Believe it or not, I’m not as upset by David Broder’s Palin piece as some others are.
What I do find interesting, and in some ways scary, is Nate Silver’s detailed analysis of how Palin could win the Republican nomination in 2012. Personally, I believe she will prove too undisciplined a campaigner, in the mold of Giuliani, to win. But the first few states make a huge difference in primaries and if Palin can win South Caroline and Iowa, then indeed, she may have a shot.
Mike Kay
Unfortunately Palin isn’t gonna run. She loves stardom and cash, but she doesn’t like hard work and running for office is grind. I mean, remember the NY Times article about chunks of her hair falling out during her brief two months on the campaign.
Mike Kay
The thing about Broder is how full of bull shit he is.
He raves about Palin’s polarizing speech when his whole shtick is about bipartisanship.
If Palin was a Democrat (lord help us) and she gave a lie-filed red-meat speech bashing the GOP, Broder would be in a tizzy, giving a FULL tisk-tisk.
He’s a complete fucking fraud.
R. Johnston
To have a shot, Palin would need to want to win. She doesn’t. The thought of actually participating in government scares the bejeebus out of her.
What Palin wants is cash. Lots of it. As much as can be made via wingnut speaking engagements and FOX News appearances. So, odds are that she’ll toy with a run, enter a few Republican primaries, win a primary or two, find herself scared shitless at the thought she might actually win, and then she’ll poison Trig and drop out of the race to care for her sickly child. Expect 500K per speaking engagement and an 8 or 9 figure deal from FOX News after that.
I wish I were kidding, for Trig’s sake. Alas, I’m not.
Mike Kay
@R. Johnston:
hahahahahahahahhahahahhahahahhahahhahahahahhhahahahhhaahhahahahahhahahhhahahahhahahahahahahhhahahahahhahahahahhahahahahahahah
JR
FWIW, it looks like the New York Sun is considering endorsing her:
A great read for those moments when you just can’t find your Ipecac.
Mike Kay
@JR:
yup, the neo-cons love her because she’s an empty suit they can manipulate. Plus of all the potential candidates, none of them have ever shown any interest in the neo-con agenda.
RandyH
I see her as about as motivated as Fred Thompson was this last time around. They want the prize, but they are just too damn lazy to make the rounds and shake all the peoples’ hands in places like Iowa and New Hampshire. No way she could pull that off, no matter how good her PR people and TV ads are.
inkadu
@JR: OMFG. Who wants clam chowder?
bob h
I’m guessing Obama and Axelrod would welcome a Palin nomination.
How often do you get an opponent who 70% of Americans consider unready for the job? Calm sunniness and optimism contrasted with flighty resentment and bile.
I’m guessing those Republican leaders with brains in their heads look at Palin with consternation.
Bill E Pilgrim
DougJ:
I felt exactly the same way, about both Broder and Nate Silver’s pieces. Here’s my comment here at BJ from yesterday to save typing it all again:
https://balloon-juice.com/?p=34437#comment-1579631
For something easily worse or as bad as Broder’s piece, look at the accompanying piece by Ignatius over there today.
The global economy needs a “Tea Party” movement in Europe to lobby for fiscal conservatism there.
I practically spit out my cafe creme this morning reading that.
The idea, first of all, that tea baggers are “fiscal conservatives”, who cheered on Bush spending far more on war and tax cuts for billionaires than we ever spent on stimulus…
In any case, the talk on the Continent is more about the failed “Anglo disease” economic model that was arrogantly trumpeted for a decade by the UK and US and has now been utterly discredited. Things are dire in places like Greece, but so are they in the entire US, and France for example actually grew over the past few years.
Simple-minded morons rule the roost at the WAPO, it’s amazing
ondioline
New photo of Palin’s hand emerges.
Unsurprising.
El Cid
They are two different categories of things.
Broder’s weirdo Palin worship (“She’s stupid, but, man, the way she’s loud and arrogant about it sure do turn on her fans! She’s good!”) is just pathetic and ridiculous, as is so much of what falls for establishment pundit insight.
A Palin run for the Presidency is disturbing on another level, because although it currently seems likely to fail in a general election, things change, often for the weirder, and also she’s basically attracting to a modern American popular fascist movement, a sort of Tea Party Khmer Rouge style of politics, which just isn’t good for the country to stir up. Ever.
Napoleon
Broder is a joke, as is nearly the entire WaPo editorial page.
Although I agree with peoples take upthread on how lazy, etc a campaigner Palin is I really think she has a shot in a field as week as the Republicans with no clear preferred candidate and winner take all primaries.
debit
@El Cid: YES. I still remember how my friends and I laughed and laughed about W. Who in the world would possibly want an idiot as our president, we thought. It’ll never happen. And then it did. Twice.
