[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
No American president has ever been even suspected of embezzling from the Treasury. (Some of their subordinates have done so.) Presidents can make a lot of money off the job, of course – after their term is over.
[/QUOTE]
Okay, I get it guys. I’m not funny.
[QUOTE=Kimstu]
I beg to differ. He may be a man of principle and a sincere conservative and all the other things his followers want him to be, but looks-wise, the guy is uglier than a baboon’s butt. He looks like a bizarre hybrid of Richard Nixon and Charlie McCarthy. The first time I saw a photo of him in the news, my first reaction was “That guy made a living as an actor?!!?”
[/QUOTE]
Character actor. Different ball of wax.
[QUOTE=BobLibDem]
I believe he is the odds on favorite to win the nomination. Look at the other “serious” alternatives:
The GOP base detests John McCain, no matter how much he sucks up to them.
The anti-abortion wing will not let Guiliani win the nomination.
Romney flip-flopped on social issues and is a Mormon for God’s sake!
I think Thompson blows these guys out of the water…
[/QUOTE]
Along those lines – the “Live Quote” (real time) market at the linked site now has Thompson trailing only Giuiani 25.2% to 24.0 % as I type. Quite a jump even with the pre-announcement speculation.
Personally, I think he needs to ditch the phony pickup truck shtick. Other than that, I’m not sure how I feel about the guy. He often comes off as extremely boorish and arrogant. On the other hand, he certainly seems to have the qualifications and the legal mind to at least give fair credence to all sides of an issue, even if he takes views I don’t like. I’ll have to see which side he truly decides to go with. Unfortunately, since this is the Republican primary coming up next, I don’t have high hopes that it will be the latter.
[QUOTE=BobLibDem]
I believe he is the odds on favorite to win the nomination. Look at the other “serious” alternatives:
The GOP base detests John McCain, no matter how much he sucks up to them.
The anti-abortion wing will not let Guiliani win the nomination.
Romney flip-flopped on social issues and is a Mormon for God’s sake!
I think Thompson blows these guys out of the water.
In November 2008, he’s got a much tougher fight. If he runs as a pro-Bush candidate (with respect to Iraq), he has no hope of capturing the independents. If he runs as an anti-Bush candidate, he loses the GOP base.
If he’s president, he’ll be just as lousy as Reagan was. Huge defeats for the environment and reproductive freedom. He couldn’t possibly be worse in foreign policy than Bush but he is definitely not what the US needs for domestic policy.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know. He only hurts Rudy a little. I just wish Rudy would start campaigning the way he did for 1992 & 1996. He has been pretty blah so far. I think he needs to take several issues, including maybe, taking back the party for the moderates and growing it again, instead of letting it shrink.
Thompson is probably going to be the biggest blow to Romney. McCain is already losing ground anyway. This might come down to Romney, Thompson and McCain splitting the more conservative side of the party, and us old fashioned disenfranchised moderates and liberal Republicans might rally enough to push Rudy to the ticket.
jim
Seems like the guy has plenty in his closet. he’s a lawyer (just like Edwards) and has a pretty unsavory record in his legal activities. plus, he has no experience 9but they said that about Reagan).
You can forget Romney-in the Deep South, mormons are perceived as devil-worshipers!
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
You can forget Romney-in the Deep South, mormons are perceived as devil-worshipers!
[/QUOTE]
I think it’s $400K now, but your point still stands.
I’d call Thompson a “Hollywood Republican”, and not because he’s an actor–if I wanted to create a stereotypical Republican for a bad movie, it would be Thompson. Pudgy, bald, bejowled, wears expensive and not especially stylish suits, talks all folksy. His views on pretty much everything are straight out of the GOP platform. That’s not a bad thing if you want to vote for a Republican, but the crossover appeal that the concern trolls tell us our Democratic candidates can’t get elected without just won’t be there when he becomes more real.
He makes me think of Wesley Clark. He looked great on paper, but when he went from being an ideal to being an actual candidate, he couldn’t make the splash people were expecting. Maybe Thompson is different, but I don’t think we’ll know until he’s in the fray.
I also wonder about skeletons, and how the Jesus wing will respond to his 25-years-younger wife.
