According to Ace, the same GOP (?) political “experts” who brought you John McStain’s hapless, fumbling, pathetic, stupid RINO campaign are right back to business as usual immediately after the previous disaster they engineered. Now they’re trying to destroy the one bright spot of the campaign, Sarah Palin.
The whole “moderate” RINO wing of the GOP probably needs to be metaphorically introduced to lamp-posts, and the remains metaphorically buried in, oh, whatever hell is reserved for suicidal dumbasses.
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
Republicans, the party faithful, the groupthinking wheelhorses who’d try to push McCain as a conservative, or at least as “our guy”, are in denial as deep as any LLL’s. After a handful of conversations and some surfing Wednesday I determined that a few years in the wilderness won’t teach them the error of their ways—they weren’t wrong, it was everybody else who let them down.
My hope all along was that this election would destroy the Democrat Party. This has been revised to include the Republican Party. Let both machines fall apart.
The “wheelhorses” are organization people, and this means that their focus is on retail politics - winning elections, gaining and keeping power, climbing the greasy pole. Since their focus is entirely on winning and not at all on principle, they typically wind up behaving in the fashion normally described as “Democrat-lite”. The only good thing about them is that they can be made to fall into line behind a principled candidate, if only you first whip them in the GOP primary. Once their path to power and patronage is forced into electing a principled candidate (e.g. Reagan) they have little choice but to sign on.
The “machines” are emergent phenomena contingent on the streams of money and power available from government control. They’re as natural as alligators and mosquitoes in swamps. I don’t think it’s useful to go after them directly. Even if you pick off corrupt individuals, there are always more available to step into their place. We have to drain the swamp by decreasing the power and money they can control. Depriving them of habitat is the only thing that decreases their numbers.
As for Palin, she’s got some choices before her. If she picks up the flag and plays the tune, lots of Republicans will follow her and work for her. Is she willing to lead, to take up a national profile, work for Congressional and Gubernatorial candidates in the off-year elections, raise money, get sharp on all the issues, and speak for the “shadow government” as Obama/Reid/Pelosi inevitably get in trouble?
The GOP is leaderless, the job is open - who will go for it?
Is Palin an idiot? To hear these GOPbots tell it, she didn’t know that Africa was a continent nor the three nations comprising NAFTA. Please!
How about this? Sen. Stevens resigns in January; Gov. Palin appoints his replacement — herself.
From what I’ve read on other blogs, if she did that, she’d only get to serve for about 2-3 months, until a special election could be held. Apparently this became law after an Alaskan gov appointed his daughter to the Senate seat he had just vacated (can’t look up the details at the moment).
Palin won’t do that. If she wants that Senate seat, she’ll appoint someone lower down in her Administration, someone who will be grateful for the raised profile. Then she resigns as Governor, allowing her Lt. Gov to step up. She runs for the seat in the special election and wins easily.
Really? Then why do they construct such losers of campaigns?
I submit a different metric is at work: The Hollywood Can’t Fail ethos. Have you ever wondered why obviously horrible, stupid, money losing movies get made? It’s because of the Hollywood Can’t Fail ethos. You can have a horrible script with an incoherent story, incomprehensible, illogical plotlines, repulsive characters, and a loathesome message, but if you attach some huge box office stars, a fabled director, and a big-money producer, then supposedly none of that matters. And, when the whole thing goes right down the dumper, as it inevitably will, you can say, “Hey! I did everything I could - big stars, big directors, etc. You can’t blame me for the failure! Who could guess those stupid movegoers would hate it?”
And everybody buys it.
In this case, dumbasses (of the media, of the party establishment, of whatever) assured the other dumbasses of the McCain campaign that they couldn’t fail with their strategy.
When they did, as was inevitable, fail, the excuses are exactly the same: “We did everything we could. You people let us down.”
Like all apparatchiks, their first priority and main focus is covering their asses and keeping their jobs - or making sure they are first in line for the next batch of jobs.
So? Do you doubt she would win the special in a landslide?
Here’s a thought. There is nothing I know of that says Stevens can’t serve out his term even as a convict in prison. Only the Senate can expel him, AFAIK. What if the Dem majority makes the calculation that the party would benefit more from labeling the GOP as the “party with felons for Senators” than from giving Palin a national platform?
If she is seriously considering a run in 2012, I would think it would be in her best interest to stay away from Wash DC, especially for the next 4 years as they are bound to be very ugly. As president we are looking for someone with executive not legislative experience. She would be better off if/when Stevens is dragged kicking and screaming from office to appoint a solid conservative and then support him thoroughly in the special election.
