I had to turn off the debate when John King teased the “describe yourself in one word” question, since I don’t think my liver could have stood the onslaught that would have caused. Still, I was able to watch the usual pooping-upon of immigrants (with a special bonus shout out to Joe Arpaio) as well as some quality slut shaming, so I was left wondering who Romney is going to choose as his running mate. To help repair the damage to women and minorities (you know, the ones doing all the fucking, according to Romney), it’s got to be a brown vagina-haver, so that narrows our field to three that I can think of:
* Ileana Ros-Lethtinen is out because she was born in Cuba and has a transgendered child whom she apparently still claims as her own. She’s also for gay marriage.
* Nikki Haley is the right color and gender but seems unable to keep an aspirin between her legs when men other than her husband are around. Also, too: it would be nice to have someone on the ticket from a state that isn’t an automatic win for Republicans.
* That leaves us with a female governor of a small western state, Susana Martinez. In addition to perhaps delivering New Mexico, which has been fairly Democratic of late, she might help with Arizona, where Romney isn’t polling too well, and Colorado.
Can anyone think of another brown female friend that Mitt can happen to have?
c u n d gulag
RuPaul?
Egg Berry
Just out of curiosity, does this strategy actually work? And how many electoral votes does NM have that it would be worth it?
Elizabelle
New Mexico was full of Obama bumper stickers when I drove through recently.
Enough to notice, even if you weren’t a political junkie.
pk
Snooki. That tan will make NJ go republican
MattF
Sarah Palin in blackface? JUST KIDDING.
amk
nikki will deliver SC to mitt like she did in primaries.
Isn’t martinez pro-choice?
Steve
Yeah, they should definitely pick the unknown first-term female governor of a small state. What could go wrong?
Hunter Gathers
Martinez won’t deliver New Mexico, or add a single non-white or female vote to Mittens total. A token candidate can’t erase months of campaign rhetoric. A woman isn’t going to make the GOP’s massage of ‘close your legs, whore’ any softer. A Latina isn’t going to make Hispanics magically forget years of brown bashing.
Schlemizel
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
Oh? You were serious? Lets see, female with perma-tan & Republican that can shore up Willards tiny problem with the wingnuts . . . yeah this will be a short thread, that leaves maybe 6 people. Why no love for Condi on your list? Sure, she is gay but the Republicans don’t know that.
Including her on your list covers all of them I can think of.
Bruuuuce
Aretha, because otherwise he’ll get absolutely no respect.
Keith
Spoiler alert: Gingrich referred to himself as “cheerful”
dan
Robin Quivers!
(another) Josh
Star Parker? Linda Chavez? I dunno.
c u n d gulag
@Keith:
Not as funny as Mitts, “Resolute.”
Now that them there’s some comedy genius!
Breezeblock
Martinez won’t even get the vote of her hairdresser.
gene108
Nikki Haley won’t get the right-wing men as hot and bothered as Sarah Palin did, i.e. she won’t create the same swell of enthusiasm Palin did. Haley doesn’t hunt or fish, which was a big plus in Palin gaining support in right-wing circles.
I don’t know how Martinez could possibly be O.K.running with the anti-Latino Republican message, though she maybe a dying breed of Republican Latinos. Latinos did show a lot of support for Republicans before the anti-immigrant bashing started.
Though not female, Bobby Jindal is brown and can prove Republicans aren’t racist. Between his stint in Congress and as governor, he probably has the most public info available to Mitt to sift through for suitability.
Otherwise I can’t think of any current brown/black Republican lawmakers of note.
gene108
@Schlemizel:
Condi, like Powell, openly admits segregation was bad and goes further to state slavery was America’s “original sin” and therefore the Founders weren’t all that and a bag of chips, ’cause some of them owned slaves.
That’d turn off the base, especially in the South, who don’t like being reminded of the bad parts of Southern culture.
PeakVT
Maybe we should reverse the question. Mitt is such a lousy candidate, he’s bound to make the wrong decision. So who does he pick? Once the ultrasound bill blows up in McDonnell’s face, he could be the leading candidate.
