Posted on 09/25/2007 8:07:22 PM PDT by Clintonfatigued
Former Republican state lawmaker Bob Keenan of Bigfork is discussing a potential Senate bid with Republican Party leaders in Washington, D.C. this week. But he says he still doesn't know if he'll run.
Keenan has plans to meet tomorrow with Republican Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John ensign of Nevada about a challenge to Democratic Senator Max Baucus. McConnell is Senate Republican leader and Ensign is in charge of the party's campaign efforts.
Keenan says he's also being pressured to run for governor.
Keenan ran for the Republican nomination in 2006, losing in the primary to former Senator Conrad Burns.
Former House Majority Leader Michael Lange has already announced he's seeking the Republican nomination for Senate.
Baucus, who began serving in the Senate in 1979, is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and his campaign had already raised 6 million dollars by the middle of this year.
(Excerpt) Read more at kxmc.com ...
Well, I was a year under the drinking age in ‘94, so I couldn’t hit the nearest bar. My parents knew at the time that being around me on election night can, well, be hit or miss, so they chose to go out to a nearby mall until very late to miss the festivities if things went badly. So absent all that, I just jumped on the bed in between running out in the hallway to see if anybody else was enjoying watching the overthrow of the half-century+ rodent regime (nope).
We were in Maine returning from New Brunswick, which was a last-minute decision to head further north on a month long New England trip (the temps were an unusually warm 70s+ along the coast, all the way into Canada in early November, really weird). Although my parents had been there, I had never been to New England before, so I would always try to cover as much as possible on the chance that I might not ever be able to see something again (and as you well know, that would soon just about become the case).
I was 12 in ‘94, so I didn’t know much about politics, but it’s always good to throw the bums out. A certain health care plan was a big reason for the win, and they want to bring it back.
It would be hard to overstate how incredible that victory was. At the time it occurred, it had been 48 years since the Republicans won Congress from a Democrat President (1946). Flash forward 2 years and when we won a majority for a 2nd time in a row, that was the first time that had occurred since 1926 and 1928 (although we technically won a very narrow majority with the 1930 elections, the Dems organized the House — although Tory Democrat Speaker Cactus Jack Garner was so Conservative that he’d make most of our most Conservative Republicans today look like Socialists).
In my own state, we went from a rodent Governor and 2 rodent Senators and majority rodent House delegation (6D-3R) and almost completely flipped it (we fell short of a 6R-3D breakdown by only a very narrow margin), a total revolution... or so we thought at the time. :-\
You mean Jim “dya-fa-cit” Sasser?
Ugh, yes that disgusting liberal piggie. It was thrilling to see him go down in flames. He was preparing to take over from George Mitchell as Senate Majority Leader, but instead found himself on the losing end of a race against a political neophyte physician in his first ever race... who would later take the position Sasser had wanted his entire political career (but, alas, too bad Dr. Frist was a piss-poor Majority Leader. He was great as a backbencher, but he was not a leader).
I still don’t buy your view that MT isn’t trending blue. I think Burns/Talent/Allen, regardless of circumstances, were a disastrous trio of losses for conservatives and show that right now we don’t have an effective message, or at least, that it isn’t getting through or being effectively communicated.
Argh, let's not use the media newsspeak colors, please. We don't call commies "blues", we call them "reds." Blue states are Republican, red are rodent. Sorry, it's one of my pet peeves, and I have to remind my fellow FReepers not to swallow the post-2000 kool-aid and aide in their psych warfare to disassociate the color red from the leftist Dems. Anywho, on with the show...
"I think Burns/Talent/Allen, regardless of circumstances, were a disastrous trio of losses for conservatives and show that right now we don’t have an effective message, or at least, that it isn’t getting through or being effectively communicated."
They were disastrous losses, but they weren't a solid indicator that a state was definitively going rodent. MT tossed Burns by a slim margin, but the GOP made legislative gains at the same time. Burns was the single most successful statewide Republican federal officeholder in the history of Montana. People don't realize that. We've had a string of major-league Republicans that came up short going back to the 1910s. But Burns was damaged goods and should never have run again. Republicans know they can't get away with even the slightest appearance of impropriety (while conversely the rodents don't make their bones until they have done something outright criminal).
As for the other two (and remember, we lost 6 in total, 4 Conservatives (incl. Santorum), 1 RINO (DeWine), and a pissant Socialist traitor (Chafee, now no longer a member of the GOP as of July)), Allen lost because of a dumb verbal gaffe and also a poorly run campaign in the fall, and Talent was the most unfortunate of the bunch. He initially wanted to be Governor, and because of the Carnahan death in '00 and other fraudulent rodent shenanigans, he narrowly lost that race. When the Governor illegally appointed Ma Carnahan to the Senate seat, Talent had to run for it in the special and won by only a narrow margin in '02, and so he never quite got a solid hold on a seat he didn't even hold for a full 4 years. His opponent was a rodent that most people didn't know about, only in that she had held some obscure statewide office by wider margins than Talent. Once the state sees her voting record as a U.S. Senator, she will be a one-term wonder. Unfortunately that wonder still has 5 years and 3 months left to go. Ditto for the junior asshat psycho Jim Webb in Vuhginnia.
