Posted on 12/01/2011 7:57:27 AM PST by Fred
NEWT GINGRICH is the latest unlikely figure to vault to the top of Republican presidential polls, and unlike those who preceded him - Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain - he’s likely to stick around. That’s partly due to necessity. With just a month until the Iowa caucuses, conservatives don’t have time to anoint a new savior. It’s also because, despite his copious shortcomings, he seems immune to what felled the others. An able debater, he won’t flop like Perry and Cain. He’s not a full-on nut like Trump. And his legislative record eclipses Bachmann’s, which barely exists.
But his late emergence as the “true conservative’’ poised to challenge Mitt Romney is rich, and its broader significance underappreciated. For two years, the driving force in national politics has been the Tea Party, whose founding myth was that ordinary citizens were rising up in defiant objection to the hidebound, self-dealing ways of Washington. Greedy politicians, this view held, had bloated the government and lined their own pockets at taxpayers’ expense, while letting the country go to rot.
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonglobe.com ...
Can you stand 4 more years of this??!!!
Nope. And what has our current crop of front runners suggested we do to fix it should we elect them?
uhh huh...
so we are STILL screwed.
Any reduction of spending MUST be below the “baseline” to impress me.
The candidates you mention - pre-date the TEA party’s organizing. The TEA party has been promoting and supporting candidates whose platforms were/are compatible with TP principles- AFTER they announce their candidacy.
There is no TEA PARTY central organizaton - its members are the leadership.
The 2010 congressional elections were the first national test of TP activism. The Presidential 2012 election will also be the first opportunity for TP participation.
“The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. ... - Milton Friedman
See post 12
Just consider it a further utter lack of respect I have for mewling toadies like yourself.
You’re an insignificant bug and will get all the respect you deserve.
Baloney.
If ROMNEY or HUNTSMAN wins, the Tea Party looses.
Gingrich is a good conservative. Has he strayed? All fall short of the Glory of God. But he’s a hell of a lot better than Romney, Hunstman and, OF COOURSE, Obama!!
Sorry to disagree.
Obama is the worst thing to ever happen to our country. He has polluted the Supreme Court with 2 destructive activists.
He is a committed Marxist who hates most everything that made the USA great. I would crawl over broken glass to vote for steaming pile of turd to see Obama defeated.
Wise up. There are NO perfect candidates. Gingrich is far from my ideal candidate, however, if he is the nominee running against Obama I would run thru a brick wall to vote for him.
See post 12
And you are clearly a simple ass that got up on the cranky side of bed this morning...I forgive you
Suddenly Buster the bulldog fell on the ground, sound asleep. He was dog-tired.
In a way, threads are like dogs, know what I mean?
Newt Gingrich is not a RINO. He holds a 90% lifetime conservative rating. He is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His track record in Congress and as Speaker of the House was solid conservative.
If nominated Newt will taunt, ridicule and criticize Barry Soetoro aka Barack Obama aka Steve Dunham every day until the election. He will eviscerate Barry whether he agrees to debate or not. Newt will make the general public see what a pathetic, loser BHO really is. That is the reason for the all out smear campaign. They want to run agains’t Mitt because Mitt like McStain before him will try to be a gentleman.
If elected President Newt Gingrich will try to make some pretty significant changes in government that need to be made. The 21st Century Contract For America is a good start.
The liberal hacks at the Boston Globe are getting frightened of a Gingrich candidacy, methinks.
Newt is the biggest hypocrite in DC. He is a Professional, Polished Politician.
A MUST WATCH VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWKTOCP45zY&feature=youtu.be
Yeah, my first thought was, “we’re taking advice from the Boston Herald? WTF?!”
I think I agree with this guy. The question is, did the Tea Party fail months ago, or are they just in the process of failing, and can still correct their error?
So far, the tea party has rejected four candidates in turn (although Paul doesn’t really count, so maybe it’s 3) — Romney, Bachmann, and then Perry.
Romney was a clear case. Bachmann was surprising, but seemed to be driven by the “We really want Sarah Palin” problem. Perry I think was the same thing, getting trashed from the right long before his debate failures took him out (and in fact, those attacks are what precipitated much of his debate problems, as he was unprepared for the questioning of his basic conservative and tea party credentials).
