Mitt Romney has said time and time again that he has no interest in running for president a third time.
But, on Sunday morning, CBS' Bob Schieffer said not to write off the idea of a 2016 campaign by Romney so quickly.
"I have a source that told me that if Jeb Bush decides not to run, that Mitt Romney may actually try it again," Schieffer said.
Really. What is the Incredible Elastic Mitt going to run as? A moderate Republican? A "severe conservative"? A Tea party acolyte? If you look at the stances that Rmoney has held over the years, about the only two political poles he hasn't touched are Pinochet-grade Fascism and Communism.
I find it hard to believe that the Republican base would, even for a picosecond, consider going with this guy again. But it's probably wise to not overestimate them.
9 comments:
Hey, I'm waiting for the "Draft Goldwater!" campaign to hot up . . .
R-money's greatest achievement to date is probably blowing the 2012 election. The GOP was perfectly willing to bask in the grassroots activism of the Tea Party before the convention, then do a 180 and pull all kinds of shady shit to throw the candidacy to the RINOest of RINOs. It's no wonder the republican base didn't turn out.
The GOP seems content to be the controlled opposition party, the boogeyman under the bed to scare democrats into voting for the blue team fascist du jour. The vast majority of my liberal friends and family aren't exactly Obama fans, but trooped to the polls to fight the specter of Mittens the Evil Businessman. It's not a horrible place to be if you're a republican politician - there's still plenty of pork and kickbacks to go around for the minority party. The democrats get to whine about not getting anything done because of the Obstructionist Rethuglikkans and the Party of No™, the landed aristocracy keeps on running the show, and the conservative voters can go fuck themselves because who else are you going to vote for, peasant?
I'd love to see the Tea Party break off from the republicans and leave the decrepit Moral Majority/evangelical lobby to deservedly rot in the dustbin of history. A hungry new populist party with media savvy and a crusade against crony capitalism that the college-educated but hopelessly underemployed youth can relate to would be a fantastic breath of fresh air in American politics. It might even scare the democratic party into fielding actual people and not rich aging boomers like HRC or fauxahontas. I would sure like to see a future where I'm looking at the presidential candidates and wondering which of these fine folks to vote for, not trying to figure out which one of these slimy motherfuckers is the least worst option.
Andrew, the kool-aid is gonna rot your brain...on wait, it already has, nevermind!
Only a "true believer" could make such a mindblowingly insane statement suggesting the Tea Party is populist. The problem with that argument is that a true "populist" party represents "the people" vs "the elite". "The people", to the Tea Party, is generally the 63% white population of the US...of which 52% lean Republican. This gives a base for "the people" of about 32% of the US population. Of these, 41% agree with Tea party views, in general, taking us down to 13% of the US population (Pew research and Gallup for affiliation data). Non-Republican and white Tea Party affiliates exist, but are negligible in real numbers.
Additionally, the Tea Party is overrepresented in the top 10% and 1% of the US population, exactly those in the real "elite" in today's economy.
Given the average Tea Party supporter is north of 50, "the people" are dropping like flies. Jim Jones would be proud of the toll the kool-aid is taking.
Centerpuke,
If you're amenable to suggestions, I'd recommend turning off MSNBC and forming your own opinions about those who identify with the tea party. Your ignorance is pretty appalling. The vast majority of the rank and file are normal, moral, hardworking Americans who are tired of being ruled ex cathedra by the landed aristocracy of the D.C. Beltway. You wouldn't know this, because your masters have served you the impression which they wish for you to have. On the other side of the coin, mainstream conservative media presented the Occupy movement in the worst light possible for their viewers' consumption. Our masters are doing a phenomenal job dividing and suppressing any challenge to the status quo. You're being played like a fiddle - please check your ad homs at the door and get to know your fellow Americans.
There really is a lot of common ground on which the Tea Party and Occupy could agree. Think defense spending is too high? You could find common ground with a Tea Partier who's adamantly for a strong military by identifying and eliminating areas of costly waste (Reducing the number of highly paid top brass, closing useless and obsolete bases, forcing the EU to pay their fair share of NATO defense, etc) to lean out the military without compromising our national defense.
