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Your Week In Republican Politics: If You Plant Ice You’re Gonna Harvest Wind
With all the subtlety of a cartoon anvil hurtling down on Wile E. Coyote, it has dawned on Karl Rove and what is left of the mainstream Republican leadership that unless Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann can be muscled aside, President Obama could cakewalk to a second term despite a sucky economy.
Even if Mitt Romney, the one-time putative front runner, grows a spine and begins acting presidential, he will remain unacceptable to the Tea Party cum Christianist base, which leaves who?
Paul Ryan or Chris Christie, that’s who.
Ryan, the Wisconsin congressman, probably has the chops for the job even if his conservative credentials are not a solid as Perry or Bachmann, but his signal accomplishment was an unmitigated disaster: A Reverse Robin Hood Plan to reduce the budget deficit by taking from the middle class and poor and giving to the rich while deregulating Wall Street. This fiscal lunacy led directly to the loss of a once solid Republican House seat in a special election and could still be trouble for Republicans whose disdain for the Have Nots isn’t playing well with senior citizens and the disabled.
New Jersey Governor Christie’s signal accomplishment is to ram a fiscal austerity plan through the Democratic-controlled Legislature, but he is short on experience and his health is bound to be a major issue since he suffers frequent asthma attacks and seems to be one meatball hoagie away from exploding.
Can you say Newt Gingrich? No? Well, there’s always Rudy Giuliani.
A disconnection between the mouth and the brain is a common ailment among politicians — especially those with an eye on the Oval Office. Rank hypocrisy runs a close second and Perry is no exception in both cases.
After a gaffe filled week which resulted, among other things, included an apology for threatening bodily harm to the “treasonous” Federal Reserve chairman, the current darling of the Republican presidential field appeared to be on his guard, but then let slip the loudest of all the right-wing Republican dog whistles: Barack Obama is not sufficiently patriotic even if, gosh darn it, he may have been born in the good old U.S. of A.
This from a man whose own patriotism is highly questionable because he has often threatened to get Texas to secede from the union.
In retrospect, there may have been no more successful federal government initiative over the last 40 years than cleaning up the environment. The skies over American cities are clearer, rivers and lakes are cleaner, toxic agricultural runoff has decreased and polluters are regulated. Well, at least to an extent.
It was a Republican president by the name of Richard Nixon who got the ball rolling with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the year that the first Earth Day was celebrated, but now as with so many other things many of the GOP presidential wannabes want to roll back the clock.
Yes, Perry, Bachmann and Gingrich, among others, reiterated this week that they want to return to the bad old days by halting all EPA regulation for the implausible reason that the economy will improve if polluters are allowed to dirty things up. Maybe jobs or something will be created because of all the messes that would have to be cleaned up.
Besides being lousy economic and social policy, padlocking the EPA flies in the face of a public, most Republican voters included, who are concerned about clean air and water and believe the EPA is fulfilling its mandate. Heck, even the Roberts Supreme Court has validated that mandate in recent rulings.
Then there’s the party’s stand on global warming. Sigh.
Christie is joined by two other Republican governors — Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio — in trying to balance state budgets on the backs of unionized state employees. Yeah, like teachers and in some instances policemen and firefighters.
The results have been mixed, but it is fair to say that Republicans in the Cheesehead and Buckeye states rue the day they decided that kneecapping public employes by curtailing their collective bargaining rights was good politics.
In Wisconsin, that effort led to an unprecedented series of recall elections. When the dust had settled this week from the last of those elections, Republican control of the state Senate had shrunken to a single seat and Walker may still face a recall effort.
Meanwhile, in Ohio Kasich and Republican legislative leaders with an eye on their political futures said this week that they will offer changes in the state’s tough collective bargaining law to keep a repeal measure off of the November ballot.
Finally, a pertinent factoid: The Gallup Presidential Tracking Poll is the Rock of Gibraltar of political polls and has been since FDR’s first term.
Lest some Republicans become smug about the party’s chances of retaking the White House, every president beginning with Truman and excepting only Eisenhower has had lower Gallup ratings than Obama, many considerably lower.
17 Responses to “Your Week In Republican Politics: If You Plant Ice You’re Gonna Harvest Wind”
You’re right Shaun, there’s no chance whatsoever that Obama can be defeated. You and all his other supporters can safely stay home and watch TV.
