Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
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.
I was at TeaCon. I wore my cool 2012 Gadsden shirt. It was a very successful event, jam-packed, lots of good stuff.
Herman Cain was the highlight. His speech at TeaCon tore the roof off.
Mr. Cain had the crowd on their feet and clapping until their hands hurt.
He had everyone smiling, ear to ear, I noticed.
It reminded me of Reagan. Mr. Cain is very much a happy warrior. Voters prefer cheerfulness to anger.
He is a contender.
That means he will now be in everyone’s crosshairs.
If he can survive the gauntlet he could beat Romney, and if he can do that he will be formidable, and could beat Obama.
Not surprisingly, he won the straw poll.
(Michael Barone has a good piece about Mr. Cain.)
UPDATE: Commenter Cynthia has a link to a good piece on Mr. Cain’s background. Worth reading.
[youtube GNAHjsAnTd4 How Liberty Dies]
How is this for a headline?
“Key Democrats call for Ending Democracy”
Some people subscribe to the idea that politicians are stupid. They shoot from the hip until reined in by their consultants during election season. There is probably a great deal of truth to that. On the other hand, the use of the “trial balloon” is a well-tested technique for gauging public reaction to an idea.
With that in mind, I submit today’s WSJ’s “Notable and Quotable” into evidence to let the jury decide.
“Most Americans complain that government is unresponsive to their wishes. But not everyone feels that way. In the space of two days, two prominent Democrats have called for less responsive government that ignores public input.
One of them, former White House Budget Director Peter Orszag, penned a piece this week in the New Republic arguing, as the title says, “Why we need less democracy.” Orszag wrote that “the country’s political polarization was growing worse—harming Washington’s ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing.” His solution? “[W]e need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.” . . .
[S]imilar comments by Gov. Bev Perdue, D-N.C., are far more troubling. “I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover,” Perdue told a Rotary Club gathering in suburban Raleigh this week. “I really hope that someone can agree with me on that.”
Gaffe or Trial Balloon?
1. Would Romney be a better president than Obama?
2. If a third party candidate ran to the right of Romney, if he were nominated, is there any chance of Obama NOT being reelected?
To me the answers to this are too obvious to need to be spoken aloud, but lets do it.
1. Of course Romney would be better than Obama. Does that mean I prefer Romney to any of the other GOP candidates? No. Does that mean I like the idea of Romney being president? No. Does it mean that pretty much any of the current Republican field, including Romney, is better than Obama? Hell yes.
2. It is going to be very, very hard to beat Obama as it is. The solid blue states get him most of the way there in terms of electoral votes. His supporters are united, mobilized, well-funded, and they will have a massive MSM barrage on their side. It is very difficult to unseat a sitting president. Even though the country is in an ongoing economic disaster, and even though Mr. Obama has done a miserable job as president, he is still barely below 50 on Intrade. Most likely he will bottom out long before the election. Odds are, he will win, as it is now. If the opposition is divided, Mr. Obama sails to victory, and we get four more years of this.
If there is any defect in that analysis, please tell me what it is.
(Do not engage in personal insults directed at me or I will delete any such comment. They do not advance the discussion. Save that for your own blog.)
I am thinking more and more that the GOP presidential candidate is a distraction.
Whoever it is will be better much than Mr. Obama, so don’t worry about it. Mr. Obama makes Mitt Romney look like George Washington.
So, what does matter?
Making sure we have a Tea Party Congress in 2012 is the most important thing.
Then the 2013-15 political era will be a conflict between a corporatist Republican in the White House and a populist Congress down the street.
Some good could come of that.
(The Ds will be on the sidelines for a while if that happens. But they will soon be back.)
So what, concretely, starting now, can we do to make sure that we get a good, solid Congress in 2012?
Suggestions in the comments, please.
UPDATE: It occurs to me, this is another way of saying that the Tea Party / Insurgency is probably not yet politically mature enough to capture the presidency with one of its own. So, get as much as you can this go-around, but don’t worry too much about what is still beyond your grasp. Mass political movements in American history don’t usually capture the presidency less than three years after they start.