The only thing truly inevitable about Mitt Romney is that he would get the Bad Lip Reading treatment, as Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Barack Obama all have before.
Regarding the WSJ’s read on the primary, I have to confess to being underwhelmed by it. The Journal was infamous in 2007 for pushing a really bad idea — amnesty for illegal aliens — and using smear tactics against conservatives in that campaign. Those of us who remember the Journal smearing us for wanting to uphold the rule of law then won’t be swayed much by their read on the primary now. They’re fine on many things, but they are also very much the establishment. And the establishment seems to be coalescing around Romney, and telling the rest of us to like it without persuading us that we should.
The Journal brings up George H. W. Bush as an uninspiring figure who won the presidency. What that overlooks is that Bush ran essentially as the incumbent, and followed Ronald Reagan, the greatest president of the 20th century. Romney will not have that wind at his back. He will be facing a weakened but devious, clever and desperate opponent who enjoys the power of incumbency and will have a massive amount of campaign money to throw at him. I’m not at all convinced that an uninspiring figure is the GOP’s best shot at beating him.
And, it’s worth remembering that Bush 41 didn’t hang onto the presidency for a second term. Because he compromised with Democrats, to his own detriment.
The fact is, Mitt Romney has been running for this nomination for about five years now, and still has about 75% of the GOP electorate wanting to vote for someone else. We’ve seen a succession of candidates rise and fall mainly as alternatives to Romney on the right, while he continues to hug a solid quarter to third against a divided field. That circumstance is playing to his strengths — name recognition, money raising, organizational talent, being an experienced public speaker, etc — but a thinned field to his right probably puts either Cain or Perry ahead of him. A Cain/Perry truce could well bury Romney in South Carolina. But that truce, at this stage, is not likely. Which is a shame, since a ticket featuring the both of them may be unbeatable.
It’s true that Romney hasn’t stumbled much in the primary. But it’s equally true that he hasn’t come under any sustained fire and most of his supporters don’t seem to mind his consistent tilts to the left when he was governor. That he governed a blue state is no excuse — Scott Walker governs one now, and has not accepted that status quo as a policy jail for him. Rick Perry inherited a state in transition and helped turn Texas red, bright and deep. Bobby Jindal took a terrible situation in Louisiana and has become one of the nation’s most effective governors. To lead as these and other conservative governors has, requires, you know, actual belief in the conservative cause. Romney’s record as governor is all we really have to go on, since rhetorically he has been on both sides of most major issues (and, news flash — many politicians lie to get your vote). The problems in Romney’s history are not really deviations from orthodoxy of the type we get with every conservative officeholder. There’s just no evident orthodoxy in Romney’s soul at all. What does he actually believe? Who would a President Romney put on the Supreme Court? Or send to represent the US at the UN? I have some idea of the kinds of appointments nearly all the other candidates would make and the policies they would pursue, but Romney? You tell me.
Scott Walker had a Republican Senate and House that Mittens never had, but I still give Scott credit for not giving in to the democrat and union thuggery.
– no beer summits with this Mormon.
Bryan – My sentiments exactly. If Romney should become president my forecast is that he will govern from the left, just like Nixon. Somebody on PJM called him a chameleon, and that’s exactly what he is. He will say one thing to one audience and quite the opposite to another. Whatever he says one day will become inoperative on the next.
My favored candidate, Rick Perry, blew it in the debates, and now he will have to claw his back in if he can. My favorite candidate to my regret announced she will not run, and the alternative (Mr. Cain) seems both clueless on and incurious about foreign policy. Things are looking bleak.
Cain ran a pizza chain. Does that mean that he personally composed every recipe? He could have run it effectively with no sense of taste at all — because he could identify competent chefs and manage them appropriately to deliver exceptional performance.
He comes to foreign policy with, “I don’t know all the answers, because much of the real information is classified. I do know that our friends should be happy that they are our friends and those who are not our friends should feel dismayed that they’re not.” That, alone, puts him light-years ahead of the current occupant of the White House.