I do agree with earlier points about her ability to do the leg work to actually get the nomination, however. Unless they pay her, I doubt she’ll put in the time she needs to in smaller settings. Not enough roaring crowds. See Book Tour for example.
kay
I think Republicans are going to have trouble if she isn’t the nominee. I can’t wait for the Battle of the Fundies, too, between she and Huckabee, in the early GOP primary states. I think they have to go completely over the top to best each other on radical religiosity, early, and I don’t know how they walk that back later. Remember Huckabees ads from last time? She’s going to have to meet or beat him on Church of the United States.
I hope Nate Silver is right. I’d rather she be the GOP nominee than anyone else out there.
She’s my favorite.
Bill E Pilgrim
@debit: I remember Doonesbury cartoons which had the absurd notion of Reagan being considered a possible Presidential candidate as the whole gag.
An extreme right wing (by the standards of the time) movie actor? Come now.
This wasn’t because anyone was considering such a thing, yet, it was purely for comedic value, at the time.
mai naem
The way the Obama presidency is going he’s going to need Caribou Barbie to be the nominee for him to win. Broder’s an idiot and probably suffering from dementia and I ain’t kidding about that either. He writes the stupidest columns.
cat48
I’m very depressed this morning. I don’t see how Obama could win again. The unions hate Obama now, the left, Wall St, small business owners, and most importantly, he has lost Independents. It is so over. I am not sure I can recover. I’m sick of everyone hating on my president and smearing him. I need to recover from my depression and enjoy the last few years. He’s my most favorite president ever so it will hard to take him not winning again. That’s saying a lot since I’ve lived thru a lot of presidents.
Xenos
@R. Johnston: Pat and Bay Buchanan made decent money doing this– for every cycle another lame attempt at electioneering, lots of fundraising, keeping themselves in the news, and so on. With a permanent campaign going on they could pretty much live off the fundraising, and then cash in on a book deal every four years.
IndieTarheel
Got a friend who is a self-described conservative. He finally got off the Palin bandwagon, albeit reluctantly. I kept after him about what Agent Orange and the rest of the Insane Clowned Posse have been saying versus what they have been doing, and I think he is beginning to see the light.
__
Baby steps…
Amy
A political scientist friend of mine told me that the Palin scenario to watch for (and fear) is that she runs for the Republican nomination, loses, and then runs as an independent candidate. In a three way race, who knows what could happen — or so he says.
debit
@cat48: It’s only been one year. He has three to go. I understand feeling down, but your reaction is like giving up one a football game after a bad first quarter.
@Bill E Pilgrim: I remember those, sorta. I was rather young and uninterested in politics at the time. I do recall very well, however, Regan telling autoworkers that trees caused more air pollution than cars, and how he was never really called upon to explain that particular bit of bullshit.
El Cid
@cat48: Back off the ledge. Yes, it’s possible Obama may lose; but much of what you perceive as “hate” is akin to infighting among family. Which is not to suggest there aren’t serious disputes, as people who have been through serious family disputes know. And “independents” rarely are — in most elections, “independents” (who are usually just defined as those who are not registered D’s or R’s) tend to break down into those who vote strongly liberal and those who vote strongly conservative.
It’s a crazy country in a crazy world. Anything can happen. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to know for sure that we’re definitely not going to drive off the cliff.
valdivia
And yet, here is this poll from the WaPo that makes it clear that no matter how much Border likes her, the media enable her, the American people are NOT buying it.
It seems even in the midst of falling for every other Republican bamboozlement the people of this country think Palin is a bridge too far.
kay
@cat48:
Obama gets analyzed a lot. Obama-analysis is an industry, all by itself, although I don’t think it’s a growth industry any longer, because there are thousands of analysts. I think we’re at full employment on that.
So just step back a bit from the ledge.
That said, I love Nate Silver, and I’m glad he’s left-leaning. He’s completely data-driven, and I think the fact that he exists keeps the narrative from spinning completely off into fantasy land.
I want him to revisit a post he wrote months ago. he made a prediction on unemployment. he admitted he had no expertise in economics, but he had come up with a set of predictive markers, and he used those. he said unemployment wouldn’t go higher than 10.
He got savaged in the comments, by Left and Right, for not knowing anything about economics. His comments section went crazy with rage.
I liked that he took a stab at it, because none of the experts will commit to a prediction.
It will be fun if his predictive system comes close, and beats the experts.
cat48
@debit:
I hope your right. If things get any worse, I may have to ask for Prozac or something. I’m just really tired of O being continually attacked for silly things. Just a bad day I guess. Will probably feel better tomorrow. I read last night that Romney is new and improved now–more moderate.
Bill E Pilgrim
@debit: We’re really living in the Dark Ages still. That scene in the Holy Grail about witchcraft could be right out of a discussion this week about how long term climate clearly isn’t being affected by emissions into the atmosphere because snow still exists.
El Cid
On C-Span’s Washington Journal this morning, the question is based on yesterday’s interview excerpts of Obama with BusinessWeek, except that the question is “Is Obama Anti-Business”.
The callers on the Republican line are answering by pointing out that Obama is a Communist. Just now a small business owner led off by declaring that Obama may be a Communist, and that Obama and the government should help his business out by helping him get access to credit. ‘Cause, you know, the problem with Communism is that there’s not enough government support for small business loans etc.
Callers on the Democratic line are mostly outraged and confused at the lunacy of the question.
kay
@valdivia:
I saw that. I don’t think it matters. The story is now set in stone. “Regular people love her”.
I think she’d be a great nominee. For Republicans :)
cat48
@kay:
Off the ledge for a while anyway. Thanks. I really like Nate too and think he’s really good.
rootless_e
i’ve always thought that Palin was just a single atwater or goebbels away from being dangerous.
ppcli
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Yep. Whenever I’m about to dismiss Palin as a candidate, I’m nagged by a memory.
I remember back before I moved to the ‘States and I didn’t have the faintest idea of the nerve-centers of U.S. populism. (I still generally don’t get it but I’m not quite as tone deaf after 25 years here.)
At university the whole dorm was in our lounge watching the Reagan-Carter debates, and we *all* agreed that Carter not only won, but made him look like a blithering idiot. Nothing but feel-good rhetoric and 1930’s movie fantasies. We expected that this would be the moment historians would point to as the moment where Reagan’s candidacy ended.
The next day, when we got the newspapers reporting opinion polls registering that U.S. voters thought Reagan won the debate by a huge margin, we were simply speechless.
valdivia
@kay:
I actually think it does matter. Because this woman has been sold, I mean *really* sold to the american public since her book came out and her numbers keep getting worse and worse NOT better. It may not matter to a section of the Village, but this is the exact same people who thought she won the debate with Biden. The fact that she has been ubiquitous and selling her brand as a ‘common sense’ politician and the people are not accepting it means that the judgement the people made of her in the last election is still pretty much set in stone. Her actions are either ingraining it more or not changing and that bodes badly for someone who has presidential aspirations.
I agree with you that it bodes well for us dems. :)
The Village is so fucking disconnected from everything that is actually happening that to this day they still don’t understand how Obama won, and they will fail to understand why Palin is not seen the way they think she is.
The Raven
And, out of Hyperborea, the land of eternal sunlight north of the north wind, it’s Sarah Palin, Barbarian Heroine!
And ravens. Don’t forget the ravens.
Croak!
El Cid
And now on C-Span’s Washington Journal, a Republican Congressman from Illinois is explaining that the reason why business hasn’t taken off is because of all the spending by the federal government, and all the talk of spending, and if we’d just stop the spending, and cut the taxes, and stop tying up business with worrying about all these new rules and regulations, they’d have enough knowledge about their investment environment to be able to focus on growing again.
Now, presumably they’re going to do this without customers and without buyers and in a weakened export situation, but I’m sure business has only refrained from investing over the past year or so because of all the spending by the federal government.
Sly
While true, and from an academic standpoint I see where Nate Silver is coming from, none of this addresses how the other participants in the 2012 GOP primary will react to her.
Which is fine, because there’s few predictions we can make on who those people will be. However, the prediction we can make with a fair amount of accuracy is that McCain won’t be among them, leaving his 2008 operatives free reign to choose who they’re going to work for. And I’d bet good money that any potential rival of Palin’s potential run will pay top dollar for any former McCain operative who has a score to settle and a pile of dirt to throw.
So we don’t know how ugly the GOP primary will get, but its likely to be uglier if she’s in it.
As for Broder… who gives a rat’s ass what that fossil thinks.
jwb
@debit: She would also have to be willing to listen to handlers as W did. She has shown no signs whatsoever of being willing to discipline herself in that way. She’s also shown that she can be bought off. She may make a run—but only to keep herself in the limelight in order to keep the money flowing.
debit
@El Cid: I wonder what would happen if Democrats stopped trying to treat the stupid, seething masses as adults, and started treating them like children. “The economy isn’t getting better because you’re bad!” Give the idiots the simple answers and the authority figures they crave.
I jest, but only sort of.
kay
@cat48:
Democrats don’t hate Obama. He polls well among Democrats.
I think the “dispirited base” theory is subject to some question too. Democrats may be less enthused because they won for a while, and they’re complacent/not as angry.
This is dull, but I think 2012 probably depends on people’s perception of their personal “better off-worse off” situation.
gnomedad
@Mike Kay:
So I have to wonder again, what the hell was she so busy doing before her first interview?
