Republicans think that their candidates are losers.
Three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Republican voters across the country appear uninspired by their field of presidential candidates, with a vast majority saying they have not made a final decision about whom to support, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll..
Not one of the Republican candidates is viewed favorably by even half the Republican electorate, the poll found. And in a sign of the fluidity of the race, former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, who barely registered in early polls several months ago, is now locked in a tight contest nationally with Rudolph W. Giuliani and Mitt Romney.
By contrast, Democrats are happier with their field and more settled in their decisions. For all the problems Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to be having holding off her rivals in Iowa and New Hampshire, she remains strong nationally, the poll found. Even after what her aides acknowledge have been two of the roughest months of her candidacy, she is viewed by Democrats as a far more electable presidential nominee than either Senator Barack Obama or John Edwards.
That pretty much jibes with my feelings. Any of the Dem candidates would work fine with me, except possibly for no-chancers like Kucinich and Joe Biden, and even Biden has been an amusing pain in the GOP ass lately. A noun, a verb and 9/11 has impressive legs as a capsule description of the Giuliani campaign. On that other hand I really feel sorry for GOP voters who have to pretend enthusiasm for their pathetic slate of has-beens, flakes, fakes and crooks.
Consider this an open thread for whatever political news I should be blogging but I’m not.
Notorious P.A.T.
Is it alright to hope that the Republicans aren’t happy with their field because they hire lunatics like Norman Podhoretz and want to “double Gitmo”?
jake
They don’t have to pretend. They could stand up and demand something completely different. They could not make every election about OMG WE HAV 2 BEAT TEH DEMONCRATS NO MTR WHUT and more about actual issues. They could … oh fuck it and them. What do I care?
Tim F.
I think that Republicans aren’t happy because there is no human way to satisfy their needs and not look like a fucking crazy person to everybody else. The current war/torture fetish agenda just isn’t ready for prime time.
Chris Johnson
My question becomes simply: is the military prepared to refuse orders to suspend elections and appoint Bush president-for-life? It appears they are prepared to refuse orders to nuke the shit out of Iran- more will be revealed about this much later, I think.
To my mind, the next move by the Bush junta, since there isn’t an acceptable Republican candidate to be put in the figurehead role for more of the same, is to come up with some reason to call off the election entirely, since even massive cheating won’t give them a plausible win. In their best of all possible worlds they’d get Giuliani, rig things to put him in and claim he won, and carry on- but Giuliani can’t really pull that one off
Another possibility is to get Clinton in and then try and get her to play the new figurehead. But I don’t think that would work, because the Clintons are too much savvy politicians to not calculate future outcomes. I picture them playing along and then abruptly kicking the neocons’ teeth in for better PR and using it as a tool to score diplomatic points on the world stage. Those guys would turn our war criminals over to the Hague- in exchange for agreements to prop up our USD$ economy a while longer. They are such politicos, nothing is really sincere, it’s all for an advantage.
So I’m guessing the last ditch strategy would be suspend the elections, keep trying to get our military to nuke Iran, and pray for Rapture.
Chuck Butcher
The funny thing about Dems thinking Hillary is so electable, is that she loses to McCain, Obama ties him. Edwards kicks all their butts. Hillary hasn’t hit the flat spot when media inevitability spoof runs out and voters get acquainted with all candidates.
myiq2xu
Well, I guess I do agree with the Repugnants on something.
Anne Laurie
Also known as the “President Cheney Option”… in everyone’s worst nightmares.
Except there’s so much sewage leaking out of the Oval Office electrical outlets at this point that even the Republicans would swarm the jersey barriers with torches & pitchforks.
I think the smarter Republicans have decided to concede the 2008 elections entirely, and are already working on how to blame the trillion-dollar deficit, the ongoing occupation in Iraqaganistan, and the upcoming total collapse of the U.S. economy on whichever Democrat “wins” next November.
r€nato
Even my mother, a diehard Republican, doesn’t like any of the GOP candidates. She doesn’t follow politics all that closely like us blognerds do, so although it’s anecdotal I’d imagine there are many more like her.
Let’s hope the Dems don’t figure out a way to blow it again this time.
r€nato
Even if they don’t concede 2008, I’d say that’s a given. Blame the janitor for the mess the day shift left behind.
Chris Johnson
The smarter Republicans aren’t the ones in the Oval Office.
But some of them are in the Pentagon, for what it’s worth. I don’t believe for a second that the B52 flew nukes to a staging area for the Middle East by mistake. That was the guys in the Oval Office going ‘let’s just DO it, we create the reality’ and some other guys somewhere in the military going ‘UH, NO’.
