This whole primary system is getting silly, don’t you think? What with all the unelectable candidates we have to go through and rule out? I say from hereon out we just let David Brooks pick the nominee. At least then we’ll have someone professional doing the selecting, and someone professional selected.
And then we can have a smoothly run professional political machine, where politics is handled professionally by people trained in politics.
Just like Chicago!
I’m getting really impatient with this “electability” hokum.
It used to mean something. Now it’s just a simplistic disparagement for the Hewitts and Morriseys and Aces and Medveds to use against people they don’t want to promote.
And conservatives stand by while our candidates get torn down…
IN OTHER NEWS:
The holiday season starts early with #ObamaChristmasCarols
And that Palin chick, too. Obviously!
Romney/Huntsman 2012 – the Republican Dream Ticket.
As in, “Will they beat Barack Obama? In your dreams, buddy!”
I’m just glad we picked the electable McCain last time.
Joking aside, though, there has to be a happy medium between people who think none of our candidates (except Mitt, obv) are electable and those who think all of them are. I like a lot of the candidates personally but they have glaring personal obstacles that would be insurmountable in the general election.
Maybe Dan should clue us in on whom he’d seen defended when their time comes. You know. So I can arrange my schedule accordingly.
I know nothing reconciles me to the thought of four more years of SCOAMF like the fear of glaring personal obstacles.
The motheringfracking Make believe media keeps telling us that Ms. Bialek was OK money-wise because her fiance was a big-goddamn-deal mediacl equipment guy?? That big 5 BR house in the NW ‘burbs of Chicago?? Money couldn’t be the issue, right?
Well, things ain’t so rosy as what they pretend it to be..
http://tinyurl.com/c8s74kh
..oh, and CarFax sux
I don’t know what SCOAMF stands for nor do I understand what that comment is supposed to mean.
Karol, you worked for Herman at one point, yes? I know you haven’t endorsed him, but what are your thoughts about him as a potential leader?
Stuttering Clusterfark of a Miserable Failure
I just ripped Dan Riehl a new one.
It means the thought of a President with glaring personal obstacles makes it much easier for me to accept four more years of the current stuttering clusterfuck of a miserable failure. I mean, why take the chance, right?
You know, you don’t have to defend Herman Cain to defend Herman Cain. Which is the point “conservatives” don’t seem to get, no matter how many times it costs them candidates, elections, legislation, and so on.
The country is being — and has been — wrenched leftward. There’re mechanisms in place that reinforce that movement, then entrench it.
When we don’t fight back against those things, we’re losing. It’s hardly worth defending a political position if you wont defend the ideology that undergirds it.
I think he’s amazing and I would trust him to surround himself with advisers who would fill in the gaps of things he does not know (bekistan, etc.). Having said all that, and I know you don’t want to hear it Jeff, but factors like how a candidate and his team handle a scandal is important. This is just the primary where the opposition is sort-of friendly. What do you think Obama’s people are going to do to him in the general? Also, a ground game is important, having a staff is important, having a campaign plan is important. I’m not sure I see any of that in the Cain presidential campaign which seems to be charmingly winging it. I wish he had run for governor of GA a few years ago. He’d be in a super strong place now. He’s really smart, he gets to the core of issues (especially economic issues), he’s motivational, he’s real. His loss in the 04 race was my worst political heartbreak. I just don’t think he was ready for this rise (and now fall) and it shows.
Uh oh..just maybe Ms. Bialek and her financially-well-underpinned fiance just ain’t so solvent
…umm, yeah…about the presser with all the accusers (except the ones who don’t want to do it), let’s do it
This isn’t a scandal, Karol. This is a hit job. No matter what he does, he’s wrong. Unless we decide there’s not going to be any upside in hit jobs.
The experts tell us that Cain is done. The stupid polls tell us otherwise, because they just don’t get it. I remain optimistic.
di: Well, you sure read him the riot act — whatever the hell that means — excellent!
We are nothing (i.e. no better than the Left) if we don’t value objectivity, truth, and reality over perception, feelings, and made-up ‘stuff’.
Buoying a campaign on the views of the people simply can’t be enough. Best to use proven techniques, gleaned from years of sociological research, to paint the picture the people should see, rather than trust them to think it themselves.
Karol,
This isn’t just about Cain and the alleged scandal. The bigger picture is that the leftist media still controls the message. Truth be damned.
…and it’s about farking time we put an end to that
Ernst, there’s politics in politics. We can pretend their isn’t or we can try to win.