Keep preaching it. You’re doing great!
Yes and the whole mess is driving James Carville into a stuttering confusion.
Hang in there James. There is no explanation for the new Republican goofiness. Take a breath, punch the wife….it’s ok….
It evident the Republicans – subconsciously if nothing else – understand that these hard right candidates can’t win in November. That’s why they are still casting about for the perfect candidate even after Perry has gotten in.
As for Rove, he knows – and the conservatives know – he’s irrelevant.
“You’re right Shaun, there’s no chance whatsoever that Obama can be defeated. You and all his other supporters can safely stay home and watch TV.”
Which homophobe would you like to elect president instead, Prof?
Because you only get to pick a homophobe.
In other news: dammit Feingold!
Prof:
The ball is in your court. Who can beat Obama and how?
“Who can beat Obama and how?”
Okun might. The media will do its part of course.
The republican can’t do it alone – they are not a bunch of people that can appeal to enough voter groups. But combine the poor economy, the useless media mongrels, the blue dogs and all the attempts to sabotage the economy with “fiscal responsibility” and “reform” and there you go.
Marco Rubio is not the governor of Florida. He is the junior Senator. You are describing Gov. Scott, the least popular governor in the United States.
John Kasich…………………………
Warren:
My bad. Thank you. Correction made.
@Shaun
Are you insinuating that I might not be sincere? I’m truly offended.
No Shaun, Obama is truly invincible. Not only has he been spared the grueling primary fight, but his crack team nearly infallible economic experts are now assuring the nation that another recession is highly unlikely. That makes him safe through to the election.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to take a bath.
Shaun – I’ll skip the petty bickering, here’s a link to a rating of the 10 best “Help On The Way > Slipknot! > Franklin’s Tower.” Thanks again for the use of the Dead…
http://gratefuldeadprojects.com/Help_Slip_Frank.html
http://www.archive.org/details/gd95-06-22.daud.wiley.8767.sbeok.shnf
http://www.archive.org/details/gd91-09-10.sbd.dan.30755.sbexx.flacf
The last link has Brandford Marsalis as a guest musician. Enjoy!!
rudi:
Have heard and own all and will reiterate as I did the first time that I used the line that the greatest performance of the medley was at the Great American Music Hall in SF on August 13, 1975.
Here’s the album:
http://www.amazon.com/One-Vault-Grateful-Dead/dp/B000002VK3/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1313781165&sr=1-1
Well, hell, Prof, they believe in other things destructive to everybody, including often themselves unwittingly, as it is.
The real issue is if the GOP offers a positive, attractive alternative (and as I’ve also said before, the same thing about conservatism).
Obama and the Congre-Dems were toxic waste when they went too far left, but the 2010 vote was anti-Dem, not pro-GOP, and the GOP really doesn’t seem all that good, hence I’ve been saying I believe Obama will survive and win again in 2012. Hopefully he and the Congre-Dems won’t stupidly tell themselves again that they have a “mandate” [sic] again and lunge to the left again. They’ve wrecked things badly enough as is, already. Don’t be toxic waste as in 1993-94 and as in 2009-2010.
Hopefully they won’t be degenerate and presume that any money saved by ending wars ASAP should instinctively be spent on more vote-buying in the form of another failed, misconfigured “stimulus,” for example, or try to force more play-pen-lefty climate politics-related or other such laws through on us then.
“Obama and the Congre-Dems were toxic waste when they went too far left”
I say they went too far to the right. I am saying this after assuming that words like “right” and “left” lack meaning, which is a reasonable assumption.
We can ignore (Axel’s) detachments from reality and continue with more important things:
such as if the Republicans hold Iowa to be so important next year, will they be discussing subjects like this?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903554904576460300155681760.html
Food for thought prior to the election and the attention paid to Iowa
We now return you to farther-left gossip and Axel’s detachments.
Oh, and again, a liberal cartoonist’s fun with Perry:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/davidhorsey/2011/08/16/rick-perry-is-george-w-bush-on-steroids/texan-8-16-11-color/
As far as i can tell, no one is detached from reality on TMV lately. Just staunch in their opinions and volleying back at some wicked spin shots.
Can’t you only be detached from reality once? Saying “detachments” seems like a sloppy way to try to strengthen an unoriginal slur. You are either attached or you aren’t.