I read an excellent opinion piece today (Paul Krugman: “Fearing Fear Itself”) on why none of the front runners amongst the Republican candidates stands a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the next election:
…Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged the nation not to succumb to “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” But that was then.
Today, many of the men who hope to be the next president — including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination — have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns.
Consider, for a moment, the implications of the fact that Rudy Giuliani is taking foreign policy advice from Norman Podhoretz, who wants us to start bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible.”
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Mr. Podhoretz, in short, is engaging in what my relatives call crazy talk. Yet he is being treated with respect by the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination. And Mr. Podhoretz’s rants are, if anything, saner than some of what we’ve been hearing from some of Mr. Giuliani’s rivals.
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Most Americans have now regained their balance. But the Republican base, which lapped up the administration’s rhetoric about the axis of evil and the war on terror, remains infected by the fear the Bushies stirred up…
Opinion | Fearing Fear Itself – The New York Times
Only Ron Paul stands a chance of winning against the Democrats this time around, and he’s rapidly being shown the door by the core of the Republican party, who don’t want to hear that their fears are baseless.
This is shaping up like all of the other Presidential elections that I’ve witnessed. I don’t know why anyone pays attention to this stuff anymore. The throwing of the election by one party or the other, by offering up a candidate that only the core of the party would ever vote for (gun-controlling Mondale, socialist snoopy Dukakis, dead fish Dole, wooden Gore, lying Kerry) and with third party candidates excluded from real participation, they essentially hand the election to the other major party. With the exceptions of the elections of 1980 and 1996, there was never any question in my mind who was going to win.
…and I really don’t want to hear about irregularities in the statistical ties that have dominated the 21st century elections. I’m well aware of the problems, they just aren’t relevant to the candidates chosen by the dominant parties, and the purposes behind their choice.
In all the other elections it seemed clear to me that the opposition party had chosen a candidate that was guaranteed to loose. It’s not as hard as you might imagine, to do this. The average Joe wants to vote for a winner (don’t ask me why that is, but I’ve talked to enough people, and seen enough data to know this is true) and the primaries can be reasonably easy to manipulate by excluding unwanted candidates and orchestrating media exposure (as was done to last elections Democratic favorite) so as to show your favored candidate as winning early enough to start the landslide.
This is clearly shaping up to be a handover election (no matter what Ol’ Joey, the Republican mouthpiece has to say about it) which is why the Democratic candidates feel secure enough to tell us all about their expensive and invasive social programs in advance (programs that the Republican front runners strangely feel the urge to parrot, albeit to a lesser extent) so that the election, when it occurs, will be a mandate for handing healthcare (and possibly control of the internet) over to the federal government.
Beauty pageants disguised as good government (election is just a popularity contest, after all) It might be more interesting if the candidates weren’t so old and wrinkly.
… And if the designated winner wasn’t transparently obvious.
Postscript
I don’t know who this guy is trying to fool here. Gore should have won in 2000. Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett did a judicial end-run that should have been flagged as out of bounds. Texas’ insane love of sports made Bush II look like a juggernaut from a Texas perspective. From a national perspective, Al Gore was still the sane choice and possibly could have been the winner had the recount been allowed to finish before the decision was made.
However, Obama was clearly going to win in 2008. That much is true.
