2012 republican presidential nominee III: can romney get santorum out of his hair?

as we all know (I hope) the candidate with the most money wins the election

wth I've never seen a chart that looks like this

http://i.imgur.com/C8ACu.png

that's oversmoothed statistical noise, not real variation

What's up? You people still worried about Romney winning the election?

It looks like a little kid scribbled on that chart.

if you don't actually think there is any difference between Obama and Romney

Depends which Romney, no? Mass. gov. Romney not radically different, to the extent that current gotta win Romney is trying his best to be un-Obama.

The GOP that emerged from the 80's has little future; young ppl and women mostly won't vote for ppl who can make it past the primaries. You increasingly cannot marry the (would-be) positive message (once a progessive stance) of freedom (tm) to fuck-science, fuck-the-queers, nuke-the-foreigners base of lizard brains with free-the-market-from-regulators-and-special-interest-unions money bags. There's no coherence at all left. I have often said that most Americans are liberals; it just depends what they want untouched by govmt, civil rights or personal economic rights. The GOP's economic 'liberals' are staunchly on the side of big business and the neo-con and RR ppl are very much against individual civil rights both at home and abroad. They very well may end up like the GOP in CA, an annoying minority. The present clowns are trying to square a circle that looks increasingly hard to square.

Chuck Todd whines a lot.

Also, Obama so far demonstrably better at singing snippets of Al Green songs than Romney.

Never has the phrase "CRY MOAR" seemed more appropriate. xp

Chuck Todd has a tenuous point but it's one Stewart addressed some time ago on Crossfire

Conor Friedersdorf: is this ALL there is?

Chuck Todd is a mockery of the auction, I mean system. He looks like an armpit with lips too.

Jonathan Karl is far worse -- he's a jellyfish filled with yellow ink.

He looks like an armpit with lips too.

This is perfect.

happily completing 7 months w/out TV

xp

following from michael white's comment:

there is an idea out there that the GOP is facing some really terrible demographic trends; and conversely, though the moment right now is so bleak, the democrats (and left-of-center parties globally, some say) are looking into much rosier future years.

going by a number of interlocking names -- the browning of america, the college-educatening, the de-suburbanizing, whatever -- the story sounds optimistic enough. a party increasingly dependent on the old, white and uncomfortable can't forever dominate a party attuned to the young and hungry. especially if the science is true and people's political ideas don't shift much after age 20. people who grew up in this recession aren't going to love any future romneyesque candidate.

but, color me pessimistic, a future of grey-vs-brown politics sounds completely fucking miserable to me. if the 'new deal coalition' finally snaps forever and any organized unionized (groan) white working class disappears into palinism and kulturkampf, doesn't that sound like a future of shitty racebaiting fox news youtubes beamed into a human face forever?

it seems like happy talk to me: oh, we got completely blasted by neoliberalism, at least we'll have multiracialism next generation to bank on!

nationally I think the GOP is a long way from where they are in CA. they still win plenty of elections. the demographic trends favor their isolation, but they also just mean that the Dems will continue to drift rightward as they observe the historically GOP oligarchs (there will be some exceptions to this, like oil companies etc)

observe absorb

In other words, the GOP as we've known it fades while the gradually swelling ranks of new Dem voters pulls the party ever more rightwards. We might have another kind of inchoate party of squabbling interests waiting for a Reagan-in-'80 moment.

george w bush tried like hell to court latino voters in 2004 but everything thats happened since has undermined all of it

eh i think theres generally a natural equilibrium between the two parties so if these demographic trends play out itll be in the form of the middle ground shifting left, ie both parties moving somewhat left rather than the democrats dominating elections

politics aside...and this was more when there was the full field and before cain and bachman and perry etc dropped out...

but you kinda have to step back and look at the stage during the early debates and just think in wonderment about how it came that such an assortment of crazy and awful people were brought together for us to watch. it's almost unreal to think about.

if the 'new deal coalition' finally snaps forever and any organized unionized (groan) white working class disappears into palinism and kulturkampf, doesn't that sound like a future of shitty racebaiting fox news youtubes beamed into a human face forever?

i'm more sanguine than that. the democratic coalition is relatively coherent and this will only become more true as young people move into the workforce and voting booth. the republicans' reliable base of terrified bigots will probably shrink over the coming years. their coalition is remarkably incoherent in comparison with the democrats'. the personal interests the wealthy are often diametrically opposed to those of poorer, non-urban/coastal religious fundamentalists, and the most dedicated economic conservatives are increasingly libertarian (ron paul).

all these issues will be lost in time after the beer hall putsch

like tears in rain

i have no idea which issues or controversies will code as right- or left-wing in the future, fyi, or how left- or right-wing each party will be on "our" metrics. but since our particular kind of democratic process tends to arrive at a semi-stable division of the country 50-50, that's what i'm talking about

xps here

i dunno if i agree that the democratic coalition is more coherent!

i just mean that there isn't a comparably big schism, at present, between the interests of social liberals who benefit from the advancement of progressive social policy and moderate-to-left-leaning 99-percenters who economically benefit from a strong federal government.

^ what i see as the democratic base

The irony of Romney thus far is that he's a millionaire businessman who got where he is in part thanks to poor regulation, he's a dedicated family man, he's a Washington outsider whose sole government experience is those four years as gov., and yet the party explicitly for all those things absolutely hates the guy. It's kind of perplexing.

