“Governor Goldilocks”: Scott Walker’s Pitch, To Many Conservative Activists, Is Just Right…..For Now
There was another big GOP presidential cattle call this weekend, at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Oklahoma City. The ostensible star, because he won a straw poll among about a thousand or so of the attendees, was Dr. Ben Carson (achieving a tactical victory over the other candidate who made a visible effort to win the thing, Ted Cruz, handicapped by being stuck in Washington along with Rand Paul for NSA reform/Patriot Act votes).
But by most accounts the candidate who got the most from the event for the least effort was Scott Walker, who finished second in the straw poll without lifting a finger. More to the point, Walker was buzzworthy, per the Washington Examiner‘s Timothy Carney:
1) His strong second-place finish in the straw poll was impressive because he was the only candidate to post double digits without an organized straw poll effort.
2) Pacing the stage, jacketless, in a blue shirt, sleeves rolled up, Walker’s speaking style was easy and comfortable. Some attendees found him too low-key. Most saw his style as confident and assuring
3) What recommends Walker most to Republican voters is his successful battles with powerful labor unions, the media, and the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Walker made these battles — including his recall election victory — the focus of his talk.
4) Walker was able to tick off a long list of legislative accomplishments, touching on all the major conservative policy priorities: cutting spending, cutting taxes, bringing the bureaucracy to heel, defunding Planned Parenthood, expanding gun rights, passing right to work, requiring photo ID for voters and so on.
5) Walker cast his political and policy wins as populist victories over powerful insiders. He described his fight against the government unions as “taking power out of the hands the big-government special interests” and putting it in the hands of ordinary people.
Yeah, well, ordinary people like his friends the Koch Brothers. But here’s how Carney describes Walker’s clincher contrasting his record with that of his GOP rivals:
Walker closed with a pointed critique of his rivals. He said many Washington politicians are good at picking fights, but they don’t win — a clear reference to Cruz’s failed Obamacare shutdown, and Marco Rubio and Paul’s lack of a record. Alternatively, many Republicans, Walker said, are good at winning races, but they never fight for important, tough things — presumably referring to Christie and Bush.
In other words, Walker is continuing to offer an electability pitch based on overwhelming his liberal opponents–at both the ballot box and in the legislature–rather than reasoning with them or cutting deals. Cruz can rage; Paul can make outlandish outreach promises; and Bush and Rubio can offer to sweet-talk Democrats or seduce swing voters. Walker’s pitch, to many conservative activists, is just right.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 25, 2015
“Bad For The Party, Bad For The Country”: The GOP’s Clamorous, Counterproductive 2016 Circus
Another day, another trio of new candidates for the Republican presidential nomination.
A brain surgeon with no particular feel for politics. A business executive who lost the only election she ever entered. And the most famous graduate of Ouachita Bible College, who made a stop in the Arkansas’ governor’s house before becoming a talk-show host. Just throw Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Mike Huckabee on the pile.
It’s already a big pile: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio are official. Jeb Bush is officially unofficial, just as Rick Santorum, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, and George Pataki are. Lindsey Graham and John Kasich are unofficially unofficial. But they are thinking about it! A few of these would-be candidates are sure to find the likelihood of embarrassment too great, and will stop before they officially start. But I’m betting that the first debates will include 10 or more candidates.
So has the addition of this week’s candidates added to the ferment of ideas? No, not really.
In some ways, Fiorina understands the minds of many modern primary voters. She’s all but promised to be a paladin of the existing orthodoxy of her party’s conservative base. So she sells herself on her ability to sell. And she sells her identity. On day one of her campaign, she rattled off the talking points her nomination would cross off Hillary Clinton’s list. She told reporters: “Because I am a woman, there are many things she can’t say. She can’t play the gender card. She can’t talk about being the first woman president. She can’t talk about the war on women.” Mutually assured decorum, I guess.
In a lineup of politicians, the non-politician Ben Carson is easily the most impressive and accomplished person in the room. But his charm is almost entirely in being charmless. He speaks with great poise, which is refreshing. But his professed political views, and his manner of expressing them, are distinguishable only in volume and lack of spittle from the apocryphal “paranoid right-wing uncle” that is the foil of every annual Thanksgiving advice column.
