Paul Waldman is wise to provide all the appropriate caveats, but Joe Scarborough’s remarks on his MSNBC program this morning are fascinating anyway:
“Nobody thinks Romney’s going to win. Let’s just be honest. Can we just say this for everybody at home? Let me just say this for everybody at home. The Republican establishment — I’ve yet to meet a single person in the Republican establishment that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election this year. They won’t say it on TV because they’ve got to go on TV and they don’t want people writing them nasty emails. I obviously don’t care. But I have yet to meet anybody in the Republican establishment that worked for George W. Bush, that works in the Republican congress, that worked for Ronald Reagan that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election.”
Call me crazy, but I don’t think Scarborough was making this up. Of course, Scarborough is living in Manhattan now, and if you spend enough time there you can find it hard to believe that a typical Republican can be elected to anything, ever. Still, it’s an odd moment in time for Republicans to be feeling so down on themselves. Romney has broken through. He has a clear path to a clean win of the nomination. All the ducks are nearly in a row. Why the pessimism?
I think it’s because of a lot of things. Mitt Romney had a big victory in Maryland last night, but he still failed to crack fifty percent. Wisconsin was closer than the polls were predicting. Gingrich and Santorum may have terrified the Republican Establishment, but they really can’t fall in love with Romney. They have buyer’s remorse and the thing isn’t even mathematically wrapped up yet. They’re all doing their duty and trying to push Santorum out of the race, but their hearts aren’t in it. They feel like they won the Booby Prize.
I also think that Establishment Republicans are a little ashamed of what the party has become. It’s not just Olympia Snowe who’s ready to quit in disgust. They can see what Romney has had to do to win this thing, and they don’t feel good about it. And then there’s another group, the true believers, who think Romney’s a soulless hack and a phony conservative, and they hate having to pretend otherwise. I think both groups agree, though, that Romney isn’t going to win because he doesn’t deserve to win. Among political sophisticates, some feel like if he isn’t Ronald Reagan then what’s the point? And the others know what kind of dishonest game they’ve been running on Obama; they know the cards the president was dealt (and who dealt them), and they know he’s done an admirable job under the circumstances. They think Obama is going to win because he has a good record to run on and Romney has bupkis. They also are clear-sighted enough to recognize that the president and his political team are top-flight pros.
So, is Romney going to turn this all around somehow? Can he just pull Paul Ryan or Marco Rubio out of a hat and change everyone’s perceptions? I don’t know. The one thing I can say to make Republicans feel better about their chances is to remind them that the people who will decide this election don’t know who Joe Scarborough is and wouldn’t give a shit about his opinion even if they did.
So if Obama is so sure of victory, how come Romney is within 1% of Obama in the Pollster poll of polls? (OK, I know the Rasmussen polls skew the sample somewhat). And that is just after a very damaging primary and before he has had a chance to really consolidate his party around a campaign to defeat a President most of them absolutely hate.
The Pollster poll of polls also shows Republicans running 5 points ahead of Democrats in the congressional races. So this isn’t all about a Romney vs. Obama thing. Republicans may not love Romney, but they do hate Obama. And for so long as the economy remains problematic even independents may be sold on Romney’s supposed business acumen after a lot of advertising.
And all of this is before SCOTUS strikes down Obama’s signature achievement as President.
I actually believe the President will win, but there seems to be little solid evidence to support that view right now. And without a solid congressional majority, will Obama even be able to do much to enthuse his base?
“OK, I know the Rasmussen polls skew the sample somewhat)”
Somewhat??? Of the 10 polls on that page, 5 are Rasmussen! Gimme a break.