Xenos
I can’t imagine that Mitt will even try to gain the votes of the minorities and independent women – there is not profit in it. He needs to get the fundamentalists and butthurt Catholics on board, so he will go for someone acceptable to both. I don’t know if Rubio is in the market, but Rubio has been careful to play both sides of the religious street, joining a Baptist church as well as being conspicuously Catholic on occasion.
Strange as it seems, some sort of evangelical/RC cultural fusion seems to be taking place.
4tehlulz
Rick Scott with a tan and a fleshlight.
amk
Has been mitt been officially crowned yet ? If no, why this ?
arguingwithsignposts
@Xenos:
Not that strange at all, actually, RC/Evangelical fusion has been taking place since at least the mid-90s, when Dobson and his ilk built bridges on social issues with the bishops.
mistermix
@Schlemizel: Condi’s got too much Bush taint.
@amk: Martinez is not pro-choice.
http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/government-and-you/state-governments/state-profiles/new-mexico.html
tjmn
GOP doesn’t even have benchwarmers. That was the JV debating last night.
August Pollak
Not sure if the post was sarcasm or not, honestly, but if anyone’s seriously thinking that the GOP nominee is going to pick a woman for their running mate, they’re crazy. Any female pick, fair or not, will just invoke references to Sarah Palin, a.k.a. the most unpopular running mate in recent history who single-handedly collapsed the McCain campaign.
Assuming it’s Romney, he’ll need to pick a running mate that is beloved by the far right and is from a Southern state to appease social conservatives. And since the birthers think Rubio isn’t a natural-born citizen, that leaves only one person: Virginia governor Bob McDonnell.
amk
@mistermix: Thanks. I know she won on women issues in NM and assumed she was pro-choice.
Nancy
Martinez recently had a minor kerfuffle in NM when her hair dresser refused to schedule a haircut because of her position on same sex marriage.
Villago Delenda Est
@gene108:
Yeah, the wannabees, perhaps. Actual hunters know she’s an utter phony. She was asked to describe her first hunt, and she utterly failed the authenticity check with her answer. Actual hunters can describe in cinegraphic detail the entire experience, and Mooselini couldn’t pull that off.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Bobbi sic Jindal.
jibeaux
I don’t think the Republicans are going to repeat their foolproof strategy of “picking a girl,” myself. Women just don’t seem to respond, the ingrates.
jibeaux
@Villago Delenda Est: Did she get the make of helicopter wrong?
Nina
Michelle Malkin.
jibeaux
@August Pollak: I agree with that. And Virginia’s governors only get one term, so he doesn’t have much to lose even if he thinks it’s a sinking ship.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Mrs. Hanky, the wife of the Christmas Poo.
aretino
Believe me, with Nikki Haley on the ticket South Carolina would no longer be an automatic win for Republicans. I don’t think that’s how Willard really wants the home-state card to play, though.
djork
As much as it pains me to stick up for Nikki Haley, it’s really unfair to bring up the claims she had an affair. The one guy making the claim as the other man is pretty much the SC version of Matt Drudge. (Check out his site FITSNEWS for examples of his work.) That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or that Nikki Haley is a saint, because she isn’t. But, the rumors of her affair are pretty thin gruel and just feeds into the GOP “slut shaming” you appear to be decrying here.
RSA
A bit off-topic, but the NRO had a panel on the debate, and the consensus seems to be that Santorum was the big loser, and Newt was the winner. Crazy stuff. Cal Thomas says,
Barry
@Hunter Gathers: “A Latina isn’t going to make Hispanics magically forget years of brown bashing.”
Worse – a hispanic VP candidate will hurt among the Tea Partiers, unless it’s somebody of Cuban ancestry (and I’d bet that even that is tricky).
daveNYC
@djork: That’s the point though. Male Republicans get to get laid, female Republicans, not so much. The rumors of her affair, no matter how weak, would not go over well with the base.
Donald G
Culturally, Governor Martinez is a Texan from El Paso. On the campaign trail, she has all the grace and charm of Nancy Grace. As a former prosecutor, she sees the world from a criminal justice perspective with heavy emphasis on punishment.
Her base of popularity is down in Las Cruces (where democratic movers and shakers defected to support her as part of a backlash against the perceived corruption of Bill Richardson) and the rural Southern and Eastern portions of the state known as Little Texas.
