Bill Kristol is really depressed about the quality of the Republican candidates and he is pining for fat-ass loudmouth Chris Christie to get into the race. Why not someone popular in their home state? Is Bobby Jindal busy? He’s strong enough that the Dems can’t even find someone willing to run against him. Gov. Christie will be a one-term governor whether he runs for president or not. He only won because his opponent used to run Goldman-Sachs. As for Rick Perry, I don’t know what he did, but no one in Washington seems to like the guy.
Now there are some legitimate excuses. With nine candidates on the stage, and answers restricted to one minute, it’s hard to really show your stuff. And two of the candidates—Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney—did provide respectable performances. But no front-runner in a presidential field has ever, we imagine, had as weak a showing as Rick Perry. It was close to a disqualifying two hours for him. And Mitt Romney remains, when all is said and done, a technocratic management consultant whose one term as governor produced Romneycare.
My heart weeps for Bill Kristol.
Rick Perry’s debate performance was horrible and abominable. I still don’t know whether to count him out or not because of his poll numbers. They are virtually the only reason I keep him in and considered him in the first place. Gonna repeat it again: he doesn’t have what it takes to compete on the national stage.
But Chris Christie? LOL! That dude is even worse. Governor Santa’s political career is going to be over by 2012, not advancing. Set aside the fact that he’s a terrible Pol — does anyone believe that he’d be able to have the stamina to run a national campaign? He’d have a stroke before the convention.
Sorry, typo. 2013.
Perry’s probably getting short shrift in DC because even more than Dubya, he’s quite obviously a lightweight, and we don’t need another Texan idiot with thumb on the button or a Cheneyesque veep’s hand to the beck, pulling the strings like Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy
Prove himself to be an abysmally stupid and unelectable hick, I would assume.
Oh, I can tell you what he did. Rick Perry’s father was a rancher – well off but not rich. Perry attended Texas A&M, went into the Air Force, and came back to become a career politician.
Now where in that resume do you see “child of wealth and privilege and/or entrenched Republican political elites”? You can be as intellectually average as George W. Bush and be supported by the conservative elites in DC, but they’ll be damned if they’re going to kowtow to someone who is beneath them in BOTH intellectual capabilities AND in status.
Bill Kristol might have known that he was the intellectual superior to W, but he also knew that W was his superior when it came to being a member of the aristocracy. It’s damn hard for courtiers to suck up to the low-born barbarian prince from the provinces, even harder when the low-born prince is an ignorant jackass like Perry is proving himself to be.
(This doesn’t explain Kristol’s initial support for Sarah Palin, but I suspect that he was distracted from both her intellect and her low-born status by her “other assets”. Like the starbursts that kept getting into Rich Lowry’s eyes.)
I think you might have something there.
Lefties can be fat too. Can we not use this a perjorative?
I would say, though, that I think americans would probably be less likely to vote for Christie simply because he is substantially overweight. Pretty people have a lot of advantages.
I wonder if the wingnut “intellectuals” will ever face up to simple reality: that stupid beliefs and ideas attract stupid people. The spectacle on the debate stage proves that that process has reached its inevitable conclusion.
I’m having fun watching the elite wingnut freakout over Perry’s performance last night. They’re all so sure, with each new entrant into the race that they’ve found their savior. But then each one just turns out to be the flavor of the month. Ultimately they find flaws.
So sad.
But I was reading somewhere this morning and they linked to an old LA Times article from 1999 about Bush doing poorly in the debates and it was the same exact freakout. And guess what, it didn’t matter.
I really doubt that someone’s debate performance really matters much to most people, especially average Republicans or so-called Independents though. For them, choosing their candidate is mostly emotional. They want what looks like a tough daddy figure no matter how dumb he might be.
In fact I wonder if that’s what they don’t like about Romney underneath it all. He’s good-looking and the Mormon thing shouldn’t matter much but he’s just too “egghead” for them.