From Frank Rich via DailyKos' Maccabee, regarding the recent GOP Presidential candidates debate:
The candidates mentioned Reagan’s name 19 times, the current White House occupant’s once. Much as the Republicans hope that the Gipper can still be a panacea for all their political ills, so they want to believe that if only President Bush would just go away and take his rock-bottom approval rating and equally unpopular war with him, all of their problems would be solved. But it could be argued that the Iraq fiasco, disastrous to American interests as it is, actually masks the magnitude of the destruction this presidency has visited both on the country in general and the G.O.P. in particular.
He's brutal, and it's all true:
Since then, panicked Republicans have been either blaming the "Let’s Make a Deal" debate format or praying for salvation-by-celebrity in the form of another middle-aged white guy who might enter the race, Fred Thompson. They don’t seem to get that there is not another major brand in the country — not Wal-Mart, not G.E., not even Denny’s nowadays — that would try to sell a mass product with such a demographically homogeneous sales force. And that’s only half the problem. The other half is that the Republicans don’t have a product to sell. Aside from tax cuts and a wall on the Mexican border, the only issue that energized the presidential contenders was Ronald Reagan. The debate’s most animated moments by far came as they clamored to lip-sync his "optimism," his "morning in America," his "shining city on the hill" and even, in a bizarre John McCain moment out of a Chucky movie, his grin.
Last night supposed GOP frontrunner Rudy Giuliani got booed in Houston, both for being a loudmouth Yankees fan as well as throwing his Pro-Choice views back in their faces. While I agree with Rudy's decision to let it all hang out and hope his dying Party grabs his non-lockstep lifeline, I don't see exactly how he breaks through in time, particularly since his message that the most important issue is which Party will better protect the U.S. from terrorists is currently clashing with reality:
Progress by September.
That, in three words, is the latest mandate from some nervous Republicans to President Bush over the war in Iraq. As the Democratic-controlled House passed yet another war spending bill last week, and Mr. Bush promised yet another veto, some members of his own party went to the White House with a blunt warning: We’re with you now, but if there is no progress by September, all bets are off.
There’s just one problem. Nobody in Washington seems to agree on what progress actually means — or how, precisely, it might be measured.
Progress might be negative. For example, on Saturday 5 U.S. soldiers were killed and 3 disappeared in a rural area south of Baghdad. That's a surge in trauma for our brave men and women. Let's hope the missing ones are found quickly. Heckuva job, Bushie.
It's always too early to pronounce any major political party dead, but the U.K.'s Guardian is sounding the neocon deathknell, from Perle to Wolfowitz. Can a foreign observer tell us more about ourselves than we can glean from within?
And yet to visit the US at present, as I have done, is to experience an overwhelming sensation of drastic impending change. It's not merely that President Bush, to whom Blair so disastrously tethered himself, is "in office but not in power". Most Americans can't wait for him to go, Congress is beyond his control, and the Senate majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, has told him that the war in Iraq is lost - for which statement of the obvious Reid was accused of "defeatism" by the vice-president, Dick Cheney.
Besides that the portents range from Paul Wolfowitz's travails at the World Bank to the Senate interrogation of Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, and the trial of Conrad Black. This might sound like the "succession of small disasters, oh trifling in themselves", in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On ("a Foreign Secretary's sudden attack of dysentery at the funeral of George V, an American ambassador found strangled in his own gym-slip...") And yet there really is an observable pattern.
So the GOP candidates are in trouble. From the middle-aged and older white male Presidential hopefuls Frank Rich excoriates on down, momentum against them. Sure, the Dems could screw it up, but even a Conservative columnist shows how easy it might be for them can win:
Blankley, the Washington Times editor and also a former speech writer for George H.W. Bush, said in an interview: “The challenge for the Democrats is that they’ve got to come up with a candidate who will be safe against the inevitable Republican campaign theme that Democrats are not competent and safe enough on the war and foreign policy.
“If the Democratic candidate can manage that, they’re the odds-on favorite to win the presidency.”
And finally, there's the criticism from the inside. When an old Barry Goldwater aide writes a book called, Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP and goes out to lecture about it at the deeply Conservative Cato Institute, there's trouble in River City. He calls Dick Cheney a megalomaniac who was just waiting for the chance to reveal himself as such, and George W. Bush as "Dan Quayle in cowboy boots." For real.
Ouch.
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