Newt Gingrich, The Ship Be Sinking

I can't believe Huntsman's at only two percent.

 

Hey, i's your guys' funeral.

 

Huntsman would get wiped out in a general against Obama.

There is no rational for his candidacy.

 

FWIW, Nate Silver's metrics have him performing better in the general than any other Republican candidate.

 

He's running for Secretary of State anyway.

 

Rove, Rush and Rupert are hedging their bets, waiting to decide.

 

They want Romney. They know Newt's a loose horse, who'll be difficult to keep under control.

 

Klein has a good piece in Time this week about how poorly Romney fares when he visits the modern Republic base, particularly in Iowa. They throw questions at him that guys like Beck and Limbaugh have made the second language of movement conservatism - for instance, a question about "czars" - and he just pretty much stares blankly.

There was an anecdote where Romney was asked about "czars" in Iowa, and he had no idea what the woman was talking about. He tried to make a joke - "I thought you were talking about SARS" - and nobody laughed. A lot of these voters, although YF will probably disagree, get their marching orders straight from Fox News and other mouthpieces, and Romney is an old-style country club Republican.

He just doesn't speak their language in the way that Bachmann and Perry and a lot of the Tea Party candidates do. He doesn't have the vocabulary. A lot of the Iowa voters and other rural voters think that something like Obama's policy "czars" is a major, major issue in this election. They get their news in a bubble.

 

Romney and Huntsman's big problem (besides the magic-underwear stuff that drives the Shiites crazy) is that they both are peripherally associated with the M. N. -- Romney through Obamneycare and Huntsman because he willingly signed on to work in the socilist liburrral's administration.

The one and only litmus test for The Base is the intensity of the monkey-screeching hysteria a candidate can work himself into when referring to Barack Hussein Osama Muhammar Malcolm X Shabazz Huey Newton Che Guevara Obama. Romney and Huntsman haven't perfected the head-spinning hair-tearing mouth-frothing routine yet.

 

Pawlenty basically admitted as much in his quotes about his debate misstep this week.

I imagine the strategy was pretty similar among the Dems in 2004, right?

 

Were you in a coma in 2004? Bush was still riding pretty high on his post 9/11 popularity wave, so Kerry couldn't and didn't make his whole campaign nothing but an endless shriek of "Bush Sucks." Maybe he should have.

No presidential campaign in recent history (except maybe I suppose McGovern '72) has ever been so exclusively based on unconditional hysterical reflexive visceral hatred of the incumbent than this one.

 

Talking about the primary battle, not the general.