Posted on 06/05/2011 2:33:17 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Former DNC Chairman Howard Dean is warning Democrats what I have noted here in many posts over the past year: it is not wise to assume that if former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin gets the Republican nomination she will lose to Barack Obama: Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman who helped
Democrats capture the White House in 2008, warns that Sarah Palin could defeat President Obama in 2012.
Dean says his fellow Democrats should beware of inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom that Obama would crush Palin in a general-election contest next year.
“I think she could win,” Dean told The Hill in an interview Friday. “She wouldn’t be my first choice if I were a Republican but I think she could win.” Dean warns the sluggish economy could have more of a political impact than many Washington strategists and pundits assume.
“Any time you have a contest — particularly when unemployment is as high as it is — nobody gets a walkover,” Dean said. “Whoever the Republicans nominate, including people like Sarah Palin, whom the inside-the-Beltway crowd dismisses — my view is if you get the nomination of a major party, you can win the presidency, I don’t care what people write about you inside the Beltway,” Dean said. The concept of “conventional wisdom” is really a dressed up way of saying: pack journalism. Or, more accurately, pack analysis. Some use the word “group think” but “pack” journalism or “pack analysis” is more like it.
As someone who worked in the media for many years and who now spends hours looking at all kinds of weblogs written from all kinds of perspectives, it’s clear the new and old media can get swept into covering the same story and echoing the same perceptions. Some of these perceptions come from left and right talk show hosts. Some come from a prominent analyst saying something which is then picked up and repeated or becomes the framework for someone else’s analysis.
But the idea that it is a “given” that any candidate nominated by a major political party doesn’t have a chance of winning is wrong. All kinds of events — natural disasters, calamities, tragedies, economic trends — can pop into a political picture.
Dean is correct: those who trust the conventional wisdom by new and old media inside the beltway and outside the beltway are making a big mistake if they bet their house on it.
In any election there are people who cast affirmative votes for a candidate and those who cast votes for a candidate they don’t like but they dislike the other candidate even more. And in an economy that seems to remain quite sick where every day you hear about someone who is looking for a job or laid off, the incumbent President better not assume he can keep his job for four more years.
So Dean and Andrew Sullivan are correct.
Do.
Not.
Assume.
Palin.
Will .
Lose.
This LADY will not sing until the ballots are counted.
Dean is making a big mistake. The only reason Palin doesn’t already have a solid majority of the GOP is that too many republicans believe she has been damaged beyond repair by the mainstream media. If Dean doesn’t get back on message with the media and the Romney campaign, they might have to face someone who can generate record turnout - and that would be a problem for socialist “progress”.
This is nothing but a signal to the drive-by media to attack her with even greater ferocity.
Dean and Sullivan and Donna Brazile.
But the GOP Establishment commentariat are still shouting their newspeak disinformation to try to dissuade our rank and file from voting for our best hope for 2012. Have they exposed themselves or what?
The problem with the Democrats thinking they can call Sarah Palin an idiot is the four-year record of Obama will demonstrate who REALLY is the idiot.
Dean makes a valid point. Any Republican candidate, once they get nomination, basically starts out with 47% of the vote. That’s a fact. As soon as you are the nominee of a major party, the fractions will rally around your candidacy. And the leftwing media knows this...
So the meme of “Palin getting killed” is out the door.
You know Palin would start out at minimum with all McCain states (plus probably Indiana, Virgina and NC goes back to GOP). And Obama would have all Kerry states from 2004. Then it would basically be a battle for Ohio and Florida (with Repub governors) - and in this economy anything can happen.
Game on!
Even a stopped, crack-smoking, psychopathic repressed-serial-killing-clcck is right twice a day. Maybe you should buy a lottery tick, Mr. Dean. You’ve got one more.
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