Gee, if Stevens is in prison, he can’t even vote “present”. That would be a problem even for Democrats. Obama crowed that he helped write the Senate’s new ethics rules, and he might be questioned about it if it’s not applied to Stevens.
It’s most likely that Stevens will be “free on appeal” for an extended period. The Senate will have to wait until that process is complete to do anything. If they have to wait until after the mid-terms, the makeup of the Senate could be very different.
I didn’t mean to suggest that the Pack wheelhorses were good at winning, Bill. They have a myopic focus on the retail politics aspects of politics - organization, money, polls, focus groups, pork, patronage, etc. They think that this is all there is to winning, because it’s worked in the past, or at local levels, or for the Democrats. (It worked well enough for GWB, twice.) They’re constantly trying to find out where the electorate is, as though the electorate were static and unchanging. What the poll-driven, organization mindset can never predict is the effects of leadership, charisma, and external events.
Obama’s campaign out-hustled McCain’s. They hustled so much, they not only ran over the line between election and fundraising hustle and outright fraud, but picked up the line, played jump-rope with it, and got praised by the MSM for their mad jump-rope skillz. But that was only part of the story of McCain’s defeat. The other part was leadership, charisma, and events. Neither candidate showed much leadership - Obama was neutral, carefully parsed, banal, and faux-conservative, while McCain was hyperactive, confused, and inconsistent - but Obama’s puerile “Hope, Change, Unity” vision at least was a vision - McCain offered nothing to compete. McCain’s excessive response to the financial crisis and the bailout made him appear foolish, while Obama stayed on message and at least did himself no harm by staying near the sidelines. Finally, Obama did tip the charisma scale in his favor, and that’s his margin of victory in places he should not have been able to win.
Leadership doesn’t tell everybody what they think they want to hear, poll-tested and focus-grouped to death - that’s followership. Leadership presents a vision of the possible future, and invites us to follow and work to make it real. Leadership doesn’t choose a path to victory. Leadership changes the game so that all paths lead to victory.
Time to rhetorically bury their asses and salt the earth, which groans at being forced to contain their shit.
You know what bothers me? The fact that drubbings in 2006 and 2008 have not yet convinced the RINO wing of the GOP that they need to return to their conservative/libertarian roots. It’s as if these jokers like sucking at the power/money teat so much that they don’t care what happens to the rest of us. And obviously, that cannot be the case. Right?
Not to geek out overmuch, but I keep coming back to a Lord of the Rings analogy in my mind. Power is power, and power corrupts. It doesn’t matter who you are, it sears you, drives you mad just to be close to it, withers you into a Gollum if you hold it long enough. Too many of the GOP leaders are making no argument against power, they merely argue that they’ll manage it more responsibly than the Democrats. This is like Isildur or Boromir arguing that they’ll use the Ring for good. Sauron always wins that argument in the end.
No, the Ring must be destroyed. The Beltway and the power it has accumulated is our Ring of Power, and we cannot use it safely, no matter how we lie to ourselves that we’d be more responsible than past users.
Hmm, now that’s an interesting question. I think that martinra is right, that if she was interested in the seat, she would appoint someone else, while making it known that she intended to run in the special election, which she would win handily.
But if she appointed herself? Such a move might turn her into just another politician in the eyes of her constituents. Enough so that they wouldn’t vote for her? Maybe, maybe not. It might depend on who was running against her.
Oh, come on. They just re-elected Stevens. You think they’d reject Palin because she’s “just another pol?”
But Stevens is just another pol, and no one has any illusions to the contrary. And, too, there may be some expectation that Stevens will step down or be booted from the Senate. So the goal there may not have been to elect Stevens, so much as to keep the seat out of Dem hands, at least for now.
Part of Palin’s appeal, on the other hand, comes from the fact that she is not just another pol, along with her reputation - well-deserved, from what I’ve read - as a reformer. Both would be tarnished should she take the seat herself. And since she has antagonized the GOP machine in Alaska, they’d no doubt mount a challenge in the special election, so Palin would be taking flak from all sides.
Sorry, but I deal in reality, NOOC. Palin is the single most potent political force in Alaska today - more popular than any other pol, and more potent than any political party. If she wants to be the next Senator, assuming Stevens is expelled from the Senate, she will be. It’s hers for the taking.
They can do it right now if they want. The only constraint the Constitution places upon either house’s power to expel a member is the two-thirds majority required for the vote.
