Posted on 04/27/2009 5:02:31 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.
Certainly Cheney himself seems to feel that way. Last week’s Sean Hannity interview, all anti-Obama jabs and roundhouses, was the latest installment in the vice president’s unexpected – and, to Republican politicians, distinctly unwelcome – transformation from election-season wallflower into high-profile spokesman for the conservative opposition. George W. Bush seems happy to be back in civilian life, but Cheney has taken the fight to the Obama White House like a man who wouldn’t have minded campaigning for a third Bush-Cheney term.
Imagine for a moment that he’d had that chance. Imagine that he’d damned the poll numbers, broken his oft-repeated pledge that he had no presidential ambitions of his own, and shouldered his way into the race. Imagine that Republican primary voters, more favorably disposed than most Americans to Cheney and the administration he served, had rewarded him with the nomination.
At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism’s present political predicament. In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.
We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
No wonder the NYT chose this squish as the second token conservative.
I do think he would have won in WY, but I don’t know about elsewhere.
He would have won Oklahoma, no question about it.
Actually, it would've been a third Rove-Cheney term wouldn't it?
Me too! After a few more months of these clowns, maybe even liberals will see the light.
I think it says volumns about America when we would elect a neophyte with almost no experience. But a man who has served his country in various capacities since the Gerry Ford presidency, but he was discounted because he was GW’s VP? The man has more brains in his little finger than Biden has in his whole brain.
Too bad the media created Bush derangement syndrome is as bad as it is. The saddest part of the ideal it is likely to be the death of the Republic.
This is in the NYT.
Was there a shift in the time continuum ???
I will buy the last edition of the New York Times.
It’ll be the first and only copy I ever purchase.
Imagine for a moment that the New York Times and anything said on its editorial pages was actually relevant......
You have to read to the end to get to the predictable punchline. If Cheney had run, he would have been crushed and the Republican party could drop this damned true conservatism and become the Democrat-lite that everyone wants.
I think Cheney would have sliced Obama to shreds in the debates. A Cheney/Palin team would have been pretty awesome. He probably would have lost, but Republicans would certainly feel better about the effort.
The author wishes Cheney had run so that “when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might – might! – have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that’s necessary if it hopes to regain power.”
The writer is basically an idiot. His underlying assumption is that if Cheney had run (and lost) it would have proved that conservatives can’t win elections.
Cheney would have lost because of his baggage, not because of his conservative principles, and this writer is an idiot not to be able to see that.
Thanks for the jolt back to reality, I never click on the link for the slimes.
"Stress positions"?
Actually, do we really know what Cheney's economic views were? It didn't seem like tax cuts -- or spending cuts or anything else domestic -- were really a high priority for him.
It looks to me like what Douthat is saying is that if Cheney had run, the notion of "real conservatism" as something that hadn't been tried wouldn't be viable any more. But Cheney would have lost by more than McCain did -- which I guess is what Douthat would have wanted.
Those who were left, sure.
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