Ted Cruz is Stupid, Cynical or Both, And I Want Him to be the Republican Presidential Nominee

 

I've never met Ted Cruz, so I can't say as an absolute certainty that he's a psychopathic retard. But because he's a Republican and a Tea Partier, he can't honestly object to either characterization, since both are such a central part of his political base.

Republicans and Teapers get awfully pissy when I say things like that, but I'm hardly the one that's been in the trenches finding new and ever more self-defeating ways to turn superstition and stupidity into conservative virtues.

Even before the advent of the Tea Party, supposedly conservative politicians have equated self-promoting ignorance as folksiness, which explains the non-sexual appeal of Sarah Palin perfectly. Christ, when I try to explain to reasonable, intelligent people why I hold conservative positions, I have to bend over backwards to demonstrate that I'm not a fucking yahoo. And that's exhausting because people like Ted Cruz have made it their life's mission to make it exhausting.

I'm going to explain the antics of the junior senator from Neverland this week as succinctly as I can.

Cruz filibustered for 21 hours - reading Dr. Suess and comparing everyone that isn't him to the goddamned Nazis - on a day when there weren't any bills pending in the Senate, which makes it less of a filibuster and more a spectacular at of public masturbation. By the way, he did this on a measure that he said that he supported and ultimately wound up voting for. It was the single most bizarre spectacle I've witnessed in my 35 years of studying American politics.

Cruz has so entranced the stupid that Erick Erikson hasn't been able to get his head out of Ted's lap long enough to write a coherent blog post in over a month. He's made Mark Levin even more insufferably Mark Levin.

But people with normal cognitive functions - including most rational Republicans - have come to loathe Cruz with the power of a thousand suns. Jon Dickerson of Slate explains why;

He wasted precious time: Republicans don’t want to get the blame for a government shutdown. By soaking up valuable Senate time with no-win maneuvers, Cruz has left House leaders with less time to follow their legislative strategy—one that might have won limited concessions from White House. Or, with significantly more time, House Speaker Boehner might have been able to produce a funding bill that would have at least included a one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act. That would have put Democrats up for re-election in vulnerable states in a tough spot; at the very least, red state Democrats would have had to take an unpopular vote. Now the GOP looks fractured, time is short, and Boehner may only be able to pass the funding bill passed by the Senate Democrats—which he’ll almost certainly have to do with Democratic votes, offering even more leverage to the enemy.

Ego: He has used his colleagues to elevate himself in the furtherance of his 2016 presidential ambitions.

He made Obama’s critique look accurate: For years, President Obama has said a minority faction of zealots controls the Republican Party. By hijacking the system for a cause that had no chance of success, Cruz confirmed Obama’s cartoonish vision of a party controlled by a wing unconcerned about practical results.

He turned a tactical fight into a purity test: The majority of Republican senators agreed with Cruz on the importance of defunding Obamacare, but they disagreed with him on tactics. He characterized those with whom he had a tactical disagreement as ideological turncoats.

He blunted the GOP’s best plan of attack on Obamacare: The Affordable Care Act was falling under its own weight as stories of rickety implementation, layoffs, and companies dropping coverage of their employees continued to be published. By linking the “defunding effort” to continued funding of the government, Cruz distracted the public from Obamacare’s inherent problems. That distraction undermined Republican efforts to chip away at the legislation through smaller attacks, like a one-year delay that might have led to a full repeal if the GOP took back control of the Senate in 2014.

Let's try to look at this dispassionately, shall we? Cruz took something really unpopular (Obamacare) and attached it to something even more unpopular (a government shutdown.) The GOP is on the record as being against the former, but they know that they can be seen as favouring the latter.

This ain't 1995, teenagers. When Newt Gingrich convinced his party to commit ritualistic suicide back then, there were continuing resolutions to fund all but the most trivial parts of the government. America wasn't at war with three-quarters of the world and threatening to bomb the rest. And nobody was crazy enough to threaten to not raise the debt ceiling and destroy what's left of the world economy. Bill Clinton wasn't afraid of a government shutdown. Shit, he used it as a opportunity to get suck-started by the unpaid help.

The ramifications are so much worse now than they were then, and Senator Cruz and his shithead brigades couldn't care less. "We can let it burn now or later," is one refrain I've heard a lot from supposed "patriots" and "conservatives." These people are actually willing - no, eager - to drive their own interest rates through the fucking roof just to score points in some idiotic ideological beauty pageant.  They honestly believe that the ruination of the full faith and credit of the United States is a credible electoral path. And shitheels like Erickson say that if Obama doesn't want a shutdown, he should just give the Tea Party everything they want, which would make him a fantastic terrorist whisperer.

They aren't just assholes, They're out of their fucking minds.

But what did Cruz actually accomplish this week? Well, he wasted time that serious people could have used to make a deal. Oh, and he was on TV a lot.

Aside from that, not much. He actually wound up voting for the cloture motion that he was supposed to be (but actually wasn't) filibustering. Everything he wanted is going to be eviscerated in conference, but now it's going to happen with malice. Ted Cruz is singularly a man without friends in Washington. Good luck with having a career that way.

On the other hand, he's now the number one choice for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination among people without teeth or common sense. And you know what? I'm with them 100%!

Establishment tool Jonah Goldberg thinks it unfair to compare Cruz to Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. I don't, because neither actually did anything to further their stated aims. McCarthy never actually named an actual communist and Cruz has done nothing in real terms in stopping Obamacare. McCarthy and Cruz are both third-rate demagogues who were just smart enough to know that they could only further their own careers by exciting mouthbreathers.

And that's exactly what the GOP needs in a presidential nominee this year. I wasn't so silent in wanting Sarah Palin to be the nominee last year, and I want Cruz for the same reasons.

There needs to be a Great Cleansing in a conservative movement, and that isn't going to come through the wingnuts forcing sane nominees to act like lunatics, as happened to John McCain and Mitt Romney. And Reagan wouldn't have passed the Tea Party's schizophrenic purity test. Neither would Barry Goldwater.

They want the first Bircher nominee, never mind that most of the country knew that was a horrible idea 65 years ago. Jesus, they've made Barack Obama - who would have fit well in Gerald Ford or George H.W Bush's Cabinets - into a Maoist Antichrist.

