& Next President
Posted on 06/26/2009 9:30:15 PM PDT by thecodont
With South Carolina governor Mark Sanford still wondering how to solve a problem called Maria, and GOP biggies falling by the wayside, a Californian may be poised to now take the reins as the leader of the GOP 2012 possible presidential pack.
Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, now claims the Golden State as his full-time home since he bought a lovely beachfront estate in La Jolla where and wife Ann now reside.
[...]
Sanford's Maria meltdown has meant that the stash of GOP possible presidential hopefuls and leadeers is shrinking fast -- with some GOPers say Romney now looks stronger than ever.
Why?
With his move to California, there's now four states where Romney now has direct connections and a potential base of supporters: count Massachusetts, of course, along with Michigan, where his dad was governor, and Utah, the Mormon stronghold where he managed the winter Olympics.
Romney didn't connect with voters enough to come out ahead in the 2008 race against Arizona Sen. John McCain. But does he now have a chance for another bite at the apple? Some GOPers say he's the go-to guy now: he's been through the process, he has a national organization, the name recognition, all sorts of friends in high places who can make good contacts for him -- and he's a squeaky clean family guy unlikely to have a Sanford-like meltdown. Besides, he's working on a policy book: "a sure sign he's going to run for office,'' says one well-connected GOP insider.
So this gives him a real serious lead over former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee -- now a radio and TV commentator -- Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who still has a strong core of GOP fans.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
We cannot let our anger die. If we do, this country is over.
She was mentioned. They admit she has legions of fans.
Anyone worth voting for will be "radioactive"
The Article II "natural born citizen" (child of American citizen parents, born on American soil) requirement MUST be met (along with age and residency requirements, of course) at the very outset. We can't afford to have a candidate who has to waste precious time and energy defending or explaining his/her citizenship issues (e.g. stating that his/her parents were legal immigrants, if not citizens), or have Senate resolutions passed to clarify them.
A viable candidate shouldn't have to be dealing with this at all. He/she should be focusing on the issues and policies and a way to make this nation strong and lead it forward.
This is all so obvious, someone from 50 years ago would wonder why we're even having this discussion.
Even Ferraro and Dukakis (both children of immigrants) didn't have their NBC status raised as a campaign issue, I think because their parents had lived here a good while (and likely had become citizens) by the time they were born. I think their respective situations mark the border of where a candidate can claim legitimately that NBC status is a non-issue, and go on to other things.
I’ll never vote for Mitt Rino, just like I never voted for McRino! Guaranteed!
Palin/Romney 2012? hmmm
Palin/Ryan 2012?...(yeah)
Palin/Jindal 2012?...(oh yeah)
Palin? Yes. But for VP I don't want the best man for backup president (tho that would be a nice bonus). I want someone who will "tell the truth about them, and they think it's hell," as Truman claimed to do in '48.
"Peeking Out From the McCain Wreckage: Mitt Romney"
"Someone's got to say it: IS MITT ROMNEY RESPONSIBLE FOR OBAMA'S VICTORY?"
"Vanity: Team Romney Sabotaged Palin and Continuing to Do So?"
"Romney Supporters Trashing Palin"
"Romney advisors sniping at Palin?"
Poor sport spoiler Romney doing what he does best:
Novak: "Fred Thompson drop-out rumors traced to Romney campaign"
Mitch Daniels seems to be doing a good job in Indiana.
You and your little friends are too intellectually challenged to even understand that Mitt Romney is the only answer for 2012. It would just be easier if you reactionary morons keep your thoughts and your populist idiot candidates to yourselves and let us in the GOP do what we have to do in order to get elected.
/sarc (at least from me)
Have at it!
I know one vote he will not get.
And while you are doing what Republicans do, get ready for four more years of obama.
Fixed it for ya...
Don’t give them any ideas ;-)
You did see the sarc tag....
If Barack Obama has been the most remarkable phenomenon of the recent political scene, Sarah Palin must be second. The emotional responses to each-- especially by the media and the intelligentsia -- go beyond anything that can be explained by the usual political differences of opinion on issues of the day.
That liberals would be thrilled by another liberal is not surprising. But there are conservative Republicans who voted for Barack Obama, and other conservatives who may not have voted for him, but who are quick to see in various pragmatic moves of his since taking office an indication that he is not an extremist.
Anyone familiar with history knows that Hitler and Stalin were pragmatic. After years of denouncing each other, they signed the Nazi-Soviet pact under which they became allies for a couple of years before going to war against one another.