John Dillinger
I’ve been predicting for months she will neither announce nor decline. No way she can win a conventional campaign. In 07-08 there were 20 some debates amongst the R candidates. And this time with no D primary those debates will get even more coverage. So, she’s not jumping in. Rather, she will hang back and hope that those who pine for her will as well. If no clearcut winner emerges out of the early primaries, she may jump in then. And her seat at Fox gives her the perfect platform to hang back, “critique” the other candidates, and be ready to go.
kay
@valdivia:
I agree with all that, and I rant and rave as much as the next person, it’s infuriating, but I don’t know what to do about it.
And I’m going to be miserable and defeated right at the onset if I focus on them, so I won’t. Or will try not to.
jwb
@El Cid: Although I’d agree that the teabag movement and Palin herself do have fascist tendencies, I think we’ve been spared by Palin’s refusal or inability to take on competent handlers and the movement’s inability to latch on to anyone else as its leader. It’s also very helpful that the movement is rather old, fat and in fact unlikely to use the guns they all say they carry. It all bears watching, of course, because circumstances change (and quickly), but until the movement coalesces around a strong leader or starts attracting a much younger demographic I’m not particularly worried.
Sports + Another Reason We Are Fucked
Does anyone think she’d be willing to run for VP again?
Suppose Romney wins in the primaries. The pressure on him from the sore losers in the base to pick her would be intense, and he’d probably be willing to do it, for basically the same reasons McCain did. That is a scenario that gives me the cold sweats–unless she’s decided the vice presidency is just too small-time a gig for her now.
El Cid
Personally I think Palin would rather just ride the gravy train than go through the campaign with all its attendant annoying “work” and “questions” and “gotcha media” and “schedules”, but as a dumb but voracious grifter she can also be sold into it.
valdivia
@kay:
yeah the media is probably my biggest target of anger and ranting these days but the funny thing is that they think they have more power than they do. No matter how much BS, and it has been A LOT they throw at Obama his numbers are pretty much stable at 50-53 in a TERRIBLE economy. Once things start getting better those numbers will also come up because people actually really like him even with all the hate and spite being thrown at him. The next election, as you say, will depend largely and mostly on the economy performing better and by all signs it looks like it will.
forked tongue
Does anyone think she’d be willing to run for VP again?
Suppose Romney wins the nomination. The pressure on him from the sore losers in the base to pick her would be intense, and he’d probably be willing to do it, for basically the same reasons McCain did (thinks she’s hot, recklessness, need to ingratiate himself with the loonies). That is a scenario that gives me the cold sweats, unless she’s decided the vice-presidency is just too small-time now for a force like herself.
rootless_e
@kay: The “dispirited base” is not an explanatory theory, it is a political goal of the people who keep advancing it.
El Cid
@jwb: That’s the point — you don’t stir up such movements precisely because of the danger of unseen leaders, figures, and reinforcing developments occurring.
I think we were spared several bullets (not that we weren’t hit by a few) because of the sheer incompetence, laziness, and venality of the committed anti-democracy conspirators of the Bush Jr. administration, particularly Bush Jr. himself.
rootless_e
The good thing about the American System is that Palin has the option of just getting really rich from the rubes. She does not need to actually attain power.
valdivia
@forked tongue:
nope, she is not going to accept the #2 again and even less with Romney who is a Mormon. This scenario should not give you sweats because it is the exact same scenario as the last time with a different top on the ticket but it has some of the same exact problems as before but worse: Romney is a big money guy, he has had no job in the last few years, comes off plastic, and he is not going to accept someone with more star power than himself.
cat48
@kay:
I look at Gallup everyday and that might be part of my angst. He is in the high 80’s with Dems so your right about that. The Independents may come back. He had been in the high 40’s in the Daily, but bounced up to 51 yesterday so that should have made me feel better. Mornings are always my darkest time. I just felt doomed today. Maybe she is responsible for his jump in the polls. A few decided he wasn’t so bad after all after listening to her.
hal
I agree, and I do not see very many people looking at Palin and thinking she could definitely do a better job.
I’m personally completely non-plussed about a Palin run. If she does win the nomination, she will lose the race. I have no doubt of that.
Oh, and off topic a bit, am I the only one who still can’t connect to this site via the URL?
kay
@valdivia:
They may make money on the bank bailouts. I don’t know how old you are, but we didn’t make money on the S and L crisis. Taxpayers lost. Billions.
I was curious about why the administration or Democrats haven’t talked more about the fact that they’re getting the bank bail out money back. I have a friend who is active in Michigan politics, and he guesses they don’t want to talk about bail outs at all, partly because they may not recoup losses on the auto bail outs (which were and are very unpopular).
I supported the auto bail outs, because I think my section of the country would have been hit so hard we’d have trouble recovering without them.
