Posted on 11/05/2004 6:58:30 PM PST by polyester~monkey
who will it be
The right to same sex sodomy was recently established in spite of an earlier verdict. Roe v. Wade has little "permanency" even though "Roe" now stands in opposition to abortion.
Some see the "court" as others see the "pope". I am not Catholic and I do not bring up such matters as any sort of dig. I grew up going to Catholic schools and my dad is Catholic. Some certainly feel that there were periods when the "infallible" pope made some errors in judgment; whether that is the case or not is not the issue here. CERTAINLY the Supreme Court has made some bad calls over time. They are human, they are prone to error (the verdict is out on the pope). I am still Christian and would be the last to want to defend the politics of today's majority Presbyterian Church.
Sanford/Tancredo
No way!
Robinson/Head
Yeah, lots of 'em do.
They're all wrong, though.
I like the way you think!
Condi, Jeb, Thune.
Right.. Frist/Condi or Frist/Jeb... Frist from the South.. Condi has extensive ties to the West Coast... Jeb can be an outstanding Pres.. I hope that he does not go back into private work in Miami.. but accepts a Cabinet level positon for the last two years of the Pres. tenure.. could be very interested.. by the way.. Frist does have executive experience....
The Fritzy from Florida
I don't think Bill Frist is a strong candidate.
Agree. I really like Bill Owens
and I like Blackwell a lot, too (and it would help w the OH vote). I haven't heard him speak much (outside of this past week wrt the election, votes, etc.). As I mentioned, I was extremely impressed w Michael Steele's speech -- -thought he was terrific!
The big question is who does W see as the person most likely to carry on his work and vision. I would look to see who gets moved to prominent positions in his administration or which legislators he involves most closely in White House meetings and photo ops.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is pro-abortion. She was nearly denied a seat at the 1996 Convention by Texas conservatives upset with her pro-abortion stance.
She did, however, adopt a child within the last couple of years. (She's married.)
1. Bill Frist isn't ready to be a national candidate.
2. Condi Rice needs to get elective experience. She's been a university provost (Stanford) and a staffer to presidents. She needs to spend some time understudying with Ahnuld out in California to become his successor. Then, after a couple of terms as Governatrix (after the Governator), she'll be ready for the big show.
3. Too soon for Jeb in '08 -- the country will be tired of Bushes, and the adversary will be Hillary.
Probably the most attractive people in the GOP right now are Rudy Giuliani (but notice his urban liberal leanings), Condi Rice (ditto, she's been contaminated by Stanford), and Colin Powell, who out of respect for his wife's needs won't run for public office. The only way I see Powell being elected is if he were appointed vice-president to fill a vacancy (say Cheney resigned for reasons of health) and then Al-Q'aeda bagged a president; or by order of succession if someone bagged both the President and VP while Powell was out of the country -- that would practically take a nuclear weapon, but you never know. It could happen. But Powell won't run for national office while his wife needs him, so it won't happen. You might say it's a case of, the better the man, the more unavailable he is.
There is another way Powell could be elected, but it's such a long shot, and the events required to bring it about would necessarily be so catastrophic, that it's hardly worth thinking about. It would require the removal from the scene of all the top contenders for public office -- the pushy types who want to be President and will do anything to get it -- and the removal, as well, of all the kingmaker-wannabe talking heads in the press. Scenarize any sort of major disaster that took most of the top political talent off the board, and what would the talking heads do? They'd immediately start handicapping the survivors and talking up different personalities for the top job -- kingmaking on Page One, call it, or nomination by ink. To forestall that, all the network studios in New York and DC would have to disappear as well, so now you are talking about a major disaster.
But to come to my point, what it would take to make Colin Powell President of the United States (or what was left of it) would be a session of an uncommitted Electoral College, who would sit without ulterior agenda and without prior commitments, to select a President based only on talent and capability -- which is exactly what the Framers intended. What a thought.
As for Powell's political center, if he were President I think he'd be a lot closer to X41, without the snobbery, than to Dubya. I don't think he's a conservative.
Right now I can't think of a conservative who could get the nomination, much less election. Even Ronnie had to give X41 the second place on the ticket and a ton of patronage, to keep the Brahmin b@stards from sabotaging the ticket the way they did in 1964.
And X41 did a lot of damage with the patronage he had -- that "pigs at the trough" stuff, IMHO, was all his doing: President Reagan's staff was run by Jim Baker (better if it had been 41 himself, he'd have been less effective and so done less damage), who immediately formed the "Tuesday morning" group to filter Ronnie's options and attempt to control him. The only Reagan loyalist in that group was Ed Meese, who was intellectually outgunned by Baker, "Tricky Dicky" Darman (or Baker II, if you will), and Stockman, who was the pick of the litter of GOP congressional staffers and therefore an establishment creature as much as Darman and Baker.
Reagan IMHO would have been a much better president, and his presidency would have been much less marked by corporate-welfarist humbug, had he not had the Bushmen on board. You will notice contrariwise, that neither Bush has had any nominees of a powerful, conservative eminence grise on his personal staff, as X41 insisted on when he negotiated his way onto the ticket, and so it eventuates that neither Bush has any really conservative voices on his staff (not in the Cabinet -- that isn't where the decisions are made), and so the street is distinctly one-way from New York and New England (and Crawford) downhill to us conservative peons in the back of the bus, if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor.
