Generally, I respect George Will's writing. He knows baseball very well. Politics, much less so. I think most of his problem is his inside the beltway perspective as well as being the token conservative for the liberal media establishment.
But let's review his short list:
- Mitch Daniels: Decent record on fiscal issues which just got forgotten. While two governors in the region, Wisconsin and Ohio, our making courageous stands against the key root cause of huge state deficits, Daniels has opted to take a pass. This shows a clear lack of courage and spine, one of the key qualification of a president. DISQUALIFIED.
- Mitt Romney: Nice fellow, great hair, impressive career as a businessman but a political career than can be defined as mediocre at best. And mediocre is turning into godawful by his continued defense of mini-ObaMaoCare on the state level. This shows a clear lack of common sense, one of the key qualification of a president. DISQUALIFIED.
- Tim Pawlenty: Nice fellow who is learning to say the right things. He was barely elected to two terms as governor in one of the more liberal states in the union and promptly replaced by a fellow who could politely be described as the nation's dumbest governor. WHAT IN THE HELL IS IT ABOUT MINNESOTA VOTERS AND THEIR INFATUATION WITH MENTALLY CHALLENGED ELECTED OFFICIALS? Other than having no major screw-ups as governor, I can't point to any outstanding achievement of Pawlenty either. And given Minnesota's checkered electoral history, I seriously have to wonder about his major alleged asset, the ability to draw votes from the middle, is a genuine asset or just lucky timing. MARGINALLY QUALIFIED.
- Jon Huntsman: I really don't know much about his record as governor of Utah. To its credit, the Utah electorate is arguably the second most conservative state in the nation (after Wyoming, where I was born) and recently dumped two GOP members of congress (Bennett and Cannon) for being insufficiently conservative. But other than Huntsman's ability to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese (which might come in damn handy in renegotiating loan extensions), I really cannot think of a compelling reason to support him. MARGINALLY QUALIFIED.
- Haley Barbour: The only WELL QUALIFIED one of this bunch. The knocks on him are all pretty superficial-- he's fat (so is Chris Christie), he's from the deep south (so is Huckabee, Clinton and Carter), he has an accent (so does anyone who grows up more than 500 miles or so from the midwest) and he's a former lobbyist (so is everybody in ObaMao's administration). He did a bang-up job of running a poor state after Katrina and he has both his feet firmly planted in the worlds of common sense and courage necessary to do the job.
So George Will got at least one right.
He wasn’t just a lobbyist, but a tobacco lobbyist. It doesn’t really bother me but I know that I’m in a minority. He also doesn’t get good ratings from Cato. They rate Pawlenty much higher than Barbour.