Dave II – YOu sound waaaaay enthused about identity politics and how a VP nomination, vs. actual policy, will “seal the deal” with voters then compelled to vote along lines of race, class, gender.
Perchance were you an early Condi Rice supporter? Despite her never holding elective office or having executive credentials before State?
Convinced biography and who you saw was all there is?
“Shes black! Shes a woman! She’s HOT! She ice-skated! She might be gay and lock up that demographic, too! Women will FLOCK TO HER! She’ll split the black vote with Obama. SHe is SO SMART! She can speak English AND Russian!”
“Oh, the 8 years of making policy for her idol Bush or getting stomped by Rumsfeld-Cheney? No matter. What resonates is her parents were schoolteachers in Birmingham, her playing piano, besides setting every identity politics checkmark off except being crippled with a disability and her lack of bona-fide Hispanicness…..”
Colette:
Did none of you read the piece? Romney lost the nomination, big time, in spite of his buckets of money. He is not popular with the base.
The Republican primaries were marred by conservatives splitting the vote 3 ways between Fred, Pastor Huckleberry, Romney. While McCain had a free field with the military worshippers, the moderates, and that element heavy in the early primaries that rewards candidates from past years for all the time and effort spent schmoozing state voters – as “finally deserving their turn”. The Bush I, Bob Dole effect.
“Not popular with the base” is a nice way of saying the Religious Right Base is bigoted and had huge problems with not just Mormon Mitt, but Catholic Rudy. They’d take either over Obama, of course – but not over The Pastor.
Also, it may be true that the Religious Right distrusts anyone who did not have all their beliefs rigidly fixed as true believers by 6th Grade. And distrusts anyone who thinks for years about an issue, judges their past belief wrong and changes or modifies it – as theologically or politically unreliable – and thinks of that as flip-flopping. Just as they believe you can never fully trust a person who came to Jesus late in life, you cannot completely trust someone who coverted to pro-life beliefs after 30. After all, if they think, rather than just feel God’s grace and be guided by it and the Pastors – they could continue thinking – and even change their minds again.
Dangerous questioning of political or religious faith. Just because a person who changes their mind is on your side now, doesn’t mean they are as trustworthy as a true child of Jesus who hasn’t changed their mind on anything since age 5!
Not exactly good, IMO, if you have someone elected President and if they get in several huge messes, stubbornly not reconsider the decision-making and beliefs that got them in the messes to begin with. Even if you view “unshakable, unalterable conviction of belief and opinion” as a plus in neighbor Fred who also goes to the Superchurch and knows that tradition and doing the same things and feeling the same things just the same everyday is true character in an oyster-schucker. That neighbor is not an executive running a business in a glabal business changing with light speed, nor a President pretty confident on running or being in office that they do not have 30 of 30 critical issues perfectly right in their heads – and they would disserve the American people not changing something they later believe they were wrong about.
Or that fast-changing world has altered to a new reality & made something or some issue that the President was right on if it was way back in 1988, even 2000, completely wrong in 2008.
Not to mention the Republicans are best off not having a judgemental Base blacklisting whole sections of society as “unacceptable” to run for national office as Republicans. Mormons, Jews, Hispanic Pentacostalists, Papists, pro-choicers, environmentally-conscious people, paleocons who have not embraced the miracle of supply-side (The more you cut taxes on the rich and grow the economy with deficit-borrowed money from China for pork for the power-brokers of the Base and Corporate America – the more Government revenue grows and the bigger you can get Gov’t, get into more wars, and cut taxes for the rich even further!)
