Kristol is delusional 24/7 god I hate that guy
There is a precedent to the “white knight” scenario. In this case the 1976 Democratic primary, in which the more liberal/Northern wing got scared by Carter’s ascendance and fielded Church and Brown as late candidates—too late, in that case, though they won several late primaries.
they did not get the nomination tho
the dem primary in 2008 involved the varied spectrum of the left-center-right leaning dems taking (pretty sure anyway..) while the gop split involves the insane rump of the party refusing to sign on with anyone remotely sane
Kristol’s article, key quote:
“...another establishment Republican could enter the race in early February and still compete directly in states with at least 1,200 of the 2,282 or so GOP delegates...”
1200 of 2282? So this mystery contender would pop in out of nowhere and sweep the board by winning 95% of the remaining delegates? This is straight up delusion.
such a hateful buffoon, he’s a disgrace to journalism
you really have to read anything from bill kristol as coming from bizarro world
Read the whole thing, with its charts of when delegates will be chosen and its discussion of filing deadlines. It wouldn’t be easy to pull off a late draft or a late entry, but it’s not as impossible as conventional wisdom assumes.
The key, I think, would be if both Romney and Gingrich stumbled during January. If that were to happen, there would be a window of opportunity in February—during the gap between the first spurt of January primaries and Super Tuesday on March 6. The window probably closes around Valentine’s Day—Tuesday, February 14—so let’s call the late entry the Valentine’s Day option. That could be the last chance (unless there’s a deadlocked convention, which isn’t totally outside the realm of possibility either) for Republicans to throw off the old suitors and run into the arms of a new Prince Charming. Or two. And Valentine’s Day is for the young.
translation: the conventional wisdom is true, we are pretty much fucked.
ryan-rubio! *eyroll*
1200 of 2282? So this mystery contender would pop in out of nowhere and sweep the board by winning 95% of the remaining delegates? This is straight up delusion
They wouldn’t need to win 95% of the remaining delegates because presumably the front-runner at that point wouldn’t have 100% of the already-awarded delegates. A simple plurality would be enough.
Plurality would be enough to deadlock the convention, perhaps, but not enough to win. Besides, there ain’t no white knights waiting out there for the draft.
Silly above and beyond all the rest: the idea that Paul Ryan would be a good candidate to send into a general. Wasn’t there a swift and pronounced push back against his budget both within and without the party?
Besides, there ain’t no white knights waiting out there for the draft.
Oh wait.
1) there are no candidates out there with that drawing power. if there were, they would have run already
2) if they enter late they have 0% of the already awarded delegates, so they would need 95% of the remaining delegates to secure a majority for the nomination. otherwise they just muddy the field even worse and the end result is a brokered convention.
i would, that person doesn’t exist
― slandblox goole, Friday, December 9, 2011 2:23 PM (41 minutes ago)
silver says he’d put the % of this happening at 5–10, which i don’t really see either
there are no candidates out there with that drawing power. if there were, they would have run already
make it happen GOP.
Kristol throws out wild stuff almost every Sunday, then just ploughs ahead with something new a few weeks or few months later as if it never happened. You’d think he’d love Gingrich.
I’m quite sure Palin is dreaming the dream furiously. I’d be happy with Gingrich as the next-most-entertaining/next-most-erratic after her.
I’d be happy with Gingrich as the next-most-entertaining/next-most-erratic after her.
read this as “next most erotic,” and got sick a little.
Man, I’m lucky I didn’t pick that post for a Freudian slip.
gingrich-palin fanfic
oh that ^^^^^ idea is horrible.
The 22nd amendment:
Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.
The way I read this, GW Bush could run for Vice President, with Jeb at the top of the ticket!
President Newt will deal with that amendment in due course.
The way I read this, GW Bush could run for Vice President, with Jeb at the top of the ticket!
well, then jeb’s VP could be . . . oh, i don’t know
anyone else, i guess.
Chris Moody @Chris_Moody — RT @seanhannity Trump’s Debate for the candidates is a go!
hell yeah
it’s good to know that, in america — where we value freedom, toughness, and rugged individualism — a blowhard, imbecile millionaire can still host a debate even if almost all the candidates don’t show up.
re: Michele Bachman:
“She came up to see me four times. She would call me and ask me for advice,” Trump said. “She said if she wins, she would like to think about me for the vice presidency. Most importantly, I did a two-hour phone call for her with her people. ... And after all that, she announced she was not going to do the debate. It’s called loyalty. How do you do that? It’s amazing to me.”
