Interesting little piece by Kevin Carey, in the Washington Monthly, explaining “Why Presidential Races Are so Limited“:
… Given the nine percent unemployment rate and the fact that the Democratic incumbent is a liberal black man, many political observers are wondering if the vaunted Republican political machine has slipped a gear. I don’t think that’s likely. Instead, they’ve run up against the laws of probability at the best possible time for Barack Obama.
__
That’s because sometime during the last half century, the guardians of conventional wisdom decided that only three kinds of people are qualified to run for President of the United States: those who are (or recently were) senators, governors, and Vice Presidents. So instead of finding the best candidate among 300 million people every four years, we’re only allowed to choose among about 200.
__
And actually, a lot less than that…
[…] __
All of which means that in any given election year, each major party only has about 20 people from which to choose. At that point, the population is so small that the laws of probability come into play. Some cold feet here, a sex scandal there, a couple of unknown skeletons in the closet, a few ill-considered remarks about Civil War, and eventually a year will come when there is simply nobody left. 2012 is looking like that year for Republicans. They have mountains of corporate cash, an army of well-trained political consultants, and a structurally winnable race. But the candidate pool dice roll has come up snake eyes. Thus, the increasing possibility of a Pawlenty vs. Mitch Daniels race that broadcast networks will be unable to televise due to the risk of viewers having their souls erased by the creation of an anti-charismatic vortex of absolute personality zero…
Click over for a reminder of how skillfully then-candidate Barack Obama managed the dull tools of the pundits’ CW to his advantage, and ours. (Yes, I did look for Mencken’s snide comment about Coolidge’s candidacy, but my google-fu wasn’t up to the task.)
Spaghetti Lee
Seems kind of Freakonomics-y to me. I’d like to think that the fact that Obama’s done a good job with what he’s been given, and that the candidates are mostly assholes and psychopaths, has something to do with it.
BethanyAnne
I wonder about Huntsman. I don’t want him to win the whole shebang, but I’d be happy if he were the R choice.
Just Some Fuckhead
If one of the unwashed masses wants to be President, they can run for Senator or Governor, right? Call me a snob but I don’t want that fucking whackjob “activist citizen” a couple aces short of a full deck, rambling on monotonously for two hours at city council meetings, anywhere near the levers of power.
EvolutionaryDesign
I think this is also a result of the Republicans deciding to go all-in after 2010. I think they seriously misread the message of that election insomuch as they thought the “mandate” pendulum had already swung back their way. That pendulum had been swinging away after 8 years in their favor, which resulted in Obama’s victory. Even though O is blackity-black-black-black, it’s still too early for popular opinion to completely snap back in their direction. They should have waited til 2012 to pull the batshit ripcord.
fhtagn
@BethanyAnne:
I imagine you’ll hear of the nuptials of Rick Santorum and Bonzo before Huntsman wins the GOP nomination. He’s got no money, not much of a track record, limited charisma, and the approbation of Barack Obama.
DavidNC
i don’t agree with the premise of the article you link. more than anything else, it’s the modern gop’s tolerance for corruption, cronyism, and incompetence that’s producing such shitty candidates. good people don’t rise in that environment–not often anyway.
just think about the pandering gutless jokes who constitute the first tier of GOP presidential candidates. in their pandering and groveling to the ignorant teabag hordes, they show themselves to be exceptionally weak individuals of poor character. and yet this is the ONLY MODEL for winning the nomination, for even having a chance at winning. that’s a systemic issue, not the consequence of have a shallow pool of candidates.
Xecky Gilchrist
This kind of analysis always strikes me as purest wankery. Early on in the 2008 race there was, IIRC, broad agreement among political junkies that senators never won the presidency. I thought that was kind of dumb, especially once the leaders were Senator McCain, Senator Clinton, and Senator Obama.
fhtagn
@DavidNC:
Part of that tolerance stems from an ideology of doing nothing constructive. They have a mandate from their base not to offer real solutions or good government. Part of it is the media not holding them to account, which leads them to disaster when people actually pay attention. Basically, they are confidence tricksters who make the fatal error of believing their own flim-flam routine.
hhex65
I know Mencken said Coolidge’s career was “as appalling and as fascinating as a two-headed boy”– if that’s not the quote we’re looking for it should be.