Cain was not rejected by the tea party, he simply was never really a good candidate, he wasn’t experienced enough to be president, and the swarm which was just jumping from candidate to candidate jumped TO him because he looked suddenly “electable”, and then jumped away because he started looking “unelectable”.
Now they have swarmed over to Gingrich. They will swarm again if Gingrich falls — but since Gingrich isn’t that conservative, it will be harder for the Tea Party to take him down. It was easy for the “Tea Party” to destroy Bachmann and Perry, because those two WERE conservatives and their base was the conservatives, so when the conservatives abandoned them, they didn’t have a liberal/moderate backstop like Gingrich will have.
Anyway, the Tea Party can’t save Cain. Cain is Sarah Palin, except with no ability to fix his appeal to the majority of republicans he would need anymore. But he can probably hold 15% through the primaries, because he’ll have half the tea party’s 30% supporting him.
That 15% will be enough to guarantee that none of the real conservatives (Bachmann, Perry, Santorum) have a shot at coming back, and will usher in Gingrich if we are LUCKY, or Romney if Gingrich’s coming implosion happens just before the Iowa Caucus when it’s too late.
The problem is, why would the tea party abandon Cain? And should they? If you want to stop Gingrich, I think they have to — Cain has nowhere to capture votes back, because the swarm ALWAYS thought that Cain and Gingrich were both just peachy (as did many of the Cain supporters when Gingrich wasn’t a threat, remember all of the “At Last, Two Adults In the Room” comments?)
There was a time the Cain supporters argued that Perry should quit to help Cain out. Well, Perry is at 8%, so he doesn’t have the votes for Cain — and frankly, Perry’s support would likely jump to Gingrich anyway, since those people still with Perry blame Bachmann and Cain for Perry’s problems, what with Bachmanns absurd attacks essentially blaming Perry for raping 12-year-olds, and Cain calling Perry a racist and then blaming Perry for women filing harrassments suits against Cain in the 1990s.
If Cain dropped out, his supporters would probably jump to Gingrich. So it’s not about Cain leaving — it’s about the tea party folks, who don’t want Gingrich, going back to one of the conservative candidates who still have a base of support.
I haven’t chosen a candidate yet. But if you want to stop Gingrich, I believe (and this is a hard sell to a group who sees their candidate at twice the poll numbers of Perry) the best way to do that would be to jump back to Rick Perry. He has the organization, he has the money. He has a decade-long record of conservative actions and opinions. If you take every non-conservative attack against him, real or imagined, and count them with all of the things he has said or done that were clearly conservative, he has a 98%+ conservative record. When you have taken HUNDREDS of actions, a few will be bad.
I don’t see Bachmann as having the capability of being the one to come back, although she certainly is conservative enough. And sadly, I don’t see Santorum having the time to be the next one to get the swarm, because time ran out.
But it is up to the Tea Party. I see a clear choice — accept Gingrich and jump to him to ensure Romney doesn’t win, or abandon Cain for Perry, and hope he can minimalize his gaffes enough to get the swarm back (I happen to believe that if Perry jumped 5 points, the media would say he was “making a comeback” and the swarm WOULD come back to him).
If the tea party continues to back Cain, it will mean Gingrich OR Romney will win without the tea party, and will have no interest or concern to listen to them.
I do see what the Cain supporters are likely to do though — push for Cain to be Romney’s (or Gingrich’s) VP nominee, and argue that so long as we have a “conservative” as VP we “won”. Hogwash. VP means squat, especially with a strong-headed President like Gingrich, who wouldn’t give Cain the time of day.
Don’t believe me? Go back and watch their ill-named “Lincoln/Douglass” style “debate”. There was not ONE time in that entire debate where Gingrich reacted to ANYTHING Cain said with the idea that Cain had merit and Gingrich would consider what he said.
Obama has set this country so far left that we may never recover. We’d better see to it that Obama is NOT reelected because if he is, our children and grandchildren will never experience the greatness of America as we have known it. We must support whoever the nominee is, even with all their flaws. The luxury of having the perfect candidate is something we don’t have right now. That’s just a fact.
Your classification of Perry as a RINO is a big part of the problem, and why we could well end up with Gingrich or Romney as our nominee.
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