In my experience, no offense intended, Frank, ppl outside the usa completely do not understand this election. I don’t know why exactly, perhaps one must be on the ground to get the complexity of the mood of the country. Europeans I’ve discussed this with, see it as a back and forth between Reps and Dems, equally balanced, polarized, etc. The discussions of 2008 that I found persuasive, however, saw 2008 as marking a turn away from 1980/ Reagan back to the trajectory of New Deal- Great Society. Note also that Clinton-Bush were both of the Vietnam generation and Obama, subsequent. It’s not a given how this will turn out because of CU, voter IDs etc and what will happen to the two party system with the GOP having marginalized itself, but the position of the majority of voters has changed, on key ingredients of what was previous GOP vote-getting points and the ethnic balance of the population has changed. The current moment is more about the .1% ers clinging to their position vs trying to reverse the damage done to our democracy under Bush/ Cheney and previous and address the global and environmental issues. For some reason it’s difficult to see the complexity of this from Europe, though we’re all reading the same internets presumably
I don’t think we disagree. I too see Obama’s election as a historic shift away from the 1980-2008 Reagan Bush revolution. But so far Obama has been able to achieve little and SCOTUS with CU and the 1%ters have been fighting an effective rearguard action. I find it appalling that a terrible candidate like Romney can be within 20% never mind 2% of Obama. All I am doing is pointing out that current opinion polls give little grounds for gross Dem optimism or complacency. Even excluding Rasmussen polls, Obama is only 4% ahead. I most certainly do not see Republicans as an essential part of the US political landscape and have occasionally taken Booman to task for wishing that Republicans could be reformed/more reasonable etc. Nothing would please me more than to see the Republican party destroyed and the chief opposition to (a very conservative) Dem party coming from the left/greens/libertarian movements. But I see little empirical evidence to support the notion that the Dems will sweep the Presidency AND congress by large margins AND that they will move US Governance significantly to the left if elected. Wishing it would happen doesn’t make it so.
Well we do disagree because Obama has achieved a great deal. First of all – to name five, the economy – against huge pushback from obstructionist, HCR, Libya, Iraq (I’m leaving out so much) and very important he’s manouvered the republican obstructionism into the foreground – that is huge. Second, my point, you’re looking too much on the surface but I’m not sure from a distance how you can do more than that because it’s made up of many components. In one recent conversation with a European (after I asked how’s the Euro doing and my conversation partner wanted to change the subject to USA elections) I asked have you been following what’s happening in Wisconsin? well, the person -who knows much about international politics- knew nothing about Wisconsin. so that’s my point in a nutshell. think about the difference between Wisconsin 2010 and Wisconsin 2011, not to mention 2012. Totally different as far as electoral politics goes. I’m not saying Obama will sweep the election, or even that he will win, but what is being played out is not captured by saying Obama is only 4 points ahead or something. I’m very glad for Booman’s post about CU saying it’s a war. I’ve thought for a long time this period of USA history is analogous to the Civil War period – probably could find an old comment from 2006 or so to that effect.
Obama will most likely win, but it’s not a sure thing. Besides all that could still go wrong with the economy, Iran, or unknown unknowns, there remains the question of what effect Romney’s pathological mendacity will have on parts of the electorate (I’m thinking of your post from the other day about the Quantum Candidate http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/4/2/85334/00069). And if his handlers can achieve the sort of makeover George Bush Sr.’s worked on their candidate in 1988, the election could be very close.
And if his handlers can achieve the sort of makeover George Bush Sr.’s worked on their candidate in 1988, the election could be very close.
Do you really think that Axelrod and Co. will put an Obama/tank ad up, or let PBO be Willie Horton’d like Dukakis was? Besides, Romney is an off-putting asshole anyway. I’m still waiting for one of his handlers to tell Mitt to host a BBQ and ply the corporate media with food & beer. Like Cranky McSame did.
Of course not: Obama is no Dukakis, and he is the incumbent. My point is that if Bush Sr., an equally improbable, flip-flopping, entitled doofus (“born with a silver foot in his mouth” in Anne Richards memorable phrase) was made into a credible candidate, so could Romney.
Bush Sr. was at the very least a long-time intelligence asset if not a real, on-the-ground, working agent, Lucidamente. He was playing in a whole different ballgame.
Bet on it.
AG
Totally different election, totally different candidates. Bush Sr. had been vice-president, fought in WW2, wasn’t defined by a crazy base, succeeded a popular president…
she quit because her husband’s in deep shit.
“disgust” has nothing to do with it.
fascinating
I didn’t know that.
Wow. I wonder why this isn’t getting more attention. It seems to me Snowe is absolutely disgraced by this.
It really doesn’t matter if the company was doing something illegal in their recruitments. What matters is this. Snowe and husband made millions when Goldman Sachs bought out the company. Snowe turns around and votes for the Goldman Sachs bailout. That’s a huge story. How is it that nobody knows about this?
as Arthur Gilroy might put it “hypno-media.”
