I’d laugh at the suggestion that Joe Scarborough might run for president except for the fact that he’s really no less plausible than Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul or Herman Freaking Cain. Don’t forget that Mitt Romney won despite not being a southerner, not having any charisma, and having created the model for ObamaCare. He won despite once having a pro-choice record, and despite having made promises to the LGBT community. He won despite being a Mormon in a Southern Baptist party.
For a long time, the Democrats correctly felt that they had little chance to win the presidency unless they ran a Southern candidate. The reverse is probably true for the Republicans at the moment. That doesn’t mean that the base of the party is clamoring for another moderate governor from a blue state, but they might be willing to settle for a northerner out of pure expediency.
Scarborough is in an unusual situation because he’s technically from Pensacola, Florida, but he’s been living and working in Manhattan for long enough to be a New Yorker. As an employee of the loathsome MSNBC, he has another strike against him. And he doesn’t have the foreign policy chops you’d hope to see in a presidential candidate, but then neither do any of the other widely talked about contenders.
He has media skills. He can think on his feet. He knows how to speak to blue America. He can probably raise a lot of money.
But I don’t think he is willing to be unorthodox enough to pull off a coup for moderates. To be successful at that, he’d have to win primaries in most of the blue states and then do well enough elsewhere against a divided opposition to grab the nomination. I don’t think a non-conservative can do that without breaking substantially from the GOP on a host of issues that would energize non-traditional Republicans. Is he willing to talk to young adults about climate change, protecting the environment, civil liberties, gay rights, and ending the Drug War? If he is, he might be able to carry New England and the Mid-Atlantic, and that would be a start.
Unfortunately for moderates, the GOP in places like Washington, Oregon, and California is so radical that moderates don’t have much of a chance. I guess I could check the primary rules in those states on a case-by-case basis, but Scarborough would not win any caucuses.
I’m tempted to argue that his campaign would do about as well as the campaigns of Rudy Giuliani and Jon Huntsman, but I think Scarborough could potentially do better than they did.
After all, consider the competition.
Scarborough has to get past the intern who was found dead in his Ft Walton Beach office. The incident was kept very quiet locally and has never been explained to the satisfaction of many of his (then) constituents. There was a very suspicious ruling by the ME, who it was discovered, had been fired,at least once, earlier from a similar post.
Just recently more rather odd information has been discovered pertaining to the ME. A storage unit was auctioned off and was discovered to contain many specimens of human body parts. The unit belonged to the ME. There have been no charges filed so far but it is very strange.
I was going to mention this but you beat me to it.
If anyone wants anecdotal proof that the Washington/National political media favor Republicans 2001 – not 9/11 – offers a great example. Two Congressmen had situations with female office employees – one of whom died in his office under suspicious circumstances, the other of whom disappeared under suspicious circumstances. One of the Congressmen was the subject of 24×7 cable coverage the entire summer of 2001 – so bad that Dan Rather took to calling CNN the “Condit News Network”. The other literally had zero mention of his “situation” on national news, and barely any local news coverage.
I don’t think Scarsborough will run because this isn’t one of those scandals, like Lewinsky, which is already fully baked in the public consciousness and no one except extreme wingnuts is interested in talking about. No, this was fully swept under the rug so any details that get out into the press will be completely new, thus of great interest to the general public.
Scarborough has to get past being a blithering idiot access journalist dolt.
You could make 100 ads where he says something idiotic and then it cuts to mika rolling her eyes like ralph cramden’s wife
but compared to the people who really are running … you’ve definitely got a point there – being an obvious and pathetic joke is almost a prerequisite for the GOP nomination
Well, it’s well-proven that the GOP is capable of nominating someone who doesn’t please the base.
Hasn’t worked out so well for them lately. On the other hand if they nominated someone who did appeal to their base they probably wouldn’t even carry the Southern states. And Scarborough is one of those guys who thinks he knows everything about every topic. Hard to see him doing well in the debates. (Of course here in Colorado Tom Tancredo – who’s running for governor again {snort} – has simply announced that he won’t participate in the debates. That might be a good tack for Scarborough too if he does decide to run. 😉
Guys who think they know everything never, ever duck debates, even when they really ought to. C.f. Newt Gingrich.
Here in WA (and I believe CA’s Republicans are similar) the presidential process is heavily weighted toward caucuses since the advent of the Top Two primary. Scarborough would have no shot. And can you really see him giving up his comfy MSNBC perch to spend 18 months doing fundraising and visiting county fairs? I can’t.