But I think he has more of a chance of being the next President than anyone else in the GOP field right now.
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
You can forget Romney-in the Deep South, mormons are perceived as devil-worshipers!
[/QUOTE]
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Romney is in the lead contribution-wise in Georgia of all places. Cite. He’s also actively positioned himself as being the social conservative out of the Republican candidates, and Southerners like that.
Besides, staying with Georgia for a minute, if the Democratic nominee is either HRC or Obama, I can pretty much guarantee you that Mitt Romney wins the state walking away.
[QUOTE=Chronos]
Didn’t Gore vacate his Senate seat in 1992, when he was elected VP? Why the two-year delay?
[/QUOTE]
The linked article in post #33 seems to have the answer to that question:
[QUOTE=Least Original User Name Ever]
The president gets paid, what, 175 thousand bucks? Something in that ballpark?
[/QUOTE]
The President of the United States’ salary is $400,000.00 (Warning: PDF file).
I think a Fred Thompson candidacy would be disastrous for this country and disastrous for the Democrats. People feel like they know him from his Law & Order character, and they like him based on that. Regardless of his actual stance on real life issues, I worry that that perception would be very difficult to overcome.
Slightly off-topic, I read somewhere that when/if he actually declares, Law & Order episodes that he’s in will either have to cease airing until after the election, or every other candidate can request “equal time” on the network(s) his episodes air on, which would be physically impossible to do. Ah, here’s one reference:
[QUOTE=Doctor Who]
Besides, staying with Georgia for a minute, if the Democratic nominee is either HRC or Obama, I can pretty much guarantee you that Mitt Romney wins the state walking away.
[/QUOTE]
Is Georgia really that sexist/racist still?
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Guns make communities safer when and only when the police are the only ones who have them. One reason (there are also cultural and economic reasons, I’m sure) why there is so much less violent crime in Japan or the UK than here.
[/QUOTE]
Wow. Not a single qualifier, not a single effort to note that this is anything other than established fact, with its accuracy on par with F=(Gm[sub]1[/sub]m[sub]2[/sub])/r[sup]2[/sup] eh?
For the record, the evidence supporting this proposition is far from one-sided. I certainly admit that a reasonable person may assert this claim, but a reasonable person would also acknowledge that there exists room for disagreement and equally reasonable people on the other side of the debate.
Bricker, **BrainGlutton ** and any others, may I please respectively request you move any gun debates to another GD thread.
I am not looking for any admonishments, but I am reporting this request to the mods to hopefully prevent a derailment of this thread.
I think it is a good subject for debate, and hopefully one of you does start it.
Jim
[QUOTE=What Exit?]
Bricker, **BrainGlutton ** and any others, may I please respectively request you move any gun debates to another GD thread.
I am not looking for any admonishments, but I am reporting this request to the mods to hopefully prevent a derailment of this thread.
I think it is a good subject for debate, and hopefully one of you does start it.
Jim
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Is Georgia really that sexist/racist still?
[/QUOTE]
I think that’s a little too simplistic - although there are definitely traces of both. I don’t want to hijack this thread completely, but I’ll sum it up like this: You have to realize that for many voters in the South, it’s going to take a lot to get them to pull the lever for a Democrat. In order to swing the results of the 2004 presidential election in Georgia, the Democratic candidate has to swing a quarter of a million votes. That’s tough.
As for the particulars:
(1) HRC suffers from something other than just being a woman. She’s Hillary Clinton. She is essentially a punchline in Georgia. The question is how do you get (or can you get) a tractor-driving Good-ol’-boy (nothing derogatory intended there - just being descriptive) to vote for Hillary Clinton after he’s made fun of her for years? Especially given a choice between her and some white male who’s saying all the right things about family values?
(2) Obama. Well, Pierre Howard got elected on the “Pierre is french for Bubba” tagline in Georgia, but I think this is a different situation. You’ve got a guy with a strange name (that rhymes with Osama for God’s sake!), who’s from Illinois (which, btw, might as well be Massachusetts to a rural Georgian), and on top of all that, is black. If Obama wins the nomination, I expect the Bradley effect throughout the Southeast will be pervasive.
