Eugene Robinson wrote today in The Washington Post that Rick Santorum could take Republicans down with him. These days, any place that you can find left-leaning commentary has something rightfully slagging Santorum and his extremist ideologies. There is a treasure trove of low-hanging Santorum fruit that we tee up and rip apart, and I don’t like it one bit.
If Santorum is indeed the Francesco Schettino of the 2012 GOP, then let’s sit back, grab some pop corn, and enjoy watching the good captain run this capsizing ship into the beach. Save the heavy ammunition in case he makes it to the general election, for when after the GOP chooses a candidate more difficult to elect than Romney. Don’t do any heavy lifting for Mitt.
Please share widely!
mornin’ glory, allow me to point out that this proposal (or attempted ukase) runs contrary to deeply cherished Values of the entire Jackass Family.
The best formulation Paddy knows of used to be, maybe still is, pinned to a
wall of Mr. Bartley’s Burger Shanty in 02138 and reads "Life is uncertain: eat dessert first.”
Anybooby seriously in quest of sermonizin’ in favor of deferred gratification would do well to apply to a severe
selfservative, if she can find one.
Happy days.
I can’t divine what much of your comment actually means, but I really like the word selfservative.
I understand that the right wing set back its influence by more than a decade when its dominance of the GOP made Barry Goldwater the nominee. Maybe Rick Santorum is the new Barry Goldwater.
I am haunted by the ghost of Ronald Reagan. I remember celebrating each step he took towards nomination, sure that Jimmy Carter would roll over him in a landslide. I remember my confidence that America would surely see through the vacuous nothingness of his empty platitudes. I remember laughing out loud at his “Voodoo Economics”, sure that nobody would take such nonsense seriously.
I was wrong. We still suffer the consequences of the Reagan administration.
I’m not sure what, if anything, I suggest we do differently. Nevertheless, I think that assuming the Rick Santorum, or any other GOP nominee, is a “good captain” of a “capsizing ship” is a serious mistake.
We should never forget that millions of Americans want Rick Santorum to be our next President. That is nothing to enjoy.
The two body problem is easy. Two bodies [Dem, GOP] move in fairly predictable, stable ways, alternately pitching to the middle to gain the majority share and a moderate* viewpoint.
The three body problem, however, is enormously complex. The social conservatives and/or tea partiers are essentially threatening to form a third party, albeit not necessarily explicitly so. In doing so, they make things remarkably unstable. As a result, we have a moderate who wears the D label, another moderate pitching right wearing the R label, and a right-winger wearing the R label. It’s tremendously unstable.
If we get Romney as the nominee, he’ll have to pitch back leftward, but be severely weakened for doing so… both because he flips his flopped flip and because the Santorobots might not fund/rally/vote for Romney as a result. Meantime, Obama holds the middle for the election. For liberals, the risk/reward is somewhat low, relatively speaking. If we get Santorum as the nominee, he’ll have to come back to the center a bit, but if he does too much he risks alienating the base which won him the nominee, although it will help him pick up Romnatons. Mean time, moderates may well be repulsed. Risk/reward: much higher. Better chance of an Obama win, but the downside of a loss is much much worse.
IMO, the best case is a nasty primary that drags both of their unfavorables to the floor. Keep trying to out-right-wing each other, and keep being nasty while drawing down the funds. In the mean time, we Dems will ensure that Obama, Warren, JK3, and perhaps some out-of-state candidates are well funded and organized.
* I define moderate to be the median voter’s viewpoint, so to speak
One thing I always keep in mind is that any major party nominee has the potential to be elected. It is a long time between now and November and none of us can predict how it will play out. I really don’t want to have to move to another country.
But what has helped to solidify my thinking was this post the other day on Daily KOS.
And, as the author of that post explains with examples, there will be collateral damage that results from that rhetoric.
Read the whole post.
I’m hoping for a long, bloody primary with Romney squeaking it out.
I understand this line of thinking, but I’m not sure I agree with it. If Obama beats Romney by a handful of votes, sure, we get a 2nd term, but the narrative of the closely-divided country continues apace, which makes it very hard to get anything done. If, on the other hand, Obama wipes the floor with Santorum, and especially if that happens along with a decent story in Congress, then Obama’s got momentum, he’s got a mandate, and it’s simply not possible to claim that the country is divided down the middle.
What if Mr. Santorum defeats Barack Obama by a handful of votes and the House and Senate each move a few seats towards the right?
I think that welcoming superstitious self-aggrandizing hate-mongering bigots into the public sphere is a bad idea. Period.
A President Romney won’t be that much better than a President Santorum, in my opinion. I think Obama and his organization would fare much better against a Santorum campaign, especially since I think a lot of the heavy hitters of the GOP machine would either sit this campaign out or go in half-hearted for Santorum.
I don’t totally agree with this. I think these backwards, regressive ideas grow like fungus in the dark. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Let’s get these people to expose themselves and their backwards thinking in a public setting and put those ideas up against our reason, our substance, our articulate President. We have the advantage. The best way to get rid of these ideas is through educating the public and giving a man enough rope.