Oh, I agree. If she wants it, it’s hers, and I look forward to seeing her back on the national stage (though I’m rather hoping not in the Senate).
I think the hypothetical departed reality with the assumption that she would give it to herself. In my initial post, I wasn’t even thinking about the outcome of the special election, only that any appointment she makes must quickly be ratified by special election, so to speak, so that there’s nothing all that advantageous about appointing herself (other than maybe to see a few talking heads pop a blood vessel or two).
Really? You don’t think it would be kinda fun watching her and Hillary duel? And I wouldn’t mind watching her slap down McStain every once in a while. She owes him a couple of return shots.
Clayton, the Senate won’t expel Stevens because the Dems will love to have him around as a GOP corruption punching bag. He’ll make them look less bad by comparison.
Stevens has made it clear that he won’t even consider resigning while his appeal is pending. That’s fair, but unfortunate in the “GOP convicted felon Senator” propaganda it will permit to be produced.
I do think that Sarah Palin is better off staying out of the Senate. If she wants to raise her profile, she can do that as Governor of Alaska just fine. What I think she should do is keep pressing on her key issues - government reform, energy production and right-to-life of the disabled. She should make alliance with as many of the disability rights orgs and charities as are willing to have her, and whose beliefs and methods are compatible with hers (i.e. not noxiously Leftist). Keep crusading against the “Down’s Syndrome = not fit to be born” equivalence. Keep up the pressure on energy independence. Use her star power to attract audience and attention for non-Leftist media. Go after the Unfairness Doctrine once it rears its ugly head, reminding people of the disgraceful conduct of the MSM against her.
Also, since among Barack Obama’s top priorities is to kneecap Hillary and forestall the likely 2012 primary challenge, there might be potential for cooperation there. It’s not that I love the idea of working with the Clintons on anything, but Clinton and Palin are now linked by shared striving for the top job, and similar sexism and abuse endured from the Obamites.
In re. the timing of the thing - there might be seniority advantages in the Senate by getting there sooner, rather than later.
Well I suppose if Franken wins the recount, she’d be one up on him (assuming Stevens resigned before the 09 Senate convened). Are there other new Senators out there?
This cements my belief that the RNC and GOP are completely infiltrated with Fifth Columnists.
This has been a problem for decades in the GOP. William Scranton, Nelson Rockefeller, Christine Whitman, Ahnald Swartzwhatever, “Missing Linc” Chafee, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter, Susan Collins (how did that dumb c*nt win re-election?), Lindsey Graham, John Danforth, and John McCain are merely a few in a long, sordid list.
Indeed. Just as I wish to destroy the Democrat party, or at least its left wing (which is most of it) I also wish to crush the left wing of the GOP as well.
I think politics would make a hell of a lot more sense if the leftists were in one party, and the conservatives were in the other - and the “undecided independents” were kept in a barrel somewhere until they made up their minds what they were.
See my earlier comment on leadership, and on making it so all paths lead to victory. Our statist opponents have done exactly that to us - they make it so that all the choices lead to their victory, and they are in both parties themselves.
I don’t know how to get a real non-crazy libertarian/conservative within spitting distance of nomination by either major Party. Neither Fred Thompson, Ron Paul, or Bob Barr were ever in real contention, and there were problems with all three.
That’s a different proposition. The one I was addressing was “can’t.”
Technically, it’s true that Congress is the final judge of its membership, but I believe SCOTUS gave Congress too much rope. I’d hate to argue that the founders intended to give Congress a veto over the choice of the electorate. I’m not sure, but I believe SCOTUS ultimately ruled in favor of Adam Clayton Powell but that Rangel took the seat away from him.
With the apparently expanded rule “a defendent is innocent until proven guilty AND all appeals have been exhausted”, Congress would have a hard time justfying removal of Stevens without bringing SCOTUS into it. I wonder how they would rule in that case.
SCOTUS wouldn’t touch an issue of Senate procedure. The Constitution gives Congress the power to order its own house, and nobody else - and that includes SCOTUS, as it has affirmed countless times.
That’s not quite true. The Supreme Court has explicitly held open the question, whether it might step in if the Senate chose to decide an impeachment by tossing a coin. That’s the only case I can think of, though.
Held open is not particularly “touching.” SCOTUS isn’t likely to mess with a body that could, if it desired, reduce it in size to the Chief Justice, and limit it to discussing only cases involving shipping rates on the lower Ohio river.