...I really do. Life is complicated and marriage is harder than it looks. Let he or she among us without sin throw the first stone. I wish him and his wife well.
With that out of the way, let's get back to handicapping the Republican field for 2012. Sanford and John Ensign are now out, of course. Bobby Jindal is probably being red-shirted for at least 2016, Jon Huntsman has been exiled to China, and I just don't see Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin as serious contenders. Haley Barbour is starting to get mentioned, although I thought the New Republic put it best when it said:
There are people who think that the solution to the GOP's image problem is to nominate a sleazy, corpulent, cigar-chomping lobbyist from the Deep South? Is Boss Hogg unavailable?
Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney are too boring, too white bread--just the opposite of what the Republicans need right now. Absent a depression, Obama would crush either one of them. So who does that leave? My best bet is that the 2012 nominee is not yet on the radar, much as Obama wasn't at this point in the last cycle. But that sounds like a cop-out, and I've never been one to shy away from having an opinion. So as of today (Intrade changes daily, why can't I?), I'll say Newt Gingrich has the best shot. Despite all his baggage, he probably has more ideas in a day than most other politicians have in a lifetime. He's also an excellent debater and a proven opposition leader. And if the economy doesn't recover by 2012, he can claim to have been against the Bush/Paulson/Bernanke/Geithner/Obama/Summers policies all along.
But four years is a long time, at least in dog and economic years, and I expect the economy will have responded to Obama's stimulus by then, just as the economy responded to Reagan's tax cuts by 1984. And so whoever gets the Republican nod in 2012 could meet a similar fate as that of Walter Mondale--a complete drubbing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment