Campaign 2008

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Top underdogs are Mike Huckabee (easiest slogan in American politics) & Tommy Thompson (another successful, charismatic executive) on the Right; Bill Richardson (successful executive, very charismatic) & Wesley Clark (military cred will be BIG)

 

I like him. He has some real libertarian attributes.

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Okay, you like him, I like him. He's supremely qualified for the job, he's been a Congressman, UN Ambassador, cabinet secretary, and a governor.

 

But...

 

Do you think people might object because he doesn't "look like" a president?

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Bush Jr - Looks like a retarded monkey that thinks he's in a John Wayne movie

Clinton - Drunken country bumpkin

Bush Sr - 100 lb stock broker

Reagan - Looked like a President

Carter - Goofy farmer

Ford - Clumsy oaf

Nixon - Creepy uncle

Lyndon Johnson - Dumbo

JFK - Looked like a President

Ike - Grandpa

 

To answer your question, no.

 

Also, Tommy Thompson filed his exploratory committee papers yesterday.

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"Look like a president" was my code for tall, slender, white guy. It'd be a real shame if his appearance effected his prospects, but I'm afraid it will.

 

He'd probably make a great president, and I'd definitely vote for him. I don't even think the fact that he's Hispanic will be held against him, but he'd have a much better chance of winning if looked more like Jimmy Smits and less like Carlos Mencia.

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Bayh is out.

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Bayh is out.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,236897,00.html

 

Damn it.

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Jerk, youre the only person I've ever heard of to think a Presidential candidate needs to be 'tall, slender, white'. We're beyond the 'white' thing by now (in the civilized regions of the country) and few Presidents of the last century have been tall/slender...Bush Sr was but wasnt even considered tall, Clinton was chubby, Carter didnt really fit that bill, nor Nixon, nor Bush Jr, or LBJ, or FDR.

 

Tall/slender/white - Ike, JFK, Reagen, was Ford?, was Truman?

 

It really doesn't matter.

 

The Dems went with guys they felt looked the part the most before (Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, Adlai) and failed. If its a trait that comes with a solid candidate, it can be a plus, but it is far from a driving point.

[Guest "Go, Mordecai!"]

An Ohio admirer, Harry Daugherty, began to promote Harding for the 1920 Republican nomination because, he later explained, "He looked like a President."

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Harry Daugherty was EXTREMELY overrated in his relation to Harding's success. Daugherty wanted desperately to be the Mark Hanna for his generation, but wasnt even in the same league. Then, once Harding was elected President, with far less help than his buddy Harry told everyone that would listen, he made the biggest mistake of his career in naming Daugherty his Attorney General. The result - Teapot Dome and a reputation as a bad president.

 

That said, Harding absolutely 'looked the part', especially for his time period. He wanted to follow in his homeboy McKinley's footsteps (like Daugherty with Hanna) and succeded at that, helped more than a little by sharing that royal Victorian look. Neither Harding nor McKinley were 'slender' either.

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Jerk, youre the only person I've ever heard of to think a Presidential candidate needs to be 'tall, slender, white'. We're beyond the 'white' thing by now (in the civilized regions of the country) and few Presidents of the last century have been tall/slender...Bush Sr was but wasnt even considered tall, Clinton was chubby, Carter didnt really fit that bill, nor Nixon, nor Bush Jr, or LBJ, or FDR.

 

Tall/slender/white - Ike, JFK, Reagen, was Ford?, was Truman?

 

It really doesn't matter.

 

The Dems went with guys they felt looked the part the most before (Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, Adlai) and failed. If its a trait that comes with a solid candidate, it can be a plus, but it is far from a driving point.

So I think a Presidential candidate needs to be 'tall, slender, white'? Really? When did I say that, exactly?

 

What I said was:

"It'd be a real shame if his appearance effected his prospects, but I'm afraid it will. He'd probably make a great president, and I'd definitely vote for him."

 

NOT the same thing.

 

And did you just say Dukakis looked like a president?

 

 

THAT Dukakis?

 

On a subconscious level, looking like a president definitely helps you get elected, though. Historically, the taller candidate usually wins.

