With news that Long Island Congresman Peter King is thinking a run for president, a couple of questions come to mind. First, as we have discussed King’s record here recently, can a former terrorist be nominated to as the head of the Republican Party. I suppose it’s possible if the candidate overcompensates enough, and that is precisely what King plans to do. He wants to run to rebut Rand Paul’s isolationism and anti-counterterrorism policies.
“It bothers me,” King told Politicker. “Rand Raul is talking about running for president, doing filibusters on drones. The image of the Republican Party is that we’re more concerned about Americans being killed by CIA attacks at Starbucks. We’re more serious than that.”
There was one 16 year-old American who was killed by a drone at an outside cafe, but I guess I’d have to agree that it isn’t exactly a serious threat to most Republican primary voters.
What interests me more is the idea that someone might come along, not Rep. King necessarily, who has the ability to divide the Republican Party along regional lines. Imagine a candidate who won all the primaries and caucuses in Obama states while losing them in all the Romney states. Wouldn’t they be in decent position to win the nomination?
If you are inclined to answer ‘yes,’ please keep in mind that it wouldn’t be a slam dunk because the Republican Party uses a formula that rewards more delegates (proportionally) to red states than to blue ones. So, blue states are worth less and red states are worth more in the nomination contest than they are in the general election. Still, someone who could sweep New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Upper Midwest, the Pacific Coast, and parts of the Southwest, would be in a position to contend, especially if the red states split their votes between two or more candidates.
I’m running out a really simple hypothetical here. For example, I don’t think a Republican candidate who had wide appeal in Vermont and New York would necessarily have much of any support in Nevada or Oregon.
I don’t know if it is still possible for there to be regional candidates anymore now that the right-wing operates like a Borg directed by Fox News and hate radio. Conservatives in Maine and Oklahoma are getting substantially the same messages. But I suppose it is possible for new regional fissures to develop over specific issues. Gay rights could be one. Environmentalism could be another. I suppose there could even be faint regional lines over terrorism policy dividing New York’s King from Kentucky’s Paul. But they would be the reverse of what you’d expect, with New Yorkers more sympathetic to Paul’s message and Kentuckians more supportive of King’s.
In any case, I expect Rep. King, if he runs, to be primarily concerned with supporting neo-conservative national security policies and, secondarily, with standing up for the regional interests of the Mid-Atlantic with regard to things like disaster relief. When Sen. Marco Rubio voted against a relief package for Superstorm Sandy, Rep. King told donors in New York not to give Rubio any money. That’s the kind of regional infighting that could conceivably make a Blue State Republican attractive in Blue States, despite the uniformity of the message coming from the Mighty Right-Wing Wurlizter.
“We’re more serious than that.”
No you aren’t, Not with what’s going on in Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, et. al.
They are peeling women & minorities off at lightspeed.
Do us a favor and die already.
The Confederacy is a state of mind, thanks in no small part to the nationalizing of
Radio Mille CollinesFox.I’d expect there are now enough neo-Confederates outside the boundaries of the old CSA to put a hard cap on the size of a King vote even in those states.
I’m stil shocked to see Confederate battle flags on a non-trivial number of cars and trucks in the student parking lot in a Maine town where 1 in 7 men — not draft-age men, men — went off to the Civil War and never came back.
And I hear “Mexican” tossed around as a casual insult in school — a school three hours from Quebec, where there are no Mexicans, and the DoE thinks our student body is 97.3% white. That’s an imported behavior.
Unless the students in Eagle Pass, TX are all sitting around the cafeteria saying “What’s wrong with you? Are you French?”
And who would that Blue State Republican be?
I agree, not Peter King – he couldn’t sell. Above all else, because he’s a loud-mouth from NY.
And there aren’t many other Republican House members from the Blue States. And the ones who exist, have no real national name.
If you look at the us Senate, in reality, how different were the Blue State Republicans from the Red State ones?
