We’ve really not had that “good Republican manager,” GWB certainly wasn’t, since Reagan, and really Reagan was the “management by walking around” sort of manager who had big objectives and put smart people in charge of achieving them. I have seen another Republican at the National level with the personal confidence and security to surround him/herself with smart people and let them do their jobs. Since Reagan, Republicans at all levels have tended to act as if governing was a zero sum game in which you only got ahead by making someone get behind.
Likewise no one since Reagan, and barely he, has been able to get past the flak barrage thrown up by the running dog media. This is where Gingrich has some advantages in that they came at him the same way they came at Reagan and it wasn’t the Left that got him, it was the zero sum types on the Republican side.
We have a serious problem with the way we groom and vett candidates and officeholders. We insist, and would be forced to insist by the media if we didn’t, on the “nice guy.” Nice guys are just meat to the grinder for skillful Democrat operatives, of which we have NONE. We have skillful election operatives but we don’t have people who can move the switches and levers of a government and make the damned thing to things for them instead of to them. We could have the “nice guy” candidate, but the Republican aversion to confrontation and controversy is such that they cannot make themselves be in any fashion associated with anyone to whom controversy has attached or who is at all controversial. That’s why Romney is so attractive to the Beltway Bandit and officeholder cohort of Republicans; it’s not that he’s a “moderate” or a “conservative,” however one defines those, but rather than he is a nice guy, so nice that he couldn’t say s&*t if he had a mouthful of it, and that’s why the Democrats are just salivating about running against him. They can accuse him of baby rape and all he’ll do is ask them to please think of another way to express themselves. I’d be OK with a Romney so long as we had one body of Congress and he had a COS who was a real SOB. He’d be a nightmare for conservatives if the Democrats controlled the Congress.
