So, Mitt? Rick? Or, maybe, Herman?
I like Herman.
Rick looks better than Mitt, but I don’t love Rick.
But any of them are better than Mr. Obama.
This simplifies matters.
Let’s pick a guy and then beat Mr. Obama.
More important, let’s get the Senate, and a Tea Party Congress.
Not containment. Victory and rollback.
Tracking alongside you in preferences, with more than a little bit of pessimism. Flags are at half mast at our house, because this is a national tragedy as far as we are concerned. The “Victory and rollback” will require candidates at all levels who are willing not only to stand and fight, but to go on the offensive against the TWANLOC Enemy, and against their Institutional Republican allies who side with them reflexively. Restoring the nation by electoral means was always a long shot; especially since the Democrats are signaling loud and long that it will be a violent period before, during, and after the elections …. if the Democrats allow them to take place at all.
There is nor flying hence nor tarrying here.
I gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish the estate o’ the world were now undone.
Ring the alarum-bell! Blow, wind! come, wrack!
At least we’ll die with harness on our back.
Subotai Bahadur
I vote for ABO.
Next: Change we can believe in.
I am reassured by the memory of how quickly things changed under Reagan. In 1978, the movie “Death Wish” was a huge hit; in 1982, the bull market began that lasted 20 years.
I do not like Mitt – most particularly because he is an establishment RINO squish. And he seems to be the one that the establishment RINOS are lining up behind, which is a good a reason in my book for giving him a miss.
Perry – also quasi-establishment, but with a solid record of achievement as a governor. And also — er, because he was one of the very first establishment politicos to take the Tea Party seriously. And because I have met him personally.
Cain – outside candidate. Not good that he was too ready to deal the racialist card against Perry in the ‘rock with an racial epithet painted on it which has been a no-no among polite white society for about forty years’ imbroglio. Good that he seems fairly quick on his feet, a good speaker, and he would so defang the ‘yer-alla-buncha-racists’ accusation.
What I believe we ought to guard against, more than anything else, is to let the establishment RINOs or the news media anoint one over all the other prospects. We are a free people, and to quote Mr. R. Kipling of sainted memory, “What have the Free People to do with the orders of any save the Free People?”
If we don’t get the Senate back all the talk about repealing ObamaCare will have been just that. I don’t really trust Mitt – after all how can anyone call himself a conservative passing MA’s version of ObamaCare – but then as one of the commenters said earlier today “I’d vote for a syphilitic donkey over Obama”.
I think it was a donkey. Don’t know if they really get syphilis ;-)
I believed G W Bush’s claim to being a conservative and then when he got it….and to think he had the House and Senate too.
What could have been done…
Makes me wonder what this country would have been like had Bush Senior really been like Reagan instead of people just thinking he was when they voted him in.
OTOH what was the choice?
You all need to take a chill pill. There will be no voting for 5 months, and the General election is 13 months away. A lot can and will happen.
Let me tell you a story. A long, long, time ago. Way back in 2008. There was an election. The country elected a man from an ethnic and racial minority, whose religion is repellant to almost all Americans, and whose track record was zilch, except for the work he had done for socialist organizers.
Why did that happen? Was he a knight in shinning armor who could communicate? He dressed up nicely and he could read the lines on a teleprompter. But, otherwise he was a nobody from a corrupt urban political regime.
He won because the economy went into a tail spin 7 weeks before the election.
Since then he has presided over disastrous policies, that have left us with the worst post crash economy since WWII, Congress has not adopted a budget in the last 3 years. The Administration has not proposed a serious budget, and he has dropped everything else to hit the campaign trail.
Would he be re-elected if the election were held next Tuesday? I doubt it, but the election is 13 months away. A lot can happen. The good news for those patriotic Americans who want to see Hussein go back to his corrupt buddies, is that if something happens, he probably will not handle it well. The economy is more likely to get worse than it is to get better. And the foreign policy arena that he so wanted to avoid holds many unpleasant surprises for him.
One thing is clear to me. The USA cannot stand another four years of Hussein and the Insane Clown Posse. We must support any GOP nominee who is not a leper. It is a matter of Fierce Moral Urgency.
As the Blogfather says: I will vote for a syphilitic camel, if that helps to stop Hussein Insane from being re-elected in 2012.
Note for Bill Brandt: No donkeys — under any circumstance.
“Put not your trust in princes,
in mortal men, who cannot save you.
When their spirit departs, they return to the earth;
on that day their thoughts die too.”
Ps 146:3-4
There seems to be present among many Republicans a desire to find a savior, a man who will ride in on a white horse and who by his aura will convince people to follow him. They think that the right man will be able to articulate their thoughts so clearly, that everyone will be convinced of the truth of his words and the Democrats tongues will be broken.