Pragmatism tells you nothing about extremism. But the conservative intellectuals who seize upon President Obama's pragmatism to give him the benefit of the doubt are obviously bending over backward for some reason.
With Governor Palin, it is just the opposite. The conservative intelligentsia who react against her have remarkably little to say that will stand up to scrutiny. People who actually dealt with her, before she became a national figure, have expressed how much they were impressed by her intelligence.
Governor Palin's "inexperience" is a talking point that might have some plausibility if it were not for the fact that Barack Obama has far less experience in actually making policies than Sarah Palin has. Joe Biden has had decades of experience in being both consistently wrong and consistently a source of asinine statements.
Governor Palin's candidacy for the vice presidency was what galvanized grass roots Republicans in a way that John McCain never did. But there was something about her that turned even some conservative intellectuals against her and provoked visceral anger and hatred from liberal intellectuals.
Perhaps the best way to try to understand these reactions is to recall what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she first saw Whittaker Chambers, who had accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Upon seeing the slouching, overweight and disheveled Chambers, she said, "He's not one of us."
The trim, erect and impeccably dressed Alger Hiss, with his Ivy League and New Deal pedigree, clearly was "one of us." As it turned out, he was also a liar and a spy for the Soviet Union. Not only did a jury decide that at the time, the opening of the secret files of the Soviet Union in its last days added more evidence of his guilt.
The Hiss-Chambers confrontation of more than half a century ago produced the same kind of visceral polarization that Governor Sarah Palin provokes today.
Before the first trial of Alger Hiss began, reporters who gathered at the courthouse informally sounded each other out as to which of them they believed, before any evidence had been presented. Most believed that Hiss was telling the truth and that it was Chambers who was lying.
More important, those reporters who believed that Chambers was telling the truth were immediately ostracized. None of this could have been based on the evidence for either side, for that evidence had not yet been presented in court.
For decades after Hiss was convicted and sent to federal prison, much of the media and the intelligentsia defended him. To this day, there is an Alger Hiss chair at Bard College.
Why did it matter so much to so many people which of two previously little-known men was telling the truth? Because what was on trial was not one man but a whole vision of the world and a way of life.
Governor Sarah Palin is both a challenge and an affront to that vision and that way of life-- an overdue challenge, much as Chambers' challenge was overdue.
Whether Governor Palin runs for national office again is something that only time will tell. But the Republicans need some candidate who is neither one of the country club Republicans nor-- worse yet-- the sort of person who appeals to the intelligentsia.
I've been trying to convince my fellow conservatives that they have been wasting their time in a fruitless quest for a new Ronald Reagan to emerge and lead our party and our nation. I insisted that we'd never see his like again because he was one of a kind.
I was wrong!
Wednesday night I watched the Republican National Convention on television and there, before my very eyes, I saw my Dad reborn; only this time he's a she.
And what a she!
In one blockbuster of a speech, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin resurrected my Dad's indomitable spirit and sent it soaring above the convention center, shooting shock waves through the cynical media's assigned spaces and electrifying the huge audience with the kind of inspiring rhetoric we haven't heard since my Dad left the scene.
This was Ronald Reagan at his best -- the same Ronald Reagan who made the address known now solely as "The Speech," which during the Goldwater campaign set the tone and the agenda for the rebirth of the traditional conservative movement that later sent him to the White House for eight years and revived the moribund GOP.
Last night was an extraordinary event. Widely seen beforehand as a make-or-break effort -- either an opportunity for Sarah Palin to show that she was the happy warrior that John McCain assured us she was, or a disaster that would dash McCain's presidential hopes and send her back to Alaska, sadder but wiser.
Obviously un-intimidated by either the savage onslaught to which the left-leaning media had subjected her, or the incredible challenge she faced -- and oozing with confidence -- she strode defiantly to the podium and proved she was everything and even more than John McCain told us.
Much has been made of the fact that she is a woman. What we saw last night, however, was something much more than a just a woman accomplishing something no Republican woman has ever achieved. What we saw was a red-blooded American with that rare, God-given ability to rally her dispirited fellow Republicans and take up the daunting task of leading them -- and all her fellow Americans -- on a pilgrimage to that shining city on the hill my father envisioned as our nation's real destination.
In a few words she managed to rip the mask from the faces of her Democratic rivals and reveal them for what they are -- a pair of old-fashioned liberals making promises that cannot be kept without bankrupting the nation and reducing most Americans to the status of mendicants begging for their daily bread at the feet of an all-powerful government.
