Friday, January 9, 2015

Theresa May is...

...a member of the Conservative Party in Britain and the current UK Home Secretary. She's famous for coining the term "Nasty Party," to describe the Tories back in 2002:

"There's a lot we need to do in this party of ours. Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies. You know what some people call us – the Nasty Party."

From Wikipedia: 

The term "Nasty Party" applied to Conservative Party members with traditional conservative stances, which included lacking concern for the poor, being anti-gay and anti-minorities, and pro-business.

Many Conservatives felt this tendency was one of the reasons the Conservative Party lost the 1997 and 2001 general elections (before losing a third in 2005, and failing to win a fourth in its own right in 2010), and that the party needed to broaden its traditional base to have a chance of re-election.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, you may recall, was the Republican who said two years ago that the GOP "must stop being the stupid party." Ouch.

(You can write him off, by the way; people don't like being told they're dumb -- especially when they are.)

But you can also write off Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, even though James Downie, writing in the Washington Post, thinks Jeb Bush "should be worried" about him. It's a good piece, and Downie is right when he says:

Right now, Walker is the candidate who can most realistically unite the base and the establishment wings of the party.

But -- Pssst! -- Scott Walker doesn't have a college degree. He has a good spin on it, though: Walker left Marquette University in his senior year to take a job with IBM.

Do I care? Of course not. (College is way overrated.) Besides, I'm a Democrat and my opinion doesn't count. But would the "stupid party" (and it is the stupid party -- evolution, anyone?) really want to nominate someone for president in 2016 without a college degree? I doubt it. Vice president, maybe, but not president.

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