As for DeWine, he was a conservative by voting record. It wasn't conservatism that worked against him in OH, but rather a string of individual stupid positions ("gang of 14," anti-gun) that separately eliminated entire sections of his conservative base. Still he lost big, and it can't all be attributed to Taft's unpopularity.
While I do not think "conservatism" is to blame for any of the losses, I do think there was a small but substantial Iraq defection by "moderates" and independents in EVERY state; a small but still important "sit out" by some conservatives in protest to the budgets and the Medicare bills; and a large "we need a change" sentiment across the board.
It is the latter that concerns me. As I wrote a week ago ("The Party of Bad Ideas vs. the Party of Old Ideas"), the GOP is now viewed as having no "new" ideas. It will NOT sell to say "well, we are in line with the Constitution." Reagan understood that and leapfrogged Jimmy Carter by selling tax cuts as "full employment and recovery" and by jumping over MAD to argue for "rolling back" the Soviet Empire. We are in desperate need of a party-wide "marketing plan" that will portray the GOP as moving forward, not just holding the line. I have argued in the WoT this needs to be a new, aggressive plan against not only Iran but against the radical schools in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere; a kind of "Marshall Plan/Voice of Arabia" approach. In domestic policy, a radical new free-market "cut the fat out" approach to medical care, rewarding doctors with some sort of tax breaks when they accept cash over employer-insurance. But whether it's THESE specific ideas or something else, there is no doubt in my mind that whatever happens in the presidential election, we will lose another clump of seats in both houses if we don't appear to be the party of NEW ideas.
I'm not in Idaho, I'm in Nashville, and my Congressional district has been rodent red since U.S. Grant's 2nd term in 1874. Boise is not solid rodent, though has had an influx of them, it does have a rodent Mayor now (thanks to a crooked RINO predecessor), and unfortunately, Ada County voted for the rodent in the Gubernatorial election (but still solidly 61-38% for Dubya in '04), but ID overall is one of the most "Blue" Republican states in the nation, and that's not going to change any time soon.
"As for DeWine, he was a conservative by voting record. It wasn't conservatism that worked against him in OH, but rather a string of individual stupid positions ("gang of 14," anti-gun) that separately eliminated entire sections of his conservative base. Still he lost big, and it can't all be attributed to Taft's unpopularity."
DeWine was lurching to often to the RINO side (in '05, for example, he scored a paltry 56% from the ACU), and between those antics and Taft, not to mention the RINO legislature, it was a fiasco for the GOP overall in OH. We're lucky we didn't rack up further losses there.
"It is the latter that concerns me. As I wrote a week ago ("The Party of Bad Ideas vs. the Party of Old Ideas"), the GOP is now viewed as having no "new" ideas. It will NOT sell to say "well, we are in line with the Constitution." Reagan understood that and leapfrogged Jimmy Carter by selling tax cuts as "full employment and recovery" and by jumping over MAD to argue for "rolling back" the Soviet Empire. We are in desperate need of a party-wide "marketing plan" that will portray the GOP as moving forward, not just holding the line. I have argued in the WoT this needs to be a new, aggressive plan against not only Iran but against the radical schools in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere; a kind of "Marshall Plan/Voice of Arabia" approach. In domestic policy, a radical new free-market "cut the fat out" approach to medical care, rewarding doctors with some sort of tax breaks when they accept cash over employer-insurance. But whether it's THESE specific ideas or something else, there is no doubt in my mind that whatever happens in the presidential election, we will lose another clump of seats in both houses if we don't appear to be the party of NEW ideas."
We do need new ideas on a variety of fronts. Unfortunately, leadership isn't big on "ideas" (as problematic as Gingrich was, at least he was always brimming with ideas). I think we basically forgot why we were elected in 1994, and if we don't recapture that mojo and hatch new ideas (or old ones we've forgotten about) that play to today, we'll lose again -- even with a 14% approval rodent Congress. And that's what is really a tragedy. Even if we do win back Congress, we need to put newer members, fresh faces, in leadership. Boehner has been there too long and he had already been previously booted from leadership. He shouldn't have returned.
Have you gotten busy LIVING, or dying? He was prophetic. Gov BS will one day get the bum’s rush just as he did to Gov Judy. It’s called the GOLDEN RULE. Max is already in full campaign mode : flooding the MT media with : SEE - all the good things I’m doing for Montana? It’s a constant daily barrage from maxnews.
The PROBLEM is that the MT economy is doing well now, ie, don’t try switching horses in midstream. But the election is over a year away, a LOT can happen in a year. Thus Keenan will be the R candidate against madmax, but it is proving difficult, at this point, to find a R candidate to run against gov BS. He’s our “forest gump”, a total incompetant(peter principle)but remember that GOD sets up and takes down rulers, just ONE hard blow to MT’s economy and bs is TOAST...HISTORY...
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