Her platform has been one of making things very difficult for illegal immigrants in this state, primarily by removing their ability to obtain New Mexico drivers licenses. Previous administrations (I believe it may have been Gary Johnson’s, but it may have been Richardson) had made it a policy to make such licenses possible for reasons of public safety. Prior to the 2010 election and the resentments whipped up in the lead-up thereto, New Mexicans didn’t seem to have the same animus toward the Mexicans as the people of Arizona or Texas, but the teabaggery has gotten strong, especially in my congressional district, where I have the misfortune of being represented by Steve Pearce.
The enlightened hippie bastions of the state, Taos, Santa Fe and portions of Albuquerque have little use for her.
Egypt Steve
@Schlemizel: Not that there’d be anything wrong with that, but are we sure Condi is gay? Remember her “My husband” slip about George Bush? She obviously has the odd hetero-fantasy, minimum (and in this case I do mean “odd”).
Hey, with Romney, she could actually aspire to marrying the president …
Tone In DC
@4tehlulz:
I did NOT need to read that.
quannlace
Aargh, I actually tuned in at that exact ‘describe yourself’ moment and was gob-smacked. Did he then go on to ask what was their favorite color or what tree they’d be? Un-fucking-lievable.
Brandon
FWIW, I don’t think calling Haley a slut is all that Kosher. But beyond that, the only thing Bush taught me was that elections were all about turning out the base. Romney will need a candidate who can do that for him, but who doesn’t turn off independents and women. Having some DC clout probably would be helpful too, but no DC taint. His list probably is limited at this point to McDonnell, who did well with those groups despite writing a crazed women hating masters thesis at one of those wingnut universities (thinking it was Regent or Heritage), Daniels who has Bush taint but could shore up the industrial midwest where Romney is doing poorly, and Santorum who was named after something dribbling down a ghey mans taint. That to me is the beginning and end of it.
Gin & Tonic
@August Pollak:
John McCain single-handedly collapsed the McCain campaign.
AliceBlue
I’m curious as to why Haley is so unpopular in SC. She’s a Republican and seems to say and believe all the right wingnutty things.
Schlemizel
@Egypt Steve:
No but the rumor has been out there for years. At one point there was even a name of a woman who share her home. It wasn’t important enough to me to care to remember the details but if she got picked it would quickly be dug up. It would be funny if she married Boy Blunder, they could be each others beard.
For those who pointed out her obvious flaws, I agree but she is no more damaged than the others in that list of losers.
I also don’t expect Willard to pick a woman of color – one or the other but not both. And I think it is less than 50/50 that he picks one of either. His strategists had to believe (and really still must) that Willard is going to appear as “the reasonable alternative” so his running mate almost has to be a wingnut white male. Its why Huckabee is so appealing, Frothy assuming they can kiss & make up in time, Haley Barbor if they have an answer for some of his skeletons, Heck , even Cantor despite being a Lonsman the wingnuts LUVS him and the press would hail it as a bold move showing the expansion of the GOP.
Schlemizel
@Gin & Tonic:
Thats not fair! He had a lot of help, sister Palin of course but the managers and party leaders didn’t do him any favors. That baby had many fathers
Watusie
I can’t imagine that Republicans really want another half-term governor on their ticket…and I can’t see anything about Martinez that would attract the interest of women and Hispanics who weren’t already predisposed to vote R.
mistermix
@daveNYC: Any politician, male or female, who has been accused of having an extramarital affair has a big problem.
Paul in KY
Michelle Malkin. Although she’d be better for Rih.
Paul in KY
@Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937: I think Mrs. Hanky is a proud Democrat.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
At the Miss congeniality portion of the questioning, at least 3 of the bozos came up with an adjective to describe himself.*
Man on Dog, however chose a noun. He’s such an idiot he doesn’t even recognize which kind of word is descriptive.
*I’ll even argue that Ron Paul’s selection was accurate – he is consistent in his utter nuttiness.
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
FTFY. Remember that McCain was polling OK against Obama until the lending crisis hit. McCain certainly did himself no favors after that, but the economy hurt him more than anything else.
maya
How about Annie Coulter: the white chocolate republican?
