is better.
I think the “Silent Majority” is going to come out one last time before they drown in 2012. I hope Sarah Palin stays home. Maybe someone has an open vagina shot of her like Dr. Laura Sleshinger.
The job is just over Obama’s head. Biden should of been the President and Obama the V.P. Biden would suck at being President, but I think he’s be more competant.
Well, Scott Brown was the deciding vote for Obama’s takeover of Wall Street (cite) which is going to lead our country to such doom that we will likely cancel elections so that Herr Obama can declare himself the Czar of Socialism and take away our guns, so that’s why you better invest in gold now.
Or at least, that’s what most Republicans are going to say about him.
But seriously, I believe he is cutting out too much of a centrist role for himself to stand any chance of getting the support of the Republican establishment. There’s going to be a strong litmus test for the Republican’s 2012 candidate, and whomever ends up successfully showing that they can balance the traditional GOP conservatism with the rambunctious Tea Party nonsense will almost certainly be the person facing Obama. I can’t see for one second that Scott Brown is anywhere near filling that role.
Sure, a Republican winning a Massachusetts Senate seat is big news, and understandably so. But he’s still pretty far left for a Republican (certainly in the top three most liberal, along with the ladies from Maine). While that might be good for general-election success, he’d have a very hard time surviving the primaries.
Yes, but Brown doesn’t have Obama’s speaking skills, and the 2012 Republican candidate will (presumably) be campaigning against an incumbent. While the incumbency rate for Presidents isn’t nearly as high as it is for Representatives or Senators (largely, I suspect, because Americans generally know who the President is but rarely know who their Congresscritters are) the incumbent still has a significant advantage- one that the pundits often overlook.
Obama is currently trending around a 44% approval rating, or roughly the same as Bush immediately prior to the 2004 election (other than a brief “we found Saddam!” spike). There’s little doubt that the economy will have recovered a bit by Election Day - certainly housing prices will have gone back up and the jobless rate will go down a bit - which will naturally give him a boost even if everything else stays the same.
Anyway, Brown is the ideological opposite of what Republicans want right now, or at least as close as can be found within the Republican Party. He’s a centrist, and an incrementalist, when the Republican base wants a Tea Partyist, a radical (or, more specifically, a reactionary).
I have no doubt that Brown could pose a credible challenge to Obama in the 2004 presidential election. I very much doubt that Brown can win the Republican primaries with things as they stand.
Brown would have no chance in a primary. Right now he’s trying to balance being as far right as he can get and still be reelected in MA. The only candidates that can make it through a Republican primary in the current atmosphere are people who go right whenever possible.
Early on their was some talk of Brown as a potential presidential candidate, that talk seems to have died out on the right since he took a few bold stances and voted no to filibuster Democrat’s proposals.
I think he’s chosen his path for now and despite my interests it’s looking like he might pull off being reelected as a senator.
Pretty much. Brown only won because people were upset by one party rule and there was an anti-incumbency vibe in the nation. He will be gone in 2013.
I have no idea who will win in 2012, but with the GOP primaries going further and further to the right someone like Brown, who has voted for cloture on more than one democratic vote, isn’t going to win.
Likely/probably/hopefully the GOP primary will elect some radical, know nothing firebrand who loses big in the general election by alienating everyone who isn’t already committed to the GOP. No idea who that’ll be though.
I’d say him trying would cost him any chance of being reelected to his senate seat.
Romney wasn’t up for any election in MA as a second term governor but if he wanted I think he could have found a place elsewhere in MA politics toward the beginning of the term. Once it was clear to the general public he was going to run for president his popularity in MA fell through the floor.
MA is OK with electing moderate Republicans.
In order to make it through a GOP primary you need to be a hard right conservative Republican.
As Brown can’t be both a moderate and a conservative, he has a choice, present himself as hard right and shoot for president or work on presenting himself as more moderate win a full term senate seat.
Politically I think he has much better odds of getting the senate seat and if the GOP ever comes back to their senses he’d have a better shot at the presidency as a moderate Republican at a later date.
Personally I don’t want Brown as my senator and I feel he lacks the intellectual capacity to make a good president. So him running for president right now would be great to me, he’d lose both the senate seat and the presidential race.
Scott Brown has demonstrated a real knack for knowing what to say and when to say it. He has positioned himself, in my opinion, marvelously to win reelection in the liberal state of Massachusetts. As a Massachusetts native myself, the state has always shown a tendency to go liberal at the lower levels of the political schism, while still managing to elect a Republican governor on a fairly consistent basis (re: Romney and Weld as recent examples).
Brown had the erudition to tailor his viewpoints to fit with his constituency, and it worked.
The problem, herein, is that, nationally, the Republican party has consistently been a group whose sole existence is based on toeing the party line, and repeated the same recycled factually questionable social and financial dialog. Scott Brown, to his general credit (and electoral detriment on a national scale) hasn’t done this.
The only hope that a candidate like Scott Brown has to win the nomination of the Republican Party would be if the Tea Party pulled enough of the zealots and extremists out of the main GOP voting bloc that the moderate Republican once again had a leading voice in the party. Unless that happens, Brown is better off cultivating his image within the Bay State and attempting to shock the world once again by holding his Senate seat next time around.
While I generally agree with this sentiment, I think Brown in this scenario would actually have a punchers chance.
If a legit 3rd party Tea Party candidate siphoned off the extreme wing of the Republican party, you would be left with a small segment of moderate Republican voters…perhaps 15% of the general population, who would stay with the Republican candidate.
That said, as an Independent-minded Obama supporter who voted for Bush twice (I’m sorry), I could see alot of the Independent support that Obama got swinging to a Scott Brown type, particularly after seeing him go hard and fast against the Tea Party-representative in the debates. I could even see a small percentage of the frustrated moderate Democrats swinging his way.
Longshot? Probably…but could he scrape together 40% vote total among this hodge-podge? Not impossible…and in a 3 way race, potentially enough…
The tea party vote isn’t going to come out for a centrist, Washington politician. Nor will they go for an old Republican establishment figure. They don’t care about Romney’s Mormonism. They don’t care if their candidate is a white male. That’s just stereotypical crap the left believes about the tea party.
However, Romney has a big problem - in a time when the right wants an authentic person with conviction, Romney has shown himself to be a political chameleon. He comes across as a technocratic managerial type, not a philosophical firebrand. His biggest liability is that he signed a health care bill similar to the one that got the tea party into a lather. He does have a lot of appeal with centrists, so he’s probably the most electable of the candidates, if he could win the primary.
But the guy the tea party wants is Chris Christie, the new governor of New Jersey. Maybe not Christie himself, but someone like him - a hard nosed, plain speaking guy willing to take on the establishment. Leading contenders right now are Christie, Mitch Daniels, and Sarah Palin. Newt Gingrich and Romney are long shots but possible. Squishy ‘compassionate conservatives’ like Mike Huckabee and culture warriors like Rick Santorum need not apply.
Other contenders could include Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, or someone not really on the radar yet - perhaps someone out of the business community.
We’ll know who wants it fairly soon after the November election: anyone who wants to make a serious run at the presidency has to start fundraising and building a campaign organization very soon. One strike against Romney’s supposed desire to be president is that he’s been awfully quiet. If he wants to be the nominee, he should have an active PAC like Palin and Gingrich do, and he should be writing books and Op-Eds to raise his profile with the tea partiers.