I think the Romney-Gingrich back-and-forth comes down to this: the part of the party that wants, above all else, to see Obama defeated, and the part of the party that wants to see him humiliated. Romney would have a good chance (I think) of beating Obama, but the debates won't be all that interesting--whoever "wins" them will win on points. I don't know how much the people who are voting for Gingrich care about the general. All they want is what they got last night in the Jon King exchange, a YouTube clip of Obama withering before a good talking down-to from Gingrich. They're convinced this will happen.

at point is "moving somewhat left" going to result in doing shit about climate change, ie utterly transforming our entire lifestyle and economy out of necessity?

(yeah, just an academic Q bcz it's too late)

plenty of hard-right types explicitly reject the thesis that "electability" = "some degree of moderation". in fact they adhere to the opposite, that adherence to true conservatism is really the winning electoral path, because all americans (except a corrupt sliver) are in their hearts conservative.

superficially the evidence of a few elections seems to support this, reagan vs. ghwb, w vs. mccain.

(yeah, just an academic Q bcz it's too late)

this is such a weird thing to say

but, color me pessimistic, a future of grey-vs-brown politics sounds completely fucking miserable to me. if the 'new deal coalition' finally snaps forever and any organized unionized (groan) white working class disappears into palinism and kulturkampf, doesn't that sound like a future of shitty racebaiting fox news youtubes beamed into a human face forever?

grey-vs-brown politics has been going on for decades!

ie just because we can't reverse it doesn't mean that we can't (or shouldn't bother) mitigate its effects

to mitigate its effects, that should say

I mean there's a huge world of difference between just being laissez-faire "let's burn-every-fossil-fuel-there-is!" about things and basically trying to re-engineer society so that it can actually function

i'm more sanguine than that. the democratic coalition is relatively coherent and this will only become more true as young people move into the workforce and voting booth. the republicans' reliable base of terrified bigots will probably shrink over the coming years. their coalition is remarkably incoherent in comparison with the democrats'. the personal interests the wealthy are often diametrically opposed to those of poorer, non-urban/coastal religious fundamentalists, and the most dedicated economic conservatives are increasingly libertarian (ron paul).

mostly agree w/ this but there's also a ticking clock w/r/t certain things most importantly global warming and the need for a much more expansive safety net and I'm not sure our long-term coalition will be in place in time

What's up? You people still worried about Romney winning the election?

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, January 20, 2012 1:24 PM (1 hour ago)

You know, I think rooting for Gingrich at this point is also partly just wanting to see the misery of the Romney campaign end sooner. That misery is genuine and he doesn't bear the strain of it well.

if there is an open primary in CA (I can't remember) I am totally voting for Gingrich.

going to result in doing shit about climate change

You know how the Right sucks Chruchill's dick 'cause of his early warning on Nazism? This is the issue which is most crying out for someone to knock some heads together and remind even the 1% that, at present, we don't have escape pods and shitting on the planet will lead to either degraded life or violent struggle, probably both.

Fundamentally, it's the right move. (xpost)

they might have escape pods, we have no way of knowing

Also, tbf, even a 'laissez-faire' system that truly values, well, value should be looking like the dickens for some power and revenue source other than nuclear and oil. Both are finite and noxious. The Steve Jobs entrepreneur-hero of the future will be one hell of a rich person when they figure that conundrum out.

Also, laissez-faire what? So called conservatives attached to this line of thought are merely adumbrating the basic edges of the idea. The devil is in the minute details of what gets regulated, how, by whom, in what fashion, etc... It's why all the idiots calling Obama a socialist drive me nuts. Even the socialist parties are center-left these days. Heck even the CPC is as much of a fascist party as a genuine socialist party these days.

they might have escape pods

I hope they do. It would serve them right to be flying through space for eons, Battlestar Galactica style, in search of an inhabitable place to land.

what's a 'genuine socialist party'? just through usage the word means 'center left european' as much as it means anything else these days.

Also, my point above about the GOP is more about how totally insane you have to be to win the primary and how much that hurts them when they get to the general than a prediction that the road ahead is all that rosy for the Democrats.

They through around 'socialist' as if it's some evil auhoritarian state when even that economic model (the state owning the means of production) hasn't been tried by anybody succesfully in ages. Otherwise, it means socially liberal Europeans who are less racist, rich and religious than others.

'the state owns the means of production' doesn't really mean much in 2012.

I think more than just having to be totally insane, you have to appeal to mutually exclusive groups of totally insane people. I think the reason the primary season has looked the way it has isn't just cause the GOP has a weak field, it's because there really isn't a magical candidate who could appeal to everybody.

apart from ronald reagan, you mean

I think this situation is partly a reason why the worship of magic-reagan exists. there's never gonna be another universally loved gop pol but there will always be magic-reagan.

If Ronald Reagan ran today on his record, the base might eviscerate him. Norquist would pummel him. He'd be accused of sitting on a couch with Tip. His talking to Gorbachev would like total wussy librul shit to the fringe. They are incoherent rage-bags. Nothing short of Atilla the Free-Market Flag. Waver or Shiva the Redneck is going to appease their blood lust. They want Jesus to win against modernity (and every other religion) and they want capitalism to make poor ppl happy. I don't see it happening, hence their 'epistemic closure'; they can't handle the truth 'cause too much of their identity and self-esteem is wrapped up in shit which isn't working or likely to.