 

Clinton was taller than Bush Sr., and Bush Sr. was taller than Dukakis. Ford, Truman, and LBJ got the office through inheritance. I don't think FDR (when he used leg braces obviously) was short for his time. Gore actually did win the popular vote. Carter, Nixon, and Kerry are exceptions, obviously. Eisenhower looked more like a president than Stevenson did, but he was Ike, so looks didn't matter because he was already so popular. Reagan and JFK really looked like presidents, and also happen to be the two most beloved presidents of the last half century (could be coincidence, though).

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Ugh, like talking to a child.

 

Dukakis looked Presidential. The Republicans used that moronic photo op against him. Something the Democrats should have used against Bush in '04, when he dressed up like a GI Joe to declare 'mission accomplished' on that boat the year before, but Team Kerry lacked anything resembling balls. Also, Dukakis, though looking respectable and bright, was a dismal candidate led by a horific manager in Manbeast Estrich. Bentsen/Jackson should have been the ticket that year.

 

I didn't say that you believe that tall/slender/white matters but you DID say, just a few posts up (unless you Jerked that post as well), that you think it could/will apply to the American voters. I said "no" it wont and gave several examples/reasons for that.

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Dukakis looked Presidential.

 

 

 

Bentsen/Jackson should have been the ticket that year.

Shut up. Just shut up. You've just proven you don't know anything, so just shut up.

 

 

I didn't say that you believe that tall/slender/white matters

youre the only person I've ever heard of to think a Presidential candidate needs to be 'tall, slender, white'.

???????

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Unreal.

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Thanks for playing.

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http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/12/16/D8M240Q00.html

 

Edwards will apparently announce his '08 candidacy from NOLA.

 

Drudgreport indicates that Newt wont be running.

 

It's been a pretty eventful 24 hours for the 2008 campaign. Thompson filed exploratory papers, this Edwards leak, and two would-be losers apparently have bowed out already.

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I'm sad Gingirch won't be running for the comedy value alone.

 

A disgraced and unpopular former Speaker of the House with a history of broken marriages caused by his infedelity running on a "bring back God" platform? You can't make shit that funny up. He will be missed.

 

You know, if Hillary doesn't run, Bayh and Warner are going to feel like total jackasses.

 

What are the odds of Obama opting not to run? I'd say 50/50, myself.

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Looks like ol' Newt might not be done just yet. He might still have to run to keep his hope of erasing the First Amendment so the Terrorists That Hate Us Cuz We Free don't win.

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SLAPFIGHT

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Political Quiz

 

The top headline on CNN's politics page is that John Edwards is getting ready to announce he'll run for president again. This is great news, because:

a) there's absolutely no way for John Kerry to run without looking like a huge asshole.

b) there'll be yet another person running with better campaigning skills than Hillary Clinton.

c) it gives him something to do, since he doesn't actually have a job or anything.

d) he can be the white Barrack Obama.

 

Please mark your scantron sheet for the appropriate letter and pass them forward when you finish.

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9 hours late, Slayer?

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9 hours late, Slayer?

But I'm also 9 hours early for the next CE folder slapfight

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So, for those of you just tuning in, here's our contestants:

 

Republicans

John McCain

Rudy Guiliani

Sam Brownback

Tommy Thompson

Mike Huckabee

Mitt Romney

Duncan Hunter

Tom Tancredo

 

Democrats

Tom Vilsack

Dennis Kucinich

Joe Biden

John Edwards

Hillary Clinton

Bill Richardson

John Kerry

Chris Dodd

Wesley Clark

 

Not Interested in Playing

Bill Frist

Mark Warner

Evan Bayh

Al Gore

Russ Feingold

Howard Dean

Tom Daschle

Condoleezza Rice

Jeb Bush

Dick Cheney

 

Coy Little Bastards that Like to Keep Us Guessing

Newt Gingrich

Barrack Obama

Chuck Hagel

Al Sharpton

Edited December 17, 2006 by SuperJerk

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9 hours late, Slayer?

But I'm also 9 hours early for the next CE folder slapfight

 

Can't argue with that.

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Looks like ol' Newt might not be done just yet. He might still have to run to keep his hope of erasing the First Amendment so the Terrorists That Hate Us Cuz We Free don't win.

Here's a fun article:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 — Newt Gingrich is not running for president, at least not yet. He has set his sights much higher.