Ayotte is a puppet of McCain and Graham.
Collins, and her former colleague, Snowe differed a bit – but how much? Just enough to piss-off the base in the rest of the country.
Ok, maybe I’m not seeing them, or him, or her, but I don’t see anyone from a Blue State. who could divide their party.
Except, maybe, Chris Christie.
And he’s about as popular with Republicans now, as a large chili-dog turd in the punchbowl.
Maybe he can fix that – but it’ll take a lot of work. But to change that, he’ll have to, like Mitt Romney, become one of THEM.
So, how much change will THAT be?
And ditto for Purple State Republicans – and, they’re already far more Red than Blue.
So, BooMan, who do you have in mind?
Who am I missing?
Who is that person who won’t have to morph into some combo of Steve King and Jim DeMint, to win the Republican nomination?
I still don’t think Christie’s impossible.
His place in the landscape is similar to Carter’s in the preliminaries to the 1976 election. He’s also from the wrong end of the country, the wrong wing of the party in some ways. And he’s equally easily caricatured. (The popular media were brutal on Carter.
His Unique Selling Proposition, that what we need is not so much a war on terror, or a moral crusade against people who have sex the wrong way — though that would be nice — but on America’s real enemies, its public employees, may be novel enough to stand out against a background of what is otherwise not just a wall of sound, but a wall of sound we’ve all heard before.
Crab-bucket America is looking for its leader.
Yeah, you could be right.
They may start to think that turd’s a Baby Ruth bar, and take a bite.
If the next super storm washes away all the wooden boardwalks Christie let the Jersey shore rebuild, he is toast no matter how much weight he looses.
A Republican candidate who can separate the non-neo-Confederate well-to-do middle class voters from the raving Republicans be competitive in red states. There are a lot of suburban Republicans even in red states who are uncomfortable with the crazies.
But if you consider North Carolina a red state now, you also have to consider Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio red states ripe for this sort of a candidate.
The problem I see is that such a candidate does not exist. Even in New England.
And this was exactly the divide that Romney tried to straddle with his Michigan, Utah, and Massachusetts residencies.
I think that Democrats need to focus on their own issues a little more and stop holding out likely false hope of the Republican implosion occuring on its own.
And any candidate would have to mount a convention fight over the rules. Which would be fun to watch.
We pretty much already had one of those guys. His name was Mitt Romney…
Romney lost 6/11 of the Confederate primaries, including the entire deep south, plus the ones in pseudo-Confederate states like Missouri and Oklahoma. It happened only 15 months ago.
Memberin’ things is tuff!
all is not some.
Not King for sure!
He is about as telegenic/photogenic as an angry iguana. He can’t be hustled to the clop-clomp-clomping middle. Every
pestilential…errr, ahhhh..presidential winner of the past 6 elections has been the one who is more telegenic/photogenic than his opposition. Right down the line, from the primaries right on through the election. You cannot sell a brand with an ugly box, and that’s what “presidential politics” is all about now.Branding.
Sorry, but there it is. The JFK vs. Nixon debates were the first clue as to what was going to happen, and now here we are.
Peter King?
FUGGEDABOUDIT!!!
He’s just the nasty old man in the suburban neighborhood yelling at the kids to get the fuck off of his lawn. Forget blue states and red states and think “uncommitted voters.” It’s the uncommitteds who elect national pols. Bet on it. Ratpubs vote for Ratpubs, DemRats vote for DemRats and those on the outer sides of those groups either vote for no one or swallow their gall and vote as close as they can get to their own beliefs. This all pretty much equals out. But the vast, clomping middle? They vote for who looks best.
Duh.
Presidential politics as a reality show.
Duh!!!
Why do you think Chris Christie went to the extreme of having his abdomen cut open and a piece of plastic wrapped around his stomach so that his habitual gluttony is no longer physically possible?
DUH!!!
His appetite for power outweighs even his lust for food.
Bet on that as well.