So, I’ve stopped bitching about the bank bail outs. Doing so seems hypocritical to me. My personal hypocrisy meter goes off :)
We’ll see how the bail out fury shakes out. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I would ask that we start with the facts.
valdivia
@rootless_e:
I so agree with your statement.
ps @kay: actually Obama has been talking about getting our money back. And it was on the news a lot in the last couple of weeks. I think that as the numbers that are on the news keep getting better, what low info voters see, the fury will definitely dissipate. Not with the crazies of course, but it will.
forked tongue
@valdivia:
Well, points taken–to a degree. But if its imaginable that she could actually win the presidency under circumstances unfavorable to Obama, I don’t see why it’s unimaginable that a rich plastic phony white guy could, with her by his side to fire up the base. And this:
assumes that he wouldn’t crawl through raw sewage to win.
El Cid
I thought that one of the most profitable yet dangerous [for the rest of us] routes for Palin to have chosen would have been to become a Talibangelical huckster. She could make a ton of money from disciplined and adoring fans, would not be a direct participant in electoral politics yet could still rally populist and authoritarian rightwing forces that shared her view that thinking=enemy, and could bask in glory and attention as much as she wanted.
jwb
@El Cid: Personally, I think the danger point of this particular crisis has passed; that’s not to say that there won’t be new trigger points in the near future, and the situation does bear close watching. But at the moment I don’t see all the ingredients, and, oddly enough, Palin’s presence may well be beneficial to those of us who would prefer the tea bag movement not turn into something more nefarious inasmuch as she keeps the movement from coalescing around some other leader.
kay
@cat48:
My personal experience probably skews my view. I deal with the much-ballyhooed “lower middle class” on a daily basis.
Some of Obama’s economic disaster mitigation policies (we had 16% unemployment here, although it’s now dropped) helped these people. They got extended unemployment benefits. They got a bump in unemployment payments. Everyone made fun of that, in the media, but that’s elitist bullshit. Twenty five dollars a week is chump change until you don’t have it. A lot of them qualified for S-CHIP or Medicaid. So they lost employer-provided health insurance, but there was a safety net in place for their kids. They got food stamps, and they would not have been available without the stimulus funding. Some of them are doing stimulus funded retraining. I cannot imagine what it would have been like here without this safety net.
So that’s my perspective. It’s anecdotal, but it’s my experience, so I can’t just discount it completely.
valdivia
@forked tongue:
but it would not be HIS win. And he would not be able to control her. *and* the people who are already working with him are from the McCain camp and they know who she is. I think the lesson to all the Reps from the last election is that you don’t put someone like her at the bottom of the ticket. Period.
I totally disagree that Palin has a chance to beat Obama. I can see where Romney may come close but he would by himself not with her help. She will only hurt his chances because what he gains in the base he loses with independents and moderates. And to repeat myself–all the gloom and doom predictions about Obama losing 2 or 3 years from now based on how things are today seem just speculation to scare ourselves. I really do not think we have to panic right now.
kay
@valdivia:
I’ve been pushing back a little here locally. There are two groups of Democrats who I will no listen to when they whine.
UAW or teachers. Give me a break. The only reason those two groups are working at all is because a Democrat is in the White House. I don’t know how states were going to pay teachers without stimulus funds, and any Democrat who works for a US auto manufacturer or in any supplier chain company (which is 90% of manufacturing here) and bitches is just delusional. I have to remind them that the auto bailouts were really unpopular. They didn’t have to happen. They didn’t benefit Obama politically at all, nationally.
cat48
@kay:
I’m really glad that part of the Recovery Act helped. Are they aware that Dems allowed for it? It makes me feel good when I see that bill helped regular folks.
rootless_e
@kay: That’s a good point. What’s interesting is that the “progressive economists” who uniformly insisted that the Geithner plan was going to lead to fiasco have uniformly neglected to revisit their (grossly wrong ) predictions.
kay
@cat48:
The local press on the recovery act has been very positive. Not the mitigation end, but the infrastructure end. The county has 30,000 people, and we have a local daily newspaper that has some incredible saturation rate, it’s like 94%. It’s big news.
They can’t really not cover the projects, because they involve traffic rerouting. But, they’ve front-paged them, and the local politicos (who are all Republicans) have encouraged that, because they applied for the project funding, so it makes them look good.
I don’t know if individuals credit Democrats for the whole safety net concept. I do know that it’s the first time a lot of people here have had to rely on it. They absolutely noticed the bump in unemployment benefits, and the increases in tax refunds for lower middle class with children to claim.
I’m not sure it’s human nature to say “I lost my job, but thank goodness for food stamps!” That seems to be asking a lot :)
cat48
@kay
Agreed, that is asking a lot. Still glad their being helped though.
kay
@rootless_e:
For me, who admittedly knows nothing about economics, the natural bail out comparison would be the S and L crisis.
