Do you think that any of the Republicans who showed up yesterday to the Iowa Freedom Summit are going to have any real influence on the 2016 nominating process, or are they all such enormous clowns that we can safely ignore them and pretty much everything that happened there?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Watch out for Scott Walker.
He’s my darkhorse candidate – clown yes, but base loves him for beating up unions and liberals. Upper midwest, younger white guy.
If Bush fades (and I think he will) and Romney eventually decides to go live in one of his fortresses (and he might), Walker might be the guy they eventually pick to face Clinton.
He really pulled off an impressive, in context, performance in Iowa. He’s the one I probably least want to see nominated. Besides Cruz.
I think Cruz’ potential for mayhem within the GOP legislative cohort, and therefore the nomination, remains underestimated. He’s their only suicide bomber and he’s a sneaky little weasel with absolutely no loyalty but to power. I expect to see people running against him having unexpected troubles at critical moments.
He’s declared war on the establishment wing of the party and he’s still standing; and now has more sway with the recently enlarged reactionary caucus in the House than any other. One is even tempted to suppose his fingerprints were on Cantor’s defenestration.
The conventional leadership is helpless and now divided also. What chaos can a senator achieve with twenty-five House votes in his pocket during a nomination brawl? We’ll see.
Agree. Bush’s numbers are unimpressive at this point, I don’t think in the end Romney will run, which means the nomination is pretty open.
Walker is a dangerous opponent in the general as well.
Well, Walker has somehow (to this distant observer) survived in WI after some negative pub, and easily beat back the recall. So I can’t easily dismiss him as a potential threat to our democracy should he get nominated and elected.
Yes, in the general he might draw some blood, but he reminds me a bit of a shark with those dead eyes, or as Quint described them in the Jaws movie — lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’.
And we all know how that shark ended up, shot and exploded all over the water.
The biggest thing Walker has going for him is a local media environment that kills all bad publicity for him and hypes all good publicity. Think FOX on every channel and with no opposing voices. I have my doubts about how well Walker will do in a national news environment, where at least some of the media will not instantly genuflect when he walks into the room.
Analogous to what Brownback enjoys in Kansas. He has a less unpleasant physical appearance and persona than Walker and we saw how he got crushed in Iowa.
Clown Show for sure. Makes the insane clown posse look normal.
I, for one, look forward to the Jugalo takeover of the GOP nominating convention.
The one that should scare liberals the most, assuming he goes for it in 2016 instead of holding back for 2020 or setting his sights on running the Senate for a couple of decades, it Cruz. He’s got his crazy, religious wacko father out there preaching to that GOP base and Teddy only has to appear every so often and he knows the songs to sing to them, to get and keep them in his back pocket. He can speak teabag as well as anyone. But unlike those clowns, he’s smart. As in really smart.
Hillary is at best a mediocre debater and she’s not going to get any better. Head to head with Cruz? I’ll be as happy to wager with those that take Hillary as I was with my tennis instructor that laughed as I insisted on a $20 bet and not his usual $1 wagers in the Riggs-Billie Jean King tennis match.
Hillary is not going to look like George W Bush looked in 2000 against anyone.
I’d wager she won’t look as bad as Obama did in his first debate with Rmoney, either.
The debates are not a game changer in the election – GW Bush proved that.
Had Obama’s second debate performance against Romney been like his first one, it most certainly would have been a game changer.
Have you forgotten GWHB’s 1992 debate performance. That one did take him out of the running for re-election.
On style, demeanor, and consistency GWB did fine in his 2000 debates. Gore was wildly inconsistent. Too hot (with weird and visually highly distracting make-up) in the first one. Too cold (more like Obama’s first 2012 debate) in the second. He hit his marks and stride in the third one, but by then had lost a lot of ground. On content, Gore outperformed GWB in all three debates — but that’s only one component that viewers take in from these events.
Hillary won’t have the low expectations advantage that was conferred on GWB. Like Gore she blows too hot and too cold but within not in different debate setting but within a single debate. She’s not fast on her feet which requires pre-scripting and memorization that gives her performance a canned quality.
Both Gore and Kerry were better and more experienced debaters than Hillary and neither were able to take out a second rate half-wit like GWB. Hillary may be able to hold her own against several of the potential GOP nominees, but she will have a struggle against Cruz and even Kasich.
The “debate performance” is only somewhat a matter of what the candidates do in the actual debate.
It’s mostly a matter of how the media decides to frame the debate performance. They luvved them some Dubya (and hated Gore): Dubya made the media feel smart, Gore made them feel dumb.
Romney got in trouble by lying too obviously.
Cruz is smart, smarter than in his previous lifetime as Sen Joseph McCarthy, and much more articulate, probably owing to not being the heavy drinker Joe was.
But Cruz and his politics are seriously overripe, and that would easily come through in debates. Somewhat akin to Obama debating the smart, articulate Alan Keyes for the senate seat. Yes, Keyes was smart and a very smooth talker, and sure of his scary positions to a scary degree, and enough voters saw that and declined to give him their vote. Nixon in 60 was also considered smart and a great debater, but he imploded on both style and substance in that key first debate.