Trump event is gonna be cancelled now, c’mon
yeah, love that bachmann quote.
donald trump is an amazing windbag. and such a real-estate guy: all bluster, all the time. really an embarrassment to the GOP. he (and, truthfully, “candidates” like herman cain) lower the party by using its machinery as a personal platform. i’ve never seen anything quite like it.
Fear and loathing in the salt mines (enjoy the comments):
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/12/09/second-look-at-a-brokered-convention/
Let’s face it: the Republican primary field is exceptionally, historically weak. If it would be possible to draft Palin, Ryan, Jindal, Daniels or maybe even Christie, I’d support a brokered convention. I frankly don’t care if Palin, Daniels, and Christie have ‘family reasons’. Military families of deployed service members suffer a great deal more than unfair and unflattering media attention, yet those service members still deploy. Time to put country first. Time to man or woman up and be the patriot you claim to be.
troyriser_gopftw on December 9, 2011
WOMAN UP
talkin to you Jindal
lol
would love it if Bobby got in the ring for realz
like an MMA-type ring?
against sarah palin, maybe?
Okay imagining Bobby Jindal covering G’n’R’s “Get in the Ring” has me deeply entertained.
like an MMA-type ring?
I dunno what this is, but if it’s like a WWF ring then yes
lol. hope palin’s entrance music is that black-sabbath song that bevis and butthead always rock-out to.
Jindal seems like the type who would go crazy and bite an ear off a motherfucker
bah. palin would make jindal tap 10 straight times.
Perhaps the elephant in the room is that the GOP is intellectually bankrupt and that they have been selling snake oil to their constituents for so long that they (the constituents) want looniness, hence the weakness of the slate.
Also, we need to pray really hard that Perry remains in this race as long as is possible.
interestingly, it didn’t have to be this way. they didn’t have to retreat to bankrupt neo-hooverism. in the 2008 campaign, mccain actually rolled-out housing relief policies that were to the left of obama, in many ways (essentially i think he proposed gov’t money directly to troubled homeowners, but i can’t recall for sure). and in the battle over the stimulus bill, the GOP could have offered its own stimulus proposal, prioritizing its preferred goals. instead, it went another way.
why? He’s not even funny anymore.
xpost
Neither the GOP or McCain had any intention of following a Hooverist path; they were desperate! Anything, anything that stucks!
and sticks too
yeah, perry’s a downer at this point. and he’s holding back our newt.
so are those other bastards, too (bachmann santorum overdrive).
Anything, anything that stucks!
new GOP slogan.
why? He’s not even funny anymore.
Because he’s actually depressing their base across the board
Perry is a non-factor and will likely drop out soon.
good. more votes for newt!
This is a weird one:
Who put it out? I don’t see any campaign-affiliated ID towards the end. A preemptive attack ad against attack ads—creative. If it helps box in Mitt, I love it.
You know what’d be extra great? Romney doesn’t win, decides to stick it to the party that hates him so much by running as an independent. (No, I’m not serious. If he were to lose and manage not to burn too many bridges, he’d cash in somehow.)
you know what’d be extra great? romney wins the gop nomination, and donald trump decides to stick it to the nominee that he hates so much by running as an independent
you know what would be best? if romney wins the gop nomination and palin, trump, cain, santorum, perry and gingrich all decide individually to run as independents creating half a dozen religious/political sects demanding that their personal messiah/politician lead our country to salvation
and then the bear comes in
russia?
Fozzie.
I was hoping Dan meant a big, hairy gay dude
that’s kinda what John Bolton is...?
Andrew Sullivan can’t legally run for President, though
Man, Fozzie for Presinedt does have a ring to it, though
IRAQA WAKKA WAKKA
Muppet Sec of State?
man does no one else remember that SNL skit, for real? ;_;
Eurythmics were the musical guests!
god they probably played “Don’t Ask Me Why.”
Beating up on foreigner’s accents/speech patterns is best left to the intimacy of your own grow room.
Protip: ‘beat’ sounds exactly like cock in French
Can someone please kidnap Newt until at least Florida has voted? It can only help.
That is sub-par cretinism coming from ‘Professor’ Gingrich. Are Austrians an invented ppl? It’s typical Likudnik BS designed to legitimize kicking out the Arabs from Israel altogether and it ignores the nuance of regional identity in favor of a brand of pan-Arabism that even Arabs haven’t really had any faith in for over thirty years. The man is a pandering ditz with dangerous delusions of adequacy.
