Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to NewsvineYou want to know how bad it's likely to be for Republicans this fall? For the first time since 1974, my south Louisiana home district in the US House will be represented by a Democrat. Bush carried this district by close to 20 points in 2004. And it just turned blue in a special election Saturday night.
Bill Kristol says this is part of why Team McCain is not at all sanguine about the prospect of facing Rev. Wright's former BFF this fall. That, and:
Some conservatives are giddy at the thought — kidding themselves that the general election will therefore be easy, that Obama will be another Dukakis. I was struck, though, in several conversations this week with McCain campaign staffers and advisers that they’re pretty sober about the task ahead. About the Dukakis analogy, for example, one McCain aide said: If in 1988 Ronald Reagan had had a 30 percent job approval rating, and 80 percent of the voters had thought we were on the wrong track, Dukakis would have won.
Bush is now less popular than Richard Nixon was when he resigned. Think about that.
Kristol also says that this is why McCain is looking hard at Bobby Jindal as a running mate. I'm divided about that. You know I love me some Bobby Jindal, but I worry about his rising too high, too fast. He's only been governor for a few months, and I hear from a source in Baton Rouge sympathetic to Jindal that the Jindalistas are way, way overconfident. Cocky, even. But boy, would I love to see him on that Republican ticket, if only so I could vote for him for president in 2012.
And: a well-known friend who knows his way around Republican politics writes to say that yes, Republicans are going to have a bad November, but come on, Woody Jenkins is one of the most unattractive Republican politicians he's ever met, and it shouldn't have been that hard to beat someone that unlikable.
Subscribe
Comments
Most of the people leaving the House this year are moderates who have been pushed aside by the party.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that they're moderates who realize that their districts are about to tip Democratic, and they don't want to face certain defeat?
Posted by: Rod Dreher | May 5, 2008 7:07 PM
"Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that they're moderates who realize that their districts are about to tip Democratic, and they don't want to face certain defeat?"
Perhaps, but you can't tell me that the party is truly happy supporting the few remaining RINOs in the House. I mean, just look at Lincoln Chaffee.
www.projo.com/news/content/CHAFEE_GOP_09-16-07_DP751KF.31dd3fe.html
Posted by: RJohnson | May 5, 2008 7:28 PM
Jeff Sullivan,
TC makes some very good points here, although I'm pretty sure the point about crunch-cons favouring public hanging for those buying non-locally-produced food was meant as a friendly dig. Er, right?
Or an unfriendly dig. I do think that the problem with the Republican party today is that is contains too few rank and file voters committed to the free enterprise system. As Mark Steyn often writes, we have one and one-half socialist parties in the US. All of the Democrat party and about half of the Republian party is committed to creeping socialism or unwilling to seriously oppose it.
Posted by: TC | May 5, 2008 8:03 PM
I, for one, am wishing that Clinton would finally realize she's lost so we can actually get this election started, because I'm rather curious about something:
What is McCain going to run on?
It's a serious question. Almost everything that differentiates him from Obama is poisonous.
The war=poisonous
Not fixing health care=poisonous
Bush=poisonous
I mean, seriously, the rule is move to the outside for the primary, inside for the election. The problem is that 'inside' for Republicans is, at this point, nowhere near the center. McCain was, according to the right, way too moderate, but everyone else seems to think he's Bush.
Whereas, for the Democrats, 'outside' isn't actually too far off where the nation is. I mean, a long primary is supposed to kill the party because they'd have to pander to their party's far-wing to get elected much more than normal, so the move back would be impossible. Well, they both did go pretty far left. And yet we've got record turnout for primaries, and we've still got both of them roughly tied with McCain.
The obvious explanation is that entire nation, at this point, is rather farther to the left than anyone suspected. I suspect we'll know after the first debate if Clinton will finally get the heck out of the way.
Posted by: DavidTC | May 5, 2008 11:17 PM
Rod, Being from Louisiana and from that area you know you are not exactly telling the whole story here :)
Woody Jenkins as you know is a person that many people just don't like. Including many conservatives. I fond him a tad of a mean spirited guy. He has a ton of people who don't wish to see him back on the political scene. When he ran against Mary Landrieu I really had to force myself to vote for him. I am not sure that National politics played much a fact in peoples minds in this. I think many could not just stomach Woody being their Congressman. As soon as he won the primary I knew we we were in trouble
Posted by: jh | May 6, 2008 12:40 AM
Post a Comment
Are you aware of our Rules of Conduct?