What we need is Newt’s oratorical skills mixed with Sarah Palin’s outsider status/true conservative principles and added to the Herman Cain pre-scandal likability quotient.
Barring this, the Republican Party is going into this year’s election with a [fairly] flawed candidate—which, I believe can still beat Obama. Having said this, I believe Newt is the better of the 2 [fairly] flawed candidates currently on top of the Republican slate.
The VP pick this year is going to be crucial. Wish we had an idea of who he’s leaning towards.
I am sometimes bewildered by all this talk about perfect candidates. We will never match the first candidate, Washington, and even he was catching hell by the end of his first term. Hoover was the first candidate in 1928. He won big. Wilkie was the perfect candidate in 1940, with all the charm of FDR and that third-term thing hanging around FDR’s neck—that and the depression. Then came the fall of France, and it became clear to everyone that we were back to 1916 and suddenly, advantage to Roosevelt. Dewey to be the right guy in 1948, bus wasn’t because the farmers of the Middle West remembered what had happened to farm prices after WWI and wanted the protection that Truman offered them. Ike was perfect. Nixon seemed to be the perfect candidate in 1960. Barry —well Barry was buried by Camelot, but also because he wasn’t a great candidate.
But why rehearse the obvious. You go to war with the candidate you have. Only, I guess, you need to have leaders who have clear goals. But —as the Bible says—put not your faith in princes, and there is that thing called the fog of war. Politics is a messy business and the men in power never seem to handle their jobs better than the rest of us do. Maybe like baseball, where perfection is batting over .300.