HRA
H. L. Mencken, American Mercury, April 1933.
In what manner he would have performed himself if the holy angels had shoved the Depression forward a couple of years – this we can only guess, and one man’s hazard is as good as another’s. My own is that he would have responded to bad times precisely as he responded to good ones – that is, by pulling down the blinds, stretching his legs upon his desk, and snoozing away the lazy afternoons…. He slept more than any other President, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored…. Counting out Harding as a cipher only, Dr. Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver and followed by two more. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant? There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.
dmsilev
@Xecky Gilchrist: Until 2008, it was pretty unusual in modern times for Senators to win the Presidency; JFK was the most recent example. However, it was pretty common for Senators to *run*, and certainly not unusual for them to at least win the nomination.
If you’re speculating about the pool of serious candidates, Senators have always been in the mix.
MikeJ
I think cabinet secretaries could also run and be taken seriously, so that potentially adds 15 people, although most of them fall into the other categories too.
The ithacan
Obama worked for the nomination and the presidency because he knew that only hard work would bring them to him.
The R candidates don’t want to work for the presidency the way he did, they want to have it awarded to them. They feel that they deserve it.
This point of view is going to run into the buzz saw of retail politics and the result won’t be pretty—- for the R’s.
Litlebritdifrnt
I am watching the Decorah Eagles right now, what the hell was the subject again?
Splitting Image
I don’t really agree with the premise of Carey’s article.
He is saying that the candidate fields are arbitrarily limited to Senators and Governors (and Vice-Presidents). I think the truth is closer to the fields being practically limited to those people because they are for the most part the only ones with state-wide campaign experience and fundraising abilities. Ron Paul is a notable exception to the rule in that he had fundraising chops and visibility beyond his own district, but he also had too low a ceiling to be viable.
I think even a political newcomer could to get into the White House if they could put together an organization from scratch capable of getting them there. But as Hilary Clinton can tell you, that is a lot easier said than done. Clinton was a well-connected insider with country-wide name recognition who thought she had a core group of absolute blue-chippers working for her. And yet they completely fucked it up for her.
Imagine how much harder it is to put together a good team if you don’t have political experience. A businessman may have the same sort of experience on paper, since a successful one will also have been responsible for putting a good team of people into positions of responsibility, but a business CEO will be hiring people with completely different skill sets. The ability to succeed in one doesn’t necessarily translate into the other.
I don’t think this is something that anybody just “decided”. It’s just really really really hard to get close enough to the White House to have a shot at it.
DavidNC
@fhtagn: yeah, that sounds right. and white resentment, often being their primary means of winning elections, has gotten so bad in the last few years that killing off any aspect of government that might benefit non-whites is pretty much the only mandate these elected gopers have. it actually makes me feel bad for the handful of gop candidates who might have wanted to contribute something positive while in office.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@dmsilev: Yeah, the Gasbags called it “The Curse of The Hill” and the fact that it was true since 1960 made it seem like Divine Law to them. Another bit of conventional wisdom I was glad to see die in ’08 was the idea you couldn’t win without a Southerner on the ticket.
That said, this article is more optimistic than I am. By this time next year, Mitch Daniels and Pawlenty are going to be puffed up, all their flaws made into virtues, like that plain-spoken, self-made businessman from Midland. Romney can’t seem to get any traction, and I still don’t believe Huntsman can overcome his religion or his work for Obama. Huckabee, if he goes for it, will be a top tier contender.
MagicPanda
Sometimes, people come up with really clever ideas that sound so cool that they feel compelled write articles about them without checking to see if reality matches their words.
This condition affects bloggers, libertarians, and op-ed writers. Apparently, it has infected Kevin Carey.
Right now, the potential pool of Republican presidential contenders consists of:
1) People who are crazy (Bachmann, Cain, etc.)
2) People who are not crazy, but feel they need to pander to crazy people (Romney, Pawlenty, etc.)
3) People who have been hesitant to get in the race, because of the crazy people.
The issue isn’t that a roll of the dice has determined that there are absolutely no qualified candidates. The issue is that none of the non-crazy people wants to run right now.
Roger Moore
It doesn’t help that the Republicans have been spiraling down in a frenzy of litmus tests and purity purges. Any Republican who seriously tries to break with party orthodoxy will get smacked down incredibly quickly. It’s not a system that’s conducive to identifying and promoting great leaders or even great candidates.
WereBear
Ronald Reagan and then Clinton were Governors who made it.
But at least we haven’t reached the point where they can’t make the leap to actor to President without some elected office first.