Meanwhile Hillary would just have to stay steady and let the guy hang himself, maybe occasionally assist that process by clearly point out the extreme position Theodore is taking, a la Walter Mondale calling out Mean Bob Dole forcefully and directly in the ’76 VP debates for, iirc, his comments about “all the Democrat wars of the 20th C.”
As a Dem, I would eagerly welcome a Cruz nomination and the debates.
Will they have any influence?
Sure!
They’ll pull the more serious contenders even further to the right – where, there’s not much room to go before we’re forbidden to discuss their policies, by Godwin’s Law.
Btw – F*CK GODWIN AND HIS “LAW!!!!!”
Today’s conservatives are Christian Fascists who worship Mammon via Plutocrats and Oligarchs.
Sadly, even the poorest of the gullible “MORANS.”
You know, God could clear up the whole question of whether or not She exists, by having Palin win the nomination.
I’d go back to church if that happened.
I would move to Jamaica. Live in a hut on the beach.
Palin as the GOP nominee could be confirmation that Satan rules or God is Satan. (And no way would I rush off to church to worship such a demon force.) OTOH, the more rational interpretation would be that the collective IQ of GOP primary voters dropped precipitously to a new and unprecedented low. Borderline cognitive functioning.
Nah, you’d get more of this:
http://wonkette.com/573788/the-fartknocker-report-sarah-palin-rewrites-mcdonalds-ad-real-good-like
Plus, if it was Palin vs Any Sentient Democrat, we might turn 40 states Blue.
Comedy Gold and potential control of the House!
Alas, there may not be even 30 states with enough sentient voters not to stop embracing the stupid. Fortunately, sanity can rule with voters in 22 states putting down the FauxNews bong.
They are ignored by everyone but the political junkies already.
Clowns.
I don’t know who attended but I’m sure one of them will win the nomination. The Republican party has a deep and long-running hatred of everything.
80% of them are nothing but grifters, but they gotta go through the motions to keep the grift coming
Kinda glad I decided to click on that Politico/Rohzhay Seemohn piece about the GOP cattle call. Some amusing stuff in there. I think I’ll quote some quotes from it tonight at dinner with my conservative Republican housemate and see if she can guess which clown said what clownish thing. Especially about immigrants as she’s a recent one herself.
I really need a good chuckle in these grim days of ISIS, Cold War 2.0, global climate change, the looming US Civil War 2.0, and Deflategate-Deflatriots.
Question #1 how long before Palin will have a RNC intervention and check herself into rehab?
Question #2 will there be a group rate for the Palin tribe and the Rep leadership that shares a stage with her?
Question #1.1 how long before USians acknowledge that Palin went from being “A Star Is Born” on the national stage to three weeks later when she began getting dimmer. Within eight weeks it was obvious that A Star is Unborn. I appreciate that conservobots are slow, but six years for some (not all yet) of them to see that she’s a blubbering idiot says more about the functioning of their brains than her’s.
Actually, the commentary from the observers at the forum was that Palin was high, which would explain a bit of her slurring her crazed speech.
That invites the question, “High on what?” Alcohol? Or something else? After the drunken brawl in Alaska I would suppose the whole family are alcohol abusers, but I thought the rural types often turn to other substances. I really won’t believe she was toking before a speech but I could easily believe she took “a couple” of drinks to “calm her nerves.” Lydia Pinkham’s maybe? That combined alcohol AND laudanum.
Clowns. All the way down.
OT (but not entirely). Because when you’ve lost Shep Smith and Chris Wallace, you know Bibi has jumped the shark:
“Smith noted that in recent years, Israel has consistently rebuked U.S. efforts to make a two-state solution work.
“George Bush used to say ‘you must stop the expansion of the the settlements,’ so what does Israel do? They move on with expanding the settlements. This president says, ‘you gotta stop expanding the settlements,’ and they just keep expanding the settlements.’
‘It seems like they think we don’t pay attention and that we’re just a bunch of complete morons,’ he said.
This is Fox News we’re talking about, folks.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/25/chris-wallace-shep-smith-netanyahu-fox-news_n_6542454.html
Interesting to observe the fast turnaround by the MSM on this latest Netanyahu visit. Is it a real perceptual shift? Or have they all decided that as Obama now refuses to be cowed by Netanyahu, they too have had enough of this foreign leader dumping on their President?
Nah, simple self-preservation. If Obama is willing to tell Bibi to go attempt the anatomically-impossible then he won’t have any problem doing the same to them, and the Washington press corp can only show value to their superiors if they have access to the administration.
Still, it’s amazing, truly amazing, that Obama has found himself in a position to be able to tell Bibi to take a flying leap at a rolling doughnut, as no American president has ever been able to do that before.
I think that’s what really put the fear of God into Fox News.
I wonder how Boner’s feeling right now?
“…no American president has ever been able to do that before.”
Ike, notorious RINO, did. Go look up the “Suez Crisis”. Ancient history now.
Different time — overall back then the US was anti-Semitic and not particularly aligned with Israel politically. It was a mixed bag for both political parties in the 1950s but support was stronger for Israel within the Democratic party than the GOP. One the fundies got political and for their own convoluted religious reasons adopted Israel as a country that can do no wrong, the support became bi-partisan.
Right. And that happened in 1967, the Six-Day War. That was the watershed.
When you’ve lost P0litic0 . . . . . .