Samara Morgan
you are smokin’ Nate Silver’s crack if you think Romney has a snoballs chance in hell of carrying Colorado.
There are only two basic kinds of voters in Colorado, mormons and people who hate mormons.
And unlike Utah, Mormons are a very small minority.
chopper
maybe palin could disappear for a month and go get the Kirk Lazarus treatment and learn mexican.
Hawes
Chris Christie SOUNDS like a girl’s name.
And he has boobs, so…
sherparick
@gene108: Actually, a good part of the Confederate Party’s base really thinks slavery was a good thing and one of the “founding” principles they would like to restore. They really don’t have a problem with Alexander Stephens “Cornerstone Speech.” They certainly think segregation and the American apartheid that existed from the end of Reconstruction to the 1960s was a good thing. See Pat Buchannan and all the conservative punditocracy weeping and wailing at his being fired from MSNBC. Herman Cain, because he accepts and celebrates White privilege, is the exception, and also the shield, that Conservatives use to defend defend the moral rot at the core of their beliefs.
Hal
@c u n d gulag:
Maybe we can determine the Presidency by having the candidates lypsync for their lives.
My guess is Obama would win in a landslide. Romney and Santorum don’t strike me as being very limber on the dance floor…or anywhere else.
Steve
Sarah Palin was a politically courageous pick for McCain, even though the pick of course showed appallingly poor judgment. It was the pick of someone who understood that he had to take a chance and didn’t have much chance to win just by making a safe, boring pick.
I’m not at all trying to fluff John McCain here, but the point remains that there is probably no politician in history who has shown less capacity for political courage than Mitt Romney. He is not going to take his chances with some gutsy pick. It’s not at all in his nature.
FlipYrWhig
@August Pollak: The only problem with the McDonnell idea is that he’d be IMHO the frontrunner for 2016. Would being associated with the colorless, flavorless Romney campaign damage that? I feel like it would give him the whiff of loserdom that’s hard to shake.
patrick II
@RSA:
For the first time Cal Thomas and I agree on something. I also wish, given the current poll numbers, the election were tomorrow.
Bubblegum Tate
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yeah, it required a lot of willful suspension of disbelief to actually think Palin was any kind of hunter and/or fisherman. The closest she could get was “Well, hunting and fishing are popular in Alaska, and I’m the governor of Alaska, soooo….”
Still, among those wingnuts who were tripping balls on the starbursts, there was this fascination with Palin “field dressing” various things–“big government,” liberalism itself, etc.–that was as bizarre as it was stupid. Sort of like Palin herself.
kindness
No. Romney is going to choose Sanitorum for VP and Sanitorum will accept. It’s
the RepublicanGod’s way.pseudonymous in nc
I think Bobby Jindal would wear a dress, a wig and false boobs if that was part of the deal to get on the ticket.
pseudonymous in nc
@AliceBlue:
SC is, in terms of statewide politics, pretty much a one-party state, which means that there are all sorts of factional politics within the SC GOP. Haley, like Sanford, wasn’t the preferred candidate of the good ol’ boy network — she won the primary on teabagger support, but since she took office, there’s been one fuck-up after another, especially concerning her expenses. Also: lots of claims that she spends money on executive business then overrules it by fiat. And the whole “great day in South Carolina” thing fell flat as a fart.
Tractarian
GOP-leaning Rasmussen shows Obama with a 19-point lead over Romney in NM. So, no way a Martinez pick puts NM in play. My money’s on Haley. She’ll excite the GOP base and the media will love the fact that she’s Indian-American and that she’s a woman.
And Mitt will need all the help he can get – take a look at Rasmussen’s national tracking poll today. Obama has opened up a double-digit lead on Mittens!
@Steve:
I see what you’re getting at, but I don’t think this has anything to do with “courage”. McCain knew he needed to make news with his pick, and he needed to excite his base. But there were many potential candidates that could have fit that criteria. McCain’s problem was that he made his choice after meeting the candidate once and doing little to no vetting.
The point is, just because you need to make a bold, outside-of-the-box pick for VP, doesn’t mean that you have to do so recklessly. Romney could make such a pick – say, a non-white tea party female governor – and he wouldn’t need one iota of courage to do it.
