Unnamed Republican consultants tell Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic that they are “struggling with” the Palin pick. “They expect her to have a good week… and then to crash and burn when she hits the campaign trail as scrutiny catches up with her.”
Perhaps. That’s one reaction from people angry that someone was chosen whose campaign business it never even occurred to them to seek. On the larger point, if you had to pick a politician in the United States most likely to say something embarrassing to party and candidate, your best guide to whether that would happen would be whether the person in question had a history of such misbehavior. Palin is from a small far-away state, but she took on a powerful party Establishment during the era of YouTube. There were plenty of people gunning for her. One can presume that if she had a history of gaffe-making, there would already be at least a limited record of it.
On the other hand, Joe Biden is the gaffe gift that keeps on giving — just last year he made two huge blunders, one about Obama being nice and clean for a black man, and another about how you have to speak in an Indian accent to get served at a 7-11. Biden has been making mistakes like this for at least two decades on a fairly regular basis. If you had to bet, the smart money would be on Biden blowing it first — because he has stuck his foot in his mouth so frequently before and because even over the past week he has shown signs of indiscipline and an overenthusiastic mouth.
Arlen Specter embodies all the worst attributes of a Democratic system of government. He has become a complete creature of Washington over the past 30 years.
I’ve voted very nearly straight Republican for all the time Specter has been mouldering in office. Enough is enough. I’ll be voting against him in the primary and in the general in the event he survives the primary.
I’d rather be abused by an honest new face Democrat if it comes to that.
And in a statewide election, Toomey will get 35% of the vote. Remember, he couldn’t even knock off Specter when conservatives were riding high. If you take out Specter, you guarantee a Democratic pick up. As a moderate deal maker, with seniority on the Judiciary Committee, Specter has more power than the rest of the GOP Senators combined.
You Republicans just love failure. Now you’ve found a new way to chase moderates from the party. You might as well just rename yourselves the Confederate Party and be done with it.
Sen. Specter says
“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the proposed cuts ‘do violence to what we are trying to do for the future,’ especially on education. Her objections are a warning to conservatives that more cuts would be unlikely to win House approval. They are also an admission of THE HIGH PRICE THAT MODERATES HAVE BEEN ABLE TO EXTRACT for their support of stimulus legislation.”
Assuming that the “moderate” neocomrades of the militant extremist Republican Party actually take delivery on that UPPER CASE pound of flesh, what do they do with it? How do they benefit from it?
Almost the whole Big Management Party pack adores ‘moderation’ as exemplified by certain régimes in the neo-Levant, but what exotic beauties does Citizen Arlen expect the ideobuddies of Gen. Mubárak and _les altesses royales du Ryad_ and His Háshemí Highness to see in the self-restraint of Citizeness Olympia and Citizeness Susan and himself?
Neocomrade J. Tobin insinuates that the Heroines of Laodicaea are only moderatin’ it for Maine and Pennsylvania, but how does that work, exactly? Are those two provinces threatened by excessive education in some special way?
In the shop window the sign plainly said “The Price of Specter’s Stimulus Support,” but no such product is available inside. Instead, one gets a lecture about how happy Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh would be to get rid of poor old A. S. Not news, and not the least bit stimulatin’ either.
Happy days.
It would be unseemly for the Democrats to act on their own to flush our money down the toilet or give it to their best buddies. They need “Republicans” to make the robbery “bipartisan”.
Spectored again, the GOP just can’t help itself.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) thinks Contentions is stupid.
“We cannot be a regional party and expect to get back in the majority,” the senator said. Touting the appeal of Sen. Susan Collins in a blue state like Maine, Cornyn added, “We need to find the candidates that fit those states. We can’t decide here in Washington, sort of have an ideological litmus test and say, ‘Well, we don’t want people who disagree with us about issues X, Y and Z.’ We need to find Republicans who can win in those states.’
Got that? The ideological litmus test is a sure road to failure. You need more Specters and Collins’s, not fewer.
thehill.com/leading-the-news/cornyn-pitch-big-tent-to-win-back-senate-2009-02-08.html
This article does not seem to articulate how Toomey would win the general election in Pennsylvania.
I have this feeling that the fix was in on the stimulus, that the Republicans wanted the bill to pass so that they could not be accused of having stopped it – how would we know the Dems had failed unless their bill passed? – but they didn’t want to get blamed for supporting it either. The obvious solution was to let a few “moderate” Republican Senators “betray” the party and support the bill. You can hear Bre’r McConnelll shouting to Bre’r Spector “Vote your conscience, but whatever you do, don’t throw the party into that stimulus patch!”