I'm suggesting that sensible conservatives give them exactly what they want and nominate Ted Cruz. The apocalypse will take care of the rest.

I figure that Boy Ted will lose about 39 states. In the last ten years, the GOP has seen Colorado, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Florida slip away. Indiana, Georgia and Arizona have all been tighter than they should be, and the demographics suggest that even Texas is going to start turning purple in the next decade.

I've spent three years trying to make a map where a Tea Partier wins the presidency, and I can't. In the last two cycles, those idiots have thrown away perfectly good Senate seats in Delaware, Colorado, Nevada, Indiana, Missouri and (if it weren't for Linda Murkowski running as an Independent,) Alaska - all of which, except Delaware, used to be pretty reliable Republican states.

There's no reason to believe that a Tea Party presidential nominee will be any more successful than their Senate nominees were in Republican-leaning states.

The Republican Party doesn't have many more elections in them to lose until they become the Whigs. The GOP only survived FDR because they Eisenhower was willing to save them. But no one with the seriousness of purpose of Ike would ever carry the idiotic standard of the Tea Party. Who needs to throw away their dignity with their professional prospects?

The Tea Party needs to run, win or lose, on their own. They can't be allowed any excuses, such as being hindered by a "moderate", which hasn't actually happened yet, or a lack of institutional support, which they say they don't want.

In an ordinary time, I'd support someone like Chris Christie, Jon Huntsman, Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush (assuming that we could collectively forget who his brother is) - considered conservatives that can win - for president. Hell, I even like about half of what Rand Paul says, depending on my mood.

But I'm not. I'm tired of the Tea Party horseshit, and willing to give them their turn. Let them nominate a hack like Ted Cruz. It'll be fun to watch him struggle to win by 10 points in a cesspool like Mississippi, where the Republicans usually win by 25.

I don't want to see Cruz turned into Robert Taft, the serious conservative that wasn't given a chance. He needs to be Alf Landon, the guy who got beaten within an inch of his fucking life.

Then, and only then, does the Republican Party have a real chance of surviving the decade.

Besides, how bad could President Biden really be?

Reince Priebus isn't Very Bright

You what a good sign that the Republican party has finally gotten it's shit together would be? When they stop running against the media.

Too many of my fellow conservatives embrace the conflicting positions that the mainstream media is dead and ignored by everybody, yet still powerful and nefarious enough to foil the GOP at every turn. You can believe one or the other, but not both.

Well, I guess that's not entirely true. You can argue both positions if you're appealing solely to inbred yokels and the recently head injured. They loves them as much anti-intellectual populist fuckheadery as they can stuff inside their little pin heads.

And that brings me to Reince Priebus, the singularly ineffective chairman of the Republican National Committee. I thought that anyone would have been an improvement after Michael Steele's reign of error at the RNC. I thought wrong.

Priebus was supposed to be the Godhead brought to earth. Under his stewardship, the GOP was supposed to expand its margin in the House, win control of the Senate and banish forever the vulnerable Barack Obama from 1600 Pennsylvania Boulevard.

None of which actually happened. Republicans wound up losing two seats in the Senate, eight in the House and Obama put Mitt Romney down like a rabid cur. Oh, and the party came out of last November looking more like wild-eyed dipshits coming out of the election than they did going in. Not a spectacular result, to say the least.

So Republicans did what they always do: Blame the media for their own bad performance.

Now Priebus is getting pre-emptive with his retatded nonsense, declaring the RNC won't partner with NBC or CNN for the 2016 primary debates if the networks go forward with planned Hillary Clinton-centric projects. 

The liberal media is on notice: If you’re in the business of spending millions to promote Hillary Clinton, you will not take part in Republicans’ primary debates in the 2016 presidential election.

On Monday, I sent letters to NBC and CNN informing them that the RNC will not sanction any primary debates they sponsor if they do not cancel their plans to promote Hillary Clinton.

NBC is planning a miniseries, CNN a documentary. If they don’t cancel these poorly disguised political ads by August 14, they can plan on watching Republican debates on networks other than their own.

Oh, fucking spare me.

I'll ignore for a moment CNN, which no one watches. But it should be pointed out that young Reince wasn't bitching too hard when CNN ran a Mitt Romney documentary last year.

The NBC mini-series (starring the always hot as fuck Diane Lane as Dame Clinton) is being produced by NBC's entertainment, which is a largely separate entity from the news division. You know how I know that? The entertainment division is located in Hollywood and news is run out of New York.

Moreover, who gives a shit if the RNC doesn't play with the networks? I can almost assure you that the networks don't.

The freakshow primary debates are expensive to produce, a nightmare to coordinate and don't do much in the way of ratings. There's a reason the broadcast networks stopped running them years ago. They can make more money with re-runs of a snuff movie or Saved By the Bell.   The only reason that they run the hour a night of the convention coverage that they do is because their FCC licenses demand it.

The presidential debates between the nominees are vapid and pointless enough. The primary debates are little more than an excuse for the candidates to show off how dumb and psychotic they are. And there are literally dozens of the fucking things now.

From there, Priebus just starts lying outright.

I called out NBC and CNN because I refuse to let biased networks turn the 2016 debates into the same traveling circus they caused the 2012 debates to be. This is just one step toward creating a better, fairer debate system. But this is also an opportunity for us to begin to do something even bigger.

The networks didn't turn the 2012 debates into a "traveling circus." The candidates did more than an adequate job of that all on their own. 

The fact is that all of the halfway smart Republicans stayed as far the fuck away from the 2012 nomination as they possibly could. The '12 primaries were so sad that at various times the main challengers to Mitt Romney were Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, some pizza lobbyist who likes pussy, and the stupid and stoned governor of Texas. How can that be anything but a travelling circus?

Furthermore, the shithead base of the GOP, as exemplified by blogs like RedState, has served only to force the candidates to marginalize themselves - and their party - to the point that they're almost incapable of winning a presidential election. People watch the Republican primaries for the same reason they stop to gawk at car accidents; Because blood has a certain glimmer to it when it's mixed with gasoline.