(3) Also, as I mentioned, I’ve been blown away by Romney’s ability to raise money in Georgia. And I’ve heard the same thing from all the politically-minded people I know back there. Sort of a shift from, “Oh, he’s Mormon, won’t play down heah,” to “He raised HOW MUCH?!” I think he’s becoming a serious force to be reckoned with.
(4) Finally, I don’t think you can discount the effect of the elderly. Old people vote. They vote in massive numbers and they matter. And I think that the racism and sexism that are often unfairly attributed to Southerners persist in much greater numbers among the elderly. You could describe it as a “generational thing.”
Now, for the record, none of this is, in any way, intended to debate or debase HRC or Obama’s relative merit as a politician or a potential president. ETA: Or to debate whether I believe either one could win overall v. Romney. I happen to like both of them and I am glad that they are among the Democratic field. This is more a discussion of (what I perceive to be) legitimate political realities in the South and Georgia in particular.
To sum up: My earlier statements were not based entirely on the effects of racism/sexism, but I do think those things matter. And, to make this post relevant to the thread, I think that Georgians would vote for Fred Thompson in the primary like it was their job. Early and often. 
I doubt that either HRC or BO (sorry, Barack, but those are your initials!) are planning on winning Georgia, so I’d say it’s a moot point. Now Florida is a whole 'nother can of beans. I could see either of them, especially HRC, winning FL.
Suppose, say, Edwards or Gore were to win the Dem nomination and tap Obama or Clinton as running mate. Could that ticket win in Georgia?
Of course, the real problem is that Barack is Irish. (Aren’t the O’Bamas related to the O’Gradys?)
[QUOTE=John Mace]
I don’t think Thompson is going to laugh off the scientific community when it comes time to set actual policy.
[/quote]
Why not? It’s 27 years since everyone was saying, “Reagan’s running on those huge tax cuts, but when he gets elected, he’ll settle for something much smaller.” There’s a time to stop being fooled that these folks don’t really mean the things they say they mean. Global warming denial is practically an article of faith, not only in the GOP base, but in its ‘intellectual’ support structure as well.
The National Review has a blog, “Planet Gore,” dedicated to making fun of global warming and related issues. Yesterday, one of their Planet Gore bloggers said, “Greens are trying to get carbon dioxide classified as a pollutant – because real pollutants are getting scarcer and scarcer.” IOW, CO2 isn’t a ‘real’ pollutant. And this is what they say in Bill Buckley’s media mini-empire, the comparatively sane end of the right-wing media machine. We won’t even discuss Free Republic and Little Green Footballs.
So why should we expect the GOP candidates they support to be any different? I don’t see that many of them come from a classier intellectual gene pool in the first place.
[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
Why not? It’s 27 years since everyone was saying, “Reagan’s running on those huge tax cuts, but when he gets elected, he’ll settle for something much smaller.” There’s a time to stop being fooled that these folks don’t really mean the things they say they mean. Global warming denial is practically an article of faith, not only in the GOP base, but in its ‘intellectual’ support structure as well.
The National Review has a blog, “Planet Gore,” dedicated to making fun of global warming and related issues. Yesterday, one of their Planet Gore bloggers said, “Greens are trying to get carbon dioxide classified as a pollutant – because real pollutants are getting scarcer and scarcer.” IOW, CO2 isn’t a ‘real’ pollutant. And this is what they say in Bill Buckley’s media mini-empire, the comparatively sane end of the right-wing media machine. We won’t even discuss Free Republic and Little Green Footballs.
So why should we expect the GOP candidates they support to be any different? I don’t see that many of them come from a classier intellectual gene pool in the first place.
[/QUOTE]
Blogs aren’t necessarily an indicator of anything. I know how much you like them, but I think they give you a distorted view of the political landscape since they attract the wing-nuts of both sides.
Look, even Bush is no longer in the global warming denial camp. I think he’d rather just ride out the rest of his term and not deal with it, but it’s going to be a big issue in the 2008 campaign. No GOP candidate with half a brain is going to just brush it off-- that would be political suicide. I really do think the zeitgeist has changed on this in mainstream America over the last 10 years. The right-wing nutters ignore it at their peril.