Loved the hilarious responses to my question about Bachmann this morning, but the latest New Hampshire polling is making a potential win look like less of a joke. She’s riding a Tea Party surge and is within single digits of Mittens in the old Granite State. And TPaw’s guy says Bachmann will be hard to beat in Iowa. Funny thing is, I predicted she was prepping for this run back when she was railing about the census and making dark comments about unAmerican House members. They mocked me then, but look at her now.
Meanwhile, my friend Michael J.W. Stickings agrees Goodhair Perry is the obvious VP pick. The fundies love him and they need to engage that part of their base. Plus he has the Tea Party creds to capture the redneck indy vote. Sure it sounds like a joke now, but Bachmann/Perry in many ways is the strongest anti-Obama team riding in the clown car.
RossInDetroit
This would be funny if it wasn’t going to take one billion dollars and vital attention away from real national problems to beat them.
Alex
With their support for Israel, they’ll finally lock up the Jewish vote for the Republicans!
mike in dc
Hmm. I’d prefer Bachmann/Cain, but mostly because I think that would put a 1964-esque outcome in reach. With Bachmann/Perry we might have to settle for 1984 in reverse.
I know, I know, lots of stuff can happen between now and then. But Bachmann is likely to kill off TPaw’s campaign, and may weaken Romney significantly.
Sly
Because the God Botherers won’t be engaged enough by Michele “Just Pray Away the Gay” Bachmann?
Perry is a better pick for Romney. Bachmann would only get the 27 Percenters no matter who she got to tag along with her for the biggest landslide defeat since Roosevelt kicked the shit out of Landon in 1936.
We’re dealing with a conservative base that is as crazy as it was in ’64 when it nominated Goldwater. And Bachmann is, objectively speaking, a much bigger lunatic than Goldwater ever was. By far. If she gets the nomination it will be the biggest victory for American liberalism ever.
Martin
Nah, they’re redundant. They both get teatard and fundie voters. She needs a Romney for the CEO vote or a McCain for the old-school GOP vote. She’d pair pretty well with Rudy or Gingrich. There’s no avoiding this being a trainwreck, though.
There’s just no pairing that I see that gets the GOP any useful geographic gain, or any useful demographic gain. Rubio might get them Florida. That’s about it.
Martin
I agree. I don’t see how anyone who wins the GOP primary, given what the rank-and-file Republicans are feeding the base as a matter of party policy, can possibly win the general. Anyone who would be competitive in November will be out of the race before Nevada.
Citizen Alan
I’m not worried. I’m sure Obama will do a great job of motivating the base.
Lojasmo
Bachmann/anybody. She is the candidate to beat, and will likely win the nomination.
Any sane (read democratic) woman wins in 2016.
Win/win/win.
artem1s
Got a recorded message from the Huckabee campaign this evening. Can’t imagine why as a 20 year registered dem at this address…but its not the first this year. The recording took me to a live call center so I could relay MY concerns. The recording was some bullshit about outlawing the national day of prayer and eliminating the word God from the pledge, etc… After the recording I was connected to a live pollster who launched into a God botherer push poll. I only got through the first question before I toll them to take me off their call list. The question…Do you believe children should be forced to learn about teh Gay history in school.
vile crap…push polls make my head assplode anyway but it really creeps me out that someones’ marketing research has led them to believe that I could be swayed by their racist/homophobic crap. I can only conclude that the rePukes assume any white woman over 50 is going to come over to the dark side.
I hate these people with the fury of a white hot nova.
pragmatism
She may want to wear Kevlar full time with perry waving that six shooter around.
Karen
Bachmann/Perry? The Republican Party will actually ALLOW a female Presidential candidate with a male VP?
Nope. This is the section of the GOP that believes that the women should submit to her husband. I just don’t see it.
Libby
Agree it seems redundant at first glance. But then again, since I’ve been traveling so much lately I’m a bit out of the loop but I’m hearing Crazy Eyes isn’t resonating with the Southern fundies. Only the northern, Midwest ones.