Already? A few of months after the surgery?
i mean…he’s not exactly svelte, but he is approaching some sort of normality already. He’s already lost about 30 lbs., maybe even more. Another 30? Suddenly he is at least passable if clothed well. If he continues?
He looks like Jeb Bush.
Only younger, thinner and probably smarter too.
That’s the program, anyway. The fixers are grooming him to win if necessary.
Watch.
AG
Younger, thinner, smarter, and with an ideally nonpartisan, heartwarming story about weightloss.
Is it wrong of me that I like the idea of a President King?
Is it wrong that you like the idea of a President King?
Yes it is.
A Citizen President would be so much better!!!
AG
“Will Northern GOP Base Want Own Candidate?”
It’s an interesting question for me because by the 70’s I had given up hope of ever seeing a northern Dem winning the Presidency within my life time. Carter and Clinton won nominations in large measure because they could compete in 2-3 southern states.
Has the bigoted, CT addicted, innumerate branch of the GOP, HQed in the South, finally gone so nuts that the less insane branch can launch a viable northern candidate?
I do think that is entirely possible. The fact that we can’t think of a lot of names right now doesn’t matter. If the time is right someone will be able to step forward. Most candidate speculation is only about a very limited list of well known politicians. Someone could emerge from the senate or house. Legitimacy as a candidate can only be granted by the corporate media.
Analysts who are influenced by the rampant bicoastalism at work in the US may want to look at the Midwest as a possible region from which such a candidate could come.
I don’t think there is much new here. This isn’t the split of the northern GOP from the southern – this is the split of the mainstream GOP from the Ron/Rand Paul pseudo-libertarian branch.
We all remember how Ron Paul has gotten support from a small but enthusiastic minority of the GOP, only to be shut out from Fox News coverage, almost getting no questions during GOP primary debates, and intensely ignored by the rest of the GOP establishment.
The GOP mainstream likes Rand a little better because until recently he has been heavy on the tea party and light on the libertarian, because he reliably votes with them on key votes, and because he holds an important Senate seat instead of a safe House district. But if he follows in daddy’s footsteps on the primary trail he’ll be actively ignored like daddy was.
Normally if a prominent Republican was saying stuff like this I’d suspect one part warning shot to Rand and one part test ballon for a King candidacy. But Peter King is irrational even within the context of the GOP’s view of reality, so I figure this is just case of random mouthing off in front of the press.
Rubio is a bad example as he is going down in flames over immigration.
Did he kill anyone? Toss a bomb? Or did he just support the IRA?
Thirty years ago?
I don’t know if he has any interests or if his health is solid enough to run but Mark Kirk from IL did a slick enough sales job to fool enough people in IL to vote for him to Senate. There has to be others who are similar to him from blue states that could make a run.
A fellow Democrat was just telling me today how much Kirk’s voting record has improved since his stroke and how he likes him better than Durbin. Had to agree. Dems here in the Northern Chicago suburbs, white and black, are getting a bellyfull of Rahm Emanuel, Pat Quinn, Bill Daley, and Mike Madigan. I understand Lisa Madigan’s dropping out of the Governor’s race, but most here consider her a cut (a LARGE cut) above her father.
P.S. This guy is a lifelong Democrat, never voted for a Republican, unlike myself. The Democratic Party is just shitting all over white and black workingmen.
As for myself, I still like Jan Shakowski (wrong spelling) and Sheila Simon (still sentimental about her father), but that’s about it.
The real problem in IL is Mike Madigan above all else. I really wish he could get a real challenger in an election. I don’t know his district well enough to know what’s up with it but he seems to have a lock on it somehow.
Mark Kirk has been better since his stroke but Durbin is still way better than he is in the Senate.
I didn’t think Kirk fooled anyone. It was just the fact that Alexi G. had dubious connections(and ethical problems). We should get that seat back in ’16 provided our candidate isn’t Rahmbo(or some other clownshow like him).