Is Brent Budowsky speaking as a typical Texas Democrat, or as a proxy for the intelligence community?
I can think of several nations Rick Perry is fit to lead, but the United States of America is not one of them. With his latest comments, perhaps Rick Perry wants to be the running mate of Vladimir Putin in the coming Russian election.
Perry will self-destruct within 30 days. It has already begun.
Do you think the Bushies like this guy?
“You don’t accuse the chairman of the federal reserve of being a traitor to his country. Of being guilty of treason,” Karl Rove told Fox News Tuesday. “And, suggesting that we treat him pretty ugly in texas. You know, that is not, again a presidential statement.”
Tony Fratto, the former deputy press secretary for Mr. Bush, sent a Twitter message right away that Mr. Perry’s comments were “inappropriate and unpresidential.”
Pete Wehner, a speechwriter and policy aide to Mr. Bush, called Mr. Perry’s remark “the kind of blustering, unthinking comment that Perry’s critics expect of him.”
Perhaps Rove is just protecting his turf. He doesn’t want any of that Texas money going to Perry instead of his American Crossroads project. But he isn’t the only Bush official to publicly cry foul.
There’s a reason no one was really talking up Rick Perry over the last year. I guess the big chiefs think he’s kind of a dick. Now that Perry is in, and in the lead in at least one poll, they’re getting desperate again. I mean, they need to seriously consider the fact that Chris Christie was just admitted to the hospital for lightheadedness (later explained rather weakly as an asthma attack). The man is two hundred pounds overweight and his circulatory system is expressing its displeasure. As for Paul Ryan, he is nothing more than an all-grown-up Eddie Munster. He’s ridiculous on every level. A cartoon of a man, with numbers that don’t add up.
Isn’t there some general they can drag out of retirement? This is getting hard to watch.
30 days? It wasn’t even 30 hours. The polls right now don’t matter, Perry won’t get a cent from Wall Street. Or the Rovian network. He’s already done. Obama is gonna have $800M+ to play with. You can’t go to war against that with a teabagging uberdick.
The (slim) possibility of becoming President of the United States is just sitting there, and Republicans aren’t going to be able to give it away come this winter. You either have to sell your soul, or never have one to begin with, to go for it. If that doesn’t cause them to abandon pandering to the absolute worst of our society, then nothing will.
AKA, their base?
Do the Republicans really need to win the presidency? It seems to me they don’t need to control the government; they only want to prevent government from functioning. 41 seats in the Senate, 5 seats on the Supreme Court, and a legion of Bushie moles in the permanent bureaucracy are sufficient for that.
I’m still not convinced he has what it takes to handle the national atmosphere. The only reason I’ve given him pause is his very high polling before he got in, and the fact that he’s leading in a poll since getting in.
Before he announced, I didn’t think he had it. I still don’t. But with a weak field it might not matter. This is getting interesting.
Steve M. says what I mean:
also most of bush’s gaffes were fairly innocent – he wasn’t generally the guy getting in front of the podium and saying “fuck you”, which it appears Perry actually is. Bush was good at looking mildly stupid instead of saying something truly outrageous, even if he was backing something truly outrageous.
“Isn’t there some general they can drag out of retirement?”
I daresay Colin Powell would look really, really good to the Establishment, eh? But I don’t see him answering the call — totally aside from the fact he’d never make it through the primaries.
I have a feeling colin powell is looking at Obama and realizing that he’d be in the same exact jam if he was president right now, and is probably glad he decided to dodge that particular bullet.
Old General out of retirement…I’m kind of surprised they were not able to find one. What I don’t understand is why the GOP couldn’t find a real successful business person to run (besides Mitt). Could be the tea baggers have scared off everyone else?
Well there’s always Bloomberg.
But beyond him – point to the “real successful business person” who wants to take the pay cut and the increase in responsibility that comes with being President.
The ones who would do it would be folks who might do it out of a sense of civic responsibility (okay, stop laughing, it’s a possibility) or the ones who have an ego trip that needs to be fulfilled.
Being the President of the USA is a tougher job than being the CEO of Apple or the President of Berkshire-Hathaway. And it pays less. And if you fuck up you get to go down in history next to guys like Richard Nixon or Herbert Hoover. And if you’re really lucky you’ll be remembered as fondly as Grover Cleveland or George HW Bush (you have to be insanely lucky and talented to be another FDR or Lincoln or even Reagan).