Mike Huckabee is the most plausible of the three, actually having been elected to a statewide office. He also performed not-terribly when he ran for president in 2008. As a bonus, he offers some good and some bad populist critiques of the party’s establishment. Is the magic still there? I’m not sure. Ted Cruz has already soaked up so much of the “I hate the Establishment and they hate me” cred. And Cruz is going directly after Huckabee’s base of evangelical voters, while Huckabee himself has yet to prove he can win the middle-income Catholics and moderate voters of the Midwest. It’s Iowa or bust for Huck.
Is any of this good for the party or the nation? No, not really.
There is broad agreement among elite Republicans that the sheer number of serious and unserious candidates may hurt the party. It crams the debate stage, elicits shallow questions, and reduces the nationally televised answers to the tiniest sound-bites or hand-raises. It’s bad for the party, and the country. It’s also a can’t-lose deal for any would-be candidate willing to endure flights to Des Moines and house parties in Nashua.
A losing campaign can generate new interest in your career. It connects you with the wealthiest backers of your party. And it generates mailing lists and emailing lists of people who are not quite as wealthy but whose contacts can be useful for selling books, or filling up a local venue and making you seem like an important voice in the life of the Republic. Because the Republican Party has a para-party shadow in the institutions of the conservative movement and conservative-media complex, even a failed presidential campaign can be quite a successful life-proposition.
And hey, if worse comes to worst, and the bottom falls out of your “candidacy,” you can just rent or sell outright the names and whatever data you collected to the highest-bidding erection pill or diabetes-treatment interests. I see you voted for Ben Carson. Are you interested in seeds that will help you survive the collapse of our currency?
By: Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week, May 5, 2015
“Doing Real Vetting Should Be Part Of The Job”: Why Conservative Media Should Be Tough On Republican Candidates
When the RNC announced a few weeks ago that conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt was going to moderate a primary debate, many liberals ridiculed it as evidence that they wanted to shield their candidates from anything but softball questions. I argued that it was a good thing, first because the journalists (mostly from TV) who have moderated primary debates in the past have done such a terrible job, and second because primaries should be about what people within the party think. Someone with an interest in picking the best nominee might actually be tougher on the candidates, and would certainly have a better sense of what will matter to primary voters.
I don’t listen to Hugh Hewitt, so I can’t make any detailed assessment of his oeuvre, but though he’s certainly a partisan Republican he has a reputation as one of the better interviewers on the right. Yesterday, he interviewed Ben Carson and seemed to expose some gaps in Carson’s knowledge. This is being touted in some quarters as Carson showing his ignorance, but I actually think it’s an example of what partisan media ought to do during a primary.
I don’t know if Hewitt thinks of his mission this way, but if I were a conservative media figure like him, the last thing I’d want is a repeat of the nincompoop parade that was the 2012 GOP primaries. So doing some real vetting should be part of the job: asking difficult questions, exposing the areas of weakness that will eventually come up anyway, not to mention illuminating the real areas of distinctions that separate the candidates.
So did Hewitt ambush Carson? Maybe a bit, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with what he asked. In this case, it was about what might draw us into a war with Russia. Yes, Carson displayed some momentary confusion about NATO and the Baltic states, but candidates have done far worse (see here, for instance). And running for president ought to be hard. The job is hard. If we’re going to give someone that kind of power, there’s almost no question too tricky or detailed for them to be asked.
Now I’m no fan of Ben Carson, not by a long shot. But Hewitt asks him exactly the right question about being an amateur in politics, and Carson’s answer isn’t so terrible. Here’s the exchange:
HH: And so what I worry about as a Republican, as a conservative, is that because you’ve been being a great neurosurgeon all these years, you haven’t been deep into geopolitics, and that the same kind of questions that tripped up Sarah Palin early in her campaign are going to trip you up when, for example, the gotcha question, does she believe in the Bush doctrine when it depends on how you define the Bush doctrine. And so how are you going to navigate that, because I mean, you’ve only, have you been doing geopolitics? Do you read this stuff? Do you immerse yourself in it?
BC: I ‘ve read a lot in the last six months, no question about that. There’s a lot of material to learn. There’s no question about that. But again, I have to go back to something that I feel is a fundamental problem, and that is we spend too much time trying to get into these little details that are easily within the purview of the experts that you have available to you. And I think where we get lost is not being able to define what our real mission is, and not being able to strategize in terms of how do we defeat our enemies, how do we support our allies? I could spend, you know, the next six years learning all the details of all the SALT treaties and every other treaty that’s ever been done and completely miss the boat.