The fact is that you can't put a dozen third-tier mutants like Michele Bachmann together on stage and not expect people - including even the media - to not point out that they're third-tier mutants.

Were it up to me, the primaries would be abolished in their entirety and the nomination would be decided in the "smoke filled rooms" of yore, by people who at least have some idea of how government and politics work. No party that considers people like Erick Erickson power brokers can be taken seriously by anyone else.

But I think we all know that I'm not going to get my way, don't we? I rarely do.

However, there is a way to make the primary debates at least a little less self-destructive

1. Have fewer of them: Look, whoever decided that having upwards of two dozen debates that no one watches should be committed.

Dozens of debates serve only to provide dozens of opportunities for the eventual nominee to make mistakes that will kill him or her in the fall. Or the losing candidates will launch attacks that will cripple the nominee later.

As much as Republicans like to pretend otherwise, the Democrats didn't make Romney's ties to Bain Capital an issue, Newt Gingrich did. And Rick Perry, not Barack Obama, coined the phrase "Vulture Capitalism." They set Obama up for the layup that destroyed Mitt Romney forever.

2. Have no more than five: Primary debates are no being held upwards of seven months because the first primary, which is insane. All that does is take unelectable misfits like Bachmann and Herman Cain and make them national figures with access to the money they need to cause irreparable harm to the party. Say what you will about the Democrats, but they've never run a collection of monsters like the Republicans did last year.

If you deny the real freaks national TV time, you deny them the money to keep their campaigns going. And if they're out, you allow yourself to present what passes for your party's best face right from the get-go. That wouldn't have stopped Gingrich and Santorum from clearing that bar last year, but I suspect that 2016 will be different.

Since there are only five primaries that matter, there should only be five debates. Those would be within two weeks of voting in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and Super Tuesday. If the nominee isn't decided on Super Tuesday, the party has problems that will only be amplified by more debates.

3. Have the most antagonistic moderator you can find, or none at all: Political swine and their shithead consultant-lobbyist enablers aren't really interested in debates, they want an infomercial. That's why Priebus wants them turned into ball-washing exercises conducted by idiots like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.

But that doesn't prepare you for a general election. Sure, it'll thrill the practically retarded primary base of the party, but it doesn't get the nominee ready for the attacks that they'll face from increasingly disciplined Democratic nominees.

If it were up to me, I'd find the smartest, most viciously liberal Harvard professor in all of Christendom to moderate the Republican debates. Or I'd have no moderator at all, and just let the candidates beat each other to death with their podiums.

The Conventions became infomercials after 1976, and the broadcast networks carry the minimal amount they can get away with, and the cable networks only carry them because they're starved for content. That will happen to the debates if fuckheads like Reince Piebus get their way.

The GOP and the Electoral College: A Bad Idea, or the Worst Idea Ever?

I promised myself that with the re-election of Barack Obama that I would spend more time attacking him and other liberals. The main purpose of the time and attention I've given to alleged conservatives is that they make it easy for people like Obama to win and there's very little point in shit-talking the other team when ours handicaps itself before a campaign even starts.

But Republicans insist on being what the military calls "a target rich environment." It's sad and serves only to create a virtual one-party state, but it is what it is. There's really no changing that until the party is ready to start changing itself in ways that don't horrify voters.

You know why Obama won twice? That's simple. The GOP has gone insane and elevated stupidity into a virtue. In a single sentence, that's it. As the demographics of America have changed, the Republican Party clung harder to its base of elderly white people, snake-handlers and the mentally ill. If things keep going the way they have for the last decade and a half, the only people voting the GOP line in 2016 will be potential school shooters.

2008 was bad, but understandable. Overcoming the debacle of George W, Bush's presidency would have been difficult under ideal circumstances and the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the coming of the Great Recession couldn't have been worse.

Last November was different. Even though I never thought there was much hope of beating Obama, the 2012 election was even worse than I suspected (or predicted) it would be. Instead of winning the Senate, like most of the smart folks expected them to, the Republicans managed to lose two seats. And they lost the popular vote for the House of Representatives by over a million votes, retaining control only as a result of gerrymandering.

The popular vote is becoming an existential problem for the GOP, having lost it in five of the last six presidential elections. If there's any one thing that suggests the party needs reforming, it's that.

So what do Republicans want to do? Change the rules of the game in such a way that they wouldn't have to persuade the majority of the electorate to vote for them.

Long story short, the want to change the Electoral College so that its votes are apportioned by congressional district, much like Maine and Nebraska does today. If the system worked that way last year, Mitt Romney would be president.

That idea is as desperate as it is dumb. Basically, it would mean that voters would no longer choose their representatives, representatives would choose their voters. It's almost impossible to imagine a scenario where the public would accept that because it fundamentally undermines the concept of popular democracy.

It also only works as concept so long as Republicans control the statehouses and governor's mansions. Once that's no longer the case, you wind up with even bigger Democratic majorities and the GOP ceases to exist.

It's striking to me that this idea is taking hold in states that are naturally blue, but elected Republicans in 2010: Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The problem with that is that the Republican governors in all of those states have approval ratings more common to pedophiles than chief executives. So far as I'm aware, not one of them (with the exception of Virginia's Bob McDonnell, who happens to be term-limited) is currently above 40%, which makes it extremely likely that none of them are going to win re-election. That being the case, it wouldn't be shocking if their legislatures went down with them.

If that happens, the Democrats draw the congressional districts. And after what Tom DeLay and Rick Perry did in Texas in 2002, there's nothing stopping them from doing it as soon as they take control. It's an idea that almost seems designed to blow up in the GOP's fucking faces. Republicans could change the law in those states this year, lose next year, and the Democrats could use it to tilt the election for them in time for 2016.

The party, including chairman Reince Preibus, has given up on the idea of not running psychopaths for national office, so they want to do the next best thing: Rig the system so it works like the House and rewards lunatic candidates with districts that favor that sort of thing.

Not only would popular vote losers taking office become far more common, it would be a disaster for the country. You think crises like the debt ceiling are bad now? Just wait and see what happens if this plan is adopted

Could they really be that goddamned dumb?

