News w/@michaelscherer: Christie declines a No Labels presidential bid after extensive discussions with the group. His team commissioned polling, calculated a potential budget, studied maps and met with donors but decided he couldn't make it work. https://t.co/Zjr99Eu3NO
— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) March 27, 2024
Cynical professional Ed Kilgore, at NYMag — “Chris Christie Rejects No Labels, Accepts No Voters Want Him”:
When former New Jersey governor Chris Christie announced his 2024 presidential candidacy last June, the general reaction was bewilderment. He had, after all, run in 2016 and dropped out of the race after finishing ninth in Iowa and sixth in New Hampshire. He ended his two-term tenure in Trenton thoroughly loathed by his constituents. So irrational were his aspirations for the presidency that my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti suggested in a piece on “Chris Christie Syndrome” that the man seemed haunted by his failure to run in 2012…
Running against Trump again in 2024 had all the hallmarks of another attempted Christie do-over. But even more than his 2016 race, it represented comically poor timing. He chose to be the loudest-and-proudest anti-Trump candidate at the very moment the party emphatically gave its heart to Daddy. He began the campaign with the highest unfavorability ratings among Republicans (and, for that matter, the general public) in the field. His announced strategy of driving Trump weeping to his knees in candidate debates fell apart when the former president decided against participating in debates at all. He didn’t even bother to compete in Iowa and never rose beyond a distant third place in New Hampshire, far and away his best state and the place where he concentrated all his resources.
With much of the non-Trump portion of the GOP shrieking at him to get out of the race and give Nikki Haley a clean shot at the front-runner, Christie finally dropped out with few votes and no delegates, but on his way out the door he damaged Haley by commenting on a hot mic that she was “going to get smoked” by Trump…
Yet Christie 2024, bizarre as it may seem, didn’t end there. It has now come to light that the twice-humiliated Republican presidential candidate had an extended dalliance with the nonpartisan No Labels organization, which has been searching high and low for someone (preferably a Republican) to head up the “unity ticket” it has been planning to launch at some point this spring. Christie, who had once referred to the entire No Labels enterprise as a “fool’s errand,” apparently considered becoming its champion very seriously, as the Washington Post reports…
… “I appreciate the encouragement I’ve gotten to pursue a third-party candidacy,” Christie said in a statement to The Washington Post on Wednesday. “While I believe this is a conversation that needs to be had with the American people, I also believe that if there is not a pathway to win and if my candidacy in any way, shape or form would help Donald Trump become president again, then it is not the way forward.”
This last remark had to come as a rude shock to the No Labels folks. They dismissed past warnings that they might inadvertently help Trump as Biden-campaign agitprop — but it seems the Republican agrees. But it appears that Christie took a long, hard look at the numbers and decided the whole thing might backfire…
Joe Lieberman's death leaves a hole at No Labels as it tries to recruit a 2024 third-party candidate https://t.co/i6z3l4ieJy
— The Associated Press (@AP) March 28, 2024
Coincidentally… right about the time of Christie’s decision…
When No Labels’ critics got the loudest, it was Joe Lieberman who came to the group’s defense.
The former Connecticut senator was a founding chairman of the centrist organization that focused, above all, on promoting bipartisanship in national politics. Despite its benign stated mission, No Labels inflamed many people across politics by working to recruit a third-party presidential candidate that some fear might tilt the 2024 election in Donald Trump’s favor.
At almost every major turn, Lieberman served as the group’s chief public defender. He was also a private force in No Labels’ presidential recruitment push. He insisted repeatedly in interviews, as recently as last week, that the nation is craving an alternative to Trump and President Joe Biden…
Now, Lieberman is gone. He died on Wednesday due to complications from a fall. He was 82.
Lieberman’s death not only marks an irreplaceable loss for No Labels, it injects a new level of uncertainty into the organization’s 2024 ambitions…
Already, No Labels had courted and been denied by would-be White House contenders in both parties including Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.
On Thursday, a fresh wave of critics called on No Labels to abandon its 2024 plans.
