Posts Tagged → Election 2008
The nine-percent solution
The media is eager to tell you how unpopular President Bush is; they’ll trumpet it from the rooftops each time he drops another point. But the dirty little secret is, he’s over three times as popular as the Democratic Congress.
According to the latest Rasmussen Report, President George W. Bush holds only a 32-percent approval rating, down one point from a month ago, when he held a 33-percent approval rating. That’s not good.
But here’s something worse: the Democrat-controlled Congress has an approval rating in the latest Rasmussen Report of only 9 percent; that’s terrible. Congress began the year with only a 15-percent approval rating and has lost another six points since then. It is the first time in history that Congress has received such low approval ratings, and President Bush is 3.6 times more popular than Congress right now.
Which leads us to the most obvious question: why, exactly, are we watching both the GOP and the Democrats nominate folks for the White House who are part of this worst-ever Congress in US History? Both John McCain and Barack Obama have been part of this worst-ever Congress; why in the world does anyone think either of them deserve a promotion?
What would be worlds better is what has always worked best: nominate successful governors and go with the Washington outsider approach. Because right now, while Congress is busy setting aside Congressional earmarks for some whack-job scientist to investigate the mystery of the best acne treatment, most of America is mad as hell, and if it lasts till November, they may not put up with any of these incumbants anymore, Democrat or Republican.
Michigan may bring sanity to GOP primary
According to the latest McClatchy/MSNBC poll of Michigan voters released Sunday, it appears Michigan, like Wyoming before it, may bring some sanity to the GOP presidential nomination race. Rather than falling for fake conservative Mike Huckabee or RINO leader John McCain, the Wolverine State Republicans are apparently leaning toward a real conservative, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who is up on closest competitor John McCain, 30-22, an eight-point margin.
If that lead holds, Michigan could be the first big state to go for Romney and push his elector lead further ahead of his competitors. Behind the front two, Huckabee is third with 17 percent, followed by Fred Thompson with seven percent, Rudy Guiliani with six percent and Ron Paul with five percent. Michigan papers, known for their left-leaning editorial bias, put the Romney-McCain race closer, for the obvious reasons. Polls are typically an “invented news” method of political talent management on behalf of the mainstream media.
Still, the poll appears to include Democrats and independents who plan to vote in the GOP primary, so none of it is a true measure of GOP support; ultimately, it is the primary results themselves that matter most. The Michigan primary is scheduled for Tuesday, January 15.
Romney takes silver in New Hampshire
Don’t attempt to adjust your HDMI cables just yet; that was indeed RINO leader Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) claiming victory in the New Hampshire Republican primary yesterday. The WonderfulPessimist.com-endorsed candidate, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, came in second, just as he did in Iowa.
This result is not a surprise. In Wyoming over the weekend, Romney won the state handily because there were rules in place to make sure that those voting in the GOP caucus were actually Wyoming residents and GOP supporters. In Iowa and New Hampshire, proof of residency and party affiliation were not requires and so the potential for crossover voting to curb the conservative candidate’s momentum was high.
Be that as it may, results are results and the zombie-like McCain makes it two states in a row where the liberal media has chosen a favorite RINO to prop up in order to rob the conservative Romney of victory. In Iowa, the RINO of the moment was former Arizona Gov. Mike Huckabee; in New Hampshire, McCain.
Realistically, however, all that does is split the three earliest states to one each for Romney, McCain and Huckabee. Despite liberal media wishful thinking, Romney’s campaign is not devastated or on the verge of pulling out; he confirmed Tuesday he’s in it till then end.
“There have been three races so far. I’ve gotten two silvers and one gold – thank you Wyoming,” Romney said Tuesday night in a post-results press conference. “On to Michigan and South Carolina and Florida and Nevada. I’ll fight to be back here in November in those states and others.”
With 47 states to go, Romney remains the conservative candidate with the best chance of winning; Fred Thompson was barely a blip on the radar in New Hampshire, which means most of his supporters must be swinging toward Romney. It remains an interesting race, with a lot at stake for the future of the GOP.
Romney is the candidate who will offer Americans a choice; McCain, Huckabee and Guiliani offer only echoes of the Democrats.
Assessing the GOP field: Mitt Romney
The final GOP candidate currently running with any decent chance of being relevant is former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. In many ways, Romney is an ideal candidate. He has been a governor rather than a senator or congressman, meaning he has executive-level experience. That’s invaluable for anyone seeking the presidency. He’s also held executive positions in the private sector, including serving on the Olympics board at a time when it was besieged by steroid scandals; he was able to cut through the press and politics and deal out tough but fair decisions in each case, and gained broad respect in the process.