I disagree that Romney would be not that much worse than Santorum. We had the guy as Governor, and while he wasn’t a good Governor, the Commonwealth survived him. I am not so confident that the country would not tip over into full-on religious craziness if Santorum took the White House. Plus, there’s that Overton window – every time the R party accepts a crazy candidate as a serious voice, it pushes them and the entire political scene farther toward the crazy. The best outcome is for them to repudiate the nuts. I hope they do. If that makes Obama work harder to differentiate himself from a more-moderate opponent, so much the better (not that I really expect that to happen).
We survived Romney for multiple reasons, but there is one key difference between Mass state government and the Federal Government: a super super majority of Democrats in the Mass state legislature and court lacking hard core right-wingers like Scalia, Thomas, and Chief Justice Roberts.
This will not be the case with any Republican president. While Santorum will not be there, what ever craziness not articulated by Romney will be articulated by the Congress and old Multiple Choice Mitt will not have the backbone to stand up to it.
I really can’t see a convincing argument that, from our progressive point of view, Mitt Romney is a clear-cut better choice over Santorum.
You seem to be arguing that unless a Republican who has the “backbone to stand up to it” wins the nomination, it doesn’t matter which of them wins. I don’t think any of them pass that test (besides Paul, on some issues). I think it does matter, for the reasons I discussed above and below.
Well, then we would learn something quite interesting about the American electorate.
I think if Obama loses to Santorum then it means he was not going to win at all in 2012.
that’s my point, stated differently. At the end of the day, it is up to the American people to decide who they want for president. I hope, and believe, that they will choose Obama over any of the GOP candidates, and I also think that a lot of those voters who could go either way, and who conceivably would back Romney out of a sense that maybe he’s better than the status quo, would not back Santorum. But I could be wrong, and if I am, well, there it is.
The point of the original comment above that references the Kos article is that it is more than just winning and losing. What are the discussions that happen in the public sphere with each GOP candidate as nominee? And who might get hurt in the process?
The mainstream media does not seem to be able to call crazy “crazy” and is just an echo machine for whatever the candidate says. Santorum’s anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-just-about-everything-I-believe-in rhetoric will get reported on the news every day in a “he said this” manner, with little to no challenge. Obama might win, but a whole lot of people are going to think “it must be OK to believe this stuff” since a presidential candidate talked about it – and then possibly act out on it.
We might beat it to death here on BMG, but elsewhere, not so much.
Bad ideas can’t be killed unless they are talked about out in the open.
I think there would be nothing better for progressive-thinking people than to have a bigot on TV representing the Republican party every day espousing dark-age ideas like contraception being immoral and that gay people are the enemy. This gives Obama and the rest of us the opportunity to systematically dismantle and destroy these idiotic arguments and educate Americans about how a modern society should function.
Every time a bad idea is kept to oneself or goes unexpressed is a missed opportunity for people on our side to spread the disinfectant of sunshine that kills pernicious beliefs.
Granted, 30%-ish of Americans are impervious to facts and will eat up whatever bigoted, ass-backwards ideas are presented by Santorum. But the history of social change – like the civil rights movement, gay liberation, and marriage equality fights – tells me that fighting these bad ideas in public is the quickest way to eradicate virulent thinking.
That isn’t going to happen. We and Obama may completely dismantle those ideas, but the net effect is not going to be destroying them. The fact that all the major “news” sources will report them as legitimate ideas is going to give them legitimacy in the minds of many people. Having many people think they are legitimate is going to craze the entire political atmosphere. Previous crazy ideas undergoing this process is exactly what allows these crazy ideas to be allowed out in public without effective ridicule. If Republican voters reject the candidates espousing these ideas, it may serve to prevent further legitimization of them. Otherwise, we can expect more of them.
I fear you are naive when you suggest that this is about killing “bad ideas” in some sort of open marketplace. It’s not.
The medium is about manufacturing desire, and is extraordinarily effective when managed by those who know what they are doing. There is a reason why corporate America spends so much money on television advertising — it works. Does anybody really drink Budweiser or Miller because they like the taste more than their other choices?
The product being sold by the GOP is bigotry, prejudice and — in this case —
superstitiousreligious extremism as a solution to all our ills. The desire being fueled by this campaign is ugly, dangerous, and explosive blood lust. Lust for scapegoats, almost always directed at segments that are less powerful and more vulnerable (because such mobs are inevitably cowardly). Lust that inevitably brings violence, bloodshed, and chaos — followed by harsh dictatorial constraints (imposed by governments, warlords, or both).Spreading sunshine is a great metaphor. It is highly ineffective against vast quantities of volatile gasoline being sprayed all over the floor, scented with manure to disguise its explosive nature. The slightest spark will ignite an enormous explosion, and the house is already smoldering.
Rick Santorum envisions an American Taliban. A campaign of religiously-motivated terror accompanies that as night follows day. This is a hallmark of religious extremism, and has little do with whether the religion of choice is Islam or Christianity.
and I’m hunting wabbits, so be vewy, vewy quiet!” Or maybe it’s campaign season and by not saying certain things something good will happen.
I may not be taking TBlade’s post in the humorous way I think it was intended, but this idea that we should not say what we think because it might give the bad guys some advantage is annoying. I’ve been corrected more than once for suggesting Scott Brown can lose the election. The idea, I presume, is that what I say will somehow stop people from working hard to defeat him.