For the most part, they aren't. McDonnell and the likely nominee for governor this year, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett and Florida's Rick Scott are all running away from the idea as quickly as they can. Scott Walker in Wisconsin is saying only that idea is "interesting," ignoring the fact that not only did Mitt Romney not win Paul Ryan's congressional district, Paul Ryan nearly lost it. Only Michigan's Rick Snyder, who seems determined to get kicked out of politics and might actually be insane, is whole-heartedly for it. Ohio's John Kasich, who's delirious enough to think that he might be president someday, is strangely silent on the issue.

The University of Virginia's Larry Sabato characterizes the entire sick, stupid scheme better than I ever could.

Republicans are struggling to right their ship after the defeat of 2012. The unfavorable demographic trends for the GOP that we describe in our new book, Barack Obama and the New America, have sunk in, and the party knows it must do something. We have solicited ideas ourselves, believing that it is vital for America to have vigorous party competition. You will see some of those ideas, offered by our readers and Twitter colleagues, here. But nestled among the constructive ideas is a truly rotten one, the proposal to fix and game the Electoral College to give a sizable additional advantage to the Republican nominee for president.

We have asked Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Alan Abramowitz, Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University, to examine the proposal and outline its likely effects. As we suspected, it would permit a GOP nominee to capture the White House even while losing the popular vote by many millions. This is not a relatively small Electoral College “misfire” on the order of 1888 or 2000. Instead, it is a corrupt and cynical maneuver to frustrate popular will and put a heavy thumb — the whole hand, in fact — on the scale for future Republican candidates. We do not play presidential politics with a golf handicap awarded to the weaker side.

Republicans face a choice that can best be characterized by personalizing it. A healthy, optimistic party is Reaganesque, convinced that it can win the future by embracing it, and by making a positive case for its philosophy and candidates to all Americans. A party in decline is Nixonian and fears the future; it sees enemies everywhere, feels overwhelmed by electoral trends, and thinks it can win only by cheating, by subverting the system and stacking the deck in its favor. Whose presidency was more successful, Reagan’s or Nixon’s? Which man made the Republican brand more appealing?

The GOP's Biggest Problem

As President Obama is inaugurated to a second term this afternoon, the Republican Party is facing what I believe is an existential crisis. If things continue the way they are, it's not  outside the realm of possibility that there won't be a Republican Party at all by 2024.

This is because the party of Lincoln and Reagan has been overrun by a cabal of populist Neanderthals who haven't the slightest idea how politics is supposed to work. Winning elections, particularly when you happen to be the minority party, is about expanding the electorate.

On issue after issue, in race after race, the GOP has done everything it can to contract it. That's fine if you contract the entire electorate through negative campaigning. It makes sense to disgust swing voters and independents enough that the election becomes an exercise in base turn-out. But it's important to shrink the other guy's vote more than you shrink your own.

Republicans haven't done that in years now. In their silly quest for ideological purity, they've driven votes to the Democrats. If supposed "conservatives" want to blame anyone for the Democrats holding the Senate and the White House (and the only managed to hold the House last fall because of gerrymandering,) they should start by looking in the window.

And please don't tell me about "the lessons of Reagan," okay? Those goddamned people don't know the first thing about Reagan or how he won in 1980.

Because John Anderson was a third-party challenger that took almost all of his votes out of Jimmy Carter's hide, Reagan started with a six point advantage in the general election. Give Anderson's votes to Carter and Reagan still wins, especially in the Electoral College, but you have a much closer election than '80 turned out being.

Not only was Carter unpopular with the general electorate, Ted Kennedy's primary challenge hurt him deeply with the Democratic base. The surest way to determine if an incumbent president is going to lose is if he faces a primary challenge. Of the five presidents that lost re-election in the last century, only Hoover didn't have a primary.

After Watergate, the registration advantage Democrats enjoyed over Republicans was even broader than it is today. Given that, Reagan knew that he couldn't win with Republican votes alone. So he went after union households (a trick picked up from Richard Nixon) and made strong inroads with Catholics. If you think that the fabled "Reagan Democrats" were created by Reagan antagonizing everybody in sight, you're wrong. In fact, the Gipper had the added challenge of convincing most voters that he wasn't actually crazy.

Reagan instinctively understood that there's a sweet spot between the requirements of governing and the ideological purity of your electoral base that needs to be found and held onto if you plan on being successful. Tea Partiers and other "Cult of Reagan" conservatives look at Reagan's rhetoric far more than they do his record, which goes a long way in explaining what a mess they are today.

People also forget that the Democrats gave Reagan the greatest gift of all in nominating Walter Mondale, the last of the New Deal Democrats, in 1984. Had Gary Hart won the nomination, '84 might have been very different, and I'm not convinced that Reagan would have won as easily as he did.

Republican fortunes began declining in 1988, which was an unbelievably stupid and mean-spirited campaign that did nothing to expand to GOP's electorate, despite the weakness of Michael Dukakis. While George H.W Bush remains one of my heroes and is the last actual adult to be president of the United States, he never should have made that stupid "Read my lips, no new taxes" promise to placate the Grover Norquists of the world.

The pledge was completely unnecessary. Bush had already won the nomination when he said "Read my lips." Yes, he was 17 points behind Dukakis when the New Orleans convention opened, but taxes was a play for the base, which was already on board. The general electorate never punished Reagan for his eight tax increases - including the largest in American history - so it stands to reason that Bush could have been silent on the issue. The lingering questions over Iran-Contra were a much bigger threat to Bush than marginal tax rates were.

But when Bush the Elder had no option but to renege on the pledge and sign the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, the base went crazy. Pat Buchanan softened Bush up in the primaries and Ross Perot handed the presidency to Bill Clinton in the general election. Buchanan further damaged the party with his base-driven "culture war" speech to the Houston convention and marked the beginning of the end of the GOP as a reliable presidential party.

That happened just as the Democrats were learning the beauty of triangulation. Clinton and his advisers understood that if they could run credibly on traditional Republican issues, such as crime, national security and fiscal responsibility; combined with their own traditional stronghold issues of education and Social Security, they could win forever. The Democrats began creating "Clinton Republicans" out of Reagan Democrats just as the GOP started concerning itself entirely with its own base.