It won’t happen. The Democrats have been running the country for three generations. They are not going to quit or give up. Their legions of minions in the media and academia will continue to spout their line, and to vilify and distort conservative ideas and Republicans statements at full volume for the next two years at least. Many institutions from unions to universities to the civil service are committed to the Democrat regime. They are dug in and they will die in the last ditch.
It is not hopeless. Hussein can’t run on hope and change in 2012. He has a record and it is ugly. If the economy continues to cough and sputter for the next year and a half, like it has for the last couple of years, Hussein will lose. The Republican will not beat him, No Republican has a chance of doing that (see the previous graf for the reasons why), but he can and will lose if things don’t get suddenly and obviously better.
Further, the first job of the next president is not invent the world from scratch. It is to wrestle the Federal Bureaucracy to the ground and make it say uncle. Ideas are unnecessary.
The second job will be recovering from the foreign policy damage that Hussein and the Monstrous Regiment of Women has inflicted on the US. It requires judgment from the President, not knowledge nor, heaven help us, oratory.
The odds are that Mitt Romney will be the Republican Nominee when all is said and done. As evidence, I can cite the InTrade board on the left side of this page, which is now giving him an almost 60% chance. I think that his competitors are by and large light-weights, and I think Mitt will wrap it up sooner, rather than later.
Cain for one example seems to be the heartthrob of the moment. But, I heard Chris Wallace reduce him to rubble by asking pretty basic questions on foreign policy. He also was not able to explain with any clarity who had vetted his 9-9-9 plan for economic viability.
I really do not understand the animus against Romney. He is human, he has flaws. He is a politician, he has flip-flopped — It is part of the game. Learn to live with it. Many people want Ronald Reagan to be re-incarnated. It will not happen.
Has Romney altered positions on occasion? Of course he has. He is a politician. That is what politicians do. Intellectuals can have clear consistent positions logically derived from first principles. Politicians do what they have to do.
You may think that Hussein is a socialist ideologue. But real lefties think he is a LINO squish. And they are not wrong. But Hussein is a politician and he is dancing as fast as he can. It ain’t pretty, but he is doing what he thinks he needs to do to preserve his shrinking chance of re-election.
President Romney will disappoint ideological conservatives. But, then again any of the possible candidates will disappoint you. Reagan disappointed me by not scrubbing the Department of Education, and he had promised.
But, if President Romney (or President Perry, for that matter) can stop the country from going over the financial waterfall it is fast approaching, I will say Dayeinu!
At any rate, if anyone reading this stays home and Hussein is re-elected, the destruction of the Republic will be on your head.
“… the election is 13 months away.”
Dude. True. So: Get involved soon. Or, even, right now.
Cain is where my heart is, but he will not have the chops to convince the Republican primary electorate (a brain dead gaggle of geese if there ever was one) that he can pull it off.
Perry has the chops, but is worse at debates than W.
Romney is not to be trusted. Further, we have will witness a media frenzy aimed at Mormonism the likes of which we have never seen once he is the nominee.
Absent Perry improving and winning, we will be stuck with Romney, and must hope for Obama to fail worse than Romney on election day. Should Romney win, it will be the House and Senate that run the nation. This is better than Romney, but worse than it should be.
A benevolent dictatorship of CB bloggers is preferred.
Bruno, thanks for cheering me up :)
Robert Schwartz Says:
October 5th, 2011 at 10:02 pm
There seems to be present among many Republicans a desire to find a savior, a man who will ride in on a white horse and who by his aura will convince people to follow him.
No, not a savior; merely someone who can be trusted to stand and fight. Conservatives have been deliberately betrayed time and again by the Institutional Republicans whose sole goal is to cut a deal and live well themselves on the crumbs off of the Democrats’ table; while the country goes to hell. Sarah Palin stood and fought. She took on the Left at all points of contention. And she took on Obama, directly. That is what I, and I believe many others, are looking for.
Romney is many things. A fighter is not one of them. Nor is he a Conservative. Nor will he push back. He refuses to commit to repealing Obamacare, restricting himself to “granting waivers to everyone”. Granting a waiver to the individual mandate does not cure the problem. The bill is full of power grabs, mandates, tax increases, and reductions in funding for actual medical care. There is no reason that Obamacare means that the Federal government is now the sole source for student loans, or that the government should tell every medical practitioner to forward copies of all medical records for everyone to the Federal government as custodian. Or that the “Death Panels” which are real should exist. Or that $500 Billion should be cut from Medicare. Waiving the individual mandate does not suffice.
Left uncoerced, Romney’s first term will be like Obama’s second from every indication. Yet, despite this, I will hold down my rising gorge and vote for Romney if he is the nominee. I won’t work for him, or campaign for him; all my efforts going towards electing a Patriot Congress. All in the hope that he will not be left uncoerced.
But until the nomination is settled, I will look for a fighter to support.