There’s no upside to moving from business to the Oval Office. it’s more work, less pay, and more chances to fuck up. If you’re already a successful CEO and rich beyond the dreams of Croesus why would you want the job?
But maybe you can explain why this cartoon and his buffoon friends have been able to kick the president’s ass and totally – totally – control the agenda of the government of the United States of America. They are driving the bus and Obama is running after it. Maybe that’s what he meant by “leading from behind”.
Maybe for the same reason that Obama is doing a bus tour promoting free trade agreements – in the exact locations where manufacturing plants were shut down and the jobs relocated to Mexico after NAFTA.
Because maybe, just maybe, Obama and Plouffe and company aren’t the brilliant strategic geniuses they thought we were. Maybe, just maybe, he’s a gifted speaker with a calm demeanor who had a great string of luck from 2004-8, leveraging his personal appeal and natural electoral advantages (economy, demographics) and having his strongest opponent, Clinton, badly screw-up the primary campaign by ignoring the delegate distribution rules.
Because if you evaluate his team on their performance since election night 2008, and ignore the period before that, it’s hard to identify anything that is particularly brilliant, either politically or policy-wise.
Man. Tough crowd.
“The Lilly Ledbetter Act”.
Nothing about extending the Bush tax cuts and destroying our nation’s economy.
Nothing about extending the Afghanistan commitment to the 12th of never.
Nothing about letting the Republicans turn a whole year working on healthcare reform into a year wasted on a piece of shit bill – which incidentally created the Tea Party.
Obama’s successes have been small and his failures monumental.
Why, it’s almost as though you’re a total liar and a charlatan. How curious.
Have to agree – Obama didn’t destroy the economy (but his team did far less than they could or should have to revive it). And his Heritage Foundation Health Care Bill is better than nothing.
No, my point isn’t that he’s awful overall – but that he’s been at best mediocre on most domestic issues, worse-than-mediocre on foreign relations (boy was that Nobel Prize given too soon — wonder if they will ever consider asking for it back), and literally as-bad-as-Bush on Constitutional rights issues.
Excuse me, destroying our nation’s economy? Wtf?
The Obama Stimulus Created More Jobs In 2010 Than Bush Did in 8 Years
I criticize him all of the time, but destroyed the nation’s economy?
comparing him to Bush. The tax cuts Obama extended were, indeed, “the Bush tax cuts”.
So maybe you’ll like this better – Bush pushed the economy overboard and then Obama held it under water.
Oh wow, he signed a bunch of bills passed by Congress. And this is supposed to be brilliance? What, no other President has signed bills passed by Congress?
And do you want to talk in depth about the quality of some of these, like the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009 which has been an unmitigated disaster, largely because of how it was administered?
I’ve seen other versions of this list that were better because they included executive orders and other actions that the administration took without needing Congressional approval. But even those only look impressive if you don’t compare the equivalent lists of previous Democratic administrations. For every EPA advancement under Obama there has been a backslide, such as unilaterally opening up off-shore drilling. For every reversal of a “dumb” (to use Obama’s descriptive word in the campaign debates) Bush-era policy, like the stem cell research ban, there has been at least one case of endorsing, defending, and extending of another dumb Bush policy, like permanent detention without charges.
But what we were really looking for was the sort of brilliance on the campaign trail — the tactics that won all those delegates from under Mark Penn’s nose or the convention speech that turned all those McCain slogans back on him. We still haven’t seen that.
GreenCaboose, I can understand your frustration—particularly if what you’re looking for from Obama is “the sort of brilliance on the campaign trail” from 2008.
Here’s how I look at the 2008 campaign:
1 – Any Democratic nominee would have beaten any Republican nominee that year. Elections tend to be referendums on the (recent) past. W. Bush had a (largely) failed presidency that was capped off by the Great Recession and the financial meltdown in October ’08. (And despite Obama’s convention speech, one month later he was behind in many polls. The post-convention “bounce” giveth and it taketh away, too.)