Those are Mitt’s strong points on paper.
On the other hand, he’s a late convert to many of his most conservative positions, including his opposition to abortion. While he claims to be pure now, it’s hard to judge if these late conversions are a genuine reflection of how he might govern, or a political calculation in his quest to gain the White House.
His perceived biggest weakness is his religious affiliation as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Being a Mormon is indeed a mixed bag outside of Utah in the political arena. Much like John F. Kennedy had to prove his Catholicism was an all-American attribute in the 1960s, Romney faces a similar uphill battle over 45 years later with his Mormonism.
For WonderfulPessimsit.com, Romney handled these questions about his faith with Reaganesque Americanism appeal in his recent address on the topic. He was at once optimistic, positive, and spoke in glowing terms of the American traditions of religious tolerance and shared, common American values.
For WonderfulPessimist.com, that speech settled any doubts. While Mormonism is not this blogger’s faith of choice (see MessianicMusings.com for details), I do know what it’s like to practice a minority religion. The Constitutional freedoms that protect my faith also protect Gov. Romney’s, and I have to respect his stance on moral issues, whether they descend from my brand of faith or another brand.
I will say that at times Romney has overstated his moral values just a bit; while I admire his long-term marriage and fidelity to his wife, claiming he and his wife have “never fought” during their marriage is just a bit of a whopper to swallow. I can believe they’ve never held grudges, but I know of no married couple who doesn’t have disagreements once in a while. It’s not a sin to disagree, or even to have mild fights, although it’s admittedly best to avoid fights. We all fall short now and then, though.
So Mitt’s Mormonism is a non-issue for WonderfulPessimist.com. What matters are where he really stands policy-wise. And while he sometimes comes off more like a term life insurance salesman than a great public speaker, his address on his faith set a much better tone for his campaign, and one worthy of a serious conservative contender for the office.
Mitt is not a pure Reagan conservative; but he’s not far off and if he’s good enough for the National Review, that says something. The National Review thoroughly vetted Mitt on his views and the important note they made is that while his rhetoric has at times seemed to lean to the middle, it must be kept in mind that he was running in Ted Kennedy’s home state, Taxachusetts, and what is more important is how he governed; he governed consistently more conservatively than did this election cycle’s “faux conservative de jour,” Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
Huckabee is surging in Iowa and in New Hampshire, McCain is attempting to revive his near-death run for the White House, where he stands a chance of upsetting Mitt. Right now, if the choice is Huckabee, McCain or Romney during the upcoming caucus and primary season, it’s clear that the most conservative of those three is Romney.
This election cycle, the GOP must decide whether it wants to be a choice against the Democrats, or a faint echo of them. While WonderfulPessimist.com would love to see Fred Thompson carry the conservative banner back to the heart of the Republican party, his campaign seems to have stagnated; and as for Ron Paul, he is too closely associated with the conservative/libertarian version of MoveOn.org extremists.
Therefore, the man who strikes the most conservative profile in an admittedly weak field, and yet has the best chance to win the nomination, is Gov. Mitt Romney. Therefore, unless Fred Thompson’s campaign rises from the dead, WonderfulPessimist.com is proud to announce our full endorsement of Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination as President of the United States.
Give ‘em hell, Mitt, and whatever you do, don’t make me regret the endorsement!
Assessing the GOP field: Ron Paul
A member of the House of Representatives with no executive experience, Rep. Ron Paul may be a genuine conservative with strong libertarian leanings, but he’s certainly not a Reagan-style conservative. And he’s not ready to be president.
If he were to pull off a miracle and win the GOP nod, WonderfulPessimist.com could conceivably support his bid in the general election, but it would be a guaranteed losing ticket. He’s not well-known enough, he’s absolutely wrong on the War on Terror and all foreign policy issues, but he is a breath of fresh air in the area of domestic policy.
Rep. Paul is solid when it comes to interpreting the Constitution to its founder’s intent, and is correct on our country’s drift away from true constitutional government. He has solid viewpoints on domestic spending and conservative, small government principals and seems at times to disapprove of wearing sexy corsets, at least on the campaign trail, which puts him at odds with Democrat Senator Barney Frank. So there’s that.
That said, Rep. Paul is a mess on foreign policy, embracing such outdated isolationist policies that he’d make the old 1960s John Birch Society look like liberals. Rarely has a Republican been so embarrassingly wrong on all things foreign policy, and with the War on Terror, Iraq, Israel, the looming threat of Iran and more all promising to be vitally important, Paul simply is the wrong candidate at the wrong time, running on the wrong issues.
