The 2012 GOP Presidential Candidate is Forked

Great Debates
1

Well, we don’t know how well Obama will do as president, and since he’s inherited a total mess and people have short memories, he may be blamed for a prolonged recession that the electorate will have forgotten was well under way when he took office. I also wonder if he’ll get the kind of turn out he got in 2008. African Americans won’t be as excited to RE-elect the first black president, and young people will be hard to energize around the establishment as much as they energized around the movement.

But based on the GOP challenges right now, I think it’s unlikely they’ll be able to take back the White House in 2012. The demographics are getting worse for them as those white rural and exurban communities get whittled away and Democratic communities swell. Bush is a cautionary tale and will have long coat tails. There are people (scary people) who absolutely want Palin and those who absolutely despise her and whether or not she runs, those groups are likely to squabble over what the party is all about. Most of all, there’s no leader right now. The party is too busy pointing fingers and casting blame to sort themselves out. As one guy said (a party insider), “there’s lots of guys who think they’re the leader, but there’s no leader.”

I say they’re forked. I see 8-12 years of foundering in the wilderness, and we may not recognize them when they come back.

2

You can’t predict the 2012 election with any accuracy. Obama could win or he could lose.

But if we’re throwing in wild ass guesses, I’ll guess the GOP loses because they put forward a bad candidate - specifically, a very evangelical, exclusionary candidate who voices a dislike of big swaths of America (e.g. “real Virginia” comments.) I doubt it’ll be Sarah Palin, but it’ll be someone like that.

My theory has always been that a political party needs to get its ass kicked twice to learn a lesson. They won’t learn their lesson this time, I don’t think. If they DO, maybe they put forth a good candidate and win. But it they’re going to lose I think it’ll be because they threw a really, really hateful fundamentalist into the ticket.

3

Don’t count Sarah Palin out yet! 69% of Republican voters say she helped McCain, and 64% think she should be their next presidential nominee.

I apologize in advance for any nightmares that result from this post.

4

I"m sure a Nov 1988 thread would have written off the Democrats in 1992. Remember that guy who gave the long introduction for Mike Dukakis?

5

Yes, I remember one pundit claiming that there wouldn’t be another Democratic president in his lifetime. As it was, he had to wait 20 years.

6

It’s too early for the fork. We’ll have to see if the Republicans get their shit into one sock by the 2010 mid-term elections first.

At the moment, all the Republican strategists and pundists appear to be saying, “We need to get back to conservative values.” However, they don’t appear to agree on what those are: social conservativism, fiscal conservativism, small government, huge intrusive Big Brother gummint to protect us fromma terrists, folksy and friendly, wonky and wise, divisive, inclusive, with just a sprig of isolationism.

Few of the Republicans are saying, “We got our butts kicked because we didn’t have a positive message and we looked like grumpy old men.” Indeed, most Republicans appear to recite the talking point that “this is a center-right nation” as if it somehow exonerates them from responsibility for this recent loss.

They’re gonna need some honest self-analysis before 2010, that’s for sure.

7

The only thing they really need to do is stop rallying rednecks as their sole strategy. Doing even a little bit more than that would make them more competitive. However, it does not solve the deeper problem of the way America is changing. Whether they rally rednecks or not, the Republicans have an idea of what a “real American” is, and that real American is dying out. I think the defining moments of the McCain campaign were not their divisive rhetoric, but their rapid apologies for it. They realized it wasn’t working. Why? Because those trailer court Palin worshippers and Joe the Plumbers are a smaller percentage of America than they used to be. They’ve lost the majority in Ohio, Virginia, and other key states.

Moreover, they’ve lost their cornerstone message. Republicans keep running like it’s 1980, like they need to go into Washington and change things (even when they’ve been minding the store for 8-12 years), and it worked up until now. There’s no way they can play that song anymore. It completely bombed for McCain, who had the best credentials as a reformer in the party. The financial mess and the bailout has robbed them of any pretense to being tight-fisted and prudent.

Somebody would have to give the Republicans a new face, and I imagine it’ll take at least eight years for that to happen. I also think it’s likely that that new face would be much more moderate and a scion of a new GOP that’s more socially liberal and irrelegious and – one hopes – practices what they preach when it comes to economic stewardship. I think we need a GOP like that to restore constructive rather than destructive conflict in Washington.

8

The longest period with Republican at the helm in the 20th century was 12 years (either 1920-32 or 1980-1992), while the longest Demo stretch was FDR + Truman at 20. Recheck your math mate.

If the George Will effect doesn’t hold (supposedly people tend to switch from Democrat to Republican as they grow older), the old Repos will die off while we’ll have another batch of young Demos voting for the first time in '12.

9

Unless Obama turns out to be a Carter level weak President the more substantial Republicans will defer from running against a sitting President. Which doesn’t mean that a new face can’t catch the public’s fancy … after all that’s how Bill Clinton became President - none of the big names wanted to go up against a sitting President so he had his chance to shine - and the rest is history. Maybe there is someone similar somewhere is the GOP up and coming, who knows? Or maybe a Palin or a Huckabee will get the nod to be symbolic opposition.