Subotai Bahadur
What about Palin’s actions since leaving office have inspired confidence? Hearing some conservatives talk about Palin is like hearing some liberals talk about Obama. All biography and personality. I have stopped reading Hot Air.
Cain would be great domestically but I bet the DC foreign policy mandarins could roll him.
Romney is a conservative/moderate democrat.
Perry needs a speech coach. Why are modern politicians such terrible public speakers, generally? Even the supposedly good communicators are only so-so. Our elites are kinda lazy.
Still, first rule of holes is stop digging. ABO.
A lot of non political people I know and eve republicans like romney but they tend to get drowned out by the righty and lefty activist types.
Me? I am into policy not politicians. I do not get the politician worship. It is vaguely celebutard-y. Why not just watch the kardashians?
– Madhu
Many of the presidential candidates and possible candidates lack significant executive experience, which IMO makes them poor choices. Of the governors and ex-governors who have been in contention, Palin and Perry were the most successful in office and Romney was the least successful. It’s possible that Perry has been successful in considerable part due to features of the Texas system that limit the harm bad governors can do. This leaves Palin as the successful governor whose success was most clearly a function of her own talents. And as someone pointed out here in another thread, she was the only possible candidate with a strong history of taking on entrenched corruption. I think that these considerations outweigh anything else. Past performance doesn’t necessarily predict future results but it predicts better than anything else.
He is human, he has flaws. He is a politician…
Sure, and he is also conniving. I think he is happy to mislead the electorate in order to gain power, and then push all sorts of stupid crap on us. For our own good of course. I’d trust the man to take a bag of nickles to the bank, but I wouldn’t trust him to make big decisions. He suffers from the over educated delusions of our current elites, think of him as Obama with executive competence and shudder. What we have now is a rudderless bureaucracy run wild, think what it would be like with an sure hand on the tiller guiding us onto the rocks.
We are governed by the admirers of Mao (Obama and his ‘Christmas’ ornaments), entertained by the admirers of Castro and Chavez (too many Hollywood types to list), and educated by the admirers of Che (too many academics to list). They don’t even bother to conceal it. In my town, in the last election, the Democrat Party flew in its precincts, not the USA flag, but the flag of Castro’s Cuba.
Pundits declare Communist China a model for America (Friedman); governors wish to rule without elections (Perdue); bankers wish for the same limited democracy as in China (Orszag). Eighty years of Socialism; eighty years of the ‘regulatory state’; eighty years of educational innovation have transformed America.
My ancestors replaced a republic with a democracy and democracy with socialism. Each step of way they praised evil as though it were good; they warred on human nature; they believed in wraiths of Marxist economics, history, and politics. The fusion of the Communist and Democrat parties, underway since the 1930s is complete. They are ready to govern openly, and they will. Who will stop them? Romney? Cain? Bloggers? Voters?
Even if the Republicans won 100% of the House and Senate and won the presidency, all of the Democrat party, all the media, all the academics will be against them. And in these 80 years, the Republicans have never lifted one finger to reverse these trends. Not under Eisenhower when the deal was new. Not under Nixon when its corruption and incompetence was obvious. Not when they held the House and Senate and presidency (Reagan promised to abolish the Department of Education–it’s still here). Not when they held the House and the danger was manifest, that is: now (the House has continued to vote funds for Obamacare, endless wars, and every bureaucracy).
Vote Generic Republican. It won’t change a thing.
The person I would trust to roll back the governing elite would be Palin. She was the target of the most effective campaign of demonization in the history of American politics. It was successful because McCain brought her to the campaign and then abandoned her. His campaign was filled with RINOs that were working for the enemy. Reagan’s strength was his ability to reach out to real people. Most have forgotten how vilified he was. The lefties who are tying to associate themselves with him have bad memories or are liars. Palin did not have enough experience to see what they were doing to her.
My present favorite is Cain but I worry about his health. He’s going to need a good young VP running mate if it gets that far.
I note that Mitt has climbed above the 60 mark on the Intrade Board
Dr. Kennedy could I ask you to dilate upon Mr. Cain’s health issues. I have heard that he is a cancer survivor.
I am reminded of Reagan’s words, “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally — not a 20 percent traitor.”
The problem with Romney is he has gone well over the 20 percent line. I think it is clear he will say anything to get elected. And I say this as someone who preferred Romney over McCain. Romney was a better candidate in 2008 than he is today after four years of Obama’s reign. His policies are too middle-of-the-road; too squishy. This goes for his support for AGW, ethanol subsidies, the Social Security Ponzi scheme, Romneycare–the list goes on.
We need to get this ship turned around immediately.
I will grudgingly support Romney if he is the nominee because he would be better than the current occupant, but I am hoping one of the other candidates starts to shine. Right now, Herman Cain looks best.