It’s weird. It’s both impossible to imagine that Mitt Romney will win the Republican nomination and to imagine that he won’t. That actually places him above any of his challengers. I can’t imagine any of them as a genuine presidential candidate. I agree with Jon Chait that Pawlenty comes closest to plausibility, but his wimp factor is so off-the-charts that I can’t visualize him winning anything. Plus, he’s a northerner with a fairly moderate record in a party that is southern and not moderate in any sense.
This does not seem to be a cycle in which the Republican primary voter is desperate to win. It usually takes at least eight years out of power for a party to start turning to pragmatism and to begin to take electability seriously. That’s how it tends to work with the Democrats, although Bush’s first term was so awful that Kerry rode the electability-factor to victory after only four years out of power. So, who knows?
Romney does seem to be the Republicans’ best bet among announced candidates, although perhaps Jon Huntsman would be even tougher for Obama to defeat. But he’s too tied to health care reform, which is basically the rallying cry for the Republicans. It is inconceivable that he can survive dozens of debates where he will be pummeled by all of his opponents on the issue.
I just can’t game the whole thing out in my mind. I have no idea where this is going.
I think the GOP is overconfident after the mid terms. I’m not sure they think they need their best candidate to beat Obama. Or maybe the calculation is something like this:
If Romney has a 50% chance at beating Obama but he himself is only 50% of what the GOP wants in a candidate, the result is a 25% chance of getting their preferred candidate in office.
If Crazy Wingnut candidate has a 25% chance of beating Obama, but he/she is 100% of what the GOP wants in a candidate, the result is the same- 25% chance of getting their preferred candidate in office.
So that’s how a GOP voter could be rationally indifferent to Romney and their preferred Crazy Wingnut. However, if Romney becomes more/less electable and/or Crazy Wingnut becomes more/less electable, this calculation changes.
Trump/Bachman, or else Bachman/somebody not in the running for the top of the ticket.
Seriously. The Republican party has completely rejected modern rationalist epistemology. They believe fervently that simply asserting a thing makes it true, that climate change is a hoax and that William Ayers is secretly in a position of great power in this country.
Things haven’t even started getting weird.
Huckabee/Someone to calm the anti-tax nutters down.
That’s my call right now – perhaps Huckster/Trump.
What about Barbour/Huckabee?
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0311/Haley_and_Huckabee.html
They ought to give the US Chamber of Commerce a run for their money.
I believe it will be Palin with someone Wall Street approves – Forbes? Trump? I also believe Obama will win 40 states against such a ticket…
I just can’t make sense of the narrative — not just you, Booman, but everywhere else too outside of Minnesota — that Pawlenty has a moderate record of any kind. It appears to be merely an association with him being elected twice as governor, narrowly in both cases, in the only state that hasn’t voted Republican in a presidential election since 1972. But it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with his policies and rhetoric both in and out of office. He is a solid member of the radical, cut-taxes-regardless-of-effects, right-wing, even willing to breach constitutional authority to do so. Pawlenty is no more moderate than current Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, and that makes him both a more credible Republican candidate as well as a more dangerous one. We need stop propagating that false, positive, narrative of his supposed moderation.
Doesn’t this come down to two mini-races: one for the Outright Crazy wing, and one for the “Can Pretend to be Not Crazy” wing. In the first camp are Palin, Bachmann, Huckabee, etc., and the latter are T-Paw, Mittens and the Huntsman. Then the winners of each of these brackets face off, with the “Can Pretend to be Not Crazy” being the winner.
So it’s something like Bachmann vs. Huntsman. As for Huntsman’s being too close to HCR, you forget that the GOP is adept at simply ignoring whatever it doesn’t like, and pretty good at convincing lots of independents to forget about that stuff, too.
Wasn’t McCain tarred for his S&L lapse? His way, way, way too stubborn opposition to MLK day in AZ? None of that stuff matters. For the GOP and about half of the swing voters, it’s all personality and theatrics.
as I’ve said before, someone posted about how much Money Mittens was raising.
My thing has always been, the best thing about states like Iowa and New Hampshire is that they are tailor-made for candidates with little money.
Mittens lost in 2008 to a guy with 10% of his money.
Iowa and NH are built for candidates with a ‘passionate bunch of crazies’ following them. the crazies that will drive from town to town, finding other crazies.
those states a tailor-made for that.
NOBODY is crazy about Mittens. the only thing they’re crazy about is that his checks clear. Outside of that, there is nobody passionate for him.
So, he loses Iowa – show me how he wins with the Holy Roller set there.
what happens in New Hampshire if he doesn’t blow it away, and someone else keeps it close?
we then turn to the South…I want someone to explain it to me simple how Flipping Mitt wins in South Carolina.
He can win in Nevada because there are a lot of Mormons there. But, South Carolina?
Mittens, you say, is the man to win it….I just have never seen it.
This is why I say the Huckster takes an early lead. He won Iowa in ’08 and he could probably do it again. He came in second to McCain in South Carolina too. He probably won’t take New Hampshire, but Wikipedia reminds me that he did take 3rd place there – after Romney but ahead of Giulianni. If he could actually manage to win SC this time he could do it.
The Huckster’s problem is that he needs to pacify the anti-tax nutters that hate him. Which means he needs an alliance with someone the anti-tax nutters love. To be honest, I’m not sure who on the upcoming Republican ballot the anti-tax nutters actually love though.
For the totally surreal reality show ticket I’d go with Huckster/Trump. Not likely, but imagine the carnival barker atmosphere around that one.
Huntsman could be interesting depending on how much of a power hungry asshole he is.
He could try to pivot from working within the Obama administration to pushing a “whistleblower” type campaign about the decline of American power and status. Especially coming from China’s accompanying expansion and rise and the residual sinophobia of it all. Not to mention the Afghanistan disaster. And if Libya somehow doesn’t work out cleanly, I mean there’s at least a seed there.
But he’d have to be a Machiavellian dick for the ages to want to try and pull that off.