The GOP simply doesn’t need an anti-war candidate; while some of his pure Constitutionalism is sorely needed in the GOP, he simply is not the right conservative for WonderfulPessimist.com to support in the primary and caucus season. (But at least he’s a conservative.) Our call is that, at most, Paul might make a half-decent running mate for whoever does win the GOP nod; but we can also think of plenty of other GOP faithful who would make stronger, and far more legitimate, running mates for whoever does top the GOP ticket in 2008.
And here’s a confession: Rep. Ron Paul himself doesn’t scare me. But the fanaticism of his supporters, their unwillingness to listen to a simple, “he’s not my candidate of choice this time around” response, their endless antiwar rhetoric, is nothing short of frightening. And no one can win the White House by frightening members of their own party. (It didn’t even work for Howard Dean over in the Democratic party, where fanaticism is far more acceptable and in fashion, thanks to MoveOn.org.)
Assessing the GOP field: Rudy Giuliani
In looking over this election cycle’s field of GOP candidates for president, WonderfulPessimist.com finds itself at odds with itself. On the one hand, just about any of this field of competitors is a vast improvement over the Democratic alternatives: Hillary Clinton? Nightmare! John Edwards? Equally so. Barack Obama? Well, at least he has a charming smile while being deeply liberal… which won’t buy him a cup of Starbucks with this conservative.
But nitpicking at obvious liberals like those are “easy pickins,” and there will be a long election cycle to engage in that. At the moment, WonderfulPessimist.com is more concerned with zeroing in on the right candidate to carry the conservative banner, the Reagan legacy, and the War on Terror into the next administration. There are six main GOP candidates remaining; it’s time to get honest about how they measure up.
First up: Rudy Giuliani
Let’s admit something right up front: Rudy Giuliani is a likable candidate. He has a self-deprecating sense of humor, going so far as to have been a guest star – more than once – on Saturday Night Live. He has the ability not to take himself too seriously, and that’s a plus.
But let’s also be honest about something else: he is a media creation of convenience. Giuliani was savaged by the liberal New York media, and the national media in general, for much of his run as New York mayor. His in-office affair, divorce and remarriage is messy, even though it’s in the past. And the only reason he media was kind to him in the wake of September 11 was because he was about to leave office, and it gave the liberal media someone to praise who wasn’t President George W. Bush.
That’s the only reason he, not Bush, was Time’s Man of the Year in the twilight hours of 2001. The media puffed Giuliani only because he would soon be out of power and because he was the only person they could find to praise other than Bush that year. That’s the simple, brutal truth of the matter.
Now that he’s running for the GOP nod as president, Giuliani will continue to receive the kid gloves treatment by the media, right up until the moment he would secure – if he can anymore – the nomination. Then, watch the fur fly as the liberal media work overtime to crush him like a bug to usher Hillary, Barack or John into office. It’s that simple.
While most GOP voters admit Giuliani is the candidate they’d trust most with handling the War On Terror after Bush leaves office, they trust him very little on any other issues, especially domestically. In fact, on the domestic front, there’s very little on which Giuliani and the GOP agree.
Abortion? Sure, he promised Sean Hannity he’d appoint originalist justices to the Supreme Court, but given his own personal pro-abortion stance, that’s hard to swallow. He’s the darling of the Log Cabin Republican crowd with his pro-gay marriage stance. And on illegal immigration, he’s as much of a mess as the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I trust Giuliani on taxes and controlling spending, to a degree; but I think he’s actually far too inexperienced and under-educated on issues like education reform, school vouchers, health care and various biomedical issues, like fetal stem cell research and other such issues. On the foreign policy front, I simply am not sure what we’d be getting from Giuliani in terms of support for Israel, which is the key to any presidential candidate’s foreign policy, for me. In my view, we must support all Middle Eastern democracies, and beyond infant democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq, or loyalty to the oldest democracy in the Middle East, Israel, must never waver.
In the end, Guiliani is a nightmare on domestic issues and a mixed bag at best on everything else; if war with Iran seemed imminent, my concern for strong leadership on that front might nudge me in Guiliani’s direction. Failing that, there’s really no other reason to support Rudy Giuliani in the primary and caucus season. Reagan-style conservative values would not be well-represented under a potential Giuliani administration, and that’s the fiber cable of any strong endorsement from WonderfulPessimist.com.
While Giuliani would be far better than the Democratic alternatives if he secures the GOP nod, there are better alternatives still in the field than the man from City Hall who wants to bypass any state house and go straight to the White House.
