Monthly Archives: January 2012

Hardest Job in Town: Boehner’s

BY STEVE BELL

Far from yielding an ambiguous electoral outcome, the Iowa caucuses solidly confirmed the Balkanization of the Republican Party, a fact that will lead to potential electoral failure in 2012 unless neutralized soon. These internal divisions hurt the party’s leadership in Congress in 2011;  they have already improved Democratic chances to retain the Senate, gain substantial seats in the House, and keep the White House in 2012.

Super-imposed on this chaos is a 2012 Congressional legislative schedule that virtually no one on Capitol Hill believes has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever passing.

Let’s take a look at the GOP. Mitt Romney gets a quarter of the vote, what we can call the “competency vote.”  Ron Paul gets  a quarter of the vote, what has been called the “Libertarian” vote, mostly male, mostly an exaggerated macho response to external order, such as a  government provides. Rick Santorum, coupled with the Michelle Bachmann Continue reading →

Life & Death of Political Campaigns

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

A political campaign is like a wedding or the launch of a space vehicle in that the planning and activity starts sometimes years in advance, reaches a frenzied pitch in the last days before the event, then it all stops with “I do,” the “The vehicles has cleared the tower,” or, “We’re reassessing.”

We assume, if none of the parties to the marriage are named Kardashian, the happy couple will settle down to years of house holding and child rearing while the florists, caterers, drivers, and bride’s maids go back to their regular lives.

Having handed control of a space launch over to mission control in Houston, the launch planners likewise turn in their three-ring binders and start the count-down clock for the next mission.

A political campaign that ends, often ends suddenly, and completely.

In the case of Rep. Michele Bachmann, there will be a few weeks of winding down; collecting cell phones and matching rental car records to states in which staffers were supposed to have been working but, that will be handled by the back office staff. Continue reading →

Three Republican Parties

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

The results from Iowa show one thing very clearly: There are now three, distinct Republican parties.

The mainstream GOP captured about a quarter of the vote in the caucus polls. The social conservatives got about half. The libertarian got about a fifth.

Iowa is a bit skewed towards social conservatives. New Hampshire will show that the mainstream Republicans make up about a third of the party, the social conservatives about a third, while libertarians make up a third.

Mainstream Republicans are business-minded. They are the establishment folks. They are both small business owners and corporate employees. They are the Chamber of Commerce Republicans. They want the government to help business. Some mainstream Republicans are neo-conservative and care about defense issues, but mostly they view the world through the prism of business. Continue reading →

Presidential Candidates: Off and Running

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

From Des Moines, Iowa

At long last, real voters cast real votes on behalf of real candidates. One down, 49 to go and that doesn’t include American Somoa, Guam, the District of Columbia and other U.S. holdings.

You already know what happened last night: Gov. Mitt Romney and Sen. Rick Santorum essentially tied for first with 25 percent apiece. Rep. Ron Paul faded to third with about 2 percent. Speaker Newt Gingrich preserved a semblance of a win by beating out Gov. Rick Perry about 13 percent to 10 percent with Rep. Michele Bachmann coming in sixth with about five percent of the votes.

The Santorum story here – and it’s a good story – is, months and months of hard work and long road trips finally paid off. After Conservatives in Iowa kicked the tires of the four other candidates: Bachmann, Perry, Cain and Gingrich; they decided to take a look at Santorum and decided he was as good as they were likely to get and they made their choice pretty clear. Continue reading →