Stop bringing me down. I like this better:
Ezra Klein’s reasoning is too reasonable to apply to this year’s Republican base. He says, fundamentally, that Gingrich is an unstable clown. So? Cain recently was polling above 25%, when no other Republican candidate was polling that high. That sort of discounts the “he’s an unstable clown” argument down to size.
Hope you’re right—Ezra Klein as Frank Grimes:
An apt analogy.
The Candidate Formerly Known as the Guy Who Had Trouble Counting to Three (now negotiating Counting to One):
This mussolini guy is a clown, he’s going nowhere
Same with that Charlie Chaplin look-alike, Adolf Wotzisname.
lol @ early adoption of THIS GOP CANDIDATE COMPARES WELL WITH THE MOST BRUTAL DICTATORS IN HISTORY trope
Merely pointing out that one’s personal conviction that a certain politician is a clown doesn’t make him disappear from politics. Many people misunderestimated Bush, too.
lol @ early adoption of THIS GOP CANDIDATE COMPARES WELL WITH THE MOST BRUTAL DICTATORS IN HISTORY trope
― undervalued aerosmith tchotchkes sold in bulk, Friday, December 9, 2011 9:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Permalink
can you name some leftists (or better yet, non-brutal dictators) who were totally dismissed as cranks/clowns and later ascended to presidencies/prime ministerships? I’m sure there are some... Maybe Castro?
(though obvs. he’s a brutal dictator)
“he’s using postage stamps...you know who else used to put stamps on his letters...Josef Stalin”
You would have thought he’d just have some sort of inkpad/stamp deal that read “Mail this you fucker or you’re off to the gulag.”
Joseph Stalin: dictatorship is magic
can you name some leftists (or better yet, non-brutal dictators) who were totally dismissed as cranks/clowns and later ascended to presidencies/prime ministerships?
Not quite the same thing, but there were a bunch of buffoonish Southern Democrats who held high elective office through the previous century, and a couple of them made decent third-party runs at the presidency. Mitigating factors—factor—obviously.
Stalin the Brony is a lol for the ages
xps
that’s a misreading of the klein piece. he says he likes gingrich! just that
a. a large % of people with influence in GOP have reasons to strongly dislike gingrich on a personal level. many already do.
b. tons of ridiculous personal scandals
c. his policy views are prob even less reliably conservative than romney’s
newt has a lot of polling support atm but it’s pretty soft and he hasn’t experienced the full public ‘vetting’
how many times does fox news need to play this ad a day for the race to change? not very many times.
Don’t say misreading; “fundamental misreading” is the proper locution when addressing Newt-related matters.
Perhaps the elephant in the room is that the GOP is intellectually bankrupt and that they have been selling snake oil to their constituents for so long that they (the constituents) want looniness, hence the weakness of the slate.
That’s astute, in part. But I’d say the phenomenon exists in tandem with a potentially larger reality that Obama enjoys the inherent advantages of incumbency, as well as, I think we can still say, reasonably strong political skills (stronger than any national figure since Bill Clinton, at least). While the economy represents a significant opening for Republicans, it may not represent enough of one for (at least arguably) stronger Republican candidates like Chris Christie or Jeb Bush to enter the race, given the (low but real) growth rate and potential for unemployment declines, as well as of course the GOP’s hand in creating the economic collapse and Obama’s continuing personal likeability. This more than anything probably accounts for the weakness (if it is that) of the field.
There is certainly a desire for looniness that has long existed in the GOP electorate and has seemed to become more amplified since their midterm loss in 2006 and especially after their loss to Obama in 2008 (which losses reflected larger demographic trends away from the Republicans, whose brand was damaged badly at the margin by Bush (who of course never won in the first place), that are ongoing and may be reversible only by making the party more palatable to hispanics (or moving it to the left)). In fact, I’ve not entirely jokingly characterized the current state of the right in terms of the five stages of grief, with birtherism as denial, the “tea party” (and filibuster) as anger, the primary process (and the marginally saner Boehner/supercommittee) as bargaining, a Romney nomination as depression, and an eventual election day loss as acceptance. Gingrich’s boomlet may be a reversion to stage 2, such that the process will take longer. That looniness also may well go much further back, to Clinton’s accession in ’92, which led to murder accusations and the Gingrich revolution, among other things, or even 1990, when a guy named Rush Limbaugh went to #1 in the ratings while a Democratic Congress pushed tax increases over the pledge of a “moderate” Republican President who simultaneously was helping to strengthen the Clean Air Act.