I just looked it up, and taxpayers lost 125 billion on that.
If they break even or make money on the banks, that would seem to be a net neutral or a positive, in my simplistic analysis, anyway.
I completely agree with critics on regulation, though. I want tougher regs, but I fear the Senate is completely captured by the finance sector, so I don’t know how I get it, unless Obama and Co. can do a lot through Agency or Administrative actions, and bypass the legislature. That sucks, but Congress seems to be broken.
valdivia
@kay:
love hearing about that. I see the projects all the time on the roads (virginia, maryland) and on the train route on the northeast corridor. I also love that the dems will come out swinging against reps who bash the stimulus and then tout the checks back home. McCaskill is already doing it very loudly through the local press.
@rootless_e: nope they won’t and according to them it was nationalization of all the banks or catastrophe. Turned out they were wrong but they continue pushing the same I Know Better lines without any sense of humility. Coming from Lat Am I learned not to take the word of any economist as anything bu speculation. Some of the people progressives now tout as wise sages really fucked my region up and they still act as if they have been right all along.
PTirebiter
@jwb: I think that’s a really interesting point. What do you think triggered the current John Birch resurgence? Is it as simple as color/other and a bad economy?
cat48
I am beginning to believe that Halperin is repulsed by Palin. I thought he was fakin it for Tweety’s benefit. Has the new poll up saying her numbers have tanked and adds, “Nothing hopey, changey about that.” Hmm
valdivia
@cat48:
LOL! If she has lost Halperin and only has Broder’s creepy starburst on her corner she is in a tough spot! You made my morning!
cat48
@valdivia:
Made me feel much better, too. I dislike Halperin, but can’t seem to resist going to the Page throughout the day. I won’t click on “HuffPost as Drudge” most days so The Page keeps me up to date on latest.
flukebucket
I believe Palin would carry South Carolina easily.
My opinion is color/other more than bad economy. The economy has been shitty for a long, long time and they did not show themselves until the color/other part came into play.
kay
@cat48:
Halperin has “fans”. I know. I was shocked. I heard him interviewed on the radio about his book and all these people were calling in to say how much they love him.
I almost drove off the highway. Who are they, and what’s wrong with them? He’s just completely unappealing to me.
Napoleon
@kay:
Just an FYI, they are not going to come even remotely close to breaking even on the banks. If you listen closely to what is getting said they have made money on those banks that have paid back, which isn’t counting stuff like GMAC. On top of it you take a broader look at the TARP program, which has included things other then banks it is even worse. So be careful.
kay
@valdivia:
Because it’s a success. I would have loved if it were bigger, but in terms of what it was it “worked”.
They’ll have to be careful though. They don’t want to appear as if they are unaware that a lot of people are still in serious trouble.
valdivia
@kay:
The way they will be doing it, as I understood, is actually calling the republicans on their hypocrisy, not make it out to be that ARRA made everything ok. McCaskill just wrote a letter to the Republicans in her state, published in the local press, asking them if ARRA is so bad as they always go on national tv to say, what exactly they will cut from the state budget now that they are going to give all the 2 billion dollars they took back. It’s really well done, calling them out on the use of the money for their own political fortunes locally while they go on national tv and bash the thing.
matoko_chan
Look…..Palin is not running.
She is a mean, nasty carny barker executing a head-fake run on the presidency to farm the marks for cash.
She can’t survive a presidential debate with follow-on questions and everyone knows that…..including her.
The teabaggers are stupid enough to think she will debate Obama.
Morans.
I’ll believe that she is going to run when she gives an open presser or a speech to an open audience.
kay
@Napoleon:
I know about GMAC. That’s auto-related finance, though, Napoleon, so Democrats have to tread lightly bitching there. I can’t square bailing out auto companies and then letting the financing end fail. Personally, I think borrowing on a depreciating asset is insane, but if everyone were like me, we wouldn’t have an auto industry.
I don’t really agree with the argument that allowing access to the fed discount window is a “loss” though. I understand the anger, that banks and bank entities were afforded extraordinary measures, while individuals were not. I get that. I still haven’t seen a persuasive rebuttal to Geithner’s argument that he did not have the legal tools he needed to go beyond the Fed actions, at Treasury.
I’m reading “Too Big To Fail” and I think it’s pro-finance. Still, there was panic. Paulson thought the world was ending. Treasury was freaking out. They not only didn’t have a plan, when they started to draft one, they ran into huge gaps in legal authority.
kay
@Napoleon:
And in order to give Treasury tools, we’re talking about going through Congress. How long would that have taken? The GOP in the House saw political benefit in pretending there was no crisis. Paulson all but admits that. The only people who were working with him at all were Democrats. House Republicans were holding press conferences saying they were going to cut taxes to save the economy.