True though that Perry has the right creds to pair up with anybody.
KCinDC
If Perry wants to run, I don’t see why he’d be VP. He should find it easier to win the nomination than Bachmann.
Midnight Marauder
Not a fucking chance Rick Perry settles for the VP slot if he runs, and certainly not as the second fiddle to Michele Bachmann.
Let’s at least entertain realistic hypotheticals if we are going to play this game.
DarkSyde
Please let this happen.
Libby
Karen, that’s historically true. Not so sure the GOP power brokers have any control over it anymore. Tea Party is revolting, in every sense of the word.
Libby
2010 changed everything. Old guard running scared of the Tea Party purists. Not that hard to imagine a Bush/Cheney kind of presidency with that ticket. Which reminds me. Anybody know what Rove is up to lately? He seems curiously silent on the candidates but his front group is running a heavy rotation of anti-Obama ads.
gizmo
It’s worth noting that in the popular vote count, McCain / Palin came within 6 points of beating Obama / Biden in 2008. And that was at a time when the nation was sick of Bush / Cheney and Obama had a huge, fired-up army. In 2012 Obama’s base is going to stay home, and the state of the economy isn’t going to help, either. I think we’re in real trouble– the unthinkable could happen.
Midnight Marauder
I think focusing on power brokers misses the point entirely. Rick Perry possesses almost every attribute that makes Bachmann such a “legitimate” contender on the Republican side, and he possesses them at a higher level with far less obvious negatives than Bachmann has. If Rick Perry enters the race, Bachmann is all of a sudden competing against the governor of Texas who organized a national day of prayer calling on Jesus to put out wildfires.
He would make her look like a novice while crushing her at her own game.
And, if we really want to discuss GOP power brokers, there’s no question who they decide to roll with if they have to choose between Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann as their nominee. I mean, there is just no way Rick Perry settles for the VP slot behind someone he would outright dominate in the primaries.
There is just no way.
Cacti
No way Perry settles for VP on a losing Romney or Bachmann ticket and immolates any shot he ever has at the White House.
askew
I honestly can’t think of a “serious” GOP politician who would take a VP slot on a Bachmann ticket. They know the crazy would taint their career for life.
FlipYrWhig
Bachmann / John Bolton!
Ash Can
I don’t think anyone peaking in July 2011 is going to win a GOP nomination in July 2012.
mb
The long knives are already out for Bachmann. Note that it was the Washington Times that broke the story of her John Wayne Gacy gaffe. The establishment GOP is in hiding but is not powerless. If Bachmann gets too close to upsetting the applecart, she will be kneecapped. Perry is a different story and may be a real contender, though he’ll never be on a ticket with Bachmann. He’s a sitting Gov., he is not going to take number two to Bachmann even if we go all the way to Crazytown and she’s the nominee. Plus that’d hardly be a balanced ticket. With Bachmann on top, they’d have to have someone kind of sane and not so teabaggy as no. 2. Be that as it may, Bachmann will not be the nominee so it is academic.
The scary scenario, imo, is if Perry enters the race. He could be a real threat to Obama. However, I’m beginning to think maybe he doesn’t really want to work hard enough to be President right now. I mean, who the hell would want the job given the current circumstances. If I were a GOPer, I’d be hanging back waiting for better times. Let Obama take the blame for the double dip recession it seems like we are cuing up for.
Citizen_X
Fag Hag/Closet Case 2012!
(Pardon my language, but it had to be said.)
danimal
I’m on record for the past 6 months predicting that Michele! will be on the GOP ticket, but it’s much more likely as a veep candidate. The disastrous duo of Perry/Bachmann looks more likely by the day; Romney/Bachmann could lead to a Mondalistic showing for the Republicans. God, please let this happen; they deserve it.
rob!
I would donate to Bachmann’s campaign to help ensure she’s the nominee, except then I’d be on the Tea Party’s mailing list forever and I don’t want my neighbors seeing GOP junk mail and getting the wrong impression. I’d rather register as a sex offender than a Republican.
