Trust me, calling Walker “Zombie Nixon” wasn’t a suggestion that he was Nixon’s equal, any more than I would expect a zombified version of myself to be the equal of me in my living years.
I was 20 when Nixon resigned; I remember him pretty well. Like you say, he was evil, but smart evil.
Walker has the general malevolence and hippie-bashing down to a science, and he has a zombie’s shambling persistence that makes him deadly. What makes him even more deadly is that he seems to be able to connect with the Republican id the way Nixon did.
I don’t think cronyism will hurt him in the primary race, and the MSM can be counted on to treat it as no worse than anything Hillary’s done in the general.
The thing about Jeb is that he still has to find a way to convince Republicans to vote for him. And whatever sense he had of how to connect with the GOP base in 2002 seems to be lacking in him now. 13 years of (a) rust, and (b) changes in the political world, can do that. I’m not sure all the money in the world, or a retinue of veteran loyalists, or bodyguards and silver cane, can make up for that.
If these two guys had a knife fight in a dark alley, Walker is the one I’d expect to come out alive.
David Corn: “Confederate flag loving Democrats who don’t want to do anything about climate change just got a candidate.”
Also, his political astuteness in choosing the eve of a summer holiday weekend to announce his entry was pretty impressive. He doesn’t have to worry about losing whatever ‘bounce’ he’d have otherwise gotten from the announcement. You can tell this campaign’s gonna go far.
His participation might get people to take Martin O’Malley more seriously by comparison.
If Bernie was younger, more dynamic and less covered in dandruff I’d say he was a contender but it looks like his role will simply be to keep Hillary from getting too complacent during the primary season (and to keep her from drifting too far to the right).
As for the GOP, at the moment I’m here:
Bush has nothing to recommend him other than the fact that he’s not any of the other, more crazy people in the race and he’s got enough money, support and name recognition to wait out the Culling of the Clowns without fading himself. I don’t think Walker’s appeal is as great as he thinks it is; Paul and Rubio could catch fire if they can thread the needle between appeasing the Tea Partiers and not alienating the general public but I’m not convinced that’s achievable as things stand.
A Clinton presidency would be good right now from a libertarian perspective. I don’t want the next collapse blamed on free market economics. I will stick with my prediction of nearly two years ago with a Clinton-Cruz contest ending in a victory for Cruz.
VP is only important if you screw it up. Clinton is ultra cautious. She will choose someone who is well known and perfectly vetted, possibly even a close associate, like Terry McCauliffe.
I think the key phrase in Saint Cad’s question was “at her age.” VP is also important if the President dies or becomes incapacitated.
While women generally hold up better at advanced ages than men do, when you’re talking about the Presidency, you don’t want to place your trust in averages. Her veep candidate needs to be someone who could credibly step in if Hillary had a stroke, for instance.
Hillary’s trying to keep the Obama coalition together (and hopefully grow it). Black and Hispanic turnout will be important to her. O’Malley’s got this little problem of having been mayor of Baltimore during a period when law enforcement was distinctly hostile towards poor blacks, with all that ‘humbling’ shit, let alone the deaths and stuff. If she nominates O’Malley, she goes from someone the black community might be genuinely enthusiastic about, to someone they’ll tolerate as the lesser of evils. That will still get her the votes of practically all blacks that vote, but it won’t help turnout.
And McAuliffe’s just too much of a Clinton insider. It would look like cronyism - hell, it would be cronyism.
Mama always said if you don’t toot your own horn, no one else will do it for you. Bush’s much-ballyhooed war chest is down to $10MM of cash on hand–less than Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz.
So far, the primary is playing out as I expected: that Bush/Rubio would fall into the 2008 roles of Clinton/Obama. An early fundraising advantage and a narrative of being the prohibitive front runner are valuable assets, but not decisive given a sufficiently large charisma gap between two equally “electable” candidates. As a Democrat, I couldn’t be more pleased with the direction this is going. Rubio’s bound to get his ass handed to him in none too pleasant a manner by Clinton. It won’t even be close.
Well, my prediction that Scott Walker would be the GOP nominee was obviously a fail. But I couldn’t be happier to be wrong.
Hillary’s looking better as the prospective Dem nominee than she has in awhile. I’ve been of the belief all along that once people see and hear a lot of her, rather than just stories about Benghazi, email servers, and polls, she’d do just fine. And the debate the other night helped justify that confidence. So if I had the chance to change that prediction, I’d stand pat.
And even though it wasn’t a prediction, per se, my take on Jeb! is holding up pretty well:
And now he’s burned through that hundred million bucks, and is still in single digits in the polls.
Don’t toot too loudly yet. That number says nothing about where most of his ballyhooed war chest fund actually were. He’s actually a hair up for in campaign funds having raised a little more than he spent in the third quarter.
JEB can’t dodge a family history of 12 years of White House failure. Then there’s the growing lack of respect for anything related to government in Florida. Strike two. Actually, three strikes, he’s not getting the national attention the carnival barker is getting. JEB is a plow horse in money race.
He hasn’t. Remember, a candidate and a PAC cannot work together. The PAC is the one that has the hundred million. Jeb the candidate is the one in danger of running out of money
The talking head community has been saying loudly that Rubio has passed Bush. The talking head community is wrong 99% of the time, so why listen?
The reality is that half the Republican voters have repudiated all, every single one, of the Republican professional politicians running. Nothing like that has ever been seen before. I’m firmly convinced that the final nominee will not be an amateur, but I have no idea how those 50% of preferences will be scattered among the survivors.
The Washington Post has an even more detailed look at the donations. Bush and Rubio are the only two politicians with eight-figure sums. Ben Carson gets there with lots of small donations. Will Carson donors switch to a professional? Will the Establishment get panicked and start flinging money around to someone? Will the Kochs step back in? Is Trump planning on bowing out before the primaries? Will there ever be a Speaker of the House? Every politician in the party has to be hysterical. But it’s more than a year before the election. Things will shake out.
Ugh, I hate to do this, but at least I got to it before others did.
Nine was the number in 2012 that Romney had to win. In 2016 the gap is smaller. Winning the three biggest states - Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio - would suffice. If the Democrats retain one of those then at least two other states have to fall. Still difficult - No current plausible scenario makes that happen - but not as impossible as 2012.