Could we have gotten legal authority for Treasury to nationalize through Congress in time for it to matter?
What was the downside to the GOP blocking the “liberal” (Krugman’s, for example) plan, and just letting the economy go into free-fall?
I think you have to grapple with that.
Napoleon
@kay:
I am not saying the program didn’t need to be done, just that it is problematic to say that it make money. You need to do some slicing and dicing of what when where to come up with that. In a way it is almost preferable to say it lost money because that is the whole reason we need regulation so it does not happen again. If blowing the economy up was painless why regulate the banks?
Remember November
@bob h:
A lot of those old guard Republicans ( you know, the quite ones who are waiting and hoping that the foaming mouth neocons in the party bite each other to death) wish she would go away- there were a few salient voices on the right who thought that she was toxic. Of course those voices were shouted down.
flukebucket
Joe Klein says
As for me personally there is nothing I would like better than for Sarah to be the Republican candidate in 2012. I want to get a good, solid reading on just how fucked up this country is.
LarsThorwald
I assume she is going to run. I assume she is going to pull in top dollar campaign people as well. I assume her team will understand that the polls are fickle things, and that the American people can be swayed. I assume that they will sell her like no candidate has been sold before. I assume she will get millions in corporate and other fundraising to help in the sale. I assume that she will have a number of successful speeches that make her seem like she has gravitas. I assume the mainstream media will jellydick its investigation of her past, soft-peddle her faults, and generally give her a leg-up in an effort to make it a horserace. I assume that the American people, being the American people, will slowly but surely succumb, after a year of selling Palin, to the idea that she is a “serious candidate.”
I assume that she will be the nominee.
I have to assume these things.
Because she is far too dangerous to laugh off.
greggha
Commenting to lay my own cookie.
aimai
I’m torn betwen agreeing with LarsThorwald and thinking that the vast majority of grown up Republicans think of Palin as a kind of red meat warm up act. I think she and her handlers will exploit this moment, when lots of Republicans (like Perry) want to use her to generate excitement in local races. They may think they can translate that to winning in the primary but my guess is that the Mitts and the Huckabees will outraise Palin for the big money, lock up the good campaign people, and go to town on her if she steps out of line and tries to run for the actual Republican Nomination. And I think that the alpha males of the republican party and sarah from alaska will end up knocking each other out in the primary–she will accuse them, successfully, of not being teabaggery enough. They will try to run to her right, but keep one eye on the center electorate, and be crushed between the primary voters/teabaggers and reality. I think we’ll end up with a situation in which one of them fails upward, like McCain did, and ends up the last man standing. I also think whoever wins will be fatally damaged by all the mudslinging and attacks of a contested primary, and an inability to walk back the crazy talk.
but maybe that’s just my sunny optimism talking.
aimai
Trinity
I like what Ta-Nehisi Coates has to say about Palin.
patrick
I thought the “I’m never going to pretend like I know more than the next person.” was the real highlight of Palin’s speech. How satisfied Broder must feel to advocate a potential presidential candidate who is proud not to know more than the next person. I hope she’s not standing next to Elmer Fudd.
carlos the dwarf
a post for the cookie monster that this blog has become.
Heart you all, and FYWP.
Another line for the spam filter.
Kirk Spencer
Posting problems, let’s try this again.
Sarah will run. She has to if she wants to stay on the talk circuit.
Once Sarah is running, she’ll keep running as long as she’s in front or a very (very) close second in either delegates or states. (That last matters due to the battle of the Lilliputians. 19 states with a total of 50 delegates between them get to set R primaries after the Opening Four but prior to the fourth week of February.) Either sets her up for the March Madness springboard. After that, she either leads or bows out – unless, again, she’s in spitting distance of the leader.
Now I don’t know what will change between now and then, but if the primaries were run right now Sarah would win. Yes, the nation doesn’t like her, but she’s not running for the national vote. She’s running for the vote of the Republican Primary Voter, and that’s not the same animal.
Zach
Mark it: she’ll lose because she’s too lazy.
McCain only avoided this by having every other major candidate either:
(1) also be lazy (giuliani)
(2) run into trouble with early primary math (romney)
(3) start too late and also be lazy (fred thompson)
(4) unacceptable to a large majority of the party (huckabee, paul)
McCain lost by as much as he did in the general election largely because he was lazy. He did not campaign vigorously, he made poorly informed and rash decisions, he relied too much on advisers with an obvious deficit of common sense, etc. Palin has all of McCain’s weaknesses and none of his strengths. She is possibly better for raising morale of a minority of people guaranteed to vote for her; that might help in the general but will not win a primary.
The only way she gets the nomination is if she turns every other major candidate against each other and stays in the background before appearing to rise above the fray. If she can restrain herself (and if a better candidate we’re not currently considering emerges), that will work; it’s how she became governor.
