Speaking of 2012, the Wall Street Journal throws up another potential GOP candidate:
When conservative activist and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer scans the potential 2012 Republican field, not much excites him… But in considering one candidate, Mr. Bauer sees only qualities that he likes. Indiana Rep. Mike Pence is a military and fiscal hawk who frequently plugs his Christian credentials. To some, he’s the potential candidate best able to unite two wings of the Republican Party—its fiscal conservatives and social conservatives.
__
“He is definitely the guy to watch,” says Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, a group that opposes gay marriage and abortion.
[…] __
“The big question with Huckabee is whether he can raise enough money to be a real contender in 2012,” says Tom Minnery, head of public policy for Focus on the Family. As a fresher face, he says, Mr. Pence “is someone who could generate a lot of enthusiasm” in Iowa and other early nominating states and possibly show more durability in the long presidential campaign…
It does not seem to me that Pence came off very well in his previous rhetorical bouts with President Obama, which hasn’t kept him from making bold pronouncements. It may be my feminazi bias, but whenever another professional Talibangelical adds his voice to the Pence choir, what I hear is “Sure, he may be even dumber than Sarah Palin, but at least Mike Pence has the most important qualification for Godly leadership — a penis!”
El Cid
The penls thing is important to the authoriGOPian mindset. But we shouldn’t forget that the statement
might likely be counted as one of his advantages, not a criticism.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Wasn’t this the guy who compared a market in Bagdad, to which he wore a bullet proof vest, which had to be cleared and secured by a 100+ active duty troops, with snipers positioned around it, and helicopter gun ships hovering within calling distance, all for a McCain ’08 photo op… if memory serves, Pence compared this market to a small town farmers market in Indiana on a Sunday after noon? It IIRC was the same market where Lindsey Graham got a fabulous deal on some rugs.
asiangrrlMN
Matt Y’s take on Pence from over two years ago. I think it still stands. Nothing I’ve read about Pence has changed my opinion of him.
rikyrah
they come up with someone new every other day.
oh THIS one is their Great White Hope.
don’t think so.
Bnut
I have about had it with this BS Time Warner internet here in Brooklyn. It’s been fucking slow as hell for 2 weeks now, and with the snow, who knows when anyone will be getting around to fixing whatever is fucked up. The best part is that Time Warner’s own internet speed testing site spits out 3x the speeds that every single other website does. Fucking lying asshole monopoly shit ass pricks.
rikyrah
I remember that MattY column. was funny then. funny now.
General Stuck
Every single one of the gooper hopefuls is dumber than dirt. Barbour isn’t but is completely unelectable for president. Aside from being a racist asshat. Jon Huntsman was probably their best bet. But Obama exiled him to bumfuck egypt or some such place. So long as the economy slowly improves, as well as the job market, there is no one on the right who could match Obama as a campaigner. Voting for president, is about the only thing that Americans tend to turn on their brains half way about with politics. The wingnuts know it, and is why they are scheming to crash the country, and take their chances on who gets blamed.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
Bauer is a corporate front, a fundamentalist cut-out.
This signals multinationals won’t initially support Palin.
Anya
Anne Laurie, I’ve been meaning to ask you what’s your take on Scott Brown’s re-election chances? From what I’ve been reading, it looks his approval is very hight, even among Dems, and there are no notable Dem challengers.
Cacti
Sorry, but you can’t be both.
Maintaining an oversized military and interventionist foreign policy is extremely costly.
Warren Terra
I came to this thread to post Matt Yglesias’s seminal dissection of Rep. Pence, only to find Asiangrrl had beat me to it. Still, if you didn’t follow her link, this is your chance to correct that error and read Yglesias’s post.
Bnut
@Cacti:
Avery Brooks disagrees.
Linda Featheringill
@General Stuck:
I googled John Huntsman and you’re right. He does seem to be an interesting person. Now ambassador to China. Wikipedia says he is fluent in Mandarin.
Suck It Up!
this line just reeks of bs
KG
@General Stuck: Huntsman is ambassador to China, not an unimportant gig. But there are two things against Huntsman in 2012:
1. He’s not stupid enough to challenge a sitting president
2. Even if he was, he took a job in the Obama Administration, and given the ODS in the party, that would have disqualified him anyway.