The MBM will do their best to take everyone but Romney down before and during the primaries. After that, they will do their best to take Romney down.
That has been their game-plan all along. Anyone who goes along with it is either ignorant or a fool.
*there
I don’t mind hearing it at all, Karol. I just differ with those who believe the handling has been poor overall.
I was just arguing the point with some reporter that if these women are shown up as motivated by something other than truth, the lack of “polish” shown by the campaign — and Cain’s decision to just go out and answer questions to the best of his abillity — will likely resonate with the anti-establishment, anti-DC sentiment that is coursing through much of the conservative base.
And good lord, if the GOP caves and gives us tax increases through this super committee, the best place to have positioned yourself is as something entirely NOT professional political class.
In other words, his campaign set the tone with that Block smoking ad. This response has also put in place a kind of campaign grammar. We’re not used to the way it’s being done. But I’m not sure that makes it a bad thing, in the long run.
For a campaign that appears to be winging it at times, they can’t be too dissatisfied with the way Cain’s profile has been raised.
I see a calculated risk: get Cain out there and known, and let people decide on whether or not he’s up to the job. The epitome of Let Herman be Herman, played out strategically.
Also, a ground game is important, having a staff is important, having a campaign plan is important. I’m not sure I see any of that in the Cain presidential campaign which seems to be charmingly winging it. I wish he had run for governor of GA a few years ago. He’d be in a super strong place now.
This harks back to one of the points I’m always hammering away on (and which I’m obviously going to keep hammering away on), which is my assertion that our movement isn’t yet mature enough to take on the national machinery of the presidential election. It’s a big part of the reason why I try to focus on state and local races, where the costs and complexities are a lot more manageable, and where the disadvantages of our newness are easier to overcome.
Of course, the flip side of my argument likely means putting up with an Obama or a Romney for at least one more term, while we get our players in place in the 50 states. That’s why I’m desperate to get majorities in both houses of Congress. Sending reform bills and defunding bills and subpoenas to the White House and the Cabinet departments every day would be a good way of minimizing the damage done from those offices.
By the way: as Newt catches fire, he goes on FOX and reiterates that SCIENCE for the most part supports global warming theory and that conservatives need to get involved in the conversation so that THEY can set policy.
Too clever by half. Again.
Block going on TV last night and saying the accuser’s son works for Politico was, to me, the epitome of poor handling. It’s just incredibly amateurish. What happens then is that all these people who want to believe in Cain take to their FB pages and twitter to spread the word that this is an inside hit by Politico. And they end up looking more than a little foolish.
I like a renegade. I like a real independent. But there are tried and true ways to negotiate a scandal (or a hit or whatever) and it’s not to declare the matter closed (see Weiner and every other politician who thought that saying so made it so). That’s just not how the world works. Where is his PR person to tell him not to make blanket statements like he doesn’t know the accuser only to have photos surface a few hours later of them together? It’s just bad. I defended him on day 1 of this and I still believe in him but we can’t just overlook that this is a race for president of the United States because we happen to really like the guy.
Yep, we wouldn’t want to impose our own choices on the office.
Oh, there have certainly been missteps, or at the very least missteps from the perspective of seasoned political observers. But once again, what does that tell you? It all smacks of political outsiderness. Which just happens to be the campaign message.
Is all I’d like to point out.
Karol —
I saw photos of him and Jacobson, but do you have a link of pics of Cain with Bialek? And again, this bothers you from a perspective of being on the defensive from the media. To me, it suggests that Cain’s met thousands upon thousands of people of late and couldn’t possibly remember all of them — not to mention, if this woman is going to accuse him of harassment, what is she doing out trying to hug him at an event just a month ago?
How the spin eventually settles is going to be interesting.
Ernst, there’s politics in politics. We can pretend there isn’t or we can try to win.
Politics = the acquisition and wielding of power.
Alinsky and Machiavelli described some reliable methods of acquiring and maintaining power, but the actual rules of politics—in a democratic republic—depend entirely on what the electorate will and will not buy.
Alinsky was fond of demanding that his enemy play by its own rules, because he figured that morality was just a pose anyway, so why not use people’s hypocrisy against them. Trouble is, using people’s own decency against them tends to work, cf. human shields, the desire to believe victims of alleged sexual assault.
However, people like Alinsky don’t recognize the Truth as more valuable than Power, and so Truth must necessarily suffer. Likewise, if you insist on Truth above all else, Power must also suffer, but it’s not necessarily YOUR power that fades.
