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

Or booking a short tour, even

Would they get an NBA franchise?

Sheldon Adelson backing Newt has started making me rethink Citizens United. Before, candidates were being bought by wealthy people and industries, but the network of donations and money funneling was so complex as to make it incomprehensible to average voters. Also, from Chait:

Money is the primary mechanism that parties use to herd voters toward the choices the elites would prefer them to make. The nomination of George W. Bush offers a classic example. Bush and his network had organized so many Republicans to donate so much money that the contest was essentially over well before a vote had been cast. The Bush fund-raising network didn’t involve a handful of billionaires in a room. It required thousands of fairly affluent people working together.

..But under the present system, Gingrich can simply have a single extremely wealthy supporter, Sheldon Adelson, write a series of $5 million checks. “Winning Our Future” is Gingrich’s “independent” PAC, and it’s an entire shadow campaign, complete with a ground operation in addition to advertising. Adelson’s money isn’t enough for Gingrich to attain parity with Romney – he’s probably being outspent at least two to one – but it is keeping him alive.

If true, CU is subverting the normal ways of doing business in politics. Obviously there are issues in having a candidate so obviously beholden to one particular billionaire, but does that substantively differ from that candidate being beholden to a particular industry, or a group of billionaires/millionaires with aligned interests? Maybe this will force the reigns of power to become more public and overt - which will open them up to criticism and dissent in a way that's impossible to do when the contributors are nameless.

Just a thought...

That is the only good part of the CU decision IMO

nate silver thinks romney has a slight edge in florida atm

in any case it should be close enough for gingrich to be sticking around

Reality's setting in. I'm sad.

newt's love of space, space travel, space colonization, etc is the only thing i find endearing in him

well, Ming the Merciless loved that shit too ...

iirc Ming's platform was more about cannabis legalisation and latterly turf-cutting.

What's w/ Pelosi's cryptic "[pause, grin]...There's something I know" response to the reporter asking her how she is sure Gingrich won't be president? (video 1:50)

maybe he's been cheating on callista w/ pelosi

ha funny enough i just read a little bit on that

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/01/nancy-pelosi-doesnt-have-a-gingrich-secret.html

After telling CNN yesterday that she was certain Newt Gingrich would never become president because "there is something I know," Nancy Pelosi is now clarifying that she doesn't actually have any deep, dark Gingrich secrets. "The 'something' Leader Pelosi knows is that Newt Gingrich will not be President of the United States," a spokesperson claims. So how does she know? Because she knows. Fascinating.

they did sit on that couch, remember

could be any number of things - something from the ethics committee investigation, the fact that all his former House colleagues hate him, some GOP establishment plan to kneecap him, etc

This pelosi thing is just one more lesson that a politician should never deviate one inch from the script when in front of a camera. What a horrible way to live. This shows me she still has a scrap of humanity left in her.

I've been assuming that she actually DOES know something, but discretion is the better part of valor and so in the end she has to say she doesn't actually know a thing, but with a smile on her face.

She may not be able to say anything about it, assuming there is an "it", but as Newty gets further in the race, scrutiny will increase, and SOMEone is guaranteed to leak to an intrepid reporter and then we'll have fun.

I just don't know what secret about Newt could be more devastating than all the stuff we already know about him...

Pelosi should've just laughed derisively at the notion of a Newt admin. getting all smirky and conspiratorial about something that likely doesn't exist or is already public knowledge is kinda dopey.

otoh, if it was in any way a gambit that somehow improves Newt's chances during the primary due to the Right's unhinged hatred of Pelosi, then i must say kudos.

ah c'mon Mordy use your imaginewtion

I just don't know what secret about Newt could be more devastating than all the stuff we already know about him...

http://www.comic-mint.com/media/client/kodos-kang-congress-steps-e0064_sml.JPG

cogent analysis from the right? wtf

As analysis goes, I found that rather tepid and obvious. The columnist worries that the bombs the candidates are throwing will damage the eventual nominee. He also admits that the bombs consist mostly of the truth, but never draws the obvious conclusion that the Republican party was unable to field a single candidate without huge, glaring, ugly flaws, and this reveals a structural weakness in the party itself. Nope. Instead he attributes this weakness to some mysterious new force, possibly the internet or the debates.

God forbid the WSJ acknowledge that "more tax breaks and less regulation" is not a viable political philosophy atm.

Obviously there are issues in having a candidate so obviously beholden to one particular billionaire, but does that substantively differ from that candidate being beholden to a particular industry, or a group of billionaires/millionaires with aligned interests?

Yes, I think so. It is harder for an entire group of billionaires to be nuts in the same direction at once than it is for one particular billionaire. So you get lower volatility, which in most markets is something that's worth a lot.

bob dole on newt:

I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late. If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway.