Oh, and a bonus 3: he has the same problem Romney has, that is, he’s Mormon.
El Cid
A “fiscal hawk” is someone dedicated to cutting programs they don’t like, such as social programs, and blocking revenue collection which may help, such as taxes on those holding the greatest concentration of income and wealthy in the nation.
KG
@Suck It Up!: yeah, the social conservative wing is no longer interested in being united with anyone that won’t take a back seat to their wants and desires. They’re tired of being second fiddle in the unity discussion.
Anne Laurie
@Anya: __
Scotty’s approval ratings are high because — as predicted by everybody — he’s rapidly shifted from “Tea Party darling” to “RINO”, which is the only viable Republicanism for a Masshole. Not gonna start making predictions about 2012, because Massachusetts will almost certainly lose one of its 10 seats in the House when the census results are finalized, and that will set off a round of musical chairs depending on how the district lines are re-drawn. (Heck, if things get messy enough around here, I can see Brown being solicited as a VP for the “No Labels (Just Money)” ticket, since he is such a publicists’ wet dream.)
General Stuck
@KG:
I agree with the stain of working in the Obama administration.
But I doubt that Mormonism would be as big an obstacle, if it was demonstrated he could possibly beat Obama. Which I think would trump any religious misgivings on the right in their current fulminating hatred of Obama.
KG
@Anne Laurie: Is it wrong that I kinda want to see Barney Frank run for the Senate?
KG
@General Stuck: so long as the GOP nomination has to go through the South, and the religious right, I think being Mormon will be a drag. I just don’t think they can see past it. But it is possible, I suppose.
El Cid
Yay!
John - A Motley Moose
@KG: Wouldn’t that be awesome! Barney Frank and Al Franken together in the Senate.
Arclite
This statement is so full of oxymoron. Why does no one call this guy out for being un-Christian: Jesus was most certainly NOT pro-military, and if he saw the wealth this nation had he would think it unbelievable we would even consider cutting domestic programs that help the poor and infirm.
John - A Motley Moose
@El Cid: Is this really new news? Lots of banks have been failing in the last 2 years. The amount is pretty small ~$40 million per bank. There are a lot of small banks in this country. It could have been a lot worse.
Anne Laurie
@KG: __
Oh, all of us muckers would loooove to watch a Frank/Brown
beatdowndebate! (Although I think Scotty has sufficient low cunning never to place his wooden ‘charms’ in such a dangerous situation.) But Barney’s old enough, and has certainly worked for the common betterment long enough, that nobody’s sure he wants to start over in America’s Hall of Mandarins, I think…Anya
@Anne Laurie: I somehow feel that in a presidential elections he cannot maintain a seat in a deep blue state, but what do I know.
Glinda
Ah, finally a Republican candidate for 2012 that I can be even more enthusiastic about that Palin! I am so relieved. I didn’t think I could take listening to Palin’s nasal screech for the 10 months before that election, but I was willing to suffer for the good of the Democratic Party.
But Pence is someone I could sink my teeth into … that is, if I were looking for tainted meat.
Morbo
To be a man you must have honor, honor and a peeeeenis.
Rathskeller
@General Stuck: No, I think the two flavors are bone-stupid (Palin, Pence) or canny with damning impediments (Romney, Barbour, Huckabee, Jindal, Gingrich, Giuliani). It’s really hard to say what’s going to happen in 2012 on the GOP side.
Maybe wildcards like Petraus will parachute in, hoping to snatch it all away. But then again, nothing in Petraus’s counterterrorism background has prepared him for the psychotic intensity of the South Carolina GOP primary.
Nerull
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Wasn’t that market shot up several days later, or is my memory faulty?
Pat
I’m just wondering which lie will clinch the nomination for which candidate. However, I expect to be continually amused while I listen to them tell the country WHAT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WANT.
mike
The GOP has an ongoing problem with inadequate brain power, but that won’t stop Barbour.
You can count me among those who are sorely disappointed with Mr. Obama, but it’s not a lack of smarts that is hurting our feelings.
