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Bill Clinton ran against GHW Bush when no one else would because of Bush's high ratings coming out of Desert Storm. We know who won that one.

From Medved's article:

"Yes, Democrats have had a few off-brand, odd-ball contenders who came out of nowhere to beat bigger names – including Carter in ’76, Clinton in ‘92 and, arguably, Dukakis in ’88. But even Democrats hand nominations reliably to front-runners like Stevenson, Humphrey, Mondale, Gore and, most likely, Hillary.

"In the GOP, however, front-runners don’t just usually win; they always win.

"The last time a genuine underdog grabbed the Republican nomination was 68 years ago, when a celebrity lawyer with no political experience named Wendell Wilkie managed to stampede a divided convention."

Warren G Harding was an amiable, lazy, manipulable Senator who got the nomination in the famous 'smoky backroom'. He would be a vanity candidate today, too, but he won.

IOW, don't knock the vanities. That's what the campaign trail is designed to test. The fact that it's starting this soon is what's sickening.

So, Medved's argument must be "Vanity Candidates Don't Stand a Chance Unless They're Liberals" or more simply stated, "Conservative "vanity" Candidates don't Stand a Chance".

I hope he is wrong because, if true, we are looking at a Dhimmicrat winning in '08.

I had to laugh at the poster who claimed that we had reduced ourselves to (somehow odious) populism, when the exact opposite has occurred. Increasingly, the Republican party, in the form of the RNC, has insisted on calling all of the shots, and has all but ignored the voices of those they serve (you & me). Medved proves my contention when he points out that both Reagan and Dole had to submit to the process three times (respectively) before they received the official nomination.

So who made "Rudy McRomney" (the disparaging term coined by "eat their own" conservatives) the only viable choices? Although Medved doesn't use the threadbare term gravitas, he certainly implies that only those three have it. Medved also doesn't claim a champion, but I suspect from his comments he favors Giuliani. From what I've seen it is the drive-by media who decided that we would have to settle for "Rudy McRomney". Pick your poison?

Another poster berates us for jumping on Presidential politics too early. I might remind him that there were already discussions raging on 11/7/06, but I understand where he was shooting from. My point is that if you watched the news this morning and saw the drive-by media fawning over osama obama's announcement, You'd realize that, ready or not, here it comes!