Is there any particular reason Limbaugh dragged McCain’s daughter into the fray? I couldn’t have told you her name during the campaign, and a quick scan of her wiki didn’t reveal anything scandalous, AFAICT.
She’s been in the news lately, first in an altercation with one of the skinny blond fem-bots of Republican punditry whose name I can’t recall now (just remembered…Laura Ingraham), and then at the Log Cabin Republican convention where she championed the Republican party embracing gay rights and same-sex marriage.
You’d be surprised the kind of pressure the party can put on potential challengers. If the party strongly suggests that you hold off on a Senate candidacy for six years, you court isolation if you don’t comply. Running for office without party support, especially in a statewide position, is VERY difficult. Playing the maverick doesn’t work so well if you don’t have major seniority and public recognition.
Two words: Ned Lamont.
The GOP needs a Nader.
It was only when the light went on in 2004 and the Democratic party recognized that there is no appeasing the wingnuts that they went on to make any headway. Letting the nuts drift off in their own lifeboat is what saved the sinking ship. Now it is time for the GOP to wander the wilderness for a while and realize after a few more cycles lost that they are better off without the extremists. Only then will the middle, and the elections they turn, look back to the GOP.
I couldn’t disagree more. One of the fundamental elements of the strategy that won the House and Senate back in 2006 was appealing to the base, and not being just Republican-lite. The principles that the left wing wanted were pretty attractive to the middle as well.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/parsing-the-polls/21-percent.html
If the Republicans wander in the wilderness too much longer, they will be outnumbered by the nation’s gay community.
The strange thing is the deeper the GOP gets into the wilderness the quicker their pace seemingly becomes. After all, the party’s response to the electorate’s increased concern over the GOP’s rightward trajectory is to lean further right. I’m afraid all that’s left in control are the extremists, unfortunately. The moderates seem to have, for the most part, left the party, or been silenced.
I wonder by what logic the GOP believes it can remain relevent and actually win elections with the 21 percent they still have, many of whom are single issue, social conservatives first and party loyalists second.
He’s probably available.
Okay, I stand corrected. Where the Democratic party calved the loonies to the green party, it saved their ship. With the Republicans, it is the loonies that have taken over the ship, and the majority of the people are now in the lifeboats.
Let’s see . . . Someone far enough right of the current GOP mainstream to reject the GOP and still have both an inclination and a chance to make a serious (hopeless, but still serious, if we’re analogizing to Nader) third-party bid . . . Only Pat Buchanan comes to mind. Because I haven’t heard anything from David Duke lately.
But, it’s not really analogous. The GOP is way, way further to the right, now, than the Democratic Party was to the left when Nader was at his peak.
Bear in mind that, under prevailing rules of medical ethics, no surgeon will perform that procedure unless the patient has undergone at least two years of psychotherapy and demonstrated clear commitment to that political identity.
This exchange is priceless (CNN’s Rick Sanchez and S.C. (R) Jim DeMint):
Compare and contrast:
Finally someone calls these guys on this crap. I’ve begun to wonder if the word freedom means something I’m unaware of.
Seriously? Appealing to the base certainly worked in 2008…oh, wait, no it didn’t. (Granted, '08 was probably more of a Bush backlash, but the nutters certainly didn’t help.)
It seems to me that “appealing to the base” just unfortunately exposes the batshit insanity of that base to the rest of the moderates in the country, further alienating them. Olympia Snowe was quoted on NPR today as opining just that, and I think she’s dead on. Hell, I call myself a liberal, and I’m even wanting the Republican party to get back to something that makes sense. They used to stand for something; they used to have good ideals that even I could support. Now they’re just a joke.
Freedom is just another word for Democrat-Socialism.
Appealing to the base isn’t a bad thing, but the GOP’s problem is that it’s become a code word for consciously trying to not appeal to anyone else. A motivated base is a powerful force, but you need to get at least some people who aren’t in the base to vote for you to win an election.
Bush was a master at this, he would get Cheney et al. to throw the base plenty of red meat, while at the same time touting his moderate record in Texas as a “compassionate conservative”. The Dems arguably moved to the left in '06-'08, but also ran successful moderates in purple and red states, and tried to expand the tent with the 50 state strategy.
The modern GOP, on the other hand, has decided not only appealing to the base, but seeking some sort of ideological purity is the way to win. That’s not the way elections are won in the US, it’s big tents and loose coalitions or nothing.
And Democrat-Socialism is just another word for nothing left to lose?
I’m wondering if Snowe is gambling that by the time re-election time rolls around there will be enough of a backlash against the “Republican base” that she’ll be in a position to drive an expanded moderate wing of the party. After all, if they keep weeding out the “RINOs” pretty soon the base is going to consist entirely of Limbaugh, Palin, Bachman and a hound dog.
Oh lord! Snowe has written an editorial for the NEW YORK TIMES:
We Didn’t Have to Lose Arlen Specter
They’ll kick her out of the GOP for sure now.
Seriously though, I’ve never thought of Snowe as having the kind of personal force/charisma she’d need to drive the sort of resurgence Gyrate suggests.