“At this point I’m not sure what else the No Labels crowd needs to hear. Every serious person who has taken a look at this gambit immediately sees they would just be helping to elect Donald Trump,” Sarah Longwell, who founded Republican Voters Against Trump, wrote on X. “Time for No Labels and its donors to pull the plug.”…
It’s like Murphy the Trickster God was sending a message!
No Labels co-founder: Potential candidates ‘afraid’ of helping Trump https://t.co/D1EjY49YE3 via @politico
— Jennifer Truth Over Phony Balance Rubin ???????? (@JRubinBlogger) March 29, 2024
War for Ukraine Day 768: A Brief(ish) Monday Night Update
rikyrah
No Labels clowns😠😠😠
piratedan
it’s almost as if relatively sane, yet still odious, Conservative voices don’t feel the need to stroke their ego and spend Billionaires money if it may increase the chances of electing a fucking lunatic.
If these No Labels asshats are serious, how about building a sane conservative party sans Nazis? You know, start over because rebranding that dumpster fire of a party ain’t gonna be cheap.
HumboldtBlue
DNC Chairman explains new Lara Trump diss track
SpaceUnit
Sure. Okey dokie.
SpaceUnit
In other words hurt the GOP more than Democrats. Got it.
Also I’m going to bed. I’m apparently the only one still up.
NotMax
They’re gonna end up with a Ramaswamy/Yang pairing.
//
(In actuality, the whole shebang was hatched irrelevant and will soon fade into deserved obscurity, fit only as an answer in a bar trivia quiz.)
Baud
No Labels was a bridge too far for Christie.
eclare
@Baud:
Hahaha…subtle but effective.
Anne Laurie
Pro tip, for those who may not have noticed: 3-4am Eastern time is the daily ‘dead zone’ for BJ commentors. I put up posts, if that’s when I finish them, but I don’t expect much in the way of reader activity until after 4am.
(This is different from the 2am ‘WordPress maintenance’ issue, when comments disappear / get duplicated because the devs are tinking behind the curtain. These days, that 2am glitch only seems to last for five minutes or less.)
Damien
@Anne Laurie: yeah but we night owls who populate our local Edward Hopper paintings appreciate the work you put out.
Quaker in a Basement
OK Christie may be an asshole, but he still has one foot in reality.
Ramalama
@Damien: wow that’s a beautiful turn of phrase.
Tony Jay
“We had a meeting with Senator Manchin about a candidacy, but he turned coal-black and started leaking toxic fumes when we said we were only looking for Democrats to fill the VP slot.”
Captain Ego must have loved that.
eclare
@Tony Jay:
That sounds about right.
Frankensteinbeck
I don’t believe for a second that No Labels preferred a Republican for their presidential candidate. Its funders want a spoiler to throw the election to Trump.
What the decision makers in No Labels want is to court no-hopes who will reject them. It’s not even a spoiler organization. It is pure grift, fleecing those Republican donors because they’re the dumbest, most gullible rich marks imaginable.
brantl
Joe Leiberman’s death left a hole at no conscience…..”, why don’t dead asshats work as well as live asshats?
p.a.
Yes to #16. “No Labels” was born dead, it’s always been dead in the reality-based sphere, so why don’t they just run with it: nominate Lieberman.
JWR
@p.a.: McCain – Lieberman 2024!
eclare
I am watching Morning Joe and a commenter just said Hope Hicks may testify in the upcoming criminal election money case. What?
Baud
@JWR:
Good news for us all!
Manyakitty
@eclare: I heard that yesterday. For the prosecution!
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
We had a bright fireball streaking through the sky earlier this morning.
Baud
Paging Betty C
Geminid
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: Those are always a lot of fun.
Baud
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
I hope it was a meteor.
lowtechcyclist
No Labels has always been No Platform, No Issues, and it would be good if some political reporters would point this out. Instead, they just chase the ball of No Labels’ search for candidates.
They could ask obvious questions like: if there’s some neglected middle ground between the parties, what are the issues where this overlooked middle ground exists? If there’s a platform that would make any sense that would take positions on some issues from Democrats, and some from Republicans, how about some examples?