Martin
Obama is polling higher than all of the GOPers in South Carolina in head-to-head polls. These things always favor the incumbent, so I don’t expect that to hold, but just the fact that Obama is pulling mid-40s support in SC has to be scaring the fuck out of the GOP. Their blackety black strategy should be paying dividends in SC, and it’s not at all.
And I agree that this may well come down to Romney/Santorum or Santorum/Romney just to try and hold the party in one piece by the convention.
jonas
Jindal or Rubio would seem like natural choices, but they have a conundrum: assuming Romney’s the nominee (very likely, in my opinion; the delegate math going forward just doesn’t add up for either Gingrich or Santorum unless Romney implodes fantastically somehow before Super Tuesday), his chances against Obama are diminishing each day the economy improves and each time the candidates have to open their mouths to out-crazy one of the others. No running mate from a failed ticket has ever gone on to win a subsequent election at the top of the ticket (in recent times, at least). So do they hitch their wagons to Romney this time around and risk running in 2016 as part of a team that lost to Obama? Or do they keep their powder (and reputations) dry this time around and start building their ground game for a run in four years?
Martin
@Steve:
No it wasn’t. In order to be courageous, you needed to have something to lose. He was going to lose to Obama with any of the candidates the GOP was considering at the time and his campaign knew it. His only hope was to pick someone so far out of the box that the polling couldn’t demonstrate it was a clear loser, leaving the door open to the candidate possibly, hopefully being a winner.
Desperate acts require no courage at all.
Patricia Kayden
Why a female VP? Why not Rubio?
jonas
@kindness: “Sanitorum”? Is that a disinfectant for cleaning up accidents involving santorum?
DanielX
Mittens has pretty well blown his chances at votes from independent women and brown people in general. And, and, you gotta remember that Mittens is a Mormon. The Mormon church isn’t real big on the rights of women or brown people, as I recall – they only got around to admitting black people were human beings some times in the 70s as I recall. So I don’t see him making a priority out of choosing a female of (any) color as VP.
I hear Lieberman, McCain and Bayh are all available…hey, it could happen.
mds
@RSA:
Cal Thomas, adorable wizened theo-neo-conservative mendacious pigfucker that he is, might want to review Ron Paul’s views on Israel. Or on invading every other country in the Middle East, for that matter.
mds
@DanielX:
Nah, you’d need someone not so obviously past their “Sell by” date.
How about Joe Manchin? He’d appeal to other egotists, turncoats, innumerate fucking idiots, and people who think it’s the later part of Robert Byrd’s legacy that’s for pissing on. So it might help shore up the GOP base, at least.
gene108
@Martin:
I think Romney as V.P. could’ve made it very interesting. Obama and McCain were statistically tied after the conventions.
As the Lehman Brothers melt down happened, Obama seemed to have his stuff together much better than McCain did.
Romney could’ve saved McCain’s campaign in that regard. He can be glib and could’ve convincingly sold the media on the fact he understood how to handle the Wall Street melt down.
I don’t know, if we’ll ever know how many undecideds jumped ship to Obama’s camp, because of the sudden fears about the collapse of the economy and the fact both McCain and Palin seemed incapable of handling things.
asiangrrlMN
ME. Since I’m running as a Republican, anyway. Call me, Romney-bot 2012, er, I mean, Mittens. Er, I mean….
PWL
Yeah! Michelle Malkin! Ooops…maybe not such a good idea….
kindness
@asiangrrlMN: Yea. We could all support you as the crossover Balloon Juice ticket grrl from MN….but you’d have to tell Mittens you didn’t support any laws that help the women out wrt their lady parts. I don’t think it’s worth it myself.
Julia Grey
Actually, a second man came forward as well. One who risked his marriage to “slut shame” her because, he said, he was so disgusted by her categorical denial of the affair with the (Republican) blogger and her claim that she had always been “100% faithful” to her husband. He told of a one night stand at a political conference.
I happen to believe that not only is Nikki Haley a hideously selfish “I’ve got mine, fug you” Publican and totally incompetent administrator, she’s a world class “family values” hypocrite. We didn’t need another one of those in our South Carolina statehouse right after the Mark Sanford debacle.