George Walker Bush's campaign was an indication that Republicans were learning how to triangulate. At the end of the Clinton Administration America was relatively prosperous and peaceful, so the campaign was largely about domestic issues that traditionally favor Democrats. Knowing that, Bush and his strategist Karl Rove triangulated what Chris Matthews calls "SHE" issues (Social Security, Health care and education) into his platform to make him appeal more to a centrist electorate.

It can be argued that Bush indeed narrowly lost the popular vote, but without triangulating it is almost certain that he couldn't have won in the Electoral College. If he had run a hard-right campaign in the America of 2000, Bush might very well have been demolished as thoroughly as Barry Goldwater had been in 1964. The fact remains that Bush, alone among post-1992 Republican nominees, ran a mostly non-ideological campaign and won.

The problem arose not from Bush's campaign, but from his presidency. He massively increased discretionary and entitlement spending without cutting anything else to pay for it. Worse, he put the biggest tax cut in human history and two wars on the national credit card. And on top of everything else, he destroyed the GOP's traditional edge on both national security and fiscal responsibility, perhaps forever. And unlike Reagan, he didn't have a Democratic Congress to blame it all on.

Social conservatives and Tea Partiers engage in the most easily disprovable thinking ever when they assert that Republican "moderate" nominees lose presidential elections. The second Bush ran to the centre and won. Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney were all pushed to their right and lost by pretty stunning margins.

The silly assertion that "moderates lose" retains significant traction, both on cable news and the congenitally wrong blogosphere. Worse, those who make it ignore both the history and the politics. Was there a candidate in the Republican primaries who were going to do better than Dole, McCain and Romney did? Does anyone seriously think that Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Fred Thompson or Newt Gingrich could have beaten Clinton or Obama? They were the "conservative alternatives" in those elections and they were all born losers. I remain convinced that Jon Huntsman might have beaten Obama, but I harboured no illusions that he was going to be nominated.

However, you can make a very well supported case that as the Republican platform has drifted further and further toward the fantasist right since 1992, their electoral map has largely vanished. The southwest and Mountain states are all reliably blue and New Hampshire, Virginia and North Carolina have joined Ohio and Florida as swing states. Even Georgia is becoming closer than it has any business being. By 2020, Texas will become purple and it will be mathematically impossible for the GOP to win a presidential election.

The Tea Party learned all the wrong lessons from their successes in 2009 and '10, beginning with the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Massachusetts hadn't elected a Republican senator since Edward Brooke in the early 1970s, so it was something of a big deal and something that the Tea Party was eager to take credit for.

But they never seemed to understand that Brown campaigned without once describing himself as a Republican or considered what would be necessary for him to stay in office. For reasons that still escape me, they honestly believed that Brown could vote in lockstep with knuckleheads like Jim DiMinit and win re-election. When Senator Brown disabused them of that notion, they started muttering about challenging him in the next primary.

And they did that over and over throughout 2010. Thinking that the entire country was Mississippi or Utah, they took out credible candidates and incumbents in states like Delaware, Nevada and Colorado, essentially surrendering easy seats to the Democrats. They won the House, but lost any chance of reclaiming the Senate or the presidency in the process.

Not having learned any lessons at all from the last few years, now they're targeting New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

I'm not entirely convinced that Christie can win the presidency, but I can't pretend that he's anything but one of the very best national candidates the GOP has. His approval ratings in New Jersey are almost unprecedented for a Republican and that at least suggests that he can be competitive in states where few other Republicans can. And being competitive in improbable states is about the only realistic way left for the party to win in the Electoral College.

If the Republicans want to wage the 2016 campaign solely in Ohio, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina, they should save themselves the money and not bother nominating a candidate at all because they'll lose again. But if they have a strong candidate who puts New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania in play, that consumes time and resources that the Democrats can't throw into the swing states. He has roughly the same path to 270 that I thought Mitch Daniels would have had last year.

If Republicans insist on continuing to run populist campaigns, they probably won't have anyone more credible doing it than Christie. He's not a career politician, like John McCain, or a zillionaire plutocrat, like Mitt Romney. He's plain-spoken and has a record that appeals to the Rust Belt, which the GOP absolutely has to do well in of they have any chance of surviving at all. More importantly still, he's been largely silent on issues that have alienated women and Latinos from the Republican Party.

Chris Christie has probably the best shot of winning the presidency of any Republican, so the Tea Party is trying to kill him off.

There's no shortage of Republicans who are running for the pin-up of innumerable idiot radio talk-show hosts, like Mark Levin and Laura Ingram. God knows that both McCain and Romney courted them to the exclusion of almost everyone else, and where did that get them? The GOP still doesn't seem to have figured out having Sean Hannity love you is maybe the single best indicator that you're about to get your ass kicked in a national election.

Here's the thing about Tea Party populism: it isn't as populist as they would like you to believe it is. The very same people who piss and moan about "the Republican Establishment" have been busying themselves creating their own establishment of functional retards like Sarah Palin, talk-show jackals and lobbyist swine. And don't start me on the wrongheaded bloggers that any candidate has to suck up to if they want to go anywhere.

But what exactly has that gotten them, other than the honor of losing badly to Barack Obama? How many presidents have those dopes elected?

In my opinion, Christie is uniquely positioned to not only bypass them on the way to the nomination, but run against them to victory. If he wins re-election by as big a margin as I think he will this fall, the governor can build a counter-base of sane people who like winning. We all know that Christie won't be a mealy-mouth sycophant to conservatism's worst caricatures, like McCain and Romney turned out to be. And it's been a good long time since a Republican has had a "Sister Soljah moment."

Sure, he'll lose Iowa that way, but he won't win there under almost any circumstances. However, it does give him a respectable chance at winning primaries in New Hampshire, Michigan and Florida. If he places second or third in South Carolina, it becomes almost impossible to stop him from winning the nomination.  