The cleansing sunlight of TRVTH is the best star to hitch your wagon to: the compromises to acquire Power at the expense of Truth are never worth it in the long run, and the losses of Power at the expense of Truth are never permanent, as long as you keep pursuing Truth.
We won’t GET the truth from the press unless we make them HURT when they lie and obfuscate and smear. As Mark Steyn points out, the goal can’t be to get the right people in the right place so that they can do the right thing, but to create an atmosphere where the wrong people are forced to do the right thing.
Because that’s as good as it gets with the human race.
Calls grow! And grow! And grow!
Focus your microscopes on the essence of politics people: Mark Block said something stupid.
In other words, it takes some thinking it through, but once you do, it turns out that Cain’s upfront strategy actually makes you question Bialek’s story even more.
I for one am tired of winning the election only to lose the agenda because the guy we won the election with doesn’t believe in it.
‘Cause I really can’t see how that’s different from losing.
Fuck the GOP.
We should listen to the professionals here; after all, they told us that our current President, Hillary Clinton, was going to be unbeatable.
Yeah, I’d like to see those photos too. I’ve been looking. They don’t exist. And if they did, from a campaign event where she ran up and gladhanded him? That would mean….?
We are nothing (i.e. no better than the Left) if we don’t value objectivity, truth, and reality over perception, feelings, and made-up ‘stuff’.
If we don’t value objectivity, truth, and reality, we merely the Left’s bitches. They play us like violins because we let them.
Either we’re too dazzled by their star power to object or we’re inside the Beltway, trying to win their respect despite being everything they hate.
The Internet and alternate media has given us much-needed confidence, if for no other reason than to show us our numbers.
The thing to keep in mind is that it simply isn’t important to support the Green Revolution of Iran in the summer of 2009, but better to offer to talk with the Mullahs is key. This is the smart business no silly Mark Block, and surely not his boss, could possibly see his way to understand. There are important decisions, and there are unimportant decisions, and the sociologists know the way.
connections
west r. naze the father of her child works for an affiliate of newcorps.
http://www.newsamerica.com/ourcompany/default.aspx
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/west-naze/a/aa7/118
When conservative do not get it we are really fucked.
The science does say that global warming is happening. Or maybe that it has been happening, but now it’s not happening so much.
I trust Newt to understand what the science says, and make decisions based on that understanding, not at all. Even the notion that there’s something that must be done I am askance-looking-at.
I’ve always defined politics as the competition for scarce resources, but at that point ethics starts to become very important as to how it works.
It’s not really whether there’s warming, the argument is mostly about what is causing it and the solutions offered to counteract or prevent it. But Slartibartfast is right.
But there are tried and true ways to negotiate a scandal (or a hit or whatever)
You’re following the script that the narration-makers want you to: focus on how well the accused finesses the attack, then use that an index for “electablility” or whatever.
Reject their assumptions, dude. Demand that they knock it off. Then watch the “opinion cascade” follow. We don’t have to put up with this nonsense anymore. We’re electing the POTUS, not giving screen tests for Survivor: D.C.
What happens then is that all these people who want to believe in Cain take to their FB pages and twitter to spread the word that this is an inside hit by Politico. And they end up looking more than a little foolish.
Foolish to whom? To “reasonable” people who automatically reject anything that smacks of tin-foil-hat conspiracies? To “sensible” people who don’t want to look like they side with the Great Unwashed? To “sophisticated” people who believe that looking awkward on camera actually means something?
The only thing that matters is the truth, and if the truth is that it’s a sleazy hit job by Politico, how does that make people look foolish if they say so?
I really don’t get people who are obsessing over the optics and the “missteps” and such. Don’t you realize that the very criteria you’re using to evaluate Cain is what got us Obama and all the other “professional” morons who are so over-handled—and so spineless or unprincipled they can be made to appear to be anything at all—that nobody knows what they really believe?
With all the hot air being expended on some of these issues, I am starting to buy a man made component in global warming.
We can pretend there isn’t [politics in politics] or we can try to win.
How about we decide what it is we’re trying to win, and from that, what constitutes winning.
If, for example, all you’re interested in is the path of least resistance to 270 votes in the electoral college, Romney’s your guy.
It’s not really whether there’s warming, the argument is mostly about what is causing it and the solutions offered to counteract or prevent it. But Slartibartfast is right.
You’re both wrong: it’s about whether the warming will result in disaster.
They rest their disaster scenarios on reaching a “tipping point,” after which there’s a positive feedback loop that makes the heating escalate like crazy. Like Venus*, or something.
Which, the “tipping point” is evident only in the computer simulations, none of which accurately simulate the mechanics of cloud formation and dispersal. And none of which can recreate past weather patterns.
