Grotewold wrote:I guess I don't understand why the establishment thought it would different this time for Romney. Just couldn't quite overcome the McCain charm offensive?

Romney is still going to win the nomination, and he's still the best option to take on Obama in November.

The establishment, if you can talk about it as a single unit, has spent most of the past year asking Paul Ryan/Mitch Daniels/Chris Christie and others to run for president, and then begging them to reconsider once they said no. Once it was clear this was all we were getting to pick from, they started lining up because it's the only option.

I gotcha

In retrospect, did TPaw panic? Or would he have been closer to the Huntsman/Romney crew and therefore had a cap on his appeal?

It wasn't that he panicked. His campaign fucked up. He was spending more than he was taking in, and the campaign bet big that the Ames Straw Poll would boost his standing in the polls and his fundraising. Finished a disappointing third and the campaign was in debt with no real hope on the horizon for raising money. Remember, at this point Perry was about to jump in as the anti-Romney, and most people thought he'd actually be a good candidate. Pawlenty's not rich like Romney or Huntsman (or McCain, Hillary and Kerry before him who had similar money crunches after their campaigns failed to take off as planned) so going hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions into debt wasn't an option, so he dropped out.

If he had gone the leaner route from the start, and not done the traditional spend a shit load of money on consultants and trying to win a straw poll that has no tangible impact on anything, I think he'd be competitive right now. I don't know if he'd be running away with it, but he wouldn't have had the same problems Huntsman did. He's boring like Romney, but he's got solid middle class appeal and seems like a real person. He also governed a blue state for two terms as a conservative.

can't wait for Newt to confront Barry with "saul alinsky radicalism" comments in debate & watch him get gutted navel to chin

Repubs scrambled for a veep candidate last time, & dipped up Palin; this time around they'll repeat the performance for their top spot

what a riot

We're most likely going to end up with a guy who has been running for president for six years and has been the most likely nominee for the past couple of them. Settling, not scrambling.

jerseyhoya wrote:We're most likely going to end up with a guy who has been running for president for six years and has been the most likely nominee for the past couple of them. Settling, not scrambling.

could be, but you just need a wild-eyed evangelical preacher or two to go all end-of-days on the guy with 6 grandmas, and look out....

jerseyhoya wrote:We're most likely going to end up with a guy who has been running for president for six years and has been the most likely nominee for the past couple of them. Settling, not scrambling.

George Will pointed out this morning that Romney's lifetime won-lost record in contested elections is now 6-19. Granted this is kind of a questionable measure given that one can "lose" a contested multi-candidate primary contest and still over-perform expectations, etc. But I can't remember too many of those in Romney's 2008 run, let alone this year.

I'd guess that he outspent his opponents in many if not most of those races. I think you and I agree that the money advantage is helpful (and often but not always correlated with other helpful things) though not dispositive.

The guy just doesn't connect with your base voters. I don't doubt that they'd choose him over Obama, and maybe he's not doing so much damage with moderates and independents in his futile attempt to win the love of the Fox/Rush crowd that he couldn't still win in the fall if the economy sucks hard enough. But he seems to have a glass jaw, and the problems with him as a candidate are innate to who he is as a public figure and probably as a human being: really rich, elite in any and every way one can be elite (wealth, education, cultural tastes), and Amaro-level smug without the charm (or the track record).

Plus, I hear he's really Mexican and believes that marriage should be a union between a man and as many women as possible.

Monkeyboy wrote:...marriage should be a union between a man and as many women as possible.

Between the Mormon, the libertarian and the Newt, this could be approaching a consensus position in the Republican nominating contest.

dajafi wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:We're most likely going to end up with a guy who has been running for president for six years and has been the most likely nominee for the past couple of them. Settling, not scrambling.

George Will pointed out this morning that Romney's lifetime won-lost record in contested elections is now 6-19. Granted this is kind of a questionable measure given that one can "lose" a contested multi-candidate primary contest and still over-perform expectations, etc. But I can't remember too many of those in Romney's 2008 run, let alone this year.

I'd guess that he outspent his opponents in many if not most of those races. I think you and I agree that the money advantage is helpful (and often but not always correlated with other helpful things) though not dispositive.

The guy just doesn't connect with your base voters. I don't doubt that they'd choose him over Obama, and maybe he's not doing so much damage with moderates and independents in his futile attempt to win the love of the Fox/Rush crowd that he couldn't still win in the fall if the economy sucks hard enough. But he seems to have a glass jaw, and the problems with him as a candidate are innate to who he is as a public figure and probably as a human being: really rich, elite in any and every way one can be elite (wealth, education, cultural tastes), and Amaro-level smug without the charm (or the track record).

He's a very awkward person and not a natural politician. Kissing babies isn't his thing. But I don't think he's smug, although he certainly has the track record for being so (made hundreds of millions of dollars, saved the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, elected governor of his adopted home state, front runner for GOP nomination). He's just kind of mechanical and trying to act like he's a real person and he's not so good at that.

He's still got a much better shot than the rest of the field at winning in November.