And why is the idiot wing of the party so pissed at Christie? Well, he wouldn't leave his disaster-plagued state to enable Romney's delusion that he could win Pennsylvania. Then he said reasonably nice things about a president that he was trying to get tens of billions of dollars from. And he called out the Tea Party fanatics for changing the rules of disaster relief in a way that they didn't for the Gulf states or the Carolinas. He's also unwilling to hug the NRA real tight as it sets itself on fire.

The only way Chris Christie was ever going to win the approval of the Tea Party was by destroying himself in New Jersey. And keep in mind that the only thing the Tea Party controls outside of AM radio is the House of Representatives, which currently has a lower approval rating that genital herpes, date rape and school shootings. If nothing else, those three things at least have the potential of building character and Congress can only be realistically expected to destroy it.

I like Rand Paul a great deal more than I expected to, but his chances of winning the Republican nomination are only slightly better than mine are. When your life's ambition is to win an election in Kentucky, you have the luxury of pandering to simpleton deejays and moron bloggers. But as the last two cycles have taught us, that isn't true in national politics. At least not anymore.

There aren't very many people that I think are capable of preventing the American conservative movement from committing collective suicide, but Chris Christie is one of them. But these people are so determined to make themselves an endangered species that they'll do whatever they can to stop him.

Populist conservatism is not unlike Nancy Spungen and there isn't much anyone can do to keep them away from their Sid Vicious. And that love story is almost guaranteed to end the same way.

Joe Biden is a Big Fucking Deal

It used to be that Democrats underestimated Republicans to their detriment. Eisenhower, they said, was lazy and not very bright. Nixon was sweaty, shifty and a two-time loser. Reagan was an amiable dunce. The first Bush was wimp and the second a classic case of nepotism. And the Democrats lost to all of them, in some cases by devastating margins.

Since 2004, the tables have turned rather dramatically. Instead of acknowledging just how badly the GOP ruined America's foreign policy and economy between 2000-'06, they chose instead to underestimate their opposition. In this, they remind me of no one as much as the Democrats during the tail-end of the Johnson Administration.

"It doesn't matter how unpopular LBJ and the war are," they told themselves. "There's just no way that the American people will elect Richard Nixon." If that sounds familiar, it should. That's almost exactly what Republicans told themselves in 2008. Instead of learning from their mistakes, they doubled down on their wishful thinking last year, with even more catastrophic results.

Much was made of Barack Obama's resume, as if that actually mattered. If experience was all it took to win a presidential nomination, Jon Huntsman would have faced Obama last fall instead of Mitt Romney. Not only was Huntsman a much more effective and popular governor, he had vast foreign policy experience that Romney didn't.

That's why conservatives should start taking Vice President Joe Biden seriously soon. He's almost certain to win the 2016 Democratic nomination and I'd give him better than even odds of ascending to the presidency.

"But what about Hillary," I'm sure you're asking. Well, I don't think that she's going to run for several reasons;

First, history tells us that the nomination is Biden's for the asking. The last three Democratic vice-presidents - Gore, Mondale and Humphrey - all won it, despite strong challengers. The last vice-president to run for the nomination and lose was Truman's, Alben Barkley in 1952, and he was practically a corpse when he announced.

Second, the Clinton legacy is something to be protected. Losing to the first serious African-American candidate for the nomination is one thing. Losing to Joe Biden, which she almost certainly would, is quite another. It may well be that Chelsea wants to run for something someday, which would be complicated if her mother decides to become Harold Stassen.

Third, Hillary is just a terrible national candidate. Yes, she was elected to the Senate twice, but she did it in a deeply blue state and beat two nobodies. Her presidential campaign was notable for the infighting within it, which was more focused than the goal of winning the nomination. And beating an incumbent vice-president is considerably more difficult than winning an open nomination.

Fourth, she's seen how much money her husband has made since leaving office, and she'll be leaving the State Department at least as popular Bill was when he left the White House. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Hillary has been talking to Colin Powell about how lucrative the private sector can be for a popular former secretary of state. Why damage that by running for a nomination she's unlikely at best to win?

Look, mocking Joe Biden is a lot of fun. I get that. I do it all the time. The difference is that I'm not running against him.

Also, as Ezra Klien points out in Bloomberg this morning, Biden is increasingly seen as a serious player;

In the continuing drama that is the Obama presidency, Biden often appears as comic relief. He’s the zany neighbor, the adorable uncle. As a result, his presidential ambitions, which burn brightly even today, have mostly been laughed off. Somehow, the sitting vice president of the United States, the former chairman of both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, a man who’s on a nickname basis with many of the world’s most powerful leaders, is seen in many quarters as lacking the gravitas to be president.

Yet just a few days before he was giving dating advice on C-SPAN2, Biden again proved himself perhaps the most effective member of the Obama administration. He reprised his role as the White House closer, the guy who can cut a deal with the Republicans after everyone else has failed. In the end, Biden got Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to strike a deal that the White House was happy with. That’s something neither Obama nor Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner had achieved. And it wasn’t the first time. Biden also helped close the 2011 deal that lifted the debt ceiling and the 2010 deal that extended the Bush tax cuts in return for fresh stimulus.

Biden’s skills as a campaigner are also considerable. According to Nielsen, his speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention won better television ratings than the addresses of either Bill Clinton or Obama (or Republicans Mitt Romney and Representative Paul Ryan, for that matter). His debate performance against Ryan bucked up anxious Democrats and arguably stanched the bleeding from Obama’s hapless initial appearance against Romney.

Republicans would do well to study Biden's performance in his debate against Ryan. Paul Ryan was presented as the GOP's most serious thinker, and Biden managed to dismiss him as if he were a contender for vice president of his junior high school class instead of the United States. And the chances aren't good that the Republican Party will put up a nominee even as smart as Ryan in four years.

Therein lies another serious problem for Republicans: The GOP's ongoing civil war.

The Tea Party and the Religious Right maintain that when the party nominates sane people (Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney,) they lose. Of course, they forget that George W. Bush ran well to the left of the party's platform and won twice.

Those elements of the party control enough of the primaries that, if they manage to work together, they can deny the nomination to someone actually capable of beating Biden. Jon Huntsman and Chris Christie seem to already be disqualified for the nomination, and I can't see another Bush being nominated anytime soon. Between his performance as Romney's vice-presidential nominee and his vote for last week's fiscal cliff deal, I'd suggest that Ryan is out, too. If someone like Marco Rubio stays on the Tea Party right, he can't be elected. But if he moves to the center, he can't be nominated.

