Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana is, according to current criteria, a moderate Republican, which is to say an authentic Reaganite. His mentors include respected centrists such as William Ruckelshaus and Richard Lugar. Now David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan want him to run for president in 2012. I'm a little confused about why fans of a more pragmatic conservatism would feel that way. Assuming an incumbent's advantage in a recovering economy, President Obama will probably be reelected. Why waste a candidate who could win in an open year?Presidential elections aren't parlor games, I realize. Both parties should try as hard as they can to win in order to keep debates vigorous and urgent and give voters a real choice as well as be in the position to exploit the vagaries of circumstance. A young first-term senator from Illinois didn't start out expecting to beat Hillary Clinton. No one expected the September 2008 financial crisis to guarantee the election of whichever Democrat had been nominated.
No, you never know what will happen in politics. You also don't know what's going to happen when a .240 singles hitter steps to the plate, but you can make a pretty good guess. As political scientists have shown and common sense confirms, the smartest money and best candidates have a tendency to stay away from riskier races. The last year a Democratic incumbent was up was 1996, when Bill Clinton, thanks to his survivor's instinct and the ministrations of the great triangulator Dick Morris, seemed well positioned for reelection. So the GOP anointed Bob Dole, a respected warhorse about whom no one seemed especially enthusiastic.
But as the open election of 2000 approached, the drum beat for George W. Bush began two years or more before election day. In Republican circles you could feel the influence and money
massing behind him. That's not happening now with any candidate because most of them (such as Daniels, I'd think) are wondering whether this is really the right time to run. All things being equal, the best nominee, whoever he or she is, will be naturally disinclined, since a better chance looms for a shift to the GOP four years later. It will be an especially tough call for Mitt Romney, who lost a strenuous bid for the nomination in 2008 and can't risk being a two-time loser.Losing matters less to true believers such as those conservatives who, in Richard Nixon's deathless formulation, would rather be right than president. The likes of Daniels and Romney would be wise to leave 2012 to any one of the tea party's Quixotes. Assuming I've read the tea leaves correctly and Obama wins, we'd see if in 2016 the GOP wanted to try to get another pot out a used bag or come back toward the center where the voters are.
3 comments:
Wrong-o. AGAIN!
Wake up and smell whatever goes for coffee these days.
Listen to me, THERE IS NO CENTER ANYMORE. It is gone--the Obama polarization has creamed it for at least the next election cycle.
Instead, you have a bulge on the left, and one on the right. Instead of the bell curve, think a dumbell graph on the political left/right scale with few if any in the "middle".
Ya gotta pick a candidate who can INCREASE THE SIZE of that bulge on the right--Not another RINO.
Thanks for your comment. There's always a center, and most voters are always there. In any event, I'm pretty sure the GOP will do just as you propose in '12, so we'll see! Thanks again.
It is better to get the ancient peoples to consider their communist oppressors akin to their long term magog oppressors, which they actually are, because a new democratic regime would still be kinder on minorities no matter how vile their heritage. If we persist in coddling their ancient oppressors, we will only harden the resolve of the ancient civilizations against us. The Shanghai Pact is all about ancient civilizations decimated by the magog millenium trying to reclaim their patrimony. Gibbon loved the Turks because he was one through his Lapp Finn Viking lineage. Fred Koch is the Khan of Magog because of his American Indian, Hun, Lapp and Finn lineage. The magog are not a race but actually a political schizo-bipolar horde of social fugitives, drawn to militaristic and police aggression with their volpomammic birth myths. The magog lineage of the deep state makes them support Uyghurs, Rohynga, Chechni, Bozni, Turqi, Paki and Saudi against the Chinese, Russians, Jews, Kurds, Greeks and Armenians. For all who claim ancient civilizations failed because they lacked Anglo Saxon patents, let them learn that Samuel Slater stole British textile intellectual property for the USA and the Alien Property Custodian appropriated German intellectual property during both world wars. The oligarchs have gouged out little inventors by calling them patent trolls, doing muchg more damage to intellectual property than China. In a keynote speech at the International Conference on Cyber Security July 23, 2019 at Fordham, Barr said that in order for law enforcement to have access to encrypted communications, Americans need to accept the risks associated with backdoor, maybe his real problem with Huawei was it would not allow back doors. Google used to tell regulators it would someday use hash matching to detect pirated material on your personal computer and delete it, just imagine if they use the same algorithms and sence of fairness they now use to detect supposed fake news. The deplorables destroyed their own brains with football and alcohol, so they should stop blaming others.
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