Dave L
Or maybe this:
“The American people, having 135,717,342 native-born adult whites to choose from, including thousands who are handsome and many who are wise, pick out the Hon. Mr. Coolidge to be the head of state. It is as if a hungry man set before a banquet prepared by master chefs and covering a table an acre in area, should turn his back on the feast and stay his stomach by catching and eating flies.”
Splitting Image
A shorter version of what I was saying above:
It’s just too easy for a political outsider to get rooked into hiring Mark Penn as an adviser.
MagicPanda
@Roger Moore: That’s it.
And it’s not just that they have litmus tests. They have litmus tests on things that are kind of crazy, like torturing people. Or this idea that lowering taxes always raises revenue (in the face of a gigantic global recession).
Southern Beale
Wow y’all, the Presbyterian Church USA just voted to allow ordaining GLBT ministers, this is so huge. Something the church has been working toward for several years but the last obstacle has fallen. I’m so proud of my denomination!
MikeJ
Remember a couple of years a go when Republicans were making noises that the natural born qualification should be dropped to Ah-nuld could run? How sad is it that he’s appears saner than anybody they can run?
mr. whipple
@Southern Beale: Nice!
gwangung
@Splitting Image:
@Splitting Image:
Ding! Ding! Ding!
AAA Bonds
Kevin Carey is a court scribe and this piece is no exception. No thanks.
Note the Friedman-esque spinning of his idle speculation and high-school-cafeteria generalizations into statements of fact.
Litlebritdifrnt
This is sad, Riley is leaving Wonkette, and he posts this
“I’m twenty-three. Can anyone even begin to count how many countries we’ve flattened, for Freedom, since 1987? I’m twenty-three, and for my entire life, all I’ve known is war.”
“all I have known is war” my heart weeps, I cannot even begin to state how much that post grieves me. I have adored Riley’s posts, and now I must give kudos to his last. It was so powerful and so, damn obvious.
MikeJ
@Litlebritdifrnt: It’s not really anything new. There have been brushfire wars 10 years or less apart for as long as the US has been around. And we didn’t start the idea. People have always been at war always.
lamh34
@BethanyAnne: I’ll admit, that the only reason why I’m hoping Huntsman doesn’t run right now, is because it gives the GOP a chance to run against Obama as the “great white hope” in a way that Romney flip-flopping and say anything persona can’t.
Daniels, I’m not too worried about, but it would serve GOP right to have a “birther” issue of their own, plus which one of his opponents will be the first the imply that Mitch can’t be trusted cause he’s an A-rab!
Just Some Fuckhead
@Litlebritdifrnt: And yet, it’s just accepted that we have to exist in permawar. The onus isn’t on those who would go to war on justifying it, it’s the default position and it’s up to sane people to make a case against it.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
David Brooks can bleat all he wants, but its not going to be Pawlenty and Daniels. Not when most of Iowa and New Hampshire are going to go ‘who?’ and then ‘oh’.
Its all about name recognition. Pick one from Gingrich, Palin, Huckabee, Romney, and Trump. As long as Palin stays on the sidelines my money’s on Newt, he’s far enough into the right-wing to gain the Tea Party vote and enough of a Washington insider to give Brooks and Kaplan sparkles.
And if he was up against Hubert H. Humphrey he’d have a shot at the general. Thankfully for us, he’s not.
Martin
This is putting the cart before the horse. Before we complain about being there too few pathways to the big office, how about we figure out how to prevent the morons from getting into those slots to begin with? 200+ qualified candidates would be fine, but out of 200 elected officials, we have but a handful that are deserving of consideration. More slots would suggest more morons, given the current process. That’s the more immediate problem.
Linda Featheringill
@Southern Beale:
Very good! Applause, applause!
Calouste
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Gosh, think about how war is for people who actually live (and die) through war rather than some whiny 23-year-old who watches it on TV and blogs about it.
Linda Featheringill
@MikeJ:
Yes, Homo sapiens sapiens seems to like war. The US has been at war more often than not since the beginning of the country.
Mnemosyne
@lamh34:
If it’s any consolation, the “great white hope” has always been a chimera. Even when Jack Johnson was defeated by the original “great white hope,” Johnson threw the fight. And Hitler’s hand-picked “great white hope” got his ass kicked by Joe Louis (and, to add insult to injury, Schmeling became very good friends with Louis after the war).
At this point, searching for the “great white hope” is pretty much an admission that you’re fucked.
Anne Laurie
@Dave L: That’s the quote I was looking for — but I remembered the first subject as ‘the Republican party‘, not ‘the American people.’