Also, our climate is currently dominated by negative feedback mechanisms, and the amount of energy it would take to flip it over to positive feedbacks is WAY more than CO2 can retain, regardless of how much more is added.
* Although Venus has an extremely hot atmosphere of mostly CO2, it’s also 49 earth atmospheres, which permits the gases to heat up that much.
That Mark Steyn is a smart guy, di. For a cannuk. And especially so when he starts channeling Milton Friedman. [wink]
Q: How do you know if someone is “electable”?
A: “One more thing, you have an all out prize fight, you wait until the fight is over, one guy is left standing. And that’s how you know who won.”
— Al Capone, “The Untouchables”
Only one “N” in Canuk, I believe, sir. As there is only one “N” in Canada. Also, Canadian law requires all insults to be bi-lingual.
— Doofus Wrightwrong, Royal Canadian Mounted Grammar Police
Wrong.
Not to take this one remark out of a greater context but kindly let me take this one remark out of a greater context: Clinton was convicted of perjury, suborning perjury, was impeached, and was disbarred. He was also accused of sexual assault, as was Al Gore, if not outright rape.
Clinton remains the hero among men he’s always been, and Gore’s fall from grace is tied strictly to the current unpopularity of AGW. Both remain highly public and in their respective areas, highly popular and influential. They got none on them.
So factors like how either handled far worse scandals are not important.
But they are for a Republican? Who should be vetted on how they handle scandals of a sexual nature?
What dicentra said in 44. This double standard is not only morally bogus — look at the respective players, man — it’s logical bullshit.
dicenta, Venus is also closer to the sun. I suspect that makes a difference too.
Typical ANTI-SCIENCE DENIALIST!!!11!!
Like a giant ball of gas millions of miles away could possibly have anything to do with global temperatures. I mean, really!
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/weekly_updates/what_they_told_us_reviewing_last_week_s_key_polls
Apparently Herman is not losing with voters (yet). So the voters are willing to see this play out. That is encouraging.
Unlike Sully, Dowd, Brooks, Frum and other principled conservatives, voters are willing to see how this plays out.
Unlike Sully, Dowd, Brooks, Frum and other principled conservatives, voters are willing to see how this plays out.
The cretins. They just don’t know how to LISTEN.
This double standard is not only morally bogus — look at the respective players, man — it’s logical bullshit.
It really does seem like Cain’s problem with the media/punditocracy is that he can’t make the truth sound as persuasive as a lie sounds to a group of people eager to be lied to.
Fail Mataconis over at Outside the Balloon Juice said Cain’s “attack” on Bialek was unfair. I asked him point blank what Cain’s response could have been. There’s no evidence one way or the other, the allegation cannot be disproven and apparently Cain is not allowed to mention that his accuser has potential credibility issues. I guess to Doug’s way of thinking, Cain should simply bend over and take it for not knowing his place in the GOP hierarchy.
We’re being set up with Romney, just like we were with McCain, whom all the smart people called the most electable GOP candidate. And I therefore see 2012 as a likely repeat of 2008, which means four more years of David Brooks jerking off to the crease in Barry’s pants.
Meh. Mataconis had a girlfriend issue play out on the twitter in public a few weeks ago. It wasn’t so much funny as pathetic. Evidently someone on twitter who was outed as a serial liar and backstabber was seeing Mataconis and thought that she was moving in with him or something. He defended her for a while and then dumped her. She went postal, he beclowned himself, and the piling on really began. It was as spellbinding as a 12 car mash up on the 405 at rush hour involving clown cars and John Wayne Gacy’s ice cream truck.
Something that only happens once every other leap year or so. Take notice!
Link
I am not likeing Mataconis all that much, but I haven’t paid enough attention to him to be able to say why, exactly.
It must have sprung a leak; last time I checked it was over 90 atmospheres.
Fed up with the peasants.
Some good advice from R.S. McCain
OUTLAW!
Crap. So much for the every-other-leap-year thing.
No, sorry; warming == disaster. There’s no discussion on that point. The only contentious issue is the magnitude of the disaster, which will happen because there’s warming, and it will be our fault because the warming is our fault.
Careful – just by posting that synopsis you’re inviting some other drama queens to engage in further queenery, and accuse Jeff of “piling on” and “taking sides”.
That Jeff has said nothing about the issues, and hasn’t necessarily even read your comment yet is completely irrelevant.
P.S. Damnit Joe, you broke the formatting with that Rasmussen URL. Please don’t do that.
