Right out of the Juan McLame "Across The Aisle" playbook.
No sale.
Do you want to win the seat? Or field some candidate that will lose with 31% of the vote and turn over the Senate seat Akaka is vacating to another Democrat for the next 50 years? Because that's exactly what's likely to happen if we don't win that seat this time around. This is Hawaii we're talking about.
"Governors bring a particularly different approach in the United States Senate than those people who have come just from the legislative side," Lingle told members of the conservative Grassroot Institute of Hawaii at the Japanese Cultural Center on Friday. "They are less ideological. They are more practical. They are more agenda-driven. They are able to put forth something they'd like to achieve and then move to do it because as governor you have to. You can't hide behind a lot of other people."
That's the full quote, and it's quite true. Governor's can't preen and cast votes they know don't matter because they've worked it out with leadership behind the scenes ahead time and know what is going to pass and what isn't. As executives they, more often than not, have to actually govern and get things done without hiding behind show votes cast for media attention.
Are you serious? Lingle would vote FOR spending cuts and entitlement reform with a new GOP president. This race could be our 60th vote to secure cloture.
As we saw with Obamacare, party labels DO matter. McConnell kept every GOP senator in opposition; unfortunately he only had 40 in December 2009, and he needed 41.
Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor etc - these so-called conservative Dems are the real fraud. I’ll take a Lingle GOP senator over a Democrat any day.
As much as I can empathize with the no-compromise approach, you do have to pick your battles intelligently.