2 – Al Giordano had a prescient essay about Obama’s campaign in the Boston Phoenix in the fall of 2007. He first noted that there’s always room in a Democratic presidential primary campaign for an insurgent (Hart in ’84, Bradley in ’00, etc.). He then noted that insurgent campaigns always stumble when the campaign goes national because they don’t have enough money and people in place. Finally, he noted that Obama’s campaign had the potential to be different because his ability to raise money and organize campaign volunteers meant that if he won Iowa or New Hampshire, he’d be able to go toe-to-toe with Clinton’s campaign.
In other words, Obama’s ’08 campaign was more about the circumstances surrounding him and his ability to organize people and money. Whether he wins or loses in 2012, it’s most likely the case that those factors will determine his fate then, too.
The problem Obama has with his critics is that his critics compare him to the Republicans under Bush. In that administration, the Congress drove and Bush signed — except for foreign policy, which Cheney drove.
Obama doesn’t have that kind of Congress to work with. The Democrats are bought and the Republicans are bought more and ideologically rigid to boot. It was hard to stop stuff in the Bush Congress. It is hard to get stuff done at all in the Congress Obama must work with.
And yet look at that list, most of which were voted on by enough Republicans to pass unless they occurred during the brief period in which Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority.
The current bunch of Republicans are 100% about campaigning and posturing and 0% about governing. Democrats have been heavily invested in governing and have had a lot of governing time sidetracked by phoney Republican campaign stunts.
The President has been punctilious in his efforts not to be publicly in campaign mode unless he is at an official Democratic event. That is a responsibility for being President of all the people. Republicans have no such self-imposed restrictions.
If you are looking for the brilliance of 2008 on the campaign trail, wait until the season gives the President the permission to be in campaign mode again.
People forget that all of those hard-hitting notable quotes from FDR, Truman, and others mostly came from convention or campaign speeches. Very few came from the Oval Office. Most of Kennedy’s notable lines were from governing all the people during a contentious civil rights era and Cold War. Obama has wars but they don’t exert the demands for unity in and of themselves that the Cold War did.
My belief and hope is that when 2012 comes, we will see that brilliance again. My only question is how do we leverage that to offices way down the ticket. In places that haven’t seen Democrats in over a decade.
This Perry thing is going to be AWESOME!!! Another stupid redneck idiot. Everything he says and does is Bush on steroids. Perry will remind the electorate daily how Bush wrecked the economy. We will remember disaster and fear and economic collapse and torture and wiretaps and death and a stupid fucking Iraq war paid for with my tax money. But I digress this has to be good the Democrats and I could use some laughs.
“Isn’t there some general they can drag out of retirement?”
Jeb Bush. Or rather George Bush’s Smarter Brother.
After the Republican Presidential Reality Show goes on for another 4 or 5 months he’s going to seem like a breath of fresh air. And like George, the media will treat him as if he is a centrist but the wingnuts will see him as one of them without him having to make a lot of crazy statements to win their approval.
Don’t underestimate the value of “freshness”. Part of what helped Clinton in 1992 was that after he clinched the nomination Perot dominated the headlines for several months – a period during which Clinton, Perot, and Bush all struggled to poll over 35%. He was the Democratic nominee but almost forgotten, which was probably a good thing because when he’d been in the headlines it was often in stories associated with past female associates.
Then Clinton played the sax on Arsenio Hall (remember him?) and did the MTV thing and – voila – suddenly he was new and fresh again.
You know the Bush’s have planned for Jeb to follow George but had to shelve that idea after the 2006-2008 disaster, but given enough time the public will forget anything.
Jeb is probably in in 2016.
People forget. Obama proved in 2008 that he is the most dominating candidate on the planet. He performs at a ridiculously high level, and he almost never makes mistakes. When he runs into a problem, boom, he hits a grand slam with a speech.
Romney is a sacrificial lamb who might have a chance if everything goes to shit at just the right moment. The rest of the field isn’t remotely serious.
When is the last time somebody that’s been out of office for almost ten years ran for President and was even remotely successful? Nixon?
Look what happened to Giuliani. And Fred Thompson. I have to figure you lose your fastball and the fire in your belly a little, even if you’re a member of the Bush dynasty.
Florida will have gone through three different governors post-Jeb if he were to decide to run in 2016.