Both Bushes have suppressed conservative political talent and ideas in their Administrations, refusing to engage conservatives except when it suited them and shutting them out of policy. That's the bottom line. Ashcroft was a sop, and he's completely under control. Even the Emerson RKBA brief was hedged -- Ashcroft, I don't think, would have done that without Dubya's instructions. Likewise, the down-ballot "values" initiatives that carried Dubya over the top last week were a Karl Rove device -- and you will notice that Bush has no liability or indebtedness on their account. They were completely deniable devices that import no obligation to the Administration. And sure enough, when Dubya appeared for the victory celebration with all the Bushes and Cheneys, there was Mary Cheney with her bedmate, right up there on the stage with everyone else. And yes, that was a signal.
What it would take to change the steady and relentless discounting of conservative input and Bush-backed RiNO primary challenges to conservative incumbents, which is the prerequisite to developing national-level conservative political talent, is for conservatives to take charge of the GOP first, and put the money boys in the back of the bus instead. Any ideas how to do that?
Peggy Noonan, however much I like her, is a speechwriter, like Pat Buchanan.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is pro-abortion.
I know, I was being facitious.
Thanks for the kind words.
I'm somewhat familiar with the phenomenon. Ten years ago I went through a personnel-development seminar with an HR hired gun who had formerly been the top personnel guy at Diamond Shamrock 25 years ago now. During breaks, or as comments sprinkled throughout his presentation (which was better than the usual "getting to know my navel" stuff some people -- like, infamously, Royal Dutch Shell -- have indulged in), he regaled us with some stories about trying to do HR consulting and staff development in the District of Columbia. He had been brought in after the Anne Burford Gorsuch brouhaha during the Reagan Administration to straighten some things out that were obviously broken.
He said he had never before (or since) seen personalities with such incredible power drives -- these people's eyes practically glowed in the dark with their need to get, and wield, power. He told of guys with master's degrees from Yale taking $25,000/year jobs on some obscure Congressional or departmental staff, just so they could get their hands on policy -- any policy, some policy, big or little policy. He didn't say so, but I got the distinct impression that he was trying to warn us that places like Washington (and the executive suite) were overrun with diseased personalities flailing around to get more power to solve whatever major malfunction it was that drove them.
He said it was his common experience that people he was told to interview wouldn't see him on the Interior Department premises, but would insist on another venue, over lunch, and then they would try to lay a marker. They would imply very strongly that they were doing this consultant a favor which they expected would be repaid if the consultant ever got into a position to do so (such as a plummy appointment with hiring authority). They were allergic to being seen with him at all.
He may have made a few other comments, but that was the burden of it, that Washington was awash in powerful, talented, strongly mismotivated personalities.
Your comments about Elizabeth Dole sound familiar, if not from things I've read about her (Southern belle, society doyenne, exclusive education, married for power -- certainly it can't have been for Bob's little blue pills), then from things I've read about other women similarly situated. I've heard very similar things about a former mayor of Houston, Kathryn Whitmire, who is supposed to be a whirlwind of tempestuous self-consequence and a force for upheaval within her extended family (her brother is a prominent Democratic state senator). She truncated her own political future by having an ill-advised affair with a very married black city councilman that state Republicans found out about, and about which said Republicans are rumored to have been very quick to let her know, when she momentarily set her sights on the U.S. Senate seat now occupied by Kay Bailey Hutchison (who herself once swatted Big John Connally's daughter over the head with a notebook in her offices -- Big John's daughter was on Kay's staff, back in the day, when Kay was still a state officer).
Just as someone once said that the rich really are not at all like you and me, it is equally true that people who are driven by the appetite for power are likewise unlike the mass of humanity, a mark of distinction which does not, despite what their egos doubtless tell them, work in their favor. It was for people like them that the Framers wrote the Constitution, to turn them against one another, to cause them to butt heads at every turn, and to be able to cooperate only "diodically", i.e. with a bias in the general direction of the People's best interest.
I set against that something I once saw in the faces of candidates for Congress who were undergoing a "school for candidates" then run by Michigan Representative Guy van der Jagdt, a leathery, cynical pol of the old school who carried in his face the marks of liberal Democratic victory after liberal Democratic victory from the 1960's and 70's, when the Democrats were drunk with power and BATF-confiscated booze that they had wheeled in on dollies onto the Senate floor in case lots, on days when Congress was about to adjourn for the holidays.
But there was none of that in the faces of the new candidates, but rather a candid openness and a manifest desire to help and serve that gave me the strong impression, however erroneous it may have been, that these were the very best people in the world.
That was years and years ago, and I suppose many of the successful candidates from that class have reached the ends of their public careers by now -- a dozen or 15 years is pretty common. But what the country has accomplished in the meantime has been extraordinary, from the overthrow of international Communism to the impeachment of Bill Clinton for misconduct that was common in the 1960's (remember Wayne Hays and Wilbur Mills?) to the abolition of the welfare trap. It's been an interesting few decades.
Marc Racicot.
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