Then there's the party's "next in line" tradition for the nomination, which heavily favors Rick Santorum. But Santorum would be crushed everywhere but the Deep South, and there's a very real chance that he'd lose the Carolinas and possibly Georgia, especially if Biden picks a Southerner as a running mate.

Republicans have also adopted the old Democratic playbook that cost them seven out of ten presidential elections between 1968 and 2004. In 2008, McCain had to run to the base so hard that he couldn't move to the center after the convention. And last year Republicans started playing the old Democrat game of "kill the frontrunner," which made Romney all but unelectable in the fall. It should also be remembered that almost all of Obama's attacks against Romney were first deployed by Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry during the primaries.

When I look at a hypothetical election, I look at the likeliest winner and ask myself "Who's going to beat him?" Combine that likely scenarios and conditions, and you'd be surprised how often it works.

It's almost unthinkable that President Obama will leave office anywhere near as unpopular as either Bush did, although I can't see him having approval ratings like Reagan or Clinton did. If Obama starts 2016 with a job approval of about 45%, that puts Biden way ahead of the GOP, who are almost certain to have another ruinous primary. Since I believe this economy is "the new normal," employment and GDP growth numbers will only have to be slightly better than they are now for the Democrats not to be hurt too badly by them.

Then there's the Republican brand. The Tea Party penchant for nominating unelectable Senate candidates is going to cost them their third consecutive clear shot at that body in two years. There's also a better than even chance that they'll lose more House seats when they historically should gain a lot of them.

And that goes to the single biggest problem conservatives had last year: Their outright refusal to recognize reality. They managed to convince themselves that they couldn't lose against Obama when the history and the facts told them something very different. When they didn't rationalize away evidence contrary to the narrative, they ignored it completely or ascribed it to some nefarious media plot.

Every instinct in my body tells me that they're going to the same thing in a race against Joe Biden. And I can't see how that ends well.

Holy Shit, Newt Gingrich is Right About Something, Remains Wrong!

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich is the smartest guy that's wrong about almost everything that he opines about. It's actually really amusing to watch. His ego, combined with his lethal allergy to humility, makes for some awesomely hilarious positions and political postures.

Always remember that Newt is a guy who left his first two wives when they were desperately ill (the first with cancer and the second with MS) for his mistresses, yet continues to have the balls to rail about the assault on the American family and cultural decay. He made his name saying that Democrats were essentially responsible for Susan Smith drowning her children, but that didn't stop him from complaining about the meanness of politics when Mitt Romney blasted him directly into hell.

Newt isn't just the worst person in American politics, he might be the worst person alive today. Not only was it a foregone conclusion that Romney was going to rain almost sexual levels of humiliation down on him, Joseph Kony probably would have, too. God knows, Kony probably has higher personal favourability numbers and is a demonstrably better Christian.

It's been said that Gingrich will have ten ideas at any given time. One of them will be brilliant, three will be balls-out crazy, and the last six will be built on intellectually faulty foundations, if not completely wrong.

But on Meet the Press this morning, Gingrich said something that desperately needs to be said;

Newt Gingrich told David Gregory on Sunday’s Meet The Press “the Republican party of today is incapable of competing” with a 2016 presidential run by Hillary Clinton. Gingrich thinks “every Republican” should be focused on 2016 because of the severity of their defeat in 2012. Gingrich said that if Clinton were to run in four years, “supported by Bill Clinton and presumably a still relatively popular President Barack Obama, trying to win that will be, truly, the Super Bowl.”

And the GOP is almost certain to get their asses kicked, especially if Hillary is the Democratic nominee.

Rightly or wrongly, American voters now look back fondly on the Clinton years of relative peace and prosperity. The almost manic levels of criminal narcissism that both Clintons embodied have been forgotten. And Hillary's once impressive personal negatives have evaporated because of her better than expected performance in the non-political position of secretary of state.

While it's true that she ran the greatest clusterfuck of a presidential campaign in recent memory in 2008, both Clintons are formidably smart and have long histories of learning from her mistakes. The odds of her staffing a potential run with lobbyist assholes who are more interested in beating each other than winning the nomination are nil.

Hillary learned four years ago that caucuses and small state primaries can bring as many (or more) convention delegates as big state primaries. Clinton's tactical mistakes were drilled into her by an incredibly disciplined Barack Obama and taught her lessons that are not likely to need repeating.

Anyone who thinks otherwise just doesn't know the history of the Clinton family. Say what you will about them (and I could go on all day about Bill and Hillary,) but they do not make the same mistakes twice.

On the other hand, I don't think Hillary is going to run. I think she wants to, but history is going to stop her.

All you have to do is look at Joe Biden and you can see how badly he wants the nomination. This will be Biden's fifth (and presumably final ) national campaign and the single best shot at the nomination that he's ever going to have.

Here's some important history for you good people. The last sitting vice president that was denied the nomination of either party was Alben Barkley. At 74, Barkley remains the oldest serious candidate for the presidency. He was nearly blind and he had recently been dignosed with heart issues. Furthermore, Truman's job approval rating in the spring of '52 was just 24%, which hurt Barkley considerably. His campaign lasted just two months.

The only three incumbent VPs who sought the nomination - Nixon, Bush 41 and Gore - all won it. More importantly, they were the only vice presidents in a two-term administration since FDR. With the exceptions of Nixon and Bush 43, two-term presidents since Truman tend to leave office with high job approval ratings, which, historically at least, sets Biden up nicely.The deeply unpopular Lyndon Johnson\s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, came within less than a point of winning  the presidency in 1968

Both Nixon and Mondale were nominated as former vice presidents, leaving Dan Quayle as the only one to run and lose. And Quayle didn't survive longe enough to contest a single caucus or primary.

The Democrats of today are just smarter than the Republicans are. There were any number of reasons that Obama could have faced a primary challenge this year, but they knew that one would have sealed his fate and Romney would have won. Presuming that Biden goes for it - and I have no reason to believe that he won't - I can't see the party engaging in their historic practice of killing the frontrunner and risk giving the White House to a Republican.