Religious or not is almost irrelevant. The RR will vote for someone who at least gives them lip service and the secular liberals won’t vote GOP even if it was a secular leaning conservative. Maybe the RR will come out stronger if the positions are stated more strongly but few else care too much if there are other messages or personility aspects that resonate.

10

Do any of the Republicans even care that the Reagan policies, which led on into the nineties and the early 2000s, led directly to the crisis we are dealing with today? Has this caused anyone in the party or of a conservative bent to re-examine his or her political approach? I’m not talking the exclusionary, religious right ideology here; I’m talking about the economic policies of ever less regulation, ever lower taxes, what’s good for big business and GDP must be good for America, let us always quest to lessen the role of government, hoping eventually to starve it to death except for the military and those other portions that cause large businesses to make a profit, etc.

The Republicans still seem to talk about Reagan as an icon, a person whose ideals represent what they should get back to. Doesn’t it matter that the budget deficit rose enormously under him?

The problem is, I don’t think the people understand this either. They remember that they thought Reagan was a nice guy, and that they’ve been told he was a great president. The Republicans may well be able to reform on a back-to-Reagan, as if we hadn’t been pursuing the ideals of Reagan for almost thirty years.

In 2012, the chances for the Republicans will depend on how quickly people expect Obama to fix the economy versus how slowly it actually happens, and also how successfully we come out of the recession. Expectations are very high, and I would imagine disappointment will be correspondingly low unless Obama is able to get people to take a more realistic approach.

What people don’t realize is that this recession probably demarks the beginning of a real change in the way middle-class Americans live our lives, wherein we begin to live more like middle class people around the world and less like the wealthy. We have come to have such high expectations that we don’t even realize that so much of what we have are luxuries rather than necessities. Now that this recession has hit, people are paring back the spending and realizing they can live without the constant spending after all. The thing that needs to be done now is to realize that it’s going to have to stay this way.

The road to new jobs is not for each consumer to spend more again, but for there to be more consumers, by creating new jobs. We have based far too much of our economy on debt and an inflated standard of living that prevents us from being remotely competetive with most of the rest of the world. That’s going to have to change, and it’s going to have to change with us. The problem is, the electorate thinks their current hold in spending is temporary. It will be up to Obama to make them understand that they must develop a new way of life; that they can’t live their lives as do the wealthy.

Americans don’t want to hear hard truths; we’ve been spoiled rotten by our politicians, who’ve spent the past thirty years promising bread and circuses while our infrastructure crumbles and people vote for lower taxes. There’s a good chance that if Obama does communicate this, he’ll go down the tubes in 2012. But if he doesn’t, the US will be done as an economic power, IMHO. I’d like to see McCain make this “Country First” decision.

11

Quote from Teddy Roosevelt:
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible
government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility
to the people.
Somebody is making out like a bandit in this mess.

12

When Clinton won in 1992, and Democrats swept into Congress, I remember exactly the same handwringing. The Republican party was finished, we’re entering an era of Democrat dominance in politics, it’s a new age, the old Republicanism is dead, young people rule, yada yada.

Two years later, Republicans took both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years, and held them for a decade. They took control of 20 state houses from Democrats, and 12 governorships. One of the biggest changes in overall power between the parties in history, dwarfing the gains made by Democrats in this election.

The lesson to be learned is that politics is fleeting, and if you govern like you have no opposition, very soon you’ll have plenty.

13

I would say that the lesson to be learned is that if your opposition doesn’t have a direction, don’t give them one.

14

They may face an uphill battle in some ways because I don’t believe they’ll have all the problematic issues from this year sorted out yet. But it’s way too soon to say there’s no chance. There’s going to be an incumbent president running for re-election and he hasn’t done a single thing yet. Start this thread again in 2011, you know?

I’m not sure why we’ve got so many people here already focusing in 2012. It’s not even day one of Obama’s term yet.

15

I think it’ll be pretty clear by March whether the GOP wants to help Obama and the Dems right the problems of this nation, or whether they want to be broadly obstructionist.

I’m betting on broadly obstructionist. When the second-ranking Senate Republican is already talking about filibustering nonexistent nominees for potential Supreme Court vacancies, that’s not exactly the language of “let’s work together.”

If that’s the game they choose to play, they’ll keep losing in 2010 and 2012 and beyond, until there aren’t enough GOPers to prevent the Dems from passing their agenda and doing something about our problems.

16

Yes, I was around for the Clinton years, and was facetiously excluding him from consideration as a “Democratic president.”

17

Election withdrawals…we can’t think of anything else to talk about anymore!

18

Dwarfing? Hardly. Since 2004, Democrats have gained at least 12 seats in the Senate, with more to come, quite possibly, at least 50ish seats in the House. The New Hampshire legislature went Dem for the first time in the century, and a lot of governors and state legislatures switched. I’m not sure if it’s more or not, but it’s certainly not much less.

19

Ah, I suspected I was being whooshed. Carry on.

20

The Republicans should learn one of the lessons of this election. Next time they need young, they need charismatic. They don’t need Palin.

As to which Republican might fit that bill …