It probably helped create an environment for more genuinely patriotic people to lay their careers on the line and possibly lose them to protect the remnants of honor the USA still can lay claim to. I hope so. Those guys don’t swear to Bush like some king. They swear to the Constitution. The country, not personal fealty to the king.
mclaren
The Repubs are probably dissatisfied with their candidates because they aren’t far enough to the right. I think they really want Vlad the imapaler. That would be their ideal candidate. Usay or Qusay Hussein as his running mate. Their platform? “ALL IMPALEMENT, ALL THE TIME.”
Geoduck
I suspect that even Cheney doesn’t want to go that route if he can possibly avoid it.
Psycheout
Tim’s obviously a Gravel or Paul fan. Figures.
Psycheout
…is that who’d vote for a woman, other than another murdering lesbian?
Psycheout
No doubt. Well said.
calipygian
Sullivan’s stable mate over at the Atlantic, Ross Douthat said it best: No Republican can possibly win the nomination, yet one of them has to.
Got stock in Alcoa? Because you must use a lot of tin foil and want others to use a lot, too.
A) No one in the military would ever, ever support a military coup. Ever.
B) There is no need to fly weapons to Barksdale because, wait for it…there are probably already weapons in Barksdale. Barksdale is a base accountable under arms control treaties. We tell the Russians there are bombers capable of carrying air launched nuclear cruise missiles there. If we tell the Russians that, there probably are.
Shit like that makes the people at Little Green Footballs laugh their wicked laughs like they were torturing a kitten or something. I hate to give evil people like that pleasure by coming to an otherwise fine website and seeing idiocy in the comments.
Cyrus
Go ahead and hope, but I strongly doubt it. The simplest explanation for why the Republicans are unsatisfied is probably the best explanation: Huckabee is a populist and, possibly even worse, his outright religiousness doesn’t play into the base’s victimhood complex; Fred Thompson is a lobbyist who looks like Fred Tuttle; McCain was his party’s Joe Lieberman until a recent, shameless reversal, and he acts like a Democrat about torture; Ron Paul is the only one to disagree with the party on one of their two litmus tests and is generally nutty; and those two lunatics you mentioned? One was a liberal in Massachusetts and is now running to the right of everyone else, and the other hates ferrets more than gays.
Personally, I’m betting that Romney will win the nomination. He’s filthy rich, he’s saying what the party likes to hear about Iraq/n but isn’t personally tied to any failure, and sure, he might have a liberal record, but he also has a religious record. After he’s nominated, he will then lose the general election to a Democrat running on vague and insubstantial promises of change, but turnout will be down far enough among Christians that they will be able to tell themselves they decided the election. You heard it here first.
Cyrus
I swear, I wrote that before I saw John’s post about NRO’s endorsement.
Grumpy Code Monkey
There’s also the possibility that the RNC is deliberately fielding losers. I mean, who wants to clean up all the shit Commander Decider Guy and his merry band of fuckwits have left behind?
No, better to concede the next term to a Democrat, then sit back and blame them for all the bad shit that’s going to land on us in the next two to three years.
After all, it worked with Carter. It’s just a question of who the new Reagan is going to be.
Cyrus
Yeah, really. Call me a bitter partisan, or maybe just young and naive, but I’m baffled at how Reagan got elected so strongly, so soon after Nixon. (And Bush 41 got elected so soon after Iran-contra!)
To all the current and former Republicans here, what was the thinking? Did people not find out how bad Nixon’s crimes were until more recently? (I doubt that given how unpopular his pardon was at the time, but whatever…) Were Nixon’s crimes not really all that bad at all? Had Reagan done an exemplary job of distancing him from the people who had led his party just six years before? (In theory that’s totally possible, but considering his Eleventh Commandment…) Were Carter and Dukakis just really, really, really terrible?
jenniebee
Co-cola just shot out my nose. If you want that to be credible, could you please at least qualify it by saying that they wouldn’t support a military coup in this country? Because they’ve not only supported, they’ve been the main agents in countless coups over the last half century, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq.
calipygian
Yes. Let me clarify. No one in the military would ever, ever support a military coup in the United States.
I didn’t think that would need to be clarified. But I never imagined in a million years that a man as stupid as Bush would be President, either.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Carter’s presidency was a disaster. The economy tanked, unemployment was high, and there was that nasty bit of business with some students in Tehran.
Reagan campaigned on pure fantasy, but he had the charisma (and the PR consultants) to sell it. It wasn’t so much that people embraced the Republicans or Republican policy; they embraced St. Ron the Savior himself. Nixon was roughly a thousand times smarter than Reagan, but nowhere near as personable. Reagan could get away with murder just by offering a wink and a “There you go again.”
For the few of us who didn’t drink the Kool-Aid it was infuriating. I know exactly how the Republicans felt about Clinton.