If there are no good answers to these questions, then No Labels makes No Sense. And of course there are no good answers – Cole made that point quite well 15 years ago with his post about tire rims and anthrax.
Geminid
It seems like Kyrsten Sinema would be a good fit for No Labels. I wonder if she told them no already.
Jinchi
Have they not tried to recruit RFK Jr? He’s perfectly happy to swing the election to Trump.
Ramalama
@Baud:
Nominated. First time I ever did such a thing here.
JWR
@Baud:
Now a matched set!
Baud
@Jinchi:
Making an argument is like filing a lawsuit. Any idiot can do it.
lowtechcyclist
@Anne Laurie:
That doesn’t surprise me – all the way back in college, some friends of mine concluded that that hour was the true divide between one day and the next. At 3am, you’d have night owls still up from the previous day, but next to no early risers. But by 4am, you’d start getting the early risers, but even most of the 3am night owls would have called it a night. And fifty years of observation (on my part anyway, I’ve lost touch with these guys ages ago) has confirmed their intuition.
So if there’s going to be a conversation here during that hour, jackals from other time zones (other countries, even) are definitely gonna have to pick up the slack.
OzarkHillbilly
A pin sized hole, one so tiny it was 2 weeks before anyone noticed.
eta: currently listening to my first whip-poor-will of the season.
MagdaInBlack
@Jinchi: He’s just another entitled butt-hurt dick, isn’t he. I knew this, just……they’re all so tedious with their constant bitching.
MagdaInBlack
@Anne Laurie: I’ve noticed and i think of those hours as the shift-change.”
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: Aussie Sheila sometimes picked up a lot slack on late night threads. Not so much recently; I hope she’s doing ok.
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
America’s biggest export.
eclare
@MagdaInBlack:
Ha! Morning George, morning Ralph.
https://youtu.be/ECa1toPGth4?si=i-iEXCJmC3wF-FWV
prostratedragon
@MagdaInBlack: Usually still up, but language output channel often switched off.
Suzanne
I just wanted to see that again.
Very little will make me happier today.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
@Jinchi:
I suspect that Penn and Jacobson know that they need to stick with potential candidates that the Villagers regard as respectable in order for No Labels to keep being taken seriously by said Villagers. And the nicest thing you can say about Sinema and RFK Jr. is that they’re a couple of flakes.
Their wooing of Christie illustrates the sort of person they’re after. He’s got no popular base of support whatsoever anymore, but the Villagers love him and think his opinions are valuable. And that’s what matters to them.
MagdaInBlack
@eclare: 🤗 That was exactly what I was thinking of !
lowtechcyclist
@eclare:
Rats! I was hoping for George Tirebiter and Ralph Spoilsport.
Princess
@lowtechcyclist: Exactly. Christie could be guaranteed to get on TV and make trouble for us even if he has zero support from voters.
hells littlest angel
An asshole-shaped hole.
Geminid
@OzarkHillbilly: I heard a turkey this morning. but I never hear whipoorwills here. Some friends living 50 miles south in Buckingham County, on the south side of the James River. hear them all the time in the warmer months . I read that Virginia whipoorwills spend their winters in the Carolina Lowlands. That’s a nice, short migration, kind of like having a house in Richmond and a second one near Myrtle Beach
Ken
I am reminded of Scrooge begging Christmas Future, “If there is any person who feels emotion at this man’s death…”
Manyakitty
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: neato!
JWR
@Princess: That’s because he sounds so reasonable to the TV people. I think of Chris Sununu the same way, as a sort of low-rent Christie, just not as polished a liar.
eclare
@MagdaInBlack:
❤️
RevRick
@Baud: No Labels, No Lanes?
Third-party efforts in a Presidential democracy are stupid. They are rooted in Green Lantern notions of the Presidency, when the reality is there this thing called Congress, which has an alternate source of power and legitimacy. And the reality is that even if the third-party candidate were elected, they’d face a Congress largely controlled by Democrats and Republicans. And then what?
