I haven’t paid close enough attention to the dynamics of all the threads to form my own observation as to whether what you say is true or not.
BUT if there is an obsession in attacking Perry, there also is evidently an obsession in defending him. You may find that the latter is more reasonable than the other, but I find them equally worthy of avoiding.
You say if Perry is toast, there is no reason to attack him. Well, yes and no.
I’m not advocating it, but I think you have to agree that so long as he is in the race AND — unlike Huntsman — has (or may have) the favor of the big donors who could try to crank up his candidacy at any time — he could be seen as the worst of all things: a potential spoiler. He also could be viewed as continuing to suck of oxygen when, if he’s toast, that’s a big waste.
IOW, there’s toast and then there’s toast that can cause trouble without any potential for benefitting the process. Huntsman, thus, is “harmless” toast; he has and can have zero impact on the race. But maybe Perry is toast that can still gum up the works, mainly because he might still (however reluctantly) get the Romney elites to turn to him when they finally realize Romney can’t win.
The problem with that is that most in the base have concluded that Perry STILL could not win the nomination. Therefore, even if the elites go full-on for him, all that will happen is he will prolong the process until we get a nominee (who, again, will not be Perry).
OTOH, if you think Perry is NOT toast, why the absolute obsession with defending him?
As far as those seemingly obsessed with defending Perry, I’m not sure who they think their audience is. It’s clear that there are a lot of people in the base who just don’t like the guy. That is not changeable by people jawboning at them that they SHOULD like the guy or that it’s UNFAIR that they dislike that. That fact is only changeable BY PERRY.
So unless and until Perry changes the minds of people who just don’t like them (which they are perfectly entitled to not like him), the obsessive Perry supporters risk putting people off more. That’s just the way it is: it’s a social dynamic that is inevitable.
If the obsessive Perry supporters are hoping they are spurring on the elites to go big in supporting Perry as the anti-Romney, the elites are not reading FR. So, see the problem above.
As far as I’m concerned, the solution is to ignore, so far as possible, BOTH obsessive attacks and obsessive defenses.
I actually agree that most of the work defending perry is a waste of time. Frankly, the candidate needs to defend themselves. If they do it well, they’ll survive, if not, they won’t.
Nothing we do here will make a bit of difference. However, I do find input from other conservatives useful (or I used to when conservatives actually voiced considered judgements, now it’s more like campaign central, which is useless. In the former case, arguing with people is a good way to determine truth, or understand the issues better. For example, I actually am much more supportive of giving children of illegals in-state tuition in a situation like that in Texas than I was before I started arguing. Not that I’m going to push for it in my state.
Anyway, someone here mentioned they thought I did a better job of defending Perry than he did. I don’t know if that’s true, but if so, Perry is in trouble, because he needs to defend himself. I’ve been told he’s won 3 elections. I know he had these SAME issues against him in those elections, so I have to presume he CAN defend himself. It’s almost like he thought he wouldn’t have to. Anyway, that will settle itself.
But having discussed this over the past couple of days, I’ll likely stop wasting my time in the attack-Perry threads. I can answer the charges, and ignore the vitriol and childishness, but I don’t see the point.
And I’ve made my arguments against Cain. I don’t want to promote my arguments to their own threads of a blog, because I don’t want them to become fodder for attacks. So I’ll probably be done with those threads as well.
I have a profound fear that if I can see these facts about Cain, so can many people. But the media is not covering it. I expect them to, the question is when. I hope our candidates go after Cain for his lack of real experience — because if he can survive it, it will innoculate him, and if not we’ll have saved conservatism from disaster.
And the nice thing about that will be it won’t matter what I think or you think — either Cain will come out stronger, or will fail, on his own.
Can’t promise I’ll shut down. I do enjoy the arguments. But I’ll most likely be scarce in attack threads for a while. Maybe after the next debate. In any case, we’ve got our final push here in Virginia to try to take back our senate.