The GOP, on the other hand, is new to that practice. Before this year, they avoided damaging their frontrunners so badly that it impacted his ability to win the general election. Even John McCain wasn't so bloodied that he was implausible before the Lehman Brothers collapse. McCain might very well have won a foreign policy referendum election, but he was the last guy who could have prevailed in the midst of an economic collapse.

The right-wing of the party changed that this year. They pushed Romney into positions that practically guaranteed that he couldn't beat an incumbent president that wasn't challenged in the primaries or facing a third party.

And if you look around, even today, you'll see that those Tea Party assholes haven't lost their appetite for launching primary challenges against perfectly electable incumbents. If they come anywhere close to beating Saxby Chambliss in the 2014 Georgia senate primary, I personally guarantee you that the 2016 Republican presidential nomination fight is going to be an indescribable bloodbath.

The Tea Party is not going to give up until they're handed a Goldwater-sized ass-kicking with one of their own at the top of the ticket. I was not-so-secretly hoping that the Republicans would have gotten this out of their system this year and nominated Sarah Palin, who Obama would annihilated before the Republican convention was even over.

If you assume that Democrats are sane, you have to assume that there's no reason for them fight a bitter primary when the GOP is going out of its way to make themselves as unelectable as they can.

I expect that Biden's incumbency will bigfoot Hillary out of the race, a process made easier by the personal regard both Clintons are known to have for him.

If that doesn't work, Obama's control of the party machinery will do it for him. Lyndon Johnson gutted the DNC to avoid a rival power base that could later challenge him, something that I'm sure isn't lost on the current president.

There are other issues for Hillary to consider.

She has the same problem Jeb Bush does. In recent American history, there is a decided paucity of presidential campaigns that don't have candidates named Nixon, Dole, Bush or Clinton in them. The idea of Bushes or Clintons bookending other presidencies is going to be a powerful weapon against whoever runs against them.

Then there's Secretary Clinton's personal legacy. She's already lost to a nobody in Obama. If she goes on to lose against Biden, which she probably would, the family brand is damaged. If Chelsea decides that she ever wants to run for something, that could leave a mark, especially when it comes to raising money and building a campaign team.

I don't see a scenario where Hillary runs, or beats Biden if she does. Of course, I could be wrong about that, but it hardly matters. Newt Gingrich's point still stands.

The Tea Party faction of the GOP, which is still more powerful than you might think, given their ability to make a giant fucking mess of the primaries, still thinks that you can subtract from the electorate and win. That's about 80 different kinds of stupid, but those assholes believe it.

They think that if they just have a "Reagan figure," the turnout models and demographics that heavily favor Democrats won't matter. The truth is, that they may be right, but it still doesn't matter.

Americans, more than anyone else, respond to personalities more than positions. President Reagan ran more on what was possible tomorrow much more than he did on what was wrong today. You could see that, at the core of his being, Ronald Reagan really did believe in the American people. Reagan's individual policies were never as popular as he personally was, and there are decades of data that back that up.

Reagan understood that addition will always trump subtraction in politics. That's how he won the union vote. He knew that he had his base, but he also understood that the conservative Republican base was never going to enough to win the presidency. That's why you almost never saw Reagan deploy wedge issues that would only serve to keep voters coming to him.

That hasn't been true since Reagan. Republicans are so scared of themselves that they have to divide the electorate with nonsense so that they can keep their base. Clever deployment of wedge issues drew enough undecideds that they could win 50% plus 1, which was still enough to win, given the demographics through 2004.

Reagan at least looked like he liked you. Since 1994 - with the possible exception of George W. Bush in 2000 -  that hasn't been true. Beginning with Gingrich, Republican candidates have built their platforms around just how disgusted they are with everybody except regular churchgoers in the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama.

It's too cute by half that Newt blames the "cultural thing with our consultants."

 And it’s part of this cultural thing with our consultants. I mean, if you start out thinking giving away 47 percent of the country, by the way, which included retirees, it included veterans. You know, it was an absurdity. And-- and I think this is-- this is much more than Mitt Romney. We didn’t blow it because of Mitt Romney. We blew it because of a party which has refused to engage the reality of American life and refused to take-- to think through what the average American needs for a better future.

Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!

In large part, the "consultants" saw how well that model of politics worked for Newt Gingrich. Gingrich saw how well wedge issues worked for the late Lee Atwater and kicked it up several notches.

Even as late as this year, Gingrich deployed the phrase "food stamp president" more than any other candidate, at least implying that that the problem was with those on food stamps as much as it was with the president who presided over the economy that made the food stamps necessary at all.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Mitt Romney believed his nonsense about the 47%. But it shouldn't be overlooked that it was Newt Gingrich, and people like him, that pushed him into saying it out loud in the first fucking place.

Consultants like Atwater pioneered tactics like this, but they were strategically used in ads that never once featured the candidate himself. Gingrich himself made it not only possible for candidates themselves to say these things out loud, but a tactical necessity. More than any other single politician, Newt Gingrich made it acceptable for candidates to declare their open contempt for half of the American people.

Reagan was seen as running for the American people. That progressed into Atwater, Pat Buchanan, Gingrich and Karl Rove, who ran against gradually larger segments of them.. By this year, Republicans were put into a position where if they didn't run against the American people, they were doomed beyond recognition.

And just like a good Republican, Gingrich isn't accepting a molecule of personal responsibility for any of it. To watch Newt Gingrich on Meet the Press this morning, you would think that the Newt Gingrich of just six weeks ago never existed.

Here's the thing; Newt is every bit the narcissistic monster that Bill Clinton was. He will run again. But unless he accepts his share of responsibility for American politics has become, Republicans will never right the course that they're on and they'll continue to lose. An optimist like Ronald Reagan will never flower in the garden of ruin that Newt Gingrich built.

Christianity teaches to "love the sinner, hate the sin." The GOP has embraced the latter at the expense of the later, at least rhetorically.

And if there's a single reason that you should get used to saying "President Biden," that's it.