A Tea Partier who thinks we spend too much on social programs could find common ground with you by reforming our welfare state and replacing the current system with one that actually addresses the root causes of poverty and provides a pathway out of poverty.
Do you think it's appalling that large corporations and wealthy 1%ers get to skip out on paying their taxes with no repercussions? You could work with a Tea Partier on this too: Lower the nominal rate of taxes and eliminate the loopholes of the rich and connected so they can't avoid paying.
Or, we could pick teams, scream at each other, and feel smugly superior to the other side while our masters screw us out of the American Dream. Your choice, but please choose wisely.
Knock off the personal slurs, people.
Rule #1 for comments is still in effect.
Play nice.
Comrade, you are correct, I should have simply stuck to the numbers, my apologies.
Andrew, I believe you have the blinders on, not me. Taxes are already at close to all time lows except for employment taxes...those effectively highest for the salaried workers.
There has been no significant investment program in US infrastructure since the Interstate highway system, and it shows. The US is rapidly heading for third world status if we don't start spending on infrastructure. We live in a "just in time" world with a creaking and aging arterial system.
The Tea Party response is cut taxes more and cut benefits more. The cut in food stamps that was just passed resulted in a total loss of support to the needy over 10 years ($8.7 billion) equaling the entire charitable outlay of food pantries and such over more than 2 years ($4.1 billion a year)...and with the multiplier (1.79) reduced national spending by an estimated $1.56 billion a year for 10 years. Or, more clearly, that cut alone wiped out 4 years of giving to food pantries.
Please explain again how starving people to cut taxes makes the Tea Party "Populist".
Oh it's simple. Us conservative types thrive off of human suffering and love nothing more than watching our countrymen starve to death. Hey, here's a joke for you: How many potatoes does it take to kill an Irish family? None! Ho ho!
Tea party types (which is an awkward label - the 'tea party' is actually a loose coalition of likeminded groups without much in the way of central organization, but 'conservatives' isn't the right word either) simply see that we spend staggering sums of money (that we don't have, and have to borrow) every year to no lasting effect. Do consider that we've seen no reduction in poverty at all in the fifty years since the "War on Poverty" was declared. If I was fighting a war for fifty years and getting my ass kicked, I'd call it quits.
I don't for a second believe that there's any kind of economic modifier from government welfare spending. Any gains from the increased velocity of money are at the very least canceled out by the sucking inefficiencies in our government. All those bureaucrats, community outreach liaisons, case workers, bean counters, and paper pushers don't work for free. Every dollar of salary taken out of the pot in the act of distributing welfare reduces the aid that actually gets to the poor. You vet charities for excessive overhead before donating, do you not? Why should the government be given a free pass? It'd be much more effective to simply tally the incoming money set aside for social spending, divide it by the number of recipients, mail a batch of checks and call it a day.
The other problem is that our current welfare spending does nothing to address the base causes of poverty. It does a mediocre job of making poverty more comfortable, but we've had 3-4 generations of people on government life support with no hope of ever climbing out. The system penalizes intact families and those who wish to work, when it should instead be offering greater benefits to complete family units and extra incentives to those who seek out and find jobs while on means-tested aid.
Your average Tea Partier (or American citizen at all, for that matter) might not have the economic training to clearly lay out why our model of social spending isn't working, but they're certainly able to look at the costs and the results and see that it doesn't add up. Tea Partiers tend to be religious folks as well. I'm an atheist myself, but I've seen how a church community comes together during times of crisis to support its members. A classmate of mine, a young lady engineer from a devoutly catholic family, was tragically killed in a horseback riding accident a few years ago, and it was humbling to me to see how the several hundred people of her parish came together to ease her family's burdens as much as possible as they worked through their grief. No government compulsion, no threat of force was needed. People saw some of their own hurting and gave freely. Fraternal organizations also worked that way in the days of yore, and the scene of small town Americans in flyover country building each other up again after natural disasters destroy a community plays out time and time again.