Susie Madrak reported on this a few weeks ago. She was way ahead of the curve.
But THAT is why Snowe is retiring. She’s not disgusted with her party, she’s part of that whole corrupt borg.
Why does Mr. Scarborough say this?
Because he has either figured out and/or is inside far enough to know that the fix is in, and for whatever reasons he is secure enough to at least halfway let the cat out of the bag.
Let the fix out of the fixtures.
Like he says:
Now…lets get real here. Suppose I translated this into prizefight-speak.
Man…the sports world would be up in arms if a major sportscaster ran this lick on national TV. Why? Because it’s believable, that’s why. The general public thinks that fixed fights are possible, that they have happened in the past and even in the fairly recent past. Scamsters don’t want to to let the marks start to get wise to the game, right? Where’s the profit in that?
But in politics?
The fix is so far in that you can actually tell the marks that the fight is fixed and they’ll just keep clomp, clomp, clomping right along, rooting for their favorites right up until the last round of the fight.
Duh.
Do you know who William Schaap is? (Or was…he’s been so non-personed that I cannot even find a listing about him in Wikipedia.)
He is (or was) a lawyer who specialized in intelligence disinformation schemes. While testifying in a trial rgearding James Earl Ray’s guilt or innocence in the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1999, Schaap covered a lot of disinfo bases.
Here is his take in a nutshell:
More translation…towards the fix idea, this time.
Yup.
So well imprinted is it in the minds of the Amnesian sheeple that a smart, agressive, self-seeking talking head like Joe Scarborough can dare to hint at the truth of the matter with little or no fear that a serious percentage of the public will buy into it.
Deep, trance state politics.
Politics as usual in the
InformationTrance-formation Age.Bet on it.
“Impossible!!!” you say?
Reread the previous paragraphs.
How deeply have you been imprinted?
Hmmmm…????
AG
Except I have a problem with your analogy.
In the boxing world, Scarborough would be suspected of trying create lop-sided betting so he could get better odds on the chump. He goes out and says that every boxing expect expects the champ to make mincemeat of the chump. But the champ os going to take a dive in the eighth round, and Scarborough is going to collect 40-to1 on his bet.
I don’t see that here. Scarborough isn’t saying the fight is fixed. He’s saying Romney is a chump.
Another possibility, of course. My point is that the whole situation has been media-fixed in order to nominate said chump. That’s also the best boxing fix method. Neither boxer in a big fight has been “bought off” precisely, but one has been painstakingly built up by being given bouts against a string of tomato cans in preparation for the big payoff against a real fighter. All of those great fighters who complained for years about how other boxers and promoters were ducking them? Like dat. Other, less skilled fighters were being prepared for the legal fix.
Schaap:
Sheer prophecy regarding the way Ron Paul was handled. Remember all of those early polls where he was the only Republican candidate who ran well against Obama? Remember how he was treated in the early
rebates…errr, ehhh…debates? While real chump losers like Cain and Bachmann were given lots of time to dangle in the wind of public mockery but Romney was given lots of respect and good camera angles too?Fix, Booman.
You know it, too.
Down inside, past the imprint thing?
You know it.
AG
Here’s where I agree with you.
The Republican Establishment, which is really the leaders of the party and their top donors (mostly Wall Street and the energy industry), and the media/think tank folks in NYC and DC, thought Romney was the best candidate to go against Obama. But they really were kind of desperate for a better option. It was only among the announced candidates where Romney was considered their clear preference.
Ron Paul? Just on defense issues alone he’s an outcast. They starved him of attention, that’s true, but they didn’t need to do that because Republican voters do not agree with Ron Paul on a whole host of issues. He was never going to get more than about 15% of the votes. If he wants to maximize his support, he needs to follow the example of Jesse Ventura and stop pretending to be a Republican.
In any case, the GOP fixers settled on Romney, but not so he could lose. It was simply the best they could do.
As for the “neutral” corporate media, those who aren’t part of the Republicans’ operations considered Romney the least insane guy with the most moderate record. So, they went easy on him. But it isn’t some scam to set him up for a loss. What sane person is going to want Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich or Hermann Cain or Rick Santorum near the nuclear triggers?