AAA Bonds
Ummmm. . .
Not to sound condescending, but this “X candidate is the one to beat” noise comes out of every challenger to the throne like Pawlenty, every primary season. Or out of their PR people, I mean.
What this is meant to do is shape the reportage in Iowa in Pawlenty’s favor by redefining the contest away from Pawlenty vs. Romney, a battle he seems likely to lose right now. Don’t buy the bull.
Since it doesn’t seem likely that he’ll beat Romney, Pawlenty’s setting it up so that if he beats Bachmann no matter where she is in the polls, it looks like his campaign came out ahead anyway and he’s in strong showing for more receptive voters in New Hampshire.
On the other hand, if he comes in third behind Bachmann and Romney, it looks like his campaign correctly assessed the situation and that he is also poised as a third alternative in what could quickly become a very, very contentious primary battle.
Seriously, someone does this every year, and usually it’s a few people at a few different points. It’s time to catch on.
different church-lady
Isn’t it like, six months or so until New Hampshire? Or did they move that thing WAAAAAAAAAAY up in the schedule?
Hell, didn’t Trump have a lead in NH not so long ago?
AAA Bonds
Rule of thumb from the above: the candidate to beat is never “the candidate to beat” according to the also-rans.
The real candidate to beat usually the candidate running right above the candidate they name in their carefully prepared press engagements, and usually that unnamed candidate is the front-runner in the polls for the state.
In this case, of course, it’s Romney. Pawlenty’s campaign naming Bachmann as the “one to beat” means that they’re guessing she comes in second in Iowa.
. . . I mean, some of y’all watch basketball, right? You know this game.
AAA Bonds
@different church-lady:
Yeah, more than six months from now, actually. Which makes all this handicapping doubly laughable.
AAA Bonds
Roy Moore’s still got his exploratory committee :D :D :D :D
AAA Bonds
The real bellwether of course is South Carolina for the Republicans, it’s all bullshit until then, sifting out the hopeless.
Since the South Carolina Republican primary started, the winner has always ended up as their presidential candidate.
Doesn’t that just warm you from the ground up?
Citizen Alan
Which is funny because the SC legislature just overrode Nikki Haley’s budget veto that wouldn’t canceled the SC GOP Primary and replaced it with a caucus.
AAA Bonds
Oh, and Rick Perry: gay.
The World is a Tweener
You are all dismissing the real fucking game changer here: THADDEUS MCCOTTER.
AAA Bonds
Thad McCotter, a Republican from Livonia. FROM LIVONIA.
One of these days, that town will be scoured from the face of the Earth by the finger of God, and no one in Michigan will miss it.
Another Bob
If it turns out that Obama has agreed to cuts to Social Security as part of a grand deal over the debt ceiling, I bet whatever sociopaths the Republicans put forward will actually win. I’m not sure I would even care. Who would be stupid enough to vote for these pussy Democrats if they can’t even express outrage at the very suggestion that someone might cut Social Security, let alone enable it and be part of it.
Dennis SGMM
This is still the nation that gave the Republicans a House majority in 2010 largely because the economy hadn’t turned around. When Obama took office unemployment was over nine percent. It’s still over nine percent and, barring a miracle, it will stay that high for some years. You can giggle all you want to about the clownishness of the Republican field (I do) but, with the economy in the tank, truckloads of corporate cash sloshing around on the GOP side, and a nation full of scared, angry voters, the laugh may be on us. Jimmy Carter was a good, capable President who was handed a shitstorm by the Fates. Did the voters in 1980 consider all of the things over which Carter had no control or did they hand the sloganeering Reagan a landslide?
Yutsano
The difference there is they had a Reagan, who despite all his flaws was an inspiring figure. If Willard had even a tenth of that charisma I’d be worried. But since all he can ever manage is whatever the next person wants to hear as a position, I’m not too concerned there.
binzinerator
@Sly:
No, Sly, I think they’re crazier.