In order to govern, that third-party President would have to align with either one of those two parties, which would defeat the premise that the party began with, which was they would somehow rise above that partisan divide or would somehow tug one of the parties in their preferred direction (Stein and West come to mind here). It’s all adolescent fantasy.
And to any who say, “yeah, but the Republicans in the 1850s” the reality is that its rise was to fill a void created following the collapse of the Whigs in 1853.
OzarkHillbilly
Nah. They like him because he’s an asshole who can always be counted on to insult all the right people and to do so in a humorous way.
Betty
@lowtechcyclist: I am told robbers consider 3 am the best time to break into your house.
LiminalOwl
@lowtechcyclist: 3-4 a.m. is also, at least by anecdata, the time when those who are awake are most likely to contemplate suicide. So now I’m wondering about any connection between these two things (SI and “shift change”). Yes, I know that correlation does not imply causality
Princess
I still think 75% of the purpose of No Labels is to provide Mark Penn with an income stream. The fact that Hillary hired him in 2008 is still a black mark against her tbh in my mind.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Anne Laurie: I don’t think there are many of us jackals in the East Europe/Middle East/West Asia time-zone band. I’m just getting rolling at that time (Athens, Eastern +7), and I suspect that it’s not until after that time that Tony Jay’s (London, Eastern +5) morning tea kicks in.
JML
At this point “No Labels” is basically just a bunch of republicans who don’t want to be associated with the crazy that is the modern GOP, but still want to get tax cuts, wars, and to let business do what they want, while tamping down on the overt meanness & bigotry (they’re fine with the covert meanness and bigotry of course; keep it in the closet buried beneath a veneer of politeness). There’s basically no actual democrats that are part of it any longer; note how very few Democrats were even mentioned in their question for a candidate for president? Sure, everyone is turning them down (correctly), but they’re basically not even asking Democrats.
It’s a clown show of fakes that spend their time with the old Broder-types of DC, a circle-jerk of people who look down on everyone who doesn’t meet their made-up standards of proper DC behavior (aka, be more male, white, and come from wealth preferably). They are the worst and need to go away.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick:
I think the theory is usually that one of our two existing parties is collapsing, so there’s an opening (and for the kinds of people who usually contemplate these things, it’s usually the Democratic Party that they think is collapsing, and usually either because it’s too far left or not far left enough).
Dorothy A. Winsor
@LiminalOwl: It’s the time of night when I think “Dammit, I have to pee.”
Matt McIrvin
(and if I were unkind, I’d say that the root of that kind of thinking in both cases is probably “why isn’t there a left party for white people any more?”)
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Matt McIrvin: There is a left party for white people; it’s just that it’s no longer hospitable to white bigots. (My answer to “what about this Dem who was part of the Ku Klux Klan?” is basically “that was before the Democratic Party had their come-to-Jesus moment on civil rights, and the Republican Party sold their souls to the Devil for Southern votes”.)
JWR
From NPR:
Frankensteinbeck
@lowtechcyclist:
3-4 am is the Hour of the Wolf for exactly that reason. It is the time when the fewest people are awake, and those who are are prone to erratic behavior like crime or suicide.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Music to my ears, Baud — thanks for the link! With reproductive freedom and recreational pot on the ballot, an unpopular abortion ban going into effect on May 1, etc., I think we’ve got a fighting chance!
As added incentive, it would be utterly humiliating for Trump to lose Florida after making it his official residence when his fellow New Yorkers resoundingly told him to fuck off. And even if the worst happens in November, broke-ass Repubs will have to defend the state in an expensive media market.
sdhays
Here’s something that surprised me: according to Merriam-Webster, the first known usage of “come-to-Jesus-moment” was in 1999. I assumed it was much older.
Anyway, I’m not sure it’s a great term. It was grating when Biden used it for Netanyahu (and in another context or spoken by a different person, it could have been ugly). I’m not sure if the term is having a moment or I’m just noticing it more now.
