It’s funny. I honestly have no idea who the Republicans will nominate for president in 2012. But I can’t believe it will be Tim Pawlenty. I wish someone would come along, like John Anderson, and try to speak a little reason to the Republican base. It won’t happen, of course, but it would be nice to see a pulse of sanity in the Republican Party. Rudy Guiliani could have been that guy, but he dropped all his moderation when he ran for president. Same for John McCain. And it will be the same for any other potential candidate who makes a run at the nomination. It’s going to be a sickening affair.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
It will be the most racist, ugly, lying, pandering dirty campaign in the history of the United States. Worse than the campaigns to vilify Lincoln and FDR.
They were trying real hard to set up Mitch Daniels as the Next Big Thing, until he went all “truce” on social issues. I’m sure they’ll fall back on the tried and true.
Yeah .. but Mitch walked that back pretty quickly .. so who knows .. I still say not to count out Haley Barbour
The campaign will be high comedy – get lots of popcorn. The sickening affair will be what happens beginning the night of November 6, 2012 – that’s when we will see just how ugly and violent this country can get…
I’m guessing it won’t be Mike Steele 😉
Kind of ironic that the GOP lives with the curse of Richard Milhous Nixon’s Southern Strategy -which was in essence a disingenuous appeal to small mindedness (racism ) for votes.
In addition to race , the other political drivers in the post Civil War South were less government (No Federal intervention ), so they could repress Blacks and poor Whites . And , the aversion to taxes comes from the mill owners and big agri business who favored low taxes because they didn’t want money going to build schools that would siphoning off the supply of child labor.
So no government and no taxes became a mantra
that working people blindly support without understanding where the mantra comes from . What a legacy to build a political base around .
…and yet today Nixon’s candidacy would seem like a miraculous breath of clean, fresh air from that side of the divide.
Even way back then Anderson had to go indie, and McCain and Giuliani are mendacious to the point of literal insanity. The Cosmo Bunny is probably the only chance at a candidate with some degree of sanity and smarts, but he’ll be lucky to get nominated for another term, much less for president.
“Moderation” is a meaningless word that should be banned from civil discourse. The problem is sanity, intellect, and good intentions for the country, not moderation. It wouldn’t have mattered if Charlie Manson could somehow be described as “moderate” — he still wouldn’t have been working for ACORN or Mother Teresa.
Charlie Manson as a moderate? It would be interesting, to say the least, to live in a world where Charlie Manson is considered a moderate.
“We welcome Charlie Manson to Meet the Press. His new book, ‘Why Can’t We Just Get Along: bridging the gulf between Adolf Eichmann and Steve King’ has been praised by analysts on all persuasions as a badly needed call to finding a centrist consensus in today’s partisanship-torn America.”
David Gregory is enough of a tool to say that, too.
As bizarre as these times will be I won’t be at all surprised to see Gen. Russell Honore step into the fray
Let’s see. Who could step out as a Republican and try to speak some reason to the Republican base. It would need to be someone who the press would fawn over so he could get the free air time since he probably wouldn’t have much money in the way of a campaign war chest. It would also have to be someone who could credibly suggest that they have a different vision for America than Obama while coming at him from the right without being crazy.
I’m not seeing it. Obama, like Clinton before him, is already about as right politically as you can get before you start running into crazy ideological land. Anderson had the freedom of a relatively huge gap between the ideology of Democrats in 1979 and that of the crazy faction of Republicans backing Reagan – there was a substantial amount of room there to still be a Republican running to the right of Carter but not be “nuts”. Post Clinton the Democrats really haven’t left the Republicans any breathing space in that area – much further to the right of Clinton or Obama and you start hitting Bircher land.
Someone like Honore or Colin Powell or David Petraeus would fit the bill, and it wouldn’t be the first time. The Republicans recruited Eisenhower in 1952. Of course, by that time they’d been out of power for 20 years and the far right wing of the party had too little power to stop Eisenhower.
A minor correction: Obama is pretty much in the center of the Democratic Party and always has been (look at his record in the Illinois and US Senates). He (with backup from Pelosi and others) staked his presidency on “going big” on health care reform rather than settling for minor and partial reforms. He’s ended up far to the “left” of congressional Democrats on closing Guantanamo.
Those are two examples of Obama not being “about as right politically as you can get before you start running into crazy ideological land”. There are others.
Obama is (in my view) a center-left politician who will move left if and when the left organizes enough political power to make/allow him to.