I’m still convinced that Romney will be the eventual GOP nominee, no matter how many of the others have to die in ‘car accidents’ for him to get there. But I’m not seeing any Repub contender that doesn’t trip the ‘Feast or Flies?’ filter when compared to our Democratic incumbent!
Nutella
@HRA:
Coolidge: “He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.”
That’s puts him way ahead of the Republican field for 2012.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Dave L: Ouch!! That gentleman from Baltimore could really deliver a smackdown, couldn’t he?
Much more subtle, more drawn out, and far nastier than “I hear Mr. Trump is running as a Republican. That’s funny, I thought he was running as a joke.”
BGinCHI
Out of roughly 10 GOP candidates, 2 are Mormon.
That’s some demographic representation.
Roger Moore
@Anne Laurie:
FTFY. Best guess is that inconvenient candidates will find themselves presented with fabulous offers of shows on Fox News or cushy gigs at libertarian think tanks. There’s no need for a rash of inexplicable accidents.
lamh34
@Mnemosyne: from ur lips to God’s, Allah’s, Mother Nature’s, Odin’s, Zeus’ ears (can ya tell, I saw Thor last Friday…BTW, loved it)
Cacti
@BethanyAnne:
I sometimes think that Huntsman is a stalking horse candidate for Romney, peeling away some of his Mormon support in the western states and setting himself up for 2016.
Phil Perspective
@dmsilev: And that’s just the thing. I think JFK was the only Senator to win in like 100 years, maybe even 150. And it took almost another 50 for a sitting Senator to win again.
JCT
@Southern Beale: OK, now that is great news! Amazing the evolution on this subject in the past several years, real momentum finally.
@Mnemosyne: +1 and they are really casting about now. Clowns and goofballs galore, though the “Trump” effect may be to make the remainders look quasi-sane.
I don’t think they’re going to come up with anyone “serious” (not that word again) for 2012, the party is just too fractious. Too bad for them and their Teabagging friends.
AAA Bonds
@Litlebritdifrnt:
I’d say that writing “all I’ve known is war” is a little bit of a stretch for someone who’s 23 and has never seen combat.
For what it’s worth, America’s been at war since before I could legally vote. But that’s in part because most people in America pay for wars but don’t know war’s face at all.
mclaren
@Just Some Fuckhead:
You’re a snob. You’re also deeply stupid.
The people who get to be governors and senators today have been driven so wildly insane by their immense wealth and incredible isolation from ordinary Americans that if you picked some homeless person off the street, the homeless person would do an orders of magnitude better job than the loonies we’ve got running America right now.
Have you been paying attention to what’s going in this country?
We’ve got a military that can’t win wars engaged in two (2) simultaneous endless unwinnable wars — and the crazy super-rich people who run America think it’s a really really good idea to spend more money on our military and get involved in more foreign wars. Libya, anyone?
Then we’ve got a financial system that’s bleeding America dry while crashing the economy periodically, and the crazy superwealthy people running America think it’s a really really good idea to let the financial system continue grinding on out of control until it crashes the global economy once again.
And we’ve got a massively dysfunctional broken health care system that’s in the process of breaking up and falling apart, and the multimillionaire looney toones who are running this country (including the president) think it’s a really really good idea to deliver the entire U.S. population into the clutches of greedy corrupt cartels and force everyone in America to buy unaffordable health care whose price is guaranteed to rise without limit.
And on top of all that, we’re so hopelessly addicted to oil in America that large parts of America, like Southern California, will fall apart completely if the price of oil goesmuch higher, so the crazy people running this country think it’s a really really good idea to ignore America’s oil usage and act like the whole problem doesn’t even exist.
If you put 435 homeless people into the congress and took some ranting raving community activist out of the local school board and made him the president, that would be a gigantic improvement over the current unsustainable completely crazy form of governance we’ve got in this goddamn country.
joel hanes
The Loneliness of the Military Historian
Confess: it’s my profession
that alarms you.
This is why few people ask me to dinner,
though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.
I wear dresses of sensible cut
and unalarming shades of beige,
I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser’s:
no prophetess mane of mine,
complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters.
If I roll my eyes and mutter,
if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror
like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,
I do it in private and nobody sees
but the bathroom mirror.
In general I might agree with you:
women should not contemplate war,
should not weigh tactics impartially,
or evade the word enemy,
or view both sides and denounce nothing.