Most important, by comparing her own stunning record of achievement with his, she showed Barack Obama for the sham that he is, a man without any solid accomplishments beyond conspicuous self-aggrandizement.
Like Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin is one of us. She knows how most of us live because that's the way she lives. She shares our homespun values and our beliefs, and she glories in her status as a small-town woman who put her shoulder to the wheel and made life better for her neighbors.
Her astonishing rise up from the grass-roots, her total lack of self-importance, and her ordinary American values and modest lifestyle reveal her to be the kind of hard-working, optimistic, ordinary American who made this country the greatest, most powerful nation on the face of the earth.
As hard as you might try, you won't find that kind of plain-spoken, down-to-earth, self-reliant American in the upper ranks of the liberal-infested, elitist Democratic Party, or in the Obama campaign.
Sarah Palin didn't go to Harvard, or fiddle around in urban neighborhood leftist activism while engaging in opportunism within the ranks of one of the nation's most corrupt political machines, never challenging it and going along to get along, like Barack Obama.
Instead she took on the corrupt establishment in Alaska and beat it, rising to the governorship while bringing reforms to every level of government she served in on her way up the ladder.
Welcome back, Dad, even if you're wearing a dress and bearing children this time around.
Conservative Snobs Are Wrong About Palin
I know Maggie Thatcher. The two women have a lot in common.
We know what is best for you and the party.
Conservatism is ok when convenient, but being liked is the most important thing.
/s
Good point. Usually, those numbers tend to go up over the course of a campaign. Obama didn’t start out anywhere near 80% of iberals and 75% of dems approval.
For example as of May of 2007 he was at 58% approval among dems. Heck, in May of 2008 after he already locked up the nomination and enjoyed the most fawning media coverage of any person in history for 18 straight months, he was only at 63% approval among dems.
So 75% approval is a good start. Especially considering all she’s been through and the fact that the media attacked her more than any other politician I can remember. And this in June 2009, 2-3 yrs ahead of when the polls above were taken. You almost never have someone with those numbers that far out. Give her 2+ yrs to prepare and she could well end up being higher. No one had heard of her this time last yr and loko where she is now.
All the things she mentions for Romney(name ID, book, experience, money, etc...)also apply to Palin. Romney’s fundraising was actually disappointing. He raised about 58M over all of 2007, compared to 101M for Obama. For comparison, W raised 68M the year he ran, 1999, and that was a whole 8 years earlier. With inflation, W was 25M+ ahead of Romney. His own money was his real asset.
We’ll need someone who can pull in at least 150M for 2011 if we want a decent chance.
That said, Romney is a formidable contender. He’ll have the beltway establishment behind him. They don’t like Huckabee or Palin, and Pawlenty and the rest are to unknown. Truth be told they’re probably hoping to put Mitt up as the sacrificial lamb to an unbeatable Obama in 2012 so they can come back with Jeb Bush in 2016. If Whitman ends up being Gov in CA that will help. Although conversely he may end up being less popular in MA as they see him basically abandon the state in a naked political play and move to CA. I wouldn’t be surprised if he buys a ranch and starts riding horseback. He wants to be Reagan so badly it’s sad.
But he was their guy in 08 and didn’t deliver. Palin could end up having a big edge in the grass roots and if she has the support of a Rush, Levin(any guy who has the #1 book in the country for 3 straight months is a very big deal), Beck(his show is doing gangbusters and he likes her) and a few others, that will be hugh. Also don’t count out cultivating some of the still angry Clinton supporters. That’s what Greta Van Suteren’s husband was trying to do and I suspect something will end up being done on that front/ So she’ll have a lot of cards to play. She could do very well with the abortion, values, gun rights orgs that are very effective at turnout and building support and very willing to be active.
He’d seemingly have a huge edge in NH. And IA is one of 5 states in the country that has NEVER elected a woman as Gov, Senator, Pres/VP, or even as the primary winner(VT, NV, VA and OR are the others). So the early states don’t neccesarily favor her. But if Romney couldn’t beat Huckabee when he outspent him 10-1 in the state and camped out there for a year, Palin would seem to have an opening since she’ll have way more money and recognition than Huckabee had last year.
Huck would complicate things since he’d split the evangelical and social conservative vote and leave the economic conservatives all for Romney. The best case scenario is Huck decides he’s happy as a talk show host or is talked out of running(promised an important cabinet post?) and she can consolidate the evangelical/values vote and basically combine that with the female vote to win.
But things are still a long ways away. We could find out she’s sleeping with some stud latin lover in Buenos Aires. Nah, no one would be that stupid.
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