Giuliani and Thompson lost on their own merits, or lack thereof.
But yes, it is an unusual event. But then Presidential elections are infrequent events so we don’t have a lot of past data to compare against, especially if we limit ourselves to the TV era.
The nominee of a party will require massive amounts of money and media attention and also be acceptable to their party elders. Jeb Bush would have all three.
In addition, the bar would be set woefully low for him. Remember how low they set the bar for W during his debates. Well, Jeb’s first advantage is that he’s going to be compared to W, and on that count he will appear much better — as I said he would run as “George W Bush’s Smarter Brother”. Then he would be compared to the Circus that passed for the Republican Presidential Race now — just the absence of a track record of really, really stupid comments will distinguish him from the rest of the field.
Remember, a tactic works only as long as the your opponents haven’t figured out how to beat it. In 2000 Rove built the whole Bush campaign on the aura of inevitability as frontrunner starting back in 1998. In 2008 Clinton tried to ride the same tactic but lost. In 2012 the aura-of-inevitability is yesteryear’s tactic. The last-minute-savior might be the tactic of the moment, especially in a year without a strong candidate.
I’ll give you this: he did almost never make a mistake, and his instincts were first class. His organization was top notch, and his primary tactics were a thing of beauty.
But I’m going to argue that the experience of 2008 and 2004 may not apply to 2012 because a key difference: In 2012 he’s going to have to run a campaign that he’s never run before – a campaign for re-election as an executive. That is, a campaign in which he must defend his recent/current record that is fresh on the minds of the voters.
Great speeches and slogans are terrific for inspiring people who are unhappy with the current government when you are the outsider – but much less effective when you are the incumbent. Fawning media coverage about your “No Drama” style and how well you’ve managed people in the past are of great interest to an electorate getting to know you for the first time, but of no interest to the electorate who’s watched you govern for the past 4 years.
Perhaps his team has a great plan for 2012 that they are keeping secret. But all indications are they are going to adapt the approach they used in 2008. Now that worked for Rove, since his approach largely consists of a mass of negative smear attacks. But will Obama be able to be successful using the campaign style of 2008 in 2012?
He is going to run against Congress. Just wait. He has gotten enough done prior to the 2010 election that this do-nothing Congress cannot take away those accomplishments. And getting rid of both Osama bin Laden and possibly Muammar Gaddafi insulates him from the Democrats as wimps attacks sticking. So he will have foreign policy accomplishments.
And if anyone but Romney is the GOP candidate, the financial industry might go with Obama and try to hamper him with their support of Congress.
So he will have a strong position against a Congress with a collective approval rating of 14% (at the moment). Exactly the environment to run against Congress and to ask for a Congress he can work with.
If it works like 2008, “no drama” will apply to the internal operation of the campaign and the ability of the staff to work as a team. But this time you might see some bipartisan fire at Congress. While at the same time standing beside the members of Congress he wants to come back. And ignoring the ones that don’t want to stand beside him.
He will be less shrill that any Republican challenger other than Romney. If Romney runs, you might get more competing visions. But the shrillness of other possible candidates will give him the latitude to go all Harry Truman on Congress as still be less dramatic that the Republican challenger (Romney excepted).
And if Rick Perry is the candidate, it will be like Martin Luther King contending with Bull Connor.
I would look for even greater emphasis on grassroots GOTV organizing. The 2010 election showed that Republicans can do it too. The ground game could turn out to be more decisive than the media messaging once the campaign moves into high gear.
Obama will have not only Congress to run against but probably a fatally flawed GOP nominee if either Perry or Romney emerges.
I think Perry is the more likely. If so, while you see a replay of civil rights battles from the 1960s, I see a replay of Civil War issues from the 1860s. Obama as Abe positioning himself as a moderate Unity president against an opponent with extremist, secessionist inclinations. Like Abe, O’s reelect prospects will seem iffy until well into the election year, then some turning point event occurs to greatly improve his chances. Perhaps great news about the economy, a major jobs bill proposal or breakthrough with Congress, or just the fact of someone as far right as Perry being nominated.
If Romney emerges, he will make for a tougher opponent but with the upside that the Tea Party and xtian evangelical groups will be displeased, perhaps enough not to turn out. Of course Romney would be far better at competing for undecideds in the middle than Perry.