Charlie Crist…speaking of Charlie, did I mention he’s working for a
personal injuryfor-the-people attorney in Florida, now? I mean, what could be more perfect?Roughly 0.72AU, which means it gets roughly twice the power density of solar radiation.
Which, yes, also makes a great deal of difference.
Serving in the House should be just like jury duty. Your number comes up, you serve a term. When you’re done, you go home.
Similarly, if you’re excited about it, you’re not the best person to be doing it.
It must have sprung a leak; last time I checked it was over 90 atmospheres.
I was going from memory, and I suck at remembering numbers. I stand corrected.
Roughly 0.72AU, which means it gets roughly twice the power density of solar radiation.
BECAUSE OF THE INVERSE SQUARE RULE! That one I know.
Also, a cloud cover of sulfuric acid.
The sulfuric acid is just handy for helping keep that heat in.
Not having done anything like analysis on this, but: it’s almost a certainty that Venus loses some of that extra insolation due to having a higher albedo, but the nearly 100x thicker (and more massive) atmosphere does its part in retaining what gets through.
It’s not so much that Venus’ atmosphere is nearly all CO2 as much as that it has ninety-odd extra Earth-atmospheres piled on top of it.
It really does seem like Cain’s problem with the media/punditocracy is that he can’t make the truth sound as persuasive as a lie sounds to a group of people eager to be lied to.
THIS
Link
Stacy quotes a smart guy…
JB, sorry about that. My bad.
Ernst, you already had it. Nevermind. Good link though.
I want to say something about Rasmussen because I think we all trust them more than others. Rasmussen’s methodology is flawed by undersampling cell-phone only people, which SurveyUSA has shown to be considerably left of land-line users(and less informed than land-line users ). Rasmussen tries to compensate using some online participatory scheme that sounds complicated and weak. He needs to adjust and start sampling cell-phones or we’ll see the same performance in 2012 as in 2010 – Rasmussen estimates are a couple of points to the right of the actual vote totals.
cell phone only people are hard to sample, aren’t they?
I’d be surprised if Rasmussen doesn’t straighten out their methodology in time for next year’s big push. In the meantime, I don’t think he loses a thing in the current polling, as I doubt the iDiots are going to do much voting in the primaries.
– It has to be awfully alarming as well as disheartening for the Progressives to see Cain’s numbers holding firm.
– I like that.
Thats because of all the raaaaacism, bbh. Those darned reich-wingers.
Nah BBHunter, it just means they’ve got rebait the hook and go back to trolling through Chicago.
Jeff, if you want to scrub that comment fire away. That wreck was ‘public’ but maybe not leaving it would be best. And tighten this one up without this reference if so desired.
I’m cell phone only. Have been for about 5 years. Most folks I know are cell phone only. The only people I can think of that aren’t are my parents, which old habits die hard.
I don’t know that I would put much weight into the left/right cell phone thingy. My parents don’t even answer their regular phone if it’s a number they don’t recognize. They always forget to adjust the numbers for caller id. A bigger issue IMO.
nobody wants to see sexual harassment sluts jiggling all over their tv during the holidays
Mr. Cain just needs to hang in there and focus on the spendings and such
I think the dirtier secret of opinion surveys is that they’re not really random. Rather they’re random among a list of phone numbers where that the pollsters know someone will consent to participate in their survey.
First time I ever got called for an opinion survey was after we moved to [REDACTED]. Now I get called all the time. Not everytime. But a lot of the time.
My wife and I might as well be cell phone only, but we don’t give out our cell phone numbers like we did our landline. And the “landline” has been a VoIP message number for years now.
We’re converting over to Google Voice for the message number now. If we become the 1% and can build our next house we may leave the phone lines out completely — except for DSL Internet, if other options aren’t available.
[…] Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom points out, this is just another form of Chicago politics: This whole primary […]
Ditto. And I love that the VoIP voicemail goes to my email as a voice recognition text message with a .wav file of the actual call attached.
[…] the accusations again Cain, the crowd booed the moderators and cheered Cain’s strong response.Jeff Goldstein observes that some guy named “Seth” has decided all the not-Romneys are…EXPECT FURTHER UPDATES . . .Category: Debates, Election 2012Comments JoeI think I better drink […]
#62: Ernst, like I said over there, I’d have better success at treating politics like a circus if the clown act wasn’t dedicated to screwing over me, my family, my friends, and my country. None of those are on the free list.
If you name comes up twice, you serve your second term, and then are beheaded before a large crowd.
What? I liked “The Reluctant King”.