Not @ing anybody because I’m not trying police anyone, just making a personal observation.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: Sinema absolutely embodies the No Labels shtick. But maybe she’d decline an offer for fear that helping to throw an election to a deranged authoritarian might interfere with efforts to cash in on her single term in the Senate
@sdhays: Yeah, I knew what Biden meant, but it was definitely cringey in that context. It made me resolve to banish the phrase from my personal lexicon, not that I used it much anyway.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@sdhays: I don’t usually use that term, but it seemed to make a good counterpoint to the one I use more often, about the GOP selling their souls to the Devil through the Southern Strategy. Granted, it assumes membership in a particular religion of which I’m not part.
lowtechcyclist
@RevRick:
I think the fantasy continues into an alternate universe where moderate Republicans and centrist Dems in Congress would unite to support the No Labels President’s legislative agenda (the nature of which of course is left to each person’s imagination), leaving the more extreme members of both parties out in the cold.
At least John Anderson had an actual policy agenda that he was running on.
Uncle Cosmo
Naah, it just replaced an actual asshole with a metaphorical hole. (That motherfucking momser is dead? Good!)
sdhays
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Nothing wrong with your usage and I definitely wasn’t trying to single you out. I think Biden’s really cringey usage has made me sensitive to it recently.
lowtechcyclist
@sdhays:
I agree with you that it’s not such a great term. It seems to mean “accept some truth that was very difficult for you to accept.” Personally, I almost always experience coming to Jesus as a very joyful thing, so the way people use it really weirds me out. I have to wonder what they think Jesus is all about.
Uncle Cosmo
@Betty: IIRC the poet W. S. Merwin, my late lamented Poifick Master & Hero Of The Zeitgeist, once referred to 3 AM (or thereabouts) as
SiubhanDuinne
@OzarkHillbilly:
Oh, how lovely and how I envy you. I adore the call of the whip-poor-will. I’m in too urban a setting these days to encounter them.
Wapiti
@sdhays: Regarding the phrase, my wife and I compared our recollections. We both think we heard it in the Army, and she got out in 1996.
It’s cringy, and tone-deaf when used with a Jewish individual. But these days, yes, we should be avoid things that are cringy when used outside the old orders.
(One of our cafes has a signboard explaining how to deal with transgender
edindividuals – one line suggests dropping honorifics like sir or ma’am. Difficult for me, but it makes total sense.)Betty Cracker
@lowtechcyclist: I don’t think there’s necessarily a negative connotation attached to the phrase. To borrow another Christianity-based metaphor, it’s an event where the scales fall from one’s eyes, as in the story of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus — he realized a truth he’d previously denied and was converted.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Uncle Cosmo:
Much more poetic than my term for that block of time, “stupid o’clock”.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
@Betty Cracker:
I don’t disagree with her at all, but I find it curious that she mentioned Scott instead of DeSantis. From The Hill article Baud linked:
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
Scott is up this cycle.
Manyakitty
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: I call it “a million o’clock in the morning”
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
Oh, of course. Duuuuhh….
[wanders off blindly to find caffeine]
Jackie
@eclare: Apparently Hope Hicks was in the room a few times when TIFG and Michael Cohen were plotting the Stormy problem. Since she’s a witness for the prosecution, she might be there to collaborate Cohen’s account. No bueno for TIFG.
VOR
We had this scenario in Minnesota with Reform Party Governor Jesse Ventura in 2002. The Republicans and Democrats united to overrule 6 of Ventura’s 9 vetoes in his final year. The post-Y2K recession left the state with a budget crisis. Governor Ventura proposed a middle-of-the-road solution with some budget cuts and some tax increases. They junked Ventura’s budget proposal and united on a temporary solution until after the 2002 election, which Republican Tim Pawlenty won.
In retrospect, Ventura appears like a proto-Trump who made the position all about him. He attacked the media, even changing press passes to say “Official Jackal”.
Ironcity
@VOR: could we get press passes that read “Official Balloon Juice Jackel”? We could promise not to claw up the woodwork or mess (much) on the carpet.
JustRuss
I can’t remember when a headline has cheered me up as much as “Joe Lieberman’s death leaves a hole at No Labels”.