 

Mr. Gingrich’s mission, as he sees it, is to save American civilization from the gravest crisis it has confronted since the Civil War. He has also set as a goal what he calls the restoration of God to a central place in American government and culture.

 

If, as a result of these endeavors, the American people should choose Mr. Gingrich to be their leader, he suggests, so be it. But, for the time being, he says he is not actively seeking the presidency, though he often appears to be.

 

Mr. Gingrich, 63, the speaker of the House from 1995 to 1998, now disdains mere politics as a distraction from what he characterizes as mortal challenges facing the United States. Prospective presidential candidates of both parties are wasting time and money at this stage of the election cycle hiring staffs, mapping strategy and courting voters, he said. Instead of doing the things typical presidential candidates are doing, Mr. Gingrich’s focus is elsewhere.

 

“Taken together, the challenges we face are greater than any since 1861,” Mr. Gingrich said in an interview Friday in his Washington office. “No party, no movement has a grip on the scale of the changes we need to make to survive as a civilization. The most important slogan for the next quarter-century is ‘Real change requires real change.’ ”

 

Mr. Gingrich has had plenty of experience in politics, having served in Congress for 20 years, bringing Republicans to a majority in the House for the first time in 40 years in 1994. That majority fell last month, brought low in part by partisan warfare and scandal, eight years after Mr. Gingrich himself was ousted for some of the same sins.

 

And while Mr. Gingrich at the moment is not hiring consultants and opening exploratory committees, others are. Analysts and even some friends of Mr. Gingrich warn that he is losing ground that will be hard to make up if he enters the race later.

 

But as other non- and quasi-candidates have demonstrated over the years, even toying with a presidential run can attract lots of attention, and with it a soapbox from which to promote an agenda.

 

In Mr. Gingrich’s case, the agenda includes a new political action committee to try to identify changes America must make to survive. It is an effort that he said would be 50 times as ambitious as the political action committee Gopac, which in the 1980s and ’90s he turned into a training ground for hundreds of Republican politicians and a personal fund-raising fief. It will be, in Mr. Gingrich’s telling, the 1994 Contract With America, which swept Republicans into power on Capitol Hill and him into the speaker’s chair, on an extra-large scale.

 

The new committee, called American Solutions for Winning the Future, will be organized as a so-called 527 group, he said. Those committees, named for a section of the tax code, can raise and spend unlimited money with minimal disclosure.

 

Mr. Gingrich said he would try to raise tens of millions of dollars through the committee to find bipartisan solutions to the nation’s problems. Any candidate of any party who wants to share in the effort will be welcome, he said.

 

The committee will also promote Mr. Gingrich’s latest manifesto, a 10-point Contract With America for the 21st century, which includes Social Security privatization, electoral reform, radical streamlining of government, and “patriotic education” for schoolchildren and immigrants. The document also includes a call to “recenter America on the creator from whom all our liberties come” and to appoint judges who understand “the centrality of God in American history.”

 

As for his presidential ambitions, Mr. Gingrich said he would not make a decision before September. He acknowledged that that was late to begin a serious presidential run in the current system, but noted that John F. Kennedy did not declare his candidacy until January 1960 and that Ronald Reagan entered the 1980 race in November 1979.

 

The Gingrich plan would seem to depend on one or more of the leading Republican presidential hopefuls — Senator John McCain of Arizona, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York and Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts — falling by the wayside and a groundswell of support for Mr. Gingrich.

 

Many analysts, including some close friends and advisers of Mr. Gingrich, consider that unlikely.

 

“Waiting for the voters to come to him is a mistake, because it just doesn’t happen,” said Frank Luntz, a political strategist who worked closely with Mr. Gingrich in his days in Congress. “When you want to engage in a battle of ideas, you have to engage in a longer campaign.”

 

Joe Gaylord, who was Mr. Gingrich’s lieutenant when he led the 1994 takeover of the House, said that Mr. Gingrich was more widely known than most of the other potential Republican candidates, but that his image might need some repair. “He has huge name ID,” Mr. Gaylord said, “but maybe there needs to be a little rebranding that goes with that.”

 

Mr. Gaylord did not elaborate, but even Mr. Gingrich’s friends said he would carry a lot of baggage into any political race. Two highly publicized divorces. A record $300,000 fine imposed by the House ethics committee over the financing of a college course he taught while in Congress. The 1995 government shutdown. A proposal to place fatherless children in orphanages. The bitter politics surrounding the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998.