I’ve seen “Morning Joe”. He’s no Moderate.
he is now.
He is not a moderate.
He’s just not a completely rabid right wing nut.
Bloomberg is a moderate. Chris Shays is a moderate.
You can land a C5a in the ideological space between JoeScar and those two.
That’s correct.
You really need to be careful in interpreting Jonah “doughy pantload” Goldberg’s Magnum Crapus “Liberal Fascism”.
It’s not that liberals are fascists, it’s that rightwingers have gone SO far off the reservation that, to them, fascists are liberals!
And suddenly it all makes sense…
Joe’s not stupid enough for the base. And he likes to argue. On the other hand his arrogance factor is right up there. In the end, anyone with as much tape on him as MSNBC has is one long series of attack ads in the making.
What makes you think that Joe would be able to do well in New England?
Pish Posh!! Our crazies are just whacked out as those in the MidWest. Our crazies are about the same percentage of Republicans in the MidWest. There just aren’t as many of them.
um, the rest of the clown car never had a dead girl in their office..
I’m just sayin’.
Not yet.
He has media skills.
Because he can read a teleprompter? So can Jim Gardner.
He can think on his feet.
Because he has pithy one-liner responses to Mark Halperin? That’s like calling JoeScar the tallest midget in the circus.
He knows how to speak to blue America.
Proof? Does anyone even watch his show besides idiot Beltway hacks?
He can probably raise a lot of money.
I’m sure he can from his big business buddies. So what? Doesn’t make them, or him, smart. What did Sheldon Adelson and Foster Freiss get out of blowing millions on Newtie and Little Ricky Santorum?
“Unfortunately for moderates, the GOP in places like Washington, Oregon, and California is so radical that moderates don’t have much of a chance.”
WTF? Writing here from Portland, Oregon. Sure, the last time a Republican was elected governor was 1982, and every state-wide office is now held by a Democrat, but the legislature is closely divided, with the Democrats having small majorities in both chambers. Our governor got his agenda enacted at a special legislative session last year by peeling off a few suburban GOP legislators to create the requisite super-majority.
When the Oregon GOP nominates rightwing cranks for statewide offices, they get creamed, but when they nominate candidates who don’t foam at the mouth, elections are close. To me this says that the Oregon tradition of moderate “mossback Republicans” like Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood may be in abeyance, but it’s not dead. The situation in Washington state is similar.
The head of the Oregon GOP is a certifiable right wing crank who thinks that radioactive waste has some sort of magical health benefits. But I don’t think he’s calling the shots.
Der Farm’s observation applies in CA as well. I’m in one of the most left-leaning parts of the SF Bay Area. My district routinely votes democratic by about 70%-30%, but that 30% is almost entirely on the extreme right. We have a Limbaugh radio station that’s just awful. The only areas where our wingnuts might be a little less psychotic than the national norm are LGBT and contraception, but they more than make up for it with anti-Hispanic racism. And climate change denial is rampant.
To look at it from the other side, I used to have to go to Oklahoma a lot for my job and most of the young people out there were hip and left-leaning. Their 30% is just as liberal as our 70% and our 30% is just as fu***d up as their majority.
So I don’t see Scarborough doing much better than Cruz & Co. in blue states in the general and I can easily see him doing much worse in the primary. He’s said many things that the Tea Partiers hate far more than Christie’s embrace of Obama during Sandy. Search redstate.com for mentions of Scarborough (if you can stand it).
But I also agree with several commenters that Scarborough – in spite of being hated by the right – is actually extremely conservative – especially on economic issues. He’s one of the worst austerity fetishists out there and he’s painfully illogical about it. You’ll see that he’s really appallingly stupid if you spend any time listening to him. He’s just less bad on social issues because he’s surrounded by other East Coast elitists.
Scarborough has the charisma of a frog that’s been dead for five days. Plus, all his years of pretending to be a reasonable moderate are surely not going to tickle the teabaggers’ collective G-spot.
This would be a minor point in the larger discussion, but Romney’s major contribution to Romneycare was to veto major chunks of the legislation and force supermajorities of the Democratic Party dominated House and Senate to pass over rides, thereby forcing the reforms into law despite Romney’s opposition at every turn.
Which is all of a piece for our favorite crooked CEO/gubernator as he went off to run for president on the platform of “I am universally despised in the state I used to govern!”