I gotta agree. I think the foreign & defense policy knock on Cain is certainly fair, but it’s wildly overblown.
Neither Mitt Romney nor Rick Perry has much foreign policy experience, although Rick as a border state governor has extensive experience dealing with our neighbor and friend(?) Mexico. (However, given the whole immigration folderol, I’m not sure this experience works to his advantage in the nomination contest.)
I’m sure Mitt can talk a good game, that’s what he does best. He’ll impress the pants off Bill Kristol, I’ve no doubt. But that’s it. To me, it’s much more important to find a nominee whose head and heart are in the right place on the wide range of issues, including national security, than someone who can memorize and regurgitate the major exports of Burundi. I gotta tell you, Rick and Hermie fit the bill, Mittens doesn’t.
And don’t get me started on Obally-bobally-momally’s lack of substantive experience when we boosted him into the seat of power. Just ask yourself, do you feel safer now than three years ago?
We’ve famously come to the place where 4 years serving as an absent Senator while you run for President qualifies you to be President, while a year and a half as governor, preceded by a decade as mayor of a small town, disqualifies you. By this light, you have to know what party Herman Cain belongs to, before you decide if he’s qualified. If he were a Democrat, he’d be eminently qualified to be President, but as a Republican he’s of course the spawn of Satan, and can’t be trusted with any government job, never mind the Presidency.
Various people have commented that being in the private sector doesn’t qualify one to run the government. Working for the government, however, seems to qualify one to screw the government up, repeatedly. I’m in favor of trying something different. We’ve been told repeatedly that we need “experts” to run the government, the latest one being this idiot Geithner, whose qualifications were so overwhelmingly impressive that we *had* to overlook his tax evasion episode and get him into Treasury as fast as possible. Does anyone think that worked out well? Frankly, at this point, if the same expert who told us Geithner was qualified to be Treasury Secretary tells us Cain is unqualified to be President, that means it’s likely Cain will do a fine job as President…
If you believe Al Gore and his Enron scheme for global carbon trading are the way for wealth re-distribution through the UN’s IPCC, and you want to shut down our power plants, vote for Romney. The Climate Depot websie has a history of Romney’s embrace of carbon trading as well as his choice of John Holdren (population control through govt action, ice age coming then global warming proponent), the current president’s science advisor. Now that the wannabe carbon traders are funding his campaign with millions, expect a continuation of the war on affordable energy…it’s creepy to see how progressives have oozed themselves into the Republican Party.
Clearly, with their strenuous support of Romney and Christie, both true believers in Global Warming, the Establishment and Retired Republicans wish for and are anticipating on-going support for the Obama Interior and EPA initiatives. From my perspective, I am hoping Governor Perry with his Energy Independence and Jobs, is able to FULLY trounce their efforts! In listening to Rush with his energy experts and my own experience of living across the street from US Steel functioning open-hearth furnaces for many years, with no identifiable ill effects – I do not support further enriching Democrat and/or Establishment Republican “cap and traders” and “renewable energy investors,” particularly in view of the present state of our economy.
From “Retired Republicans Quietly Try to Shift GOP Climate-Change Focus” it is reported that Holtz-Eakin, working with the New Hampshire-based climate policy advocacy group Clean Air-Cool Planet, has flown to New Hampshire to talk to voters about the economic concerns raised by climate change–and the economic benefits of addressing the problem.
George Shultz (another retired republican greenie – JGwen) cochaired the “No on Prop. 23” campaign in California, which successfully defended California’s pioneering climate-change cap-and-trade law against an oil-industry-led effort to overturn it. Shultz own opinion is that this problem is very real, there’s a huge problem coming at us. There’s a huge melt coming in the Arctic regions. When two major oil companies, Tesoro and Valero, bankrolled last year’s campaign to overturn California’s cap-and-trade law, Shultz said his response was, “We’re not just going to beat these guys, we’re going to beat the hell out of them.
Romney is thus their candidate of choice.