 

Mr. Gingrich acknowledged that he was probably better at formulating ideas than at carrying them out, more of a revolutionary agitator than an elected executive. He said that unexpected events swept him into the speaker’s office — though he had spent years planning to get there — and that the same could happen with the Oval Office.

 

“It all depends on whether the movement I’m building gets big enough and how large the vacuum of leadership is,” he said.

 

Merle Black, a professor of government at Emory University and an authority on Southern politics, said Mr. Gingrich was dreaming. His appeal is limited to a relatively narrow slice of right-wing voters, Professor Black said, with virtually no support from independents and Democrats.

 

“He couldn't get elected to statewide office in Georgia,” Professor Black said, citing a recent poll of Georgia Republicans that placed Mr. Gingrich a distant third in presidential preference in his home state, behind Mr. Giuliani and Mr. McCain. “I cannot imagine him winning a presidential race in the United States.”

 

Running or not, expect Mr. Gingrich to remain in the public eye. He has narrated a special, “One Nation Under God: Religion and History in Washington, D.C.,” to be broadcast on Fox News this weekend, and he will appear on “Meet the Press” on NBC on Sunday to talk about his new organization and his political plans.

 

“My hope is that we’ll have a genuine dialogue over the next year,” he said in the Friday interview. “Then we can get into the political debate.”

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/washington/17gingrich.html

 

Burn.

 

I'm sure his Fox News special about God will be good...

 

 

 

(wait for it)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"...FOR ME TO POOP ON!!!!"

 

 

In other news...

Richardson to criticize McCain's Iraq plan

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson will denounce Sen. John McCain's, R-Arizona, suggestion that more U.S. troops are needed in Iraq when he appears Saturday at a New Hampshire Democratic Party event, his campaign said.

 

Richardson is actively exploring a run for the Democratic presidential nomination, while McCain is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination. Richardson and McCain have said they will announce their plans early in the coming year.

 

-- CNN Political Editor Mark Preston

 

http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/blogs/politica...cains-iraq.html

 

I can't wait to find a transcript of this.

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To add to Jerk's list:

 

Republicans - Duncan Hunter (Cali Rep) and Tom Tancredo (Colorado Rep & Chairman of his local Aryan Nation Brotherhood)

 

Dems - General Wesley Clark

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So noted.

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You forgot Mike Gravel!

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Has he even left Alaska since his announcement? He's making the least amount of noise of all the candidates, obviously, though he is on the right track with his Iraq stance.

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You forgot Mike Gravel!

Okay...you gotta draw the line somewhere.

 

Snuffbox was probably right about Evan Bayh's early support for Iraq hurting his chances. I really didn't pay attention to it earlier, but the Russ Feingold quote about not supporting anyone who voted for the war is a pretty big "fuck you" to Hillary Clinton. If the Democratic primary voters make Iraq the number one issue and go so far as to withhold support for any and all early supporters of the war, quite a few campaigns are in serious trouble.

 

Here's a list of all the Democratic senators who voted for the war:

Max Baucus

Evan Bayh

Joe Biden

John Breaux

Maria Cantwell

Jean Carnahan

Tom Carper

Max Cleland

Hillary Clinton

Tom Daschle

Christopher Dodd

Byron Dorgan

John Edwards

Dianne Feinstein

Tom Harkin

Fritz Hollings

Tim Johnson

John Kerry

Herb Kohl

Mary Landrieu

Joe Lieberman

Blanche Lincoln

Zell Miller

Bill Nelson

Ben Nelson

Harry Reid

Jay Rockefeller

Chuck Schumer

Robert Torricelli

 

Against:

Daniel Akaka

Jeff Bingaman

Barbara Boxer

Robert Byrd

Jon Corzine

Kent Conrad

Mark Dayton

Dick Durbin

Russ Feingold

Bob Graham

Daniel Inouye

Ted Kennedy

Patrick Leahy

Carl Levin

Barbara Mikulski

Patty Murray

Jack Reed

Paul Sarbanes

Debbie Stabenow

Paul Wellstone

Ron Wyden

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Wellstone could've been a great '08 candidate.