But the desire for a non-Romney is not looniness alone—the lack of heavyweights cowed by the incumbent has allowed a claim on frontrunner status to be made by a Northern, famously data-driven Mormon in a largely Southern, anti-intellectual, and often explicitly “Christian” party. While the base may well have to ultimately accept him (and would do so, for the most part), Romney simply is not a natural fit for his party (and perhaps not a natural, period), which is why he has had difficulty gaining significant support anywhere outside his native Northeast, Michigan, and Inter-Mountain West/Mormon country, as well as why his most recent and current challengers have all been from the South(/Midwest) (and not born with silver spoons in their mouths) and have all enjoyed a slight advantage over him.
The race now is down to Romney and Gingrich, of course, with the electorate having ultimately figured out that the other “mainstream” candidates were not sufficiently prepared to be standard-bearers for the party (with the exception of Santorum, perhaps, but angry nerd isn’t really “AGL” on either side; he only lightens up occasionally when policy is off the table, it seems), even if some of them briefly made themselves seem more “likeable” (Bachmann, Perry, and Cain all scored well on the beer midterm, but as we approach the final, the first is asleep, the second has turned into a sloppy drunk, and the third clearly couldn’t keep his hands to himself and got kicked out of school). Gingrich is now (at least temporarily) winning that race on both likeability and perceived conservatism/toughness. While Willard Mitt can try to turn on the charm a bit and hope that Gingrich forgets to look at the note from his granddaughters reminding him to smile or commits some other gaffe (probably inevitable), Romney’s real work will be on the second front, on which he’ll have to go after Gingrich in both debates and tv ads hard enough to do some damage without seeming desperate. Assuming he can, it may not have too much impact in Iowa, where they like their candidates to play nicer and there isn’t much time left, but it may help there at the margin (it certainly wouldn’t be good for Mitt to lose second place to Ron Paul) as well as down the road.
While Gingrich is perfectly capable of taking himself out of the running, I think the real key to the race at this point may be how far influential figures in the party go towards vouching for Romney and, more importantly, declaring Newt unacceptable. The latter is widely regarded among beltway/political insiders as erratic, undisciplined, and a pompous asshole, which rightly causes concern among not only the other side but within his own party about his suitability for the office. There are a good number on his own side who have said so, and many more who could. The question is whether they will, and when, how, and by whom, as well as whether it will have much if any effect upon the primary electorate (that looniness factor again), a symbiotic factor perhaps. John Sununu has begun to inhabit this role for Romney in New Hampshire, where it’s safest to do so, while unaligned Terry Branstad in Iowa will keep his powder dry. It will be interesting to see what Jim DeMint (a Romney leaner, perhaps) and Nikki Haley do in South Carolina, as well as how active a surrogate Chris Christie will be nationally. I think the key to the race will be Florida, where the role of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio (and perhaps Charlie Crist) could be significant. While Romney theoretically could rebound from a loss there with February wins in the Great Lakes and Southwest leading up to Super Tuesday, the polls today suggest that Florida is a must-win for him, putting Jeb and Rubio in a potentially kingmaking role. What they do may have ramifications for their prospects in 2016, as well as quite possibly for the VP slot (for Rubio, perhaps; Bob McDonnell may be strong competition) this year. Do they want Romney to win the primary? Does Rubio want to be on the ticket? Do they think Romney can win? Do they want Obama to win the general? I don’t know the answers.
Oh, and hi guys. :)
Hello and welcome to your extended break from the Offspring to take time with us!
who is this person irl-ilx
Romney’s un-Republican characteristics make him a potentially strong Republican candidate in the general, moreso than Newt most likely, but I think Obama still has to be called the favorite...
http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/mark-mellman/196063-is-obama-toast-in-2012-
http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/mark-mellman/197687-strategy-and-structure-part-ii
but see this potentially key framing of the election that could be read to call for more of a tossup, as long as Romney is the nominee: http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2011/11/brownstein_1.php
If party satraps finally accept Romney, then Rubio as VP nominee looks most likely; Rubio will Keep Mitt Honest, according to Tea Partiers.
romney/rubio is a decent ticket. they’ll carry 42 states in ’12.
romney/rubio is only a good ticket if the most active 25% of the party doesn’t go into conniptions over romney and try to field a tea party scarecrow candidate, siphoning off volunteers and votes.