2012 GOP Presidential Campaign -- "This individual's going to accuse me of an affair for an extended period of time."

andrew sullivan

The new polls today are striking in two respects. First, Newt is headed toward a landslide victory in the early states, apart from New Hampshire. He beats Romney in Florida and South Carolina by 15 and 19 points respectively. But in the same poll, Obama beats Gingrich in the general election in both Florida and South Carolina! I know it's way too soon, and I will bet, I dunno, $10,000, that the Republican candidate will win South Carolina next November. But still: Obama beats Gingrich by 12 points in Florida. Nationally, Obama beats Newt by around the same margin he beat John McCain - 6.9 percent - during a brutal recession.

Romney is far more competitive with Obama (behind by only 1.5 percent) but still underperforms the generic Republican by 2.5 points. So now you know why the Establishment is beginning to panic.

romney 42.2, gingrich 38.8 on intrade

lol. "i'm not a betting man," but at those odds, i'd say put 10K on romney.

obama elected pres - 50.4
romney elected pres - 20.9
gingrich elected pres - 17.5

obama+romney would be a pretty good bet. ~70% one of those two people becomes president?

I'd be too nervous to put a sizable amount of real money on either Romney or Gingrich right now. If I had go, I'd go with Gingrich.

lol, and just wait till newt secures the crucial sarah palin endorsement!

and we can build this dream together
standing strong forever
nothing gonna stop newt now.

I forget that Palin's still out there, guaranteed to swoop down at some point. I don't think her endorsement would do much for Gingrich; presumably he has 95% of her true believers in the bag. If she could come up with some kind of plausible rationale for endorsing Romney (presumably getting much in return), I could see where that would hurt Gingrich.

Depending upon your tolerance for Matthew Dowd and/or Charlie Rose, and how hopeless a junkie you are in general for this stuff (I got it bad!), here's a half-hour of Dowd on Gingrich:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12028

you guys appetite for that kinda thing is still blowing my mind; i know there's a stage at which elections become intravenously fascinating but at this stage it still seems like a half hour of thinking about gingrich (/re-streaming a debate/w/e) you could avoid

It's semiotics. I listen to these talking heads earnestly mention how The [insert noun] Issue will "slow him down" with certain voters and it's all crap. Pundits only care about these "issues" insofar as they affect a candidate's performance.

I wouldn't mind this folderol if our press didn't already spend too much time reducing endemic problems into "issues" suitable for Politico types.

it is for this ^^^^^^ reason that i only listen to dennis perrin.

Weird coincidence: Perry briefly made reference to semiotics in last night's debate.

The political-junkie mindset has been a fact of life forever. You either find this stuff fascinating or you don't. I wouldn't be as interested right now if Romney were sleepwalking to the nomination as was expected, but what's going on right now is amazing--and, with Romney's campaign seriously teetering, I don't think negligible in terms of who ultimately faces Obama.

I'd argue nothing has changed except for the media, looking to increase hit counts, starting the vetting earlier. The limelight shifting from Bachmann to Perry to Cain to Gingrich isn't much different than we've seen in other primary cycles, except now we're inundated with debates months before the first caucus.

I mean, of course we won't know who the frontrunner is. It's December 2011!

The number of debates has been insane, I agree. But I think the central story--a perfectly acceptable candidate who would have a good chance of beating the incumbent getting spurned by his party, and said party toying with walking over a cliff--is, again, fascinating. I don't know that I can remember anything similar since I started paying attention in '76.

I think you walk off a cliff, not over one. You see, this is what happens when you spend too much time watching Rick Perry.

The bet as an extension of Romney's temperament:

http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-stump/98402/the-10000-question

Re: that article's starting premise, since when has anyone called Mitt Romney 'unflappable'? He's generally good at not lashing out with, for instance, a "Have you ever sexually harassed anyone?", but his general lack of spontaneous overreaction doesn't make him any less flappable. He seems pretty thoroughly flapped in most public appearances where he's challenged in the slightest. I'm pretty sure that's what Constipation Face is all about.

http://www.rwongphoto.com/RW2547_web.jpg

Hertzberg has a few yuks here.

xxpost

Like, for instance, he pseudo-affably laughed his way through others dogpiling him during the Republican debates in '08, but he always seemed to be one jibe away from blurting, "Hey, fuck you guys, okay?".

an affable flapper!

http://lh4.googleusercontent.com/public/n_fvsnwARat8mSveYOuNzRIQEXNP3lw5t8fkJgs55j3_NNHD0wawGsier5HUerUUx1Xm1HyjLT1tFzsXSeH0O4t9bt6D1x5Fguu9xLnZESM2zYcPBIN-CyqEh7M7AGdFTCjaKxN8P8hk6A

Looks like Rick Perry as Daisy Buchanan.