If you want a better explanation for what we’re witnessing, it’s a combo of two things. The best candidates already took a dive by not running. They didn’t run because they didn’t think they could win. And that’s because of the crack-up of the party. A guy like Huntsman could be real trouble for the president in a general election, but he got laughed out of the room in the primaries. The GOP has almost no compelling candidates, and those few with talent and brains aren’t able to attract the support of the base.
You need to give up on this idea that Ron Paul was ever a serious threat to win the nomination and that only the media and dirty tricks thwarted him.
Some of Ron Paul’s ideas are more popular than anyone wants to let on, and some of those ideas are taboo and are ignored in the way your guy suggests. But Ron Paul lost for the same reason Huntsman lost or Guiliani lost before. The base of the party didn’t like him.
I repeat:
Had Ron Paul been given equivalent media attention to that which was offered the other RatPub candidates…Romney particularly…the entire situation would have played out much differently.
The “Republican base?”
Which Republican base? What was the percentage of Obama’s 2008 popular vote win again? 52.6% is about right, I think. So over 47% of the electorate voted for McCain/Palin. Is that “the Republican base?” Roughly 125 million people voted. Eligible voters at that point in time numbered around 210 million. McCain lost the popular vote by about 4 million. Thus the addition of only 5% of that non-voting 85 mllion…or a combination of such a movement and voters who switched votes from Obama to McCain…would have resulted in a McCain popular vote win.
Do you not think that there are way more than 4 million voters in the U.S. who would have been pro-Ron Paul in a general election, voters who would add to the real “Republican base?” The “Republican base” people who continued to give Butch II passing grades no matter how seriously he flunked his presidential tests? Not the ideologues, not the pro-Israel Neocon hawks, the Tea Party retirees or the DC hustlers but the clomp, clomp, clomping “I’m a Republican ‘cuz that’s whut mah parents taught me to be!!!” folks? Millions of them? I believe that the early…and continuing… polls showing Ron Paul running better than any other Republican candidate against Barack Obama were quite accurate. And I further think that the military/industrial/financial/intelligence/PermaGov complex saw the same thing and very purposefully, very effectively deployed every asset that they had against Ron Paul from the moment that he entered the race. Why? Need you ask? He’s a fucking bomb-throwing revolutionary in oldster drag, Booman!!! End the wars? End the ongoing financial porkbarrel scam? Please. There are trillions of dollars at stake. Of course they opposed him.
And they won.
Just as I said that they would.
They won with Romney.
The safe choice.
The choice that is supposed to lose but if he won would be quite manageable.
Bet on it.
Fix Central?
Bet on it.
AG
Funny, but when Paul got his increased media attention, you people complained that they were smearing him. Sorry, but increased media attention = increased scrutiny, which implies that they’re going to ask about his newsletters. Rather than admitting to the truth of the matter, he thought he could ignore it and walk away like Herman Cain could keep spouting “999!” and “my experts approve” to avoid criticisms of the plan.
Ron Paul and his ideas simply aren’t popular when they’re scrutinized — unless you’re on the internet. Trust me, he should want as much media attention as he got. When people realize what he really believes in full, it’s not something they embrace.
“You people,” eh?
The last time I heard that phrase it was from one of the original WWII-era black Marines. He was telling me the horror stories of going through basic training in down-country Alabama with an entirely segregated troop that was commanded entirely by white people and not issued live ammo just in case they decided enough was enough. When they finally made it through basic, an old southern Marine general came to address them. They gathered in formation on the base’s drill field and the old general began his speech with these words.
He never forgot it, this man who volunteered to die for his country. The whole troop walked off of the drill ground in unison, and the officers couldn’t do anything about it. Too many men, not enough officers.
“You people,” eh?
Nice.
Like everybody who supports the goals of the Paul movement is the same sort of lower being.
Ron Paul adresses this type of knee-jerk thinking very nicely. Here it is:
What? You think collectivist posturing is limited to race and religion?
Or did you mean us anit-war people.
Us non-interventionist people.
Us anti-racist thinking people.
Us anti-endless national debt people.
Us anti-security state/nanny state people.
With enemies like you, who needs friends?
AG
Peculiar.
