On the heels of GWB’s re-election and predictions of a permanent Republican majority, the GOP power brokers had but one task: the selection of GWB’s 2008 replacement. Wouldn’t have been difficult for them to see that they had the perfect candidate. A total party guy. Practically out of central casting. Former governor and congressman and sitting senator from a not quite red state. George Allen was the man. He would have been a strong candidate.
Until the 2006 GOP “thumping.” When GWB’s messes and assorted scandals caught up with Republicans. Including Allen’s re-election loss to a guy with little money and no prior experience in elected office.
Immediately climbing back into the ring for even higher office after a re-election defeat must have the lowest odds for success in US politics. Allen passed. Not even the deluded Santorum was out in Iowa running for President in 2007. Allen’s 2012 comeback was for the senate seat he’d lost and then only after Webb declined to seek reelection. But he lost again.
How quickly and easily Allen went from being considered a formidable national candidate to loser is instructive. A small rent in his manicured, reasonable persona in an election year when the tide was running against his party and against an articulate and attractive, if not well-funded and perhaps not all that well organized, opponent was enough to take Allen down. Just barely. What also can’t be left out of the equation is that the GOP didn’t consider him to be vulnerable and was more focused on tough senate races. It was a unique combination of factors, but all elections are like that.
What if Allen had been re-elected? The Democratic Party (with the exception of Howard Dean) didn’t do much to stop that from happening. And they don’t seem that much wiser today. Not with Chris Christie on cruise control for his re-election. Yet, perhaps he’s too old school for the new GOP to win the nomination.
Charles P Pierce suggests that the one to watch out for is Scott Walker who he aptly describes as the “goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin.” And he makes an excellent case.
He’s ambitious as Lucifer. He can work a room and, as the Iowa piece linked above proves, he’s already got some serious political allies on the ground in Iowa. But there is one thing that nobody should ever overlook when judging his appeal to the superheated Iowa Republican base.
He’s already beaten back all the bogeymen.
He’s beaten the unions. He’s beaten the thousands of union goons who stood around on his front lawn. He’s beaten the public school teachers. He’s beaten — with the help of even bigger gobs of out-of-state social-welfare money — the gobs of out-of-state money that came to Wisconsin to throw him out. He’s even skated on a serious corruption rap dating back to his days as Milwaukee county executive. He has, as they say, the holes in his T-shirt, and he’s already won the battles that the folks in the base are simply slavering to win over the people that the folks in the base are slavering to destroy. (He got the single biggest ovation at the Republican convention in 2012, and he gave a helluva speech.)…
What Pierce doesn’t mention is that Walker and Koch have already taken over the RNC. Reince Priebus is their guy. Looks as if they have been playing a long-game in full public view.
Still fail to see how Walker can flip enough states to win the Presidency, but ReinceCo has time, and will have plenty of money, to work on that. Unless a WI Democrat can beat googly-eyes in 2014.