Political bits
Harry Reid is spinning, partially for his book rerelease, partially crowing about the Specter switch, and partially feeling his oats as Republicans have been unable to find a 2010 challenger against him. ((WaPo) "Reid: 'I Have My Eye on What I Need to Do', (Politico) The political lessons Harry Reid learned.)
(Politico) Sarah Palin is dead as a 2012 hopeful. Read this Politico piece where the figures of this new GOP "rebranding" effort take shots at her, Romney, Jeb Bush, Mike Murphy....
(CNN) Just out of curiosity, who is managing Meghan McCain? Whoever it is seems to be able to get CNN to print anything she says.
And, (QPac) Specter polls well ahead of Toomey, but is only 3 points ahead of Ridge (46-43.) (And Sestak is still sniffing around a Dem primary challenge.)
(Politico) Sarah Palin is dead as a 2012 hopeful. Read this Politico piece where the figures of this new GOP "rebranding" effort take shots at her, Romney, Jeb Bush, Mike Murphy....
(CNN) Just out of curiosity, who is managing Meghan McCain? Whoever it is seems to be able to get CNN to print anything she says.
And, (QPac) Specter polls well ahead of Toomey, but is only 3 points ahead of Ridge (46-43.) (And Sestak is still sniffing around a Dem primary challenge.)
posted by mikevotes at
7:49 AM
2 Comments:
wrt the Politico piece, it's important to note that it's the (putative) Republican moderates who are talking her down. The fringe of the fringe Party still is wildly enthusiastic for Palin. And it's clear that Romney, Jeb, McCain (and his advisor, Murphy), etc. are not representative of the Party any more.
This is kind of the purpose of the "Council", after all: to carve out space from the fringe that moderate Republicans can rally around. It's not surprising that they aren't embracing Palin, but I'd be cautious into reading too much into it. Romney did lose his bid for the Party's nomination, after all, and the Party has moved to the right since then.
Hopefully 2010 will lay this myth of a "centre-right nation" to rest. The myth crystallised out of a misreading of a poll that showed a slim majority self-identifying as 'conservatives'. However, once these 'conservatives' were asked about policy specifics, it became clear that these were not the kind of 'conservatives' who would be comfortable with the Republican agenda.
And so we have seen the Republicans continuously assert that the solution is a "re-branding" that will bring these 'conservatives' back into the fold, but this is based on a false premise.
Moreover, this "re-branding" is focused on marginal issues rather than the crucial points of failure: the Iraq occupation (and the lying that got us into it), the Katrina response, incompetence, and the "politics of division". The Party has failed to renounce or confront any of these issues yet.
In reality, the Bush Administration's spending was the logical result of Republican philosophy: take tax dollars from the country at large and redistribute them to the corporate sector (based on ideological symmetry, of course). I doubt that most Republicans would argue with Bush's spending when phrased in that manner, so the Party really has not learned any lessons yet.
By
Todd Dugdale , at 10:47 AM
I definitely agree that this is the new group trying to stomp her, but it does come on the tail of some other rumblings that more broadly Republican political insiders and consultants are starting to make jokes about her.
As I framed it to EPM in a comment (on the post above?) this is to a large degree about the "invisible primary" for the insiders, donors, and media who decide long before Iowa who is a candidate and who is not.
As for the council and it's plan, it appears to be an effort to shift the emphasis from "social issues" to economics which may well work for awhile, but, as soon as there's some sort of real competition for power, whether it's internal or election, those on "the right side" will drag the social issues back out and pillory Romney, Jeb Bush, and whoever else is on the moderate side.
They may want to be about economics or whatever, but that's not where their base's passion lies. It's too easy to tap into the crazy, so someone will again.
By
mikevotes, at 1:14 PM
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