And now another voice — a prominent voice — expressing frustration and dismay over the current field of Republican candidates for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination. And Maine Gov Paul LePage doesn’t mince words:
In remarks captured by the Portland Press Herald, Maine Republican Gov. Paul LePage unloaded on the GOP 2012 field Saturday, decrying all the candidates as damaged goods after having battered each other. He said the country “deserves better” than the current crop and called for a brokered convention to pick a dark horse candidate to challenge President Obama.
“The candidates in this primary have beat themselves up so badly it would be nice to have a fresh face that we all could say, ‘Okay.’ The country deserves better than having people stand up and keep criticizing each other,” said LePage, according to the Press Herald.
He told reporters at the National Governors Association meeting that the remaining candidates have all “injured themselves and injured the party” to the point where he’d “love to see a good old-fashioned convention and a dark horse” emerge from it. LePage’s spokesperson later told the Press Herald that the governor would support the eventual nominee for president.
The remarks come as party insiders fret that a GOP primary battle between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum may not end any time soon.
Indeed, in the past few days Jeb Bush has expressed concern over GOP primary rhetoric and the kind of conservatism that seems to exclude chunks of the population and plays on fear. And New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd perfectly captured the concern in the GOP and the GOP’s problem.
Indeed, this is beginning to feel like the Bill Murray movie “Groundhog Day,” where a news anchorman wakes up at 6 a.m and has live the same day over and over again.
The big difference: the anchor gradually changes and improves parts of the day each day until he changes himself…and moves into the present.
In this case, Republican primary candidates seem to be merely….reliving the same, angry day.
UPDATE: And then there’s this:
—The Politico:
Maine Republican Gov. Paul LePage told POLITICO Saturday he hopes to see a “floor fight” at the GOP convention in Tampa this summer, giving the party an opportunity to nominate a “fresh face” rather than one of the battered members of the 2012 field.
“I’m pushing for a floor fight … I’d like to see a good old-fashioned convention and a dark horse come out,” LePage told my colleagues Dave Catanese and Alexander Trowbridge at the National Governors Association winter meeting. “I think the candidates, in my mind, have injured themselves and injured the party by not following Ronald Reagan’s ‘never speak badly of another Republican.’”
While LePage didn’t knock any of the current GOP candidates by name, he made it clear he considers them too compromised to enter a general election on strong footing.
He’s the first major public official to say what countless Republican insiders are murmuring in private: that the party might be better off with a wild-card candidate selected in August rather than one of the damaged options they already have.
“It’s been too messy. I just believe we ought to go to the convention and pick a fresh face,” LePage said. “They beat themselves up so badly that I’d think it’d be nice to have a fresh face.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.