My Father voted for Goldwater in 1964. I’ve asked him, when I was older and understood what Goldwater was about, why he voted for Goldwater.
Goldwater, he said, was crazy. But not crazy enough to get us into a war in SE Asia. And he was certain Johnson would, and would accelerate it.
Dad was in the middle of his hitch in the US armed forces in 1964. He’d enlisted when he was 20. He finished his associates degree and got his draft number. The draft number was low. Better to have some say in what you’re going to do for Uncle Sam, he said, if you think you’re going to be drafted.
So he had a powerful reason to choose someone who would keep him out of Vietnam.
Vietnam.
He knew about what the US had been up to in Vietnam and, not being stupid, had some idea about the kind of war that Uncle Sugar was on the brink of getting a lot of young men into.
And as for Goldwater’s craziness — get this — he trusted Congress to keep him from doing something really stupid, like nuking China. Jeebus.
I am amazed the trust people had in Congress even just 30 years ago, misplaced or not. What the hell happened since then?
Two words: Newt Gingrich.
My Father, former Goldwater voter, voted for Gore, Kerry, and Obama in the last 3 presidential elections. He even did grass-roots canvassing for Obama in 2008.
He never had a ‘conversion’ moment. When I asked him why he votes democratic now, he just said (this was before it was a catch-phrase of sorts) he didn’t leave the republican party, the republican party left him.
My Father isn’t a radical guy given to wild-eyed bouts of emotionalism or passions for “causes”. He just changed along with a lot of our society. There’s been a lot of change over the last half century, at least for the ones open to it.
So no, Sly. This conservative base is far, far crazier than the Goldwater base. They don’t learn anything, they seem incapable of change, and they have no faith in facts, reason, or in any branch of our government other than a strong executive with a dictator-like Leader figure, and they have not a shred of pragmatic sense.
I would like to think that the Goldwater base, many of them, were the products of their time in regards to social conditions, roles of women and minorities, and I can see how some of the viewpoints they had, views that might seem crazy now, given that they were shaped by living under the conditions of a real nuclear existential threat that had existed almost for a generation.
But that was almost 50 years ago.
We’ve had a half-century of progress in social conditions since then, massive changes and acceptance — and no existential threat since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989.
So what the fuck is up with these modern conservatives? I dunno, and my Father, an actual Goldwater voter, thinks they are nuts.
“Pop”, I says to him, “‘Nuts’ is old school. What these teatard Goopers are now known as is called ‘batshit insane'”.
“Batshit? As in guano?” he says.
“Yup.”
“Batshit insane. That’s about right,” he says.
Citizen Alan
Awesome. Glad to hear it. God, I’m almost laughing at you people now. Every time somebody makes a hilarious joke about the Republican clown car, all I hear is Pauline Kael’s plaintive whine: “I don’t even know anybody who voted for Nixon.”
Yutsano
Just out of curiosity, who is “you people”? And what mean nasty little Republican has you shaking in your boots?
Steve in Sacto
GOP VP nominee is going to be Rubio regardless of the Bachmann, Mittens, T-Paw outcome.
Yutsano
I’m not quite sold on Marco yet. He doesn’t even really guarantee Florida much less any automatic Hispanic votes. Plus, well, he’s still brown.
John Puma
I need to see the outcome before being able to believe the notion of the existence of any GOP male, a plausible nominee to the nation’s two top posts, accepting second place to a female candidate.
debbie
@ Karen:
Absolutely. Especially when that male is a good ol’ boy.
OmerosPeanut
Bachmann/Perry doubles down on Tea-Party support, at the expense of the rest of the nation. That can’t possibly be the strongest combination, can it?
NeenerNeener
I always took that quote to mean that she didn’t know anybody who would admit to having voted for Nixon.
Xenos
Can Bachmann deliver Minnesota, even at the top of the ticket? It is not like she has won a state-wide election yet.
A third-term representative on the top of the ticket? It may marginally be better than a half-term governor of a state with half the population of Suffolk County, NY, bit is that not a bit thin of a resume?