Romney's heated exchange with a veteran

but he always seemed to be one jibe away from blurting, "Hey, fuck you guys, okay?".

― In Your Velour Slacks (Hairplug Receipts), Monday, 12 December 2011 16:03 (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

lol, otm. the weirdest thing about the $10000 bet clip is just how much insincere masking of base human emotions is going on; with Perry's weird, smiling attempt to indict Mitt & then Mitt deploying his autochuckle so he can be seen to laugh it off. there's this long silence after Perry says his part, it just hangs in the air. both smiling. so weird.

“He is not going to make it,” he said. “Because you can’t trust him. I just saw it in his eyes. I judge a man by his eyes.”

So, does he agree with Mr. Romney on any issue?

“I kind of liked his health care plan in Massachusetts,” Mr. Garon said.

take this to the zing thread

He seems pretty thoroughly flapped

Love that.

Wow that confrontation between romney and the veteran looked bad for romney. not sure how it played on tv, if it was video-captured, but sounded bad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hRdqGKA782A

ok, idk how to embed youtubes on ilx anymore i guess -- anyway, ron paul continuing to produce high quality production videos that make newt look terrible

reminds me of when gordon brown had to talk to an old lady.

delete the "feature=player_embedded" parameter; the URL needs to look like "watch?v=blahblahblah"

I've had that happen. You can't embed an embed code from somebody's else's site; you've got to go to the original YouTube page.

Paul's going to bring down Newt; Huntsman's going to bring down Romney; Newt and Romney are going to destroy each other. Into the breach, the only man who can truly restore America.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Rick-Perry-3.jpg

it's too bad he's totally insane bc ron paul is clearly the most intelligent dude on the debate stage.

wha? no. (romney)

I'm still cracking up at

PERRY: I'd cut three departments; commerce, education and... uh... help me out here!
PAUL: There's five!

i don't get a sense that romney is particularly smart. i mean, he's not dumb (like Perry or Bachmann)

he's v smart.

The way I read Ron Paul is that his convictions have some very attractive bits, like knowing what torture is and why it is bad, and some bits that are batshit crazy, like a return to the gold standard. When he talks about the attractive bits he sounds intelligent. His greatest strength is that he has convictions, not that he arrived at them by being smart.

No Ayn Randian should ever be considered smart about anything but inanimate objects.

i don't get a sense that romney is particularly smart

His plan is working! The RR base have contempt for anyone who looks or acts smart.

it's easier for ron paul to sound knowledgeable. he occupies an enviable position of ideological purity: everything's reducable to a simple set of libertarian litmus tests. it's harder to be mitt romney, who lives on this planet, and has a pragmatic view of the world.

pity the poor mitt romney.

I think Romney is smart but he's a not very good actor. He seems to be struggling with the role that his political consultants have assigned to him.

i hate to quote Joe Scarborough, but this is OTM:

"If Newt Gingrich is the smartest guy in the room, leave the room."

there's a clarity of speaking that ron paul has that partially comes from ideological purity but also comes from being clear thinking. articulation is a key identifier of intelligence (esp to me). romney may be bundled up by his handlers and struggling to sneak around issues but he's also very difficult to listen to. i often will be listening to him for five minutes and realize that i have no idea what he is talking about. other politicians -even ones who are similarly going the slimly bullshitter route - don't seem to have that effect on me.

eh, i appreciate clear, straightforward thinking and communication, too. i just believe it's a lot easier for paul to do this, given his ideological purity.

If he was any more pragmatic, he'd be.. oh, yeah.

also: ron paul is a loon. the opposition research on his is overwhelming. no-one's bothered to do it, yet, since he is a marginal/vanity candidate. but if and when the other GOP contenders turn on him, his support will evaporate down to his small basic core.

for an example of what i mean, review the articles concerning race in the newsletters affiliated with ron paul.

re Paul's ideological purity: the guy invokes ~The Founders~ every bit as much as he alludes to Randian pablum... which is why his nominal support for Citizens United is a pretty big ideological blind spot imo (as it seems pretty clear to me that those dudes at the Constitutional Convention would have balked at the thought of corporate personhood. maybe i'm wrong?). Also, he supports DOMA under the guise of "states rights", but wouldn't that suggest he could/would support anti-miscegenation laws? doesn't sound very libertarian to me.