Gingrich served as Speaker from 1995 to 1999 and had trouble within his own party. Already in 1997 a number of House members wanted to throw him out as Speaker. But he hung on until after the 1998 elections when the writing was on the wall. His mounting ethics problems caused him to resign in early 1999. I know whereof I speak as I helped establish a line of credit of $150,000 to help Newt pay off the fine for his ethics violations. In the end, he paid the fine with money from other sources.

Gingrich had a new idea every minute and most of them were off the wall. He loved picking a fight with Bill Clinton because he knew this would get the attention of the press. This and a myriad of other specifics helped to topple Gingrich in 1998.

In my run for the presidency in 1996 the Democrats greeted me with a number of negative TV ads and in every one of them Newt was in the ad. He was very unpopular and I am not only certain that this did not help me, but that it also cost House seats that year. Newt would show up at the campaign headquarters with an empty ice-bucket in his hand — that was a symbol of some sort for him — and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it.

an indelible image, this

Newt would show up at the campaign headquarters with an empty ice-bucket in his hand — that was a symbol of some sort for him — and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it.

haha

I can hear that indelible Bob Dole voice, incredulous about Newt and the ice bucket.

wtf with the ice bucket!!

Bob Dole doesn't have any ice!

"Bob Dole doesn't have ice," said Bob Dole.

Newt would show up at the campaign headquarters with an empty ice-bucket in his hand — that was a symbol of some sort for him — and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it.

omg

"Where's the muthah fuckin' party?"

I read that Bob Woodward book about the lead-up to the 1996 election and it mostly focused on Dole since (A) Clinton already had the nomination locked up and (B) Dole was the only one of the two who actually talked to Woodward.

In it, Newt's kind of this background figure who every once in awhile someone turns and goes, "The fuck?"

I wish I could find the clip of Tip O'Neill instructing CSPAN to pan back to show that Newt was addressing an empty House chamber.

what DID he mean by the empty ice bucket?

Leading up to the 1996 election, Gingrich criss-crossed the country brandishing a white bucket, as a symbol of how Gingrich had cut bureaucratic waste by eliminating an anachronistic ice delivery service to congressional offices. Dating back to before the advent of refrigeration, ice had been delivered via white buckets to each office twice a day at no cost. Gingrich boasted that the program had cut $400,000 per year from the federal budget by eliminating 23 paid staff positions. "If there was any one symbol I wish we could be remembered by, I believe it should be an ice bucket," Gingrich said at the time. "We didn't authorize a study, we didn't phase it out, we didn't call for a training program, we just went cold turkey."

"If there was any one symbol I wish we could be remembered by, I believe it should be an ice bucket," said Gingrich.

god that is so awesome and stupid

i wish bob dole would just hush up and let me have my newt

http://www.mediaite.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/tip.jpg

The ice bucket anecdote is profoundly strange.

Not really. That sounds like vintage Gingrich

fundamentally Gingrichian

I really liked Bob Dole as a candidate. I thought he was funny as hell. He would show up on a show like Conan and just kill it. Too bad his politics are horrible.

cutting waste + bureaucracy is a religion for all politicians, but gingrich is especially obsessed with stuff like efficiency. i assume everyone on this thread has read about his relationship to Lean Six Sigma? http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2011/08/jack_donaghy_for_president.html

Bob Dole was quite funny during that campaign but, yeah, he was in the same party as Newt.

yeah Newty loves management strategies/gurus

I've mentioned before how that book was pretty funny. Lines like "The meeting ended with Dole yelling 'Aaaarrrggghhh' at his staff before calling CNN back…"

that's newt has all this 'supported policy now considered left-wing' in his past

romneycare, carbon pricing, etc. = all market based / 'efficient' / etc. ways to solve big problems.

dole is so awesome as a character:

and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it.

the "did" ^^ in this sentence just KILLS it

way behind here i know but I feel like I should address the morbs storm I unleashed, firstly I like morbsy and regret snapping at him quite as intesly as I did, the reason he was pissing me off is his pov on what we were talking abt and on the gov in general is m/l what I consider a primary defilement as far as how citizens relate to their government, it's the tendency to make the whole thing an undifferentiated morality play where every politician is as bad as the next and this knowledge excuses not actually knowing anything abt how the government works, like the filibuster is an actual problem that has huge distorting effects on our electoral system, its one of the things that allows poloticians to behave so poorly, if you really believe everyone in government to be so horrible shouldnt you have at least some interest in the mechanism that allows that to happen

which is not even mentioning how ignorant the the bums are all the same platform is, its not just the parties thatre different, each polotician is themself a snowflake, for instance gwb is the only guy out of all the pres candidates of any party in that cycle who wouldve started the Iraq war, it was just a weirdo quirk of his psychology and neocon retinue, ralph nader was majorly tragically wrong on that one

overall: long on moralizing short on precision, nagl