QotD, I Guess That I’m A Republican Political Pro, Then edition.

Because I agree with Peggy N0onan on this:

Mr. Romney is not the leader of the party; he left no footprints in the sand. There is no such thing as Romneyism, no movement of which he’s the standard-bearer. Nor is he a Washington figure with followers. Party leaders already view him as a kind of accident, the best of a bad 2012 lot, a hiccup. The bottom-line attitude of Republican political pros: Look, this is a man who’s lived a good life and would have been a heck of a lot better than Obama, and I backed him. But to be a successful Republican president now requires a kind of political genius, and he didn’t have it and wasn’t going to develop it. His flaws as a candidate would have been his flaws as president. We dodged a bullet.

…with the caveat that I’d still have preferred the bullet to the out-of-control, rampaging rhino that the Obama administration has provided as an alternative.  As Peggy makes clear in the rest of the essay, Barack Obama has still not provided any indication that he’s prepared to lead, rather than campaign.  Peggy seems to take the position that this is due to Obama preferring campaigning to leading; I take the position that Obama simply doesn’t have any other skill than in running for things.  Certainly his legislative and administrative record is remarkably bad, to the point where it aspires to beat William Henry Harrison’s in terms of positive accomplishment.

And Harrison barely lasted a month.

 

 

14 thoughts on “QotD, I Guess That I’m A Republican Political Pro, Then edition.”

  1. Moe:
    I think you’re neglecting a very important point: there’s good evidence to suggest that the bad government is, in fact, the very point of his presidency. That is to say, in order to “fundamentally transform” the nation, he needs a sustained crisis and thus he and his cronies are doing their best to sustain it.

    1. zamoose: If Obama is trying to fundamentally transform the nation in the manner of Reagan and/or Roosevelt, he’s doing a piss-poor job of it. There’s going to be nothing for his successors to build on, and the pool of qualified successors dwindles with every election.

      1. No, he’s not trying to do that. He’s trying to alter the ways in which the population interacts with the permanent bureaucracy, and it’s working, distressingly. He’s trying to make lower-middle-class makers into makers and takers, so the Behemoth gets a dual benefit: tax revenues and reliable votes, voting in their own crass self interest for gobs of gov’t bennies.

  2. Like you, I think “dodged a bullet” is a tad over stated. I’d take a 1,000 year reign of Romney over another 2 weeks of Obama. My only hope at the moment is that while Obama is crashing from one monumentally stupid economic idea to the next he’ll chance onto a stupid idea that benefits me (like forgive my student loans or something). I mean as long as he’s destroying the economy, I might as well get something out of it, right?

  3. Aspires to beat W.H. Harrison’s record? Very little chance of that, frankly. I will give President Obama this much, though: he might manage, in eight years of office, to do more good things for this country than David Rice Atchison accomplished during his (non-existent) presidential tenure. Of course, Obama will also do significantly more damage, since Atchison spent the one day he “held” the office…sleeping, and so not doing much of anything whatsoever. [Okay, so Atchison was never really president, and the long-standing minority historical claim that he was has no real constitutional basis. Still, I think his “tenure” easily ranks in the top ten, if only for his irresolute honoring of the Hippocratic principle.]

  4. The real issue after this election is: Who speaks for the party? Conservatives don’t like McConnell/Boehner, the D.C. branch doesn’t want a Rand Paul or DeMint type leader. The Dems had the same problem during the Bush years, after Kerry lost, they didn’t look to him for guidance. We need to look to the future among the recently elected.
    .
    This is were people like Paul, Jindal, Cruz, Rubio, et al have a real oppurtunity to remake the party.

    1. I call this “Opportunity”, Spegen…
      .
      I note that Rand Paul was already talking about a 2016 run for the white house, and would suggest that – if Marco or Bobby want to beat him – they start taking some public positions.
      .
      Think Reagan in 1977.
      .
      Mew

  5. Of course, these things about Romney were eminently predictable by pretty much everyone who wasn’t a Republican Political Pro, ahead of time.

    So of those folks pushing that line, we need names, so we can identify those who were pushing Romney before the thing was decided, and get rid of them.

  6. I’m with zamoose on this, at least partially.
    In the name of Keyensian economics, Obama’s team has systematically done nearly everything that Keynes warned against. Sure, I can buy that one or two members of the team are too incompetent to realize this, but the whole team?
    OK, he’s no Keyensian, but what is he?
    .
    Well, his history leads us to believe that he’s either a bonafide leftist, or an utter cynic.
    .
    Leftists actually believe the Marxist doctrine of “historical inevitability”. That is, society will collapse, and in the resulting revolution, their utopia will arise like a phoenix from the ashheap of history. Yes, it’s stupid. But they do believe it. Cloward-Piven, and all that.
    .
    History has shown that it’s easiest to assume dictatorial power in times of extreme societal instability. And he has an expressed a desire for dictatorial power.
    .
    One thing Obama has done, is systematically undermine the Rule of Law in this country. [shrug] We may not be the only ones saying “Let it Burn”. It may be Obama’s whole Raison d’être.

    2. D’sousa argued he is a third-world style Commie who is so committed to making the West pay for it’s crimes against humanity that he’ll enjoy watching the world burn and slip into another Dark Age. I can buy that.
      But, then again, I have argued that he is a Skrull (or pick your shape-shifting alien species) invasion vanguard trying to soften up America’s ability to use guerrilla tactics to resist his alien overlords. So, what do I know?

  7. Of course, Obama being elected instead of Romney is like dodging a bullet only to be hit by a bus.

  8. When a pool hustler calls the shot, lines up the shot, pokes the cue ball in just the right spot to make all the other balls go exactly where he said they would, and then takes your money … it ain’t luck.
     Cloward and Piven detailed the plan back in the Sixties, the “Progressives” carried out their Long March through the institutions, more and more of the population became dependent on a supposedly benevolent federal government, our credulous citizens elected a community organizer as President, and the country is now going to Hell in a handbasket … Naaaah, just a coincidence …

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