So no remaining candidates (genuine candidates, not Ron Paul), including POTUS, with any military service

jerseyhoya wrote:

Grotewold wrote:I guess I don't understand why the establishment thought it would different this time for Romney. Just couldn't quite overcome the McCain charm offensive?

Romney is still going to win the nomination, and he's still the best option to take on Obama in November.

The establishment, if you can talk about it as a single unit, has spent most of the past year asking Paul Ryan/Mitch Daniels/Chris Christie and others to run for president, and then begging them to reconsider once they said no. Once it was clear this was all we were getting to pick from, they started lining up because it's the only option.

It increasingly makes sense to see the divide between parochials and cosmopolitans as significant in American politics. It does seem that this divide is a bigger problem though for the Republicans than Dems. The Democratic parochials (I'd consider labor and ethnic minorities in this group) aren't going anywhere. On the Republican side, however, the tensions between neo-cons and free trade types and social conservatives and isolationists are getting harder to manage. In part, Bush was able to do it for 5 years, but I think his overreach in trying to create a permanent majority ended up doing more harm than good.

I think the other problem is that various Democratic factions are more open to pragmatic compromise with each other than the various Republican factions are. Moreover, there is a substantial number of Republicans who believe that McCain lost because he wasn't conservative enough.

The Democrats have made some stupid mistakes as well. Abandoning the Howard Dean strategy of really reaching out to Republican parochials who were beginning to suspect the Republicans had sold them out and contesting elections in any congressional district where they could scrounge up a viable candidate and retreating to the coastal and metropolitan enclaves perhaps made sense, but I do miss the aggressiveness of the 2006-2008 era. I think you'll always do better in American politics with an aggressive offensive strategy.

TenuredVulture wrote:The Democrats have made some stupid mistakes as well. Abandoning the Howard Dean strategy of really reaching out to Republican parochials who were beginning to suspect the Republicans had sold them out and contesting elections in any congressional district where they could scrounge up a viable candidate and retreating to the coastal and metropolitan enclaves perhaps made sense, but I do miss the aggressiveness of the 2006-2008 era. I think you'll always do better in American politics with an aggressive offensive strategy.

I get where you're coming from here, particularly considering the well-known mutual contempt between Dean and Rahm Emanuel. But I also think this was halted less by conscious Democratic strategery than what happens once you "own" government in recessionary times, as the Dems did entirely in 2009-10 and still mostly do.

However much fault you care to assign them given the economic shit storm they inherited from Bush, the truth is that Obama and the Democratic congress didn't deliver for the Republican voter groups you're talking about. And while they had and still have an argument that their policies are better suited to do so than the Gilded Age system the Koch brothers pine for, selling that to low/limited-information voters--the folks who get a lot of their information from Fox/Rush or Focus on the Family, and probably aren't culturally well disposed to the bi-racial Ivy League guy anyway--seems like a lot to ask.

Giffords resigning

Christie: Gingrich has been an embarrassment to the GOP

http://www.northjersey.com/news/Christi ... party.html

dajafi wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:The Democrats have made some stupid mistakes as well. Abandoning the Howard Dean strategy of really reaching out to Republican parochials who were beginning to suspect the Republicans had sold them out and contesting elections in any congressional district where they could scrounge up a viable candidate and retreating to the coastal and metropolitan enclaves perhaps made sense, but I do miss the aggressiveness of the 2006-2008 era. I think you'll always do better in American politics with an aggressive offensive strategy.

I get where you're coming from here, particularly considering the well-known mutual contempt between Dean and Rahm Emanuel. But I also think this was halted less by conscious Democratic strategery than what happens once you "own" government in recessionary times, as the Dems did entirely in 2009-10 and still mostly do.

However much fault you care to assign them given the economic shit storm they inherited from Bush, the truth is that Obama and the Democratic congress didn't deliver for the Republican voter groups you're talking about. And while they had and still have an argument that their policies are better suited to do so than the Gilded Age system the Koch brothers pine for, selling that to low/limited-information voters--the folks who get a lot of their information from Fox/Rush or Focus on the Family, and probably aren't culturally well disposed to the bi-racial Ivy League guy anyway--seems like a lot to ask.

It was probably inevitable that the Dems would lose seats in 2010. However, what I'm getting at is that you need to keep playing the long game. When you don't run viable even if long shot campaigns in as many CDs as possible, you fail to present a counter narrative.

And, forget the partisan contest--if you don't have a competitive election, you don't have democracy. And the result of that is corruption and incompetence.

Over at redstate, some whispers that the evangelical leadership's embrace of Santorum is really about helping Romney. Though there is a certain plausibility to this, I do wonder if it really makes sense--if the evangelicals really wanted to see Romney win the election, you'd see at least some supporting Romney.

But perhaps they really don't want to win this election. I suspect it's easier for the evangelical establishment to raise money for itself when the flock believes Armageddon is coming.

jerseyhoya wrote:Giffords resigning

a comment on the WSJ website:

Another government worker who just wants to claim WC just so
they can retire early and collect additional WC benefits too
... despicable piece of unionized excrement.