Violet
No need for Romney to go with a female VP. Palin was such a disaster, I think they’ll look to distance themselves from any memories of her by choosing a man instead. I think a non-white man will be the obvious choice. Rubio probably. Jindal maybe, but he’s just kind of weird and did so poorly in his SOTU response (Kenneth the Page) I don’t see him getting the nod.
redshirt
@gene108: I have to think the Masters of the Universe did everything they possibly could to delay the implosion until after the 2008 election. Alas!
billiecat
Oh Jeebus. Nikki Haley makes Caribou Barbie look like a Ph.D candidate. Obama should be so lucky.
James E. Powell
VP candidates don’t win elections. The VP used to be picked to balance regional differences. Now, it seems, the VP is picked to please factions (Edwards, Palin) or to satisfy the Beltway that the candidate has an insider to keep them in line (Gore, Cheney, Biden).
Romney is going to have to find some one who will not overshadow him. Despite his campaigning for more than five years, I suspect Romney is still largely unknown to that great mass of American voters who do not pay much attention to politics.
DFH no.6
@Steve:
I don’t think so. Lieberman – who I believe McCain wanted to pick as his VP – would have been a fairly brave pick (not that it would have changed the result).
I remember reading a couple places back when that McCain was directed by some rightwing Christian GOPer group (don’t remember the outfit’s name, don’t care to research) to pick Sarah Palin instead, “or else” (I suppose, loss of religious-wacko ground troops).
That’s why McCain didn’t know the first thing about her when she was picked just prior to the convention. He was told to pick the smarmy little dumbass, and cowardly followed orders.
So I believe McCain picking Palin was the opposite of “politically courageous”. Glad he did it, though.
Many eyes were opened to the sheer nuttiness and outright incompetence of the Republican national “leadership” when the Snowbilly Grifter was bestowed such a prominent position. She was (rightly so) a laughingstock. How much Palin hurt McCain is impossible to quantify, but hurt him she did.
Romney, I think, will go with some “safe” seeming pick, whoever that would be. Won’t make a difference in the election.
Lihtox
Since the goal of this exercise is to win over moderates, I think Condi should definitely be on the list; Romney is going to take a hard turn to the left once the primaries are over.
Also, I think it’s rather tacky to speculate on Condi’s sexual orientation, one way or the other, particularly as a means to insult her. Whether she’s gay or straight or has a fetish for stupid Texas men–––totally besides the point. There are plenty of much better reasons to make fun of her.
Cat Lady
John Bolton. Angry white guy who wants to bomb the browns is a safe pick.
JoyfulA
@pseudonymous in nc: From comments I heard, it was firing the beloved Darla Moore.
JoshA
@Egg Berry: It can work if the state’s extremely close, but other than that, not really.
I’d say naming Gore to the ticket helped Clinton win Tenn in 1992, but the margin suggests maybe it wasn’t even necessary. Obviously, John Edwards didn’t help Kerry win either North or South Carolina in 2004.
I’d say that naming a VP from a particular state when that VP is a sitting Senator or Governor would be a bump of at least .5% there but no more than 5%.
McDonnell from VA would be the best bet to swing a state this year. He’s popular in VA (62% approval in the last poll I saw, tho that was before the transvaginal probe controversy), and VA’s turned into a knife-fight in terms of swing state.
Frankly, I think New Mexico has become too Democratic to be swung by a Governor. But she could help hold Arizona and maybe help in Florida or something.
BDeevDad
Haven’t you heard? Rand Paul is going to be Mitt’s running mate. Mitt is the only one Ron Paul has not attacked in the debates.
Groucho48
Isn’t Rubio an anchor baby? Maybe even a terrorist baby?
asiangrrlMN
@kindness: I would tell him exactly what he wanted to hear – since he is who he is, he would believe me. Then, rusty pitchfork™ in the hindquarters!
pattonbt
My money is on McDonnell. I think they would look at Jindal and Rubio (and I think they both have their sites on 2016), but I think they would both say “no” very quietly. I think McDonnell gives Romney enough “south” / nonRINO balance to help the soon to be depressed (after Romney pulls out the nomination) teabaggers. Enough to carry the election, I doubt, because I can never really think of where the VP candidate swung the election before, so why now.