I Think I Just Threw Up in My Mouth a Little Bit
It’s tough to disagree with Von’s assessment of She Who I Shall Not Name’s likely impact on the 2012 Presidential race:
The only candidate that conceivably benefits from Palin is Mitt Romney. Well connected, well established: Palin may suck the oxygen from a room, but Romney sucks the money. Romney also can’t help but like the contrast between him and Palin. More importantly, so long as Palin is around, it’s going to be that much harder for another candidate to get traction against him.
For those 99 percent of you who haven’t been reading me for two years, I should probably mention that there is no politician I find quite so emblematic of the deficiencies of the American political system as Mitt “Battlefield Earth” Romney and his minions (see, e.g., here, here, and here). I’d take a RINO or an arch-movement conservative any day of the week over the robotic and insincere establishment rump that Romney epitomizes.
I dunno. Mitt seems to me to be the personification of the Prisoner’s Dilemma applied to American Presidential politics. Of the plausible major candidates, he’d be the best to serve in office but there’s no way for him to get there.Report
Koz….has it just about right.
What a sad reflection on the American people. I think America is getting the leaders that match their own characters. Benjamin Franklin said it best in a short speech to the Convention prior to the signing of the final draft of the Constitution. “I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other..”Report
I’m torn on Romney. On one hand every conservative I know agrees he is an empty suit. On the other hand, if you fill the suit up with the right policy positions, then maybe the candidate himself doesn’t matter all that much. The biggest problem I could forsee is someone who sort of pulls a Clinton x 100 and starts every day by consulting the polls to see what he should believe in.Report
Not worth rehashing all this, but my feeling is that empty suits who talk out of both sides of their mouth are precisely what has made the GOP so incapable of good governance on the national level. I’d take both Lindsay Graham and Jim DeMint – despite their vastly different relationships with movement conservatism – any day of the week over a John Boehner or a Mitt Romney.Report
Well obviously I agree with you that there are much better candidates. Romney is so maleable he could end up a full-blown liberal after 4 years if Democrats put enough ideas in his head.Report
Well, now you know one who doesn’t believe Romney is an empty suit. This isn’t a partisan thing either: in my memory the one Presidential candidate from our team who was an empty suit was Lamar Alexander.
I guess I give some weight to the fact that Romney has a real record of accomplishment in several important jobs. Nonetheless it’s clear that a lot of people really dislike him for reasons which seem odd to me. As a candidate he’s running into too many headwinds. If a Republican is elected President next time around, I hope he gets an executive branch job. I think he’s way better than some of the guys Bush had.Report
I think Romney would make an effective bureaucrat, and I’d have no unusual reservations about him running an agency. But he’s not someone I’d want setting any kind of agenda. My problem with him as a politician, though, is precisely the same as my problem with Chris Christie – he has no discernable principles beyond telling people what they want to hear so he can obtain and maintain power. In practice, this means a willingness, once in office, to choose the politically safest option (which can mean the option the biggest donors prefer or the option voters in the biggest swing state prefer, etc.) rather than taking the types of bold steps necessary to implement a principled agenda of his own.Report
Just as an aside, I saw Romney give a speech here in Louisville at the NRA convention last May…man, was it bad. Completely insincere and so mechanical. The only one that was worse was Kay Bailey Hutchinson, but at least she was genuine. She just isn’t a great public speaker.Report
von’s intro is amazing:
“I suppose that I should say something about Sarah Palin. I know, I know, she’s pretty obscure. She’s not even a one-term govenor. She’s a quitter. She’s a losing VP candidate. She doesn’t have any expertise. She hasn’t really done much.
Kind of a waste of a post.
Still, Palin paid someone write a book for her. And she was on Oprah. That makes her newsworthy. Right?”Report
On Romney: HELL YES. I actually prefer Palin to him, as there are probably principles she does believe in.
Romeny tells people what he thinks they want to hear. That’s all. He’s a person entirely interested in gaining power and not even slightly interested in using it wisely.Report
I don’t know if I’ve ever agreed with you as much as I do now. 😉Report
Oh, when I ran across Publius Endures last year the Romney posts made me feel I’d found a kindred spirit. It amazed me through the whole campaign how many people were (and are) conned by this guy.Report
Heh. I didn’t realize you’d been reading me that long…that must have been just a few months after I started blogging. Thanks for your loyalty!Report
Found you around the end of the campaign, via Culture11, agreed with some posts, and went back to read the old ones on the campaign. Your blog is how I found the Ordinary Gentlemen in the first place.
It was the Ron Paul stuff that really impressed me. Most people pick a candidate and stick with them, and treat any bad news as just a criticism to defend against. You actually responded to the news about the mailing by re-evaluating him and deciding he wasn’t the right guy. That’s vanishingly rare, especially for supporters of fringe candidates.Report