WereBear
What’s amazing is that the Republicans are, at least publicly, giving power to women. This is the exact same party that STILL claims women are fit only for the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant.
The tide of history is drowning them despite their own best efforts, despite what they’d like, despite their conservatism and their pointless longing for the sanitized 50’s that only exist in their puny imaginations.
Kirbster
At this point, all the polls show is that the participants seem to have Attention Deficit Disorder and can be easily distracted by the latest shiny object.
bob h
I think authenticity is the key to the Republican mind here; Bachmann is authentically unhinged, Romney is seen as a phoney.
Libby
Agree that historically the early front runners rarely get the nomination, but these are not usual times. Teabaggers and fundies are practically all that’s left of the GOP base. I feel like anything can happen.
I’d remind you that we were laughing and pointing at the TPs back when they were dumping tea bags into the harbors two years ago but they managed to get a lot more people elected than the hippies did. Also, too, without a Dem primary, would bet a lot of hippies in open primary states might switch to vote in the GOP primaries just to get the craziest candidate nominated.
JD Rhoades
Sort of like the way people here in an area that went overwhelmingly for George W. Bush now insist they are not now nor were they ever Bush supporters.
Chris
To be fair, there were several factors affecting the Goldwater landslide. One, Kennedy’s assassination was still on the minds of many, and it did give the Democrats a bit of a boost.
Two, the Cuban missile crisis had just happened, slapping some cold water on the American people’s face by bringing the world to the brink of death. As a result, Goldwater’s attempts to out-McCarthy LBJ, which would’ve worked just fine in the previous fifteen years, suddenly became a liability, making him sound like the kind of person who’d start a nuclear war.
Three, Goldwater ran on an honest platform of wanting to dismantle the New Deal. Nixon taught Republicans never to do that again – always run on cultural issues and vaguely defined but powerful resentments. Any Gooper campaign in 2012 will do the same – expect anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric and “Obama hates America” and the rest of that stuff out the ass, but very little except in the vaguest terms on welfare reform.
This isn’t exactly 1964.
Chris
@ Libby,
Interesting – any idea why?
Steve in Iowa
The Kewl Kidz would destroy Bachman in the general. Misogyny is one of the strongest unconscious forces that rules the villagers media world. They will tear. Her. Apart.
Libby
No idea Chris. Maybe because she doesn’t have the right drawl. I been listening to her speak a bit on the teevee. She doesn’t do the country twang like Palin does. And she speaks in complete sentences, mostly.
Anyway, with that, I’m off again. Hope to land somewhere early enough to blog later this evening.
GlenInBrooklyn
Not getting excited just yet (though endlessly amused). Wasn’t The Donald a shoo-in a couple of weeks ago?
Cris (without an H)
Eight-year-olds, dude.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Sly #4:
Folks need to get over this idea that we are still living in the era of huge landslides, like 1936, 1964 and 1972. In 1936 FDR could get votes in the south because he was a Democrat and in the north because he was a liberal. Ditto for LBJ in 1964. The Southern strategy put the whole country in play for Nixon in 1972 back when the GOP still had a liberal wing based in the northeast. Huge landslides in that era were a byproduct of the fact the the two parties were straddling the regional, cultural and ideological divides between north and south, so every region of the country was potentially in play.
That era is over. We are a divided country now. Do any of you honestly think Obama can win in the deep south, in MS or LS, etc.? Or conversely that any GOP candidate can win in CA?
Absent a strong 3rd party bid like Perot in 1992 to split the vote, no major party candidate in the next several cycles is going to poll worse than 45%. The 2008 election was within a few points of being the closest you are going to get to an actual landslide for the next 20 years.
Enjoy the era of divided
govtnation.steve
1984?
BTW, a (cheap and not too accurate) linear curve fit of the last 50 years predicts the GOP candidate getting about 41% in 2012, probably due to the decreasing % of voters who are old white southern racist christianist males,