Women should march for peace,
or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery,
spit themselves on bayonets
to protect their babies,
whose skulls will be split anyway,
or, having been raped repeatedly,
hang themselves with their own hair.
These are the functions that inspire general comfort.
That, and the knitting of socks for the troops
and a sort of moral cheerleading.
Also: mourning the dead.
Sons, lovers, and so forth.
All the killed children.
Instead of this, I tell
what I hope will pass as truth.
A blunt thing, not lovely.
The truth is seldom welcome,
especially at dinner,
though I am good at what I do.
My trade is courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.
In my dreams there is glamour.
The Vikings leave their fields
each year for a few months of killing and plunder,
much as the boys go hunting.
In real life they were farmers.
They come back loaded with splendour.
The Arabs ride against Crusaders
with scimitars that could sever
silk in the air.
A swift cut to the horse’s neck
and a hunk of armour crashes down
like a tower. Fire against metal.
A poet might say: romance against banality.
When awake, I know better.
Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters,
or none that can be finally buried.
Finish one off, and circumstances
and the radio create another.
Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently
to God all night and meant it,
and been slaughtered anyway.
Brutality wins frequently,
and large outcomes have turned on the invention
of a mechanical device, viz. radar.
True, valour sometimes counts for something,
as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right—
though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition,
is decided by the winner.
Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades
and burst like paper bags of guts
to save their comrades.
I can admire that.
But rats and cholera have won many wars.
Those, and potatoes,
or the absence of them.
It’s no use pinning all those medals
across the chests of the dead.
Impressive, but I know too much.
Grand exploits merely depress me.
In the interests of research
I have walked on many battlefields
that once were liquid with pulped
men’s bodies and spangled with exploded
shells and splayed bone.
All of them have been green again
by the time I got there.
Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day.
Sad marble angels brood like hens
over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.
(The angels could just as well be described as vulgar
or pitiless, depending on camera angle.)
The word glory figures a lot on gateways.
Of course I pick a flower or two
from each, and press it in the hotel Bible
for a souvenir.
I’m just as human as you.
But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.
– by Margaret Atwood
Just Some Fuckhead
@mclaren: You’re one of those whackjobs at the town council meeting that wants the city to ban the teevee people from using listening devices in the tree, aren’t you?
Protip: Use more foil.
mclaren
@Roger Moore:
Nonsense.
Mitt Romney will never ever ever ever ever be the Republican presidential nominee. He’s a Mormon. To the fundamentalist Christians who run the Republican party, that’s equivalent to being a Satanist.
mclaren
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Please explain why saying that America can’t continue fighting unwinnable foreign wars makes me a “whackjob.”
Please explain why saying that America can’t keep importing more and more and more oil while China’s oil imports continue to rise exponentially makes me a “whackjob.”
Please explain why saying that we have to do something to fix a Wall Street casino economy that’s on track to crash the world economy again makes me a “whackjob.”
Please explain why my statement that the people who are running America are driving us straight off a cliff, policywise, makes me a “whackjob.”
Guy, we have got the chicken-driven clown car called America veering toward the edge of the Grand Canyon, and you’re telling us that anyone who points out the clown car is being drive by a chicken is a “whackjob.”
That is not helpful, my friend.
Uloborus
@mclaren:
Hmmm. There doesn’t seem to have been an American casualty in Iraq since January. That’s quite a war.
mclaren
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Please explain why saying that America can’t continue fighting unwinnable foreign wars makes me a “whackjob.”
mclaren
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Please explain why saying that America can’t keep importing more and more and more oil while China’s oil imports continue to rise exponentially makes me a “whackjob.”
mclaren
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Please explain why my statement that the people who are running America are driving us straight off a cliff makes me a “whackjob.”
mclaren
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Guy, we have got the chicken-driven clown car called America veering toward the edge of the Grand Canyon, and you’re telling us that anyone who points out the clown car is being driven by a chicken is a “whackjob” and needs to “use more tinfoil.”
That is not helpful, my friend.
AC
@fhtagn
1) working with Obama and being Obama are two very different things, 2) hunstman is good looking, 3) Beck came very close to closing the evangelical/Mormon gap. His crazy might have peaked too soon, but maybe not. 4) huntsman will draw all the money he needs if he gets the nom.
Tyro
All of which means that in any given election year, each major party only has about 20 people from which to choose. At that point, the population is so small that the laws of probability come into play.