Given the examples of bloated, costly, wasteful government programs and the rapidity and quality of care offered by a local, community-based social safety net, can you fault a Tea Partier for voting for less of the former and giving more to the latter? Prioritizing community-initiated and community-led relief efforts over the Ministry of Welfare's 5-year plan does indeed seem populist to me.
Andrew,
1) "TEA Party" is the genesis of the "Tea party". It stood/stands for "Taxed Enough Already". The problem is taxes have rarely, if ever, been this low...especially on businesses. Yet businesses still actively avoid paying even these paltry sums, so much for Corporate Citizenship.
2) So the answer to having not beaten poverty is to quit and allow people to die? The answer is to blame the "bureaucrats" without having any figures to back this up. Given that an expanded single payer insurance system like Medicare/Medicaid would have lower overhead than private, for profit, insurance, why don't we try that? Oh, the Tea Party and Conservatives say that that is a no go, it would stifle private companies. So inefficiency is OK, as long as it isn't Public, eh.
3) Your economic ignorance doesn't make your viewpoint correct, it simply makes it laughable.
4) Our "current welfare spending" is the result of Reagan's "Revolution". That's almost 35 years (2 generations) of that failure. Maybe your side is wrong.
5) The examples you cite are not listed, and thus make me wonder just what you refer to. Since we've seen multiple natural disasters where local resources we NOT sufficient, what is the answer to that, sir? Might it be your bloated, inefficient Federal Government? It would be as long as they are allowed to do their job and properly funded...instead we have hacks in charge who try to slash agencies because "Government is inefficient", regardless of facts.
6) Your use of "flyover county" gives insight into your mindset. You've bought into the us vs. them mentality espoused by certain news organizations...I expect you believe there is a war on Christmas too, despite being a self identified atheist.
1) T.E.A is a backronym, first off, and I don't think you'll find much resistance from the Tea Party about forcing large corporations to actually pay their taxes. Frustration at the GOP's complete lack of fiscal responsibility is a common theme.
2) Not wanting something to be done by the government != not wanting it to be done at all. "either a massive permanent welfare state or starve the poor to death" is a false dichotomy. I'm not blaming the bureaucracy (entirely, anyway) but anybody with even a smidgen of economic training knows that humans are rational actors that respond to incentives, and the incentives present in our current system do nothing to boost people out of poverty and everything to keep them mired in it.
3) If you want a laughable notion, I'll point to your belief that government spending carries some magic multiplier effect that private spending doesn't. Keynesian economics is the broken window fallacy writ large. Every dollar taken from my pocket to pay for a government program (be it TANF or the F-35 program) is a dollar that I would have spent on something else and am now not. Take the economic activity generated by using one of the dollars I've earned on welfare, subtract the economic activity that it would have generated had I spent it on a food bank donation, subtract the overhead from the bureaucracy, and tell me with a straight face that we have a net positive. The reality is even worse - we're borrowing this money, and it'll have to be repaid someday at compound interest that will require even private economic drain. There would be a multiplying effect if the government created the money out of thin air, spent it on welfare, and destroyed that money when it was collected in taxes so as to keep the money supply unchanged, but that's not what's happening. Go ahead and call me economically ignorant again though, it's cool.
4) I'm counting since Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" declaration in '64, fifty years exactly this past January.
5) If my only bitch about the federal government was "we spend lots of money helping American victims of natural disaster" you could safely discount me as a loon. My examples were to show that local, voluntary help can be and is effective.
6) go on, lecture an Ohio boy about flyover country. I'm a bitter clinger too, and Harry Reid thinks I'm a domestic terrorist!
We're pretty off topic now, so I'll leave it at that to avoid shitting up our host's blog further. Point is, I think the Tea Party officially breaking away from the GOP and running on the national stage would be a great thing for this country.
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