Posted on 02/12/2011 3:31:47 PM PST by matt04
BOSTON - Gov. Deval Patrick hopped on a plane to Chicago Friday evening for a meeting with President Barack Obama’s top political advisor David Axelrod, one the principal architects of the president’s 2008 election and a former advisor to Patrick’s first campaign for governor.
The meeting between Patrick and Axelrod comes just days after the governor flew to Washington, D.C. to have dinner with Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine, the former governor of Virginia and a classmate of Patrick’s at Harvard Law School.
Over salad, salmon and calamari on Tuesday night, Patrick and Kaine discussed the president’s re-election campaign in 2012 and ways in which the governor could be helpful to Obama on the campaign trail, Patrick told reporters on Wednesday.
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The governor has indicated a willingness to assume a larger national profile to help his friend Obama win re-election in 2012 following his own victorious campaign last November when Patrick bucked the anti-incumbent trend across the country that saw Democrats take a beating at the polls.
Asked this week whether there was a lesson for Obama and his advisors to take away from his victory in Massachusetts, Patrick quipped, “That’s what they tell me.”
(Excerpt) Read more at masslive.com ...
Usually, if a presidential election has a three-way race, it hurts the incumbent party. In 1968, when the president was a Democrat, George Wallace ran as an independent, helping Nixon win with about 45% of the vote. In 1992, when George H.W. Bush, a Republican, ran for reelection, Perot ran as an independent, helping Clinton win with 43%. In 2000, when the president was a Democrat, Nader ran for the Green Party, helping Bush win with about 48%.
The difference in 2012 is the revulsion TEA partiers/conservatives now harbor toward RINOs. McCain turned our stomachs to such a degree that we just won’t sit around and take it anymore. The Dems are counting on this, and will invade our open primaries to insure we get a RINO so liberal we rebel. The RNC open primary system is broken, but the Ruling Party RINOs that run it won’t fix it. Dems don’t let Republicans choose their candidate, but we have little choice under the current system.
In some states, Republicans can vote in democrat primaries and vice versa. I live in Illinois, where we have open primaries. Each voter can choose, on primary election day, which party ballot he or she wants to use.
What matters most are the early primaries. Where is IL in the lineup? If the first GOP primaries were closed, it wouldn’t be as problematic if later primaries were open. Our problem is we get heavy Dem and Independent voters early in the process, and our first primaries are held in the northeast. [IA isn’t, but it’s fairly liberal, or at least has been. NH had become quite liberal, but it appears that at least a slight shift back to conservative is underway. Won’t matter, though, as they have open primaries, same day registration/voting, and make NO attempt to verify residence. Students are bussed in from other states and vote in the NH primary; this is a fact.]
The IL primary is the second Tues. in March. I hope that NH will change its law and require each voter to prove his or her address.
My fondest wish will never happen, but I would love to see IA knocked off its perch. Ethanol subsidies are killing us across the board, but as long as IA is #1 we’ll be screwed. Politicians are so shameless. Unless the TEA party more or less runs the table in 2012, there’s really not that much hope.
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