It’s peculiar here that there is a leap to offense from the commenter, based on a fixation on two words among hundreds written by the previous poster, particularly since
We could start with the fact that less than a year ago Ron Paul said that he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act if he had been in Congress in 1964, and go on from there. In reality, Paul’s claim that “The true antidote to racism is liberty” is useless, since he supports taking away laws which provide equal liberties for minorities. Paul also empowers those with racist views in other ways as well.
Booman, I see no meaningful evidence for your supposition that Establishment Republicans “…know what kind of dishonest game they’ve been running on Obama; they know the cards the president was dealt (and who dealt them), and they know he’s done an admirable job under the circumstances.”
Establishment Republicans may be pandering to their rabid base, but when they drag out their completely unreal, fucked-up rhetoric about Obama’s failed muslimterroristfascistcommie record, they are quite consistent and convincing in their wild lack of objectivity and disrespect of factual information. Does it get any more Establishment that the head of the RNC or the GOP Congressional Caucus? What of the bullshit Priebus and even the R Senators peddle? I can’t square that with the level of mendacity it would take for them to know they’re lying as they say these things. I think they have rationalized it all, and that they are not carrying around the thoughts you suppose for them.
there are Steve Kings and Louis Gohmerts in the world who are actually insane.
But John Boehner and Mitch McConnell know exactly where Obama stands ideologically, and exactly how well he has handled international affairs, national security, and the economic crisis.
You need to try harder to wrap your head around it because Rush Limbaugh knows, too.
That’s a lot for my head to wrap around, but I’ll consider it. As I rethink the issue, I don’t believe that their sincerity or their “real thoughts” make much difference. They’re horrible people, lying liars who are hurting the vast majority of the people they serve, whether their lying is motivated by “just business”, pure cynicism, their true ideological beliefs, or a combination of these and other attributions.
As long as their resultant actions are divisive lies which damage the future of our governance and our planet, and a consistent unwillingness to take action on nothing except that which helps the 1%, the outcome is identical, no matter their motivations.
If “…Establishment Republicans are a little ashamed of what the party has become”, then they infuriate me, because they are doing nothing meaningful to change their party. Empowering the Kings and Gohmerts and the many base voters who share their delusions has been a disaster for our country, and they need to take measures to actively disempower those rabid dogs.
I would not count the Establishment’s success in pushing Romney through as meaningful, because the rhetoric of the primary season has driven Romney severely to the right, to the point that Mitten’s stump speeches are now hostile to the facts and to decency. The GOP Establishment could demand a more reasonable, fact-based set of arguments from all the candidates, but they are unwilling to do so. Plus, if Romney loses as is presumed in this post, the empowered wingnuts will blame the Party’s loss to a vulnerable, hated “other” on Romnney’s “moderate” status, setting the base on fire to seek a Prime Wingnut Presidential candidate in 2016.
They’re so glum because it’s not even close, and close elections are easier to steal.
Not even fifty Katherine Harrises or Sandra O’Connors could put Mitt into the White House.
You can just keep on publishing those polls ….but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
I wonder if any clear-eyed establishment Republicans realize that they’re better off with four more years of Obama — to fatten up the country for them to plunder again.
The Obama Campaign apparatus is the best anyone has seen in a generation. they are professionals on the cutting edge.
I think Mitt will lose because he’s got no story, at least none that he’s willing to tell. “Born richer, got richer.” The kind of “work” he did for a while, people don’t get.
It actually is work, restructuring a business, firing people, getting financing and such, but he structured it all so he never was at risk, so even that won’t work.
His work with the LDS? Cultish helping-his-own. The Olympics? He helped Utah dodge a bullet but the Olympics are still a cesspool. Massachusetts? I’m alive today because of RomneyCare, and I would make an ad for Obama because of it.
Otherwise, his story is of using wealth to get more wealth. No pain, no struggle, no redemption. Even George Bush had the bottle and the Texas Rangers or whatever that loser team was that he used taxpayer funds to fix. Romney has absolutely nothing except five handsome, scary clones.
The only thing that can save him is his wife’s MS, and I don’t think he’s able to play that card, because at some level, he wouldn’t stoop that low (unlike John Edwards, say). So he’s stuck with nothing. It’s low Republican turn-out that may win this for Obama.
This and a penny is worth a penny. As you make clear in the rest of your article, they are ready to obliterated everything good to defeat Obama. So what the fuck does it matter if they feel bad about it? They should all be imprisoned anyway.