If Mike Pence is the GOP nominee, BO will destroy him in any head to head competition. Pence, like most GOPers is an empty head that repeats easily memorized talking points. If he has to go outside of that boundary, he sounds like the fool he is.
The racial situation seems to be backsliding enough that maybe Barbour’s overt race-baiting will get him both the repub nomination AND the election to president. I doubt that Pence could defeat Obama, but an overtly racial Barbour might be able to pull it off. god help us all if it happens.
Carol
@Rathskeller: Anybody as smart as Petreaus will wait until 2016 or 2020 (if one of this motley crew wins). By then the war in Afghanistan will be completely over (for us, anyway) and he can campaign on the “we kept you safe” platform and get up to speed on domestic matters. So we are watching the fight over who will lose in the least humiliating way to Obama.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
That’s a Who’s Who of SPLC-identified anti-gay and hate groups.
This is one thing I’m looking forward to in the next election. Watching GOPers try to run for office while remaining in the good graces of a bunch of rabid bigots.
debbie
@General Stuck:
But the more, the merrier. I look forward to their first debate. Hopefully, there will be two rows of lecterns on the stage and we can all play whack-a-mole.
Alwhite
Herein is the key to handicapping the GOP weepstakes. The ‘established’ candidates are all so badly flawed as to be unelectable. They have to be on the lookout for a ‘fresh face’; FF = some low level wingnut that will satisfy the teabagging crowd while not well known enough to scare off the normal low-information voter.
It will matter if the press plays patsy – again – and ignores the painfully obvious inadequacies of the GOP nominee. Otherwise Obama should be sure of a second term.
Woodrowfan
I yell this from the rooftops every time I see Pence discussed: I went to college with him. We took classes together at our small school. He’s a self-righteous dweeb who will gladly stab you in the back while he praises Jeeesus. He’s dumber than a box of rocks, and thinks he brilliant. And, just to top it off, he’s as honest as he is smart.
4tehlulz
@Woodrowfan: So he’s the VP candidate that Sarah Palin deserves.
Palin/Pence 2012: To busy destroying each other to destroy the country.
John Bird
O______O
mds
Right now, it looks like Mitch Daniels is trying to clear the field for Pence to run for governor of Indiana.** This is at least partially because Daniels has been toying with a presidential run, and knows that he can’t sling the Jeebus horseshit the way Pence can. So tempt him with that “executive experience” canard, reduce the competition for the prez nomination, and make your own mismanagement of Indiana look good in retrospect as Governor Pence really fucks everything up. (Of course, the smart thing to do would be to let a Democrat win the governorship, watch them be caught in the hotseat when the shit from Daniels’ budgetary shenanigans really hits the fan, then ride to the rescue. But this is Mike Pence we’re talking about.)
**See Doghouse Riley for such insights into the wacky world of Indiana politics.
Brachiator
@Anne Laurie:
Yep. It’s your feminazi bias.
rikyrah
Daniels is of AY-RAHB descent.
just want to point that out.
SadOldVet
There is one candidate who will unite all THREE wings of the rethugnican party…
The one rethug candidate who will unite the repukes is…
1) an original signer of the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) ‘Statement of Principles’. He is on the ‘right’ side of the neocons who want one world under U.S. military domination!
2) a darling of the social conservatives, who says the ‘right’ thing on social issues.
3) a ‘charter’ member of the wealthy wing of the repuke party, whose credentials for supporting the wealthy and corporate elites will never be challenged.
Ain’t no Mike Pence. Mike Pence is arguably the 2nd stupidest person on the face of the earth. And, we are still looking for the stupidest.
Ain’t no Bitch Daniels. Ain’t no Neutered Gingrich. Ain’t no Sarah Palin. Ain’t no Mittens ‘Mormon’ Romney. Ain’t no preacher from Arkansas.
It is the one and only Jeb Bush! Beloved by the Christianistas! Able to push all the ‘right’ buttons without ever following thru on them. Membership in the Bush Criminal Family guarantees virtually unlimited support from those who have 100% certainty that the role of the government is too make the wealthy have greater wealth. Able to drown opponents in corporate and wealthy contributions and Citizens United untraceable spending! Guaranteed to start another war in the middle east. Able to follow the Bush family tradition of invading ‘enemies’ of Israel.