I like Dem chances much more going against the Bush-like Texan.
But O will need to offer some bold substance on jobs to be credible and turn out his base– it can’t just be a negative campaign and nothing else.
this is just awesome news for john mccain!!!
palin/mccain 2012!!!
(most conservatives really just want a do-over of 2008, so don’t laugh too hard …)
… Isn’t there some general they can drag out of retirement? …
How about the moldering corpse of Dwight D?
He already refused.
The only Republican with the gravitas and foreign policy experience to be President is Dick Lugar. But he is too old and most current Republicans would no let him near a general election.
I don’t even think they have a good general. And Bloomberg wouldn’t touch this bunch.
I guess one of the Koch brothers are going to have to run themselves. Or maybe Koch/Koch.
If the Obama campaign starts building momentum, the question Democrats face is how to get broad and transformative coattails. Right now, I’m not sure they are imaginative enough to think this boldly. The real battles are getting some fire down-ticket that will turn out folks for mid-ticket.
Well if we’re counting guys too old, I bet George H.W. Bush could beat any of the current crop. Of course, that’s assuming his record could overcome the stigma his son later left on the family name.
I’m glad to hear you say you don’t think Bloomberg will run. He’s the only one who scares me – in the sense that he would have a chance at being elected. The rest of them scare me because of their politics. Oh, and because they are all crazy.
Bloomberg won’t run…as a Republican.
But if there’s a “Third Way” opening, he’ll be Mr. Ross Perot.
Obama/Bloomberg 2011. Unstoppable electoral sharkaconda.
Jobs problem? Solved. Bi-partisanship? Delivered.
Get it done.
Forget Bloomberg, NYC will get out against him if he even tries to run. What has he accomplished in NYC so far? get the city council to change term limits against the will of the voters, muzzle the grass roots org’s via his “philanthropy”, hire some spoiled brats who had to resign due to incompetence (Cathie Black, Stephen Goldsmith http://www.nyc.gov:80/portal/site/nycgov/menuitem.047d873163b300bc6c4451f401c789a0/index.jsp?pageID=
nyc_photo_slide&catID=1194&doc_name=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nyc.gov%2Fhtml%2Fom%2Fhtml%2Fbios%2Fbio
_om_dm_ops.html) – the snowstorm in which ppl died – well, let me not ruin my morning by continuing this rant that is already putting me in a bad mood. let’s hope he contented with having enriched himself many times over during his “terms” as mayor.
Since when did foreign policy experience matter to the US electorate?
It’s sad Molly Ivens is no longer around. She was familiar with governor Perry; calling him governor Goodhair; she could have shed a lot of light on what he was like right about now.
“As for Paul Ryan, he is nothing more than an all-grown-up Eddie Munster. He’s ridiculous on every level. A cartoon of a man, with numbers that don’t add up.”
BooMan, quality writing like this keeps me coming back again and again. Much love.
“You don’t accuse the chairman of the federal reserve of being a traitor to his country. Of being guilty of treason,” Karl Rove told Fox News Tuesday. “And, suggesting that we treat him pretty ugly in texas. You know, that is not, again a presidential statement.”
Sure it is. Sadly it is exactly what a seeming growing number of knuckleheads in the USA want. A reactionary, tough talking, “principled” dumbfuck is just what dumfucks want. They’ve elected W to two terms. They elected this God fearing, secessionist yet country loving idiot to ten years in the governors office in TX. He pulls in millions from people who think keeping America ever more (tax) free for the rich is all that’s necessary to fulfill their patriotic duty.
“You don’t accuse the chairman of the federal reserve of being a traitor to his country. Of being guilty of treason,” Karl Rove told Fox News Tuesday. “And, suggesting that we treat him pretty ugly in texas. You know, that is not, again a presidential statement.”
Sure it is. Sadly it is exactly what a seeming growing number of knuckleheads in the USA want. A reactionary, tough talking, “principled” dumbfuck is just what dumfucks want. They’ve elected W to two terms. They elected this God fearing, secessionist yet country loving idiot to ten years in the governors office in TX. He pulls in millions from people who think keeping America ever more (tax) free for the rich is all that’s necessary to fulfill their patriotic duty.