The only person who suggested that the Republican candidate needs to be a white male in this thread appears to be a conservative.
Not true. Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004, putting his Presidency at the four year mark of his term. Brown was elected in a special election in January 2010, putting the start of his hypothetical Presidency a little under the three year mark of his Senate term.
If Brown wanted the Presidency, his best bet would be to hope the Republicans get trounced in 2012, and are looking for a centrist in 2016. And of course, hope he gets reelected to the Senate in 2012. To win the Republican nomination in 2012, he’d have to start staking out a much more conservative voting record than he has been so far, and he’d have to do it soon. Doing so would pretty much mean giving up on reelection in Massachusetts. He’s already got a narrow path to tread if he wants a second term, and that path is a very different path than one that could lead to Republican primary victories in states outside the Northeast.
Romney stopped being concerned primarily with governing Massachusetts about halfway through his term, in 2004, four years before the election, and didn’t run for reelection in 2006. And it still involved him being seen as a flip-flopper. And if current trends hold, the Republican Party of 2012 is going to be far more demanding of ideological purity than it was in 2008.
Also, if Romney’s running, I think he’ll be using many of the advisers that helped Brown get elected. From what I understand, Brown’s team consisted of a lot of people from Romney’s campaigns (many of whom are currently working to get Charlie Baker elected governor). Just as Obama needed a top-notch team of advisers and endorsements from big Democratic Party names such as Ted Kennedy, so does Brown. And Romney is pretty much the only guy that he stands much of a chance to get them from. In 2016, especially if he’s ambitious, he’s likely to have much better contacts, and Romney’s chance will likely have irrevocably passed.
Maybe the fact that you are not an American and in fact a Canadian has blinded you to the deep prejudice against Mormons in this country, and especially by the very same people who vilify Barack Obama for being a secret Muslim. They may not care in Massachusetts, but out here in the Tea Bagging West you should hear what Christian Republican White people have to say about Mormons. What they say about Catholics is rather polite, if irrational, by comparison. The quality of someone’s Christianity is very important to the political right. Personally, I think that Romney is the strongest and best Republican candidate at the moment and I want the other team to nominate their best. George W Bush was a disaster because he was lazy, functionally stupid and an all around bastard, but that is what the Tea Bag base wants, but without the baggage of the Bush name. They openly and then secretly loved Bush.
Scott Brown seems like a decent enough guy. I disagree with a lot of his positions, but I disagree with some of Obama’s positions too, and I voted for him-- and will happily vote for him again next time around. I think Brown would be 10 times the president that whatever nudnik the GOP ends up hoisting for 2012 would be.
You are assuming that many of the same voters who think Obama is a Muslim actually know that Romney is a Mormon, assuming that a significant number do care. Romney polls better among Republicans right now than he does among all voters.
ETA: That was addressed to The Second Stone, not Cisco.
Not that there isn’t at least some truth to that (I happen to know there is), but then how do you explain Glenn Beck?
Not to mention said conservative made an entire post without mentioning the subject of the thread Scott Brown. Maybe he was just copy pasting from the Romney thread by mistake.
Obviously, Satan is real.
He didn’t have to run for his position.
That’s the topic sentence of an argument, not an argument.
I’m curious - how many of you who claim to know what the tea party wants actually follow tea party dialog directly, as opposed to reading someone else’s interpretation of what the tea party wants?
I may be Canadian, but I also live in Alberta which is far more closely aligned to the tea party folks than is coastal America. Our Conservative party is being challenged from by the Wild Rose party, which is a libertarian-oriented party with a female leader. It’s currently polling higher than all other parties in Alberta combined.
I read tea party web sites, listen to their podcasts, I’m personally aquainted with several of the more powerful people in the movement. I think I know these people fairly well - much more so than I did the old Catholic, Ivy League Republicans of the Buckley stripe or the deep south Republicans.
I don’t see the racism that so many of you think is there, for one thing. What I do see is a strong desire to bue left alone. They don’t like being condescend to, they don’t like being told what too think or how to behave, and they don’t think the federal government understands them or ohas their interests at heart. They want to run their businesses, keep their profits and invest it in their own communities rather than having it all go to Washington to be distributed back to them as some distant technocrat sees fit.
There is lots of contradiction here - they come from states that have big farm subsidies, for example. But by and large, what you’re really seeing here is a bunch of people who have been told what to think for a long time, and they are finally asserting themselves.
Trust me - if Romney had been consistently articulating a small government, free market philosophy and had a history of putting free market reforms in place and of cutting the size of government, almost no one in the tea party would care about his religioin. Hell, some of the most popular people in the movement are overt athiests. This isn’t about religion. It’s about culture anid values. Small government vs big government. Rule by technocratic elites vs self governance. Big deficits and high taxes vs small deficits and low taxes (an admitted conundrum - we have yet to see if they’ll stomach the kind of cuts their philosophy requires).
If a black American came along with the speaking ability of Obama coupled with the free market principles of Milton Friedman, he’d be the darling of the tea party.
The image Brown needs to convey to Massachusetts voters if he wishes to be reelected Senator is totally, completely, and 100% incompatible with the image he needs to convey if he wishes to be nominated as the GOP candidate for President.
If he can hang on to his Senate seat for maybe twenty years until the cycle has looped around again, he might have a shot then. Not in 2012. No way. No how.
Well, the thing with the pickup truck probably works in both scenarios.
39%, with four sitting MLAs out of 83, only one of whom was actually elected, with the next election not due till 2013.
Better that the Tea Party, I must admit.
Jesus, that sounds like a parody of how they see themselves. I mean you really nailed it with the farming subsidies, Sam. The whole movement is hypocritical beyond absurdity. It’s a mass denial of reality in favor of some fictional, 1830s perception of what America “used to be.”
Actually it was mostly a joke.
Who you gonna believe me or your lying eyes huh?
I forgot to mention a couple of other strong possibilities for challengers to Obama in the next presidential election: Jeb Bush and Mike Pence.
Oh, and please ignore the typos in my last messages. I’m typing this from an iPad, and Apple’s auto-correct is insane.
Typos don’t matter.
But Sam, I think you’re utterly mistaken about the Tea Party. I think within two years this thing fades away.
And about the racism? In my campaign (voting in less than 100 days!) the local Tea Party, which is one of the most active in Ohio, is clearly racial in bent.
Hell, I bumped into their founder in a grocery store last week. I chatted him up…you never know where a vote will come from, after all, and we’ve known each other for years. He mentioned that he’d been travelling to 9-12 and Tea Party events all over the state doing organizing. Well and good. Then he sang out with “We’ve got to do it. We’re trying to take our country back from the blacks.”
I smiled and nodded. This is a man who was invited to the first Tea Party event on the National Mall to be a speaker because he was an early organizer. And he DOES travel throughout Ohio giving speeches and helping to organize other groups.
So you’ll forgive me if my experience doesn’t march with yours.
Wow.
I’ve never heard of Pence, but I’ve never seen such a boneheaded list of policy positions in my life, other than the banal “cut government waste” stuff.