Sloegin
What other certifiable winger / talk-talk demagogue ran recently and posted some good primary numbers? Pat Buchanan.
Her numbers and discipline are poor at the moment, but she’s got a built-in base, and MSM ‘consensus’ always brings their horses within closing distance.
Anyone who dismisses the grifter outright as anything less than a dangerous candidate is a loon.
Just ‘sayin. You Betcha. Also.
tomvox1
Palin makes a certain strain of white guy (usually repressed and conservative) horny. That is the only explanation for these dopes tying themselves in knots explaining away her obvious stupidity to try to somehow legitimize her.
If she spouted the same ignorant, incoherent gibberish but looked like Golda Meir would anyone be talking about this person?
Tony J
It wouldn’t surprise me.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that her position as the Great White Hope of the PUMA wing of the Teabagger Movement doesn’t change in the next two years, I don’t see how she can avoid running for something in 2012. Her entire Once and Future Queen shtick is based around the fantasy that the Republicans only lost in 2008 because McCain’s people prevented her from fighting the brilliant, common-sense campaign she really wanted to. So even if she tries to stay out of the Primaries, citing MSM meanies, family advice, the reduced paycheck, whatever, there’s still a good chance that the nutjobs who form her Base will force her to run because “It’s Sarah’s Turn!”, and no one will stop them voting for her.
In that situation, it wouldn’t astound me if she put out the meme that what she really wanted was the VP slot on a suitably conservative ticket. That way, she can’t lose. Either she gets to campaign as VP again, as the ‘Voice of the Moron Minority’, loses badly, and stays on the “Poor Sarah” gravy-train, or she doesn’t get the nod, plays the victim of cynical Washington politics-as-usual, and stays on the “Poor Sarah” gravy-train.
It would be odd to witness in real-life, but if there’s one thing the last decade has taught me, it’s never under-estimate the ability of Republicans to do very crazy things.
bago
Ah, South Caroline. I’d enjoy it if she went South on me too. Fix yer typo.
catclub
The first poster at TNC Atlantic article had it right, and I will repeat (in a different way):
Sarah Palin does not win where George Bush did because George Bush is a born and bred member of the GOP aristocracy. As long as the GOP aristocracy rules, she is not the candidate. Sarah Palin will eventually be put in her place, as Huckabee was in 2008.
karent bidwell
I agree with those who don’t think she wants to actually run – too much work, too much discipline, too much at stake when mistakes are made, too much of a possibility to look like FAIL (couldn’t blame it on JMcCain this time). She wants the adulation and the money and the possibility. She most likely will follow the Gingrinch playbook (pretending to be on the verge of running but not running, but interfering at strategic moments to keep the cash flowing) not understanding that if she doesn’t run, she’s toast. Even her most die-hard supporters won’t take any excuses for that, no matter what doozies she came up with. She doesn’t have the perceived intellectual heft to pull off the scam that Newt has and there is always that weird right-wing perception of femaleness that won’t let her call her own shots entirely. One thing to be said for her is that Sarah doesn’t “stay in her place” very well and that doesn’t work for those who are winding her up and pointing her in a direction.
Anne Laurie
@Bill E Pilgrim:
The joke was that a leading Hollywood donor heard about the early Reagan-for-Prez movement and said, “No, NO — Jimmy Stewart for President; Ronnie for his best friend.”
HyperIon
I stopped reading WaPo several months ago but news of this idiotic column sent me back for the 86 pages of comments there, which do cheer one up.
Here are three good ones…
matoko_chan
The only people that are stupid enough to think Palin is actually running are teabagger/retards.
She hasn’t given an open presser since the turkey chopper debacle.
The only way she can be president is by a putsch, an thank gawd there aren’t enough teabaggers in the whole country to pull that off.
matoko_chan
@karent bidwell:
Bingo.
The Old Conservative White Guys knew Palin was a dimbo….but they thought they could pygmalion her. She won’t play galatea……that is why she quit as gov in a snit fit….Krauthammer and Doughy Pantsload told her to go back to Alaska and read some books. The same week Schmidt dripped a little poison into the media (they had been keeping mum about her campaign performance not out of loyalty to mccain, but in hopes of being able to use her as a tasp on their base again) as a threat to make her go back to Alaska and read some books. She then rushed her own version of events out in her “book” and beat Schmidt to the punch.
Believe me, she knew the embedds couldn’t talk for a year, and took advantage of that.
We are damned lucky she is just that stupid, and thinks she can get by on slogans and demogoguery. After a successful pygmalion treatment she would have been a formidable candidate.
In an open presser she’d be a deer in the headlights, just like she was in the Couric interview.
And she knows it.
She is just scamming the rubes.