Here’s where I depart from the author: at that point, those 20 people should be the very best possible leaders. They should be the ones who are the least likely to be felled by a sex scandal or cold feet and have the most charisma and institutional support: after all, they are the 20 people at the very pinnacle of political achievement in America. It quite simply shouldn’t be 20 independent variables, equally likely to be felled or deemed unqualified at any given moment.
I know it doesn’t work that way and for various reasons those 20 people aren’t really the best we have to offer, but I have to argue that the problem is that the system is set up such that the 20 top political posts in the nation in each party tend to be mediocre.
Just Some Fuckhead
@mclaren: Calm down, sugarpants. Chickens can fly.
Viva BrisVegas
Or Fox News pundits.
fhtagn
@AC:
Sure, run as the guy Obama likes (and worked with!) in the GOP primary and see how far you get. I am all for watching mindless optimism in action, but I reserve the right to laugh at the results. As for “he’s good-looking” – that and a bag of chips will get you about 50 cents these days. Finally, he isn’t going to win the nomination without raising a good chunk of cash. You can’t win without raising name recognition, and no cash means no ads, no big glossy mailings, no blow jobs from Pam Geller/Ralph Reed/Chuck Norris.
fhtagn
@mclaren:
So if I understand you correctly, your analysis, which was mostly excellently phrased, comes down to: “We’re fucked!”?
General Stuck
@fhtagn:
I like to think of mclaren as our lil teapot of sunshine.
fhtagn
@General Stuck:
Dare I ask how you think of Lady Matoko Bush-Fellatrix?
mclaren
@fhtagn:
You don’t.
No, my analysis is “if you’re in a hole, job number one is to stop digging.”
We’re in a deep dark hole on our oil usage. How about announcing that we need to make it national policy to improve the gas mileage on our cars to, oh, I don’t know, something around 150 mpg? Maybe we could even take a lot of those unemployed people and put ’em to work re-tooling Detroit’s assembly lines for those 150 mpg cars? And if the Big Three automakers were to be in serious financial trouble, so that, you know, if they were to ask for a government bailout, maybe we could even make a requirement of that government bailout that Detroit completely retool for cars with vastly better mileage?
Instead of our current brain-damaged “oil policy,” which is basically to invade every country in the Middle East in a desperate effort to secure oil imports, but which always manages to create such havoc that the oil supplies only get disrupted even more.
Or how about if (you know, this would never happen, but IF it did…) the global financial system were to melt down, we could, like, make it a condition of bailing out Wall Street that they have to completely reform the way they operate? I know this sounds ridiculous, because, after all, how could the entire world financial system melt down? Oh, wait…
You know. Simple stuff like this.
Even a homeless person could figure this stuff out. But the rich guys in the senate and the house and the White House don’t seem to be able to figure these simple things out. Maybe because the rich guys in the senate and the house live in such a bizarre bubble so completely disconnected from the average American that they think the crazy stuff they’re doing actually makes sense.
fhtagn
@mclaren:
Seldom has gentle teasing been rewarded with such outraged pomposity. Gratifying, in a way.
mclaren
The problem with lampooning or spoofing or teasing nowadays is that it’s impossible to distinguish from reality.
Splitting Image
@fhtagn:
Pretty much agree with you that having worked with Obama is a problem for Huntsman, but I wouldn’t assume he’s got cash problems. His dad helped invent the plastic egg carton and the clamshell container that you get fast food in. His family makes the rest of the Republican candidates (including Romney and Trump) look like pikers.
I think that his biggest problem is really that he’s the LDS church’s fallback choice. They badly want to see a Mormon win and they are not going to be happy to see a second tier candidate do any vote splitting. As long as Romney is a viable candidate, Huntsman is probably an also-ran. If Romney falls down, the church is likely to rally behind Huntsman like nothing you’ve ever seen.
pattonbt
I am with Anne Laurie on this. I think Romney will get the nomination. I think the Mormon business is nothing. I get the negatives everyone else is saying, I just think that, in the end, the crazies will settle for Romney. The R’s forgive the sins of their candidates and get in line when told. They may not like the fact that he is a Mormon, but he’s on the right team in the end and they will get behind him because he will present himself (and the serious people will agree) as the best shot they have to beat Blackity, Black, Black and make the “white house” white again.
That said, I still think the R primaries are going to full on clown shows and highly entertaining (although I am scared just a slight bit because you just never know for sure).
Julia Grey
But what about Romneycare?
How does he explain that away?