HH: Well, that’s possible, and I want to be respectful in posing this. But I mean, you wouldn’t expect me to become a neurosurgeon in a couple of years. And I wouldn’t expect you to be able to access and understand and collate the information necessary to be a global strategist in a couple of years. Is it fair for people to worry that you just haven’t been in the world strategy long enough to be competent to imagine you in the Oval Office deciding these things? I mean, we’ve tried an amateur for the last six years and look what it got us.
BC: Well, if you go to, let’s say, a very well-run hospital, you’re going to have a president of the hospital or chief administrator. He probably doesn’t know a whole lot about cardiac surgery, probably doesn’t know a whole lot about neurosurgery or pediatric infectious disease. But he knows how to put together a structure where the strength of all those departments work effectively. And as far as having an amateur in the Oval Office in the last six years, I would take issue with that. I would say that this man has been able to accomplish a great deal. It’s maybe not the things that you and I want accomplished, but in terms of fundamentally changing this nation and putting it on a different footing? I think he’s done quite a masterful job.
Ben Carson obviously isn’t going to be the GOP nominee; his run for the White House is part of a media strategy whose end point is a Fox gig or a talk radio show, supplemented by revenue from books revealing the shocking story of how liberals are destroying America. But you have to give him credit for pushing back on the idea so common in conservative circles that Barack Obama is some kind of incompetent dolt (he can’t give a speech without a teleprompter, ha ha!).
In any case, this is how interviews from conservative talk show hosts ought to go. Carson can go on Sean Hannity’s show and get a bunch of softball questions, and the answers will make the viewers nod their heads in agreement. But that doesn’t do them any good. They’ll be much better served if all their candidates get the toughest interviews possible now, and conservatives are the ones to do it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 19, 2015
“Clowns, Stunts, And Acrobatics”: The ‘Traveling Circus’ The RNC Can’t Stop
Nearly two years ago, with his party still licking its wounds after a rough 2012 cycle, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus looked ahead to the 2016 presidential race and focused on a specific goal: far fewer debates.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said Friday he was trying to stop the party’s primary process from transforming into a “traveling circus.”
“Quite frankly, I’m someone – I don’t think having our candidates running around in a traveling circus and doing 23 debates, slicing and dicing each other is in the best interests of our party,” Priebus said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
There’s little doubt that Priebus’ concerns were rooted in fact. The 2012 debates for the Republican presidential candidates were often entertaining, but they didn’t do any favors for the aspirants themselves. When the Republican National Committee sharply curtailed the total number of debates for the 2016 race – and prioritized events on Fox – it didn’t come as a surprise.
But as the Republicans’ presidential field takes shape, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the “traveling circus” is not wholly dependent on debates – a circus needs clowns, stunts, and acrobatics, and the likely 2016 candidates are already providing plenty of antics for our viewing pleasure.
* The entire party is facing a curious new litmus test about whether President Obama is a patriot and a Christian. It’s a test Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is failing badly.
* This comes on the heels of a vaccinations litmus test that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) failed – one of many key issues the senator doesn’t seem to understand.
* Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) is desperate to prove he’s his “own man” by hiring his brother’s and his father’s team of advisers, and advancing his ambitions with his brother’s and his father’s team of donors.
* New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) operation appears to be moving backwards – his vaccinations flub didn’t help – as his popularity falls quickly in his home state.
* Right-wing neurosurgeon Ben Carson (R) has positioned himself as a rare candidate who supports war crimes.
* The closer Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) gets to launching his campaign, the more some party officials plead with him not to run.
* Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) wants states to pursue nullification if the Supreme Court endorses marriage equality.
* Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) seems eager to say and/or do anything to get attention.
* A variety of GOP candidates have set up private meetings with Donald Trump.
The Greatest Show on Earth? Probably not, though it’s clear the “traveling circus” is well underway, and there’s very little Reince Priebus can do about it.
The problem isn’t the debates, per se. Rather, it’s the candidates themselves who run the risk of embarrassing themselves and their party. As the last few weeks have reminded us, they don’t need a debate platform to cause trouble.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 23, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 