In fact what it shows is that when the Presidential candidate is particularly down and out they look to a female VP choice as a means of trying to jack up their chances. And they choose poorly. They choose as a gimmick.
Obama would have won with HRC at least as well as with Biden and if Biden stepped down and HRC reneged on her statement of no future ambition, they would win just as solidly as they will against any of this crowd.
A female VP candidate does not work as a gimmick is all. A female of substance, who people could actually see in the job, such as HRC, would be something different.
When the Republicans were swept in last year in a wave of Tea Party enthusiasm focused on jobs and the economy, it took them about ten minutes to start trying to make sweeping changes to abortion policy. It was HR3–the third resolution taken up by the House–that at first attempted to limit Medicaid funding of abortion to victims of “forcible” rape, instead of just regular old rape. And we nearly saw the government shut down over funding for Planned Parenthood.
All evidence suggests that no matter how much these candidates want to focus on the economy, if one of them gets elected he or she will push for big changes in social policy. So the media wouldn’t be doing us any favors by staying away from those subjects.
They’d be just as well off saying “Please go vote for Barack Obama.” Like it or not, the Republican base is all about social issues. Even if the single-issue types don’t make up a majority of GOP votes, they’re the ones who are organizing in church basements and powering the ground game. They won’t vote Dem, but if the Republicans all promised to maintain the status quo on abortion/gay rights/whatever they’d stay home or vote third party.
This is the dilemma for the Republicans–the social views that their base requires are increasingly distasteful to more moderate voters. But just refusing to talk about them won’t make those views go away.
Back about 15 years ago, I worked with a former ATC turned programmer. One day we were talking about it at lunch and I said “Well, I’m sorry, but at the time I thought you guys deserved to be fired”. The whole table paused. He looked at me for a second, and then said “Yup, we probably did.”
They were, like a lot of other unions at the time (the entire Steel Industry for one example), out of control. Demanding way too much money for far too little work. And he, after the fact, admitted the same. That they were just pushing their luck with wage demands and special conditions in a bad economy where they were not going to get any sympathy from the public.
Thurgood Marshall was no conservative, not even a little. The present holder of the “black seat” was chosen to avoid turning the court all-white again. The fact that Judge Thomas was basically the furthest-right Negro on a federal bench anyone could find might indicate that they were afraid a more moderate black man would lose votes from the base.
George W. Bush is unusually racially progressive for the current GOP. He also favored guest worker visas; how much support did that get?
…in a vanity campaign that would be just as meaningless if he were white.
I guess we’ve forgotten about the black head of the RNC already?
But I guess you’re right. A lot of the base would love to elect a black or female candidate who’s, “one of theirs.” I wonder how many still insist that conservatives don’t need to be progressive, because conservative is not the same as progressive!
The Republicans’ best chance against Obama is to run a fiscal hawk who’s at least socially inoffensive to the independents and libertarians. This is one time when they’d be right to ignore their social conservative base. They stand to gain a lot more by running a candidate that can hold the middle, because the ‘base’ has nowhere to go anyway. They wouldn’t vote for Obama if Republicans put up a drunk raccoon for a candidate.
But what will really kill Republicans is if they run someone who’s a fiscal moderate and a social conservative. In other words, one of the Paleo Republicans in the mold of Pat Buchanan, or another ‘compassionate conservative’ like Bush. Huckabee comes to mind.
The Tea Party is all about the economy. Give them the kind of economic conservatism they’re looking for, and they won’t care if you’re socially liberal. Or at least, they won’t care enough that it will keep them home. But if someone comes along who’s an ‘establishment’ type who’s squishy on deficit cutting and curtailing the growth of government, he could pray to baby Jesus every night and the Tea Party will still sit on its hands.
Mitch Daniels was their perfect candidate. They need to find someone else like him, pronto. Paul Ryan would be good, but he’s not doing it. Chris Christie is still a contender if they can convince him to run. Hell, even Jeb Bush might be welcome given the field so far.
This should not be hard. The Republicans are in a great position to win the next election with the right candidate, so they should have people coming out of the woodwork. Where are the business leaders, right-wing economists, military generals, and other usual sources of Republican candidates? They’ve got Herman Cain from business, I suppose.
This seems to be completely correct. Despite Sam’s assertions, the evidence points to the Tea Party as being the social conservative base of the party.
[The link in the article is bad. Here is the correct link.]
Because of the extremity of their views, Poll Shows More Americans Have Unfavorable Views of Tea Party. What’s interesting there is support for the Tea party has been fixed at 30% since they emerged, but disapproval has more than doubled over time.
No matter what that 30% would like, it would be fatal for the GOP to nominate a candidate with strong Tea Party ties. Not because of their economic conservatism but specifically because of their social conservatism. You cannot separate the two.
Like Palin with the “fire in the belly”, Bachmann suddenly has a titanium spine!
And of course, she denies that the money she received did any good for the “clinic”. Isn’t this the same clinic where her effeminate hubby counsels homosexuals back to their true christian ways?
I am telling you guys. If the GOP regains the WH and majorities in both houses of Congress, you better have a lot of cash stashed away. Can you say, “Hello Herbert Hoover?”
They will cut, cut, and more cut. EPA will be history and 40 years of environmental contraints will drift down the stream with the oil slick.
But since the rest of the world doesn’t have the environmental constraints we have, how are we supposed to compete if we aren’t going to practice protectionism?
The real problem with the US economy is that less and less does it exist as a national economy and more and more it’s part of a world economy.
Incidently, I suspect that if a Republican wins, the 1% who own half of everything will probably be feeling a bit generous, and “allow” limited economic recovery so their nutcase sounds less like a nutcase.
The real problem is, do we get their puppet like Mitt Romney, or do we get a character they feel nervous about like Bachmann?
The rest of the developed world has much deeper industrial constraints we have. Sure, China, India and other industrialized-but-not-developed powers don’t, but they also don’t require that their workers be paid a living wage and a host of other advantages.
But I go back to my point, how do we compete with that?
Remember the movie Network when Ned Beatty’s “Mr. Jenson” tell’s Peter Finch’s “Howard Beale” that corporations are the nations of the world today, and nations themselves are becoming irrelevent.
We don’t. We compete along other measures that we are better at. It’s called the Future. Happens every year, regularly.
People say that, and people are wrong. It may be true at some distant point but it is actually no more true than in the past. You might have an argument that it is **less **true, given that individual nations currently have such tremendous pressures to individualize themselves.
It would be a joke. Oil and water.Romney would not want to saddled with a right wing crazy who disagrees with much of what he stands for. He would have to gag her for several months.
Yes, he could never win a nationwide election with a running mate who believes (by proxy of her husbands public statements) that homosexuals are “barbarians”.