Posted on 02/21/2010 7:09:17 PM PST by HapaxLegamenon
For several decades, it has been an article of faith among politicians and political analysts that no candidate can win a U.S. presidential election unless he can dominate the broad center of the spectrum, that all candidates on the edges of the left or right are doomed. Barry Goldwater's "extremism . . . is no vice" campaign of 1964 provides the classic evidence, reinforced by George McGovern's 1972 defeat in 49 out of 50 states...
Ex-President Gerald Ford left no doubt about his views when he warned last month: "A very conservative Republican cannot win in a national election."
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
They have Reagan losing to Carter by 25 points, just 6 months before he beat Cater by 10 points in popular vote and 489 to 49 in the EC.
It get real old. And who the hell said Reagan was “extreme”? “Right” and “left” fluctuates over a 30 year time span and issues change.
The article mentions that Gov. Ronald Reagan left a $500 million surplus for his replacement Jerry Brown in 1974. Reagan is long deceased, but Jerry Brown is running for governor again in 2010 . . barf. And he has a 50 percent chance of winning!
And just how many national elections did Ex-President Gerald Ford win?
He won twice as many as Steve Schmidt, David Frum and George Will combined
I remember they said it again when GW Bush first ran. I recall them saying a pro life Republican could never win.
“National opinion polls continue to show Carter leading Reagan by an apparently comfortable margin of about 25%.”
LOL
“And since G.O.P. Front Runner Ronald Reagan relies upon a base of support that is on the far right wing of the Republican Party, some experts have long declared that if he wins the nomination, the G.O.P. would simply be repeating the suicidal Goldwater campaign”
Ah yes..ex Oxford Don and Ivy Leaguer, the wise of the wise, the great George Will himself, wrote this article just last week, in which he solemnly declared that if the GOP made the mistake of nominating Sarah Palin in 2012, they would be committing suicide, and the GOP would lose by 44 states.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2454336/posts
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
“As recently as last month, before Reagan's New Hampshire victory, White House advisers looked forward with relish to the possibility of Reagan as their target.”
“Ex-President Gerald Ford left no doubt about his views when he warned last month: “A very conservative Republican cannot win in a national election.”
Heck, all that sounds like the talking points, the anti-Palin bots have been spewing nonstop, against Sarah Palin on Freerepublic for the past year at least.
?????????
2 X 0 = 0
It’s always fun reading articles like this, to see just how wrong folks were.
To be fair, this has a date of March 31, which I’m pretty sure was before the disastrous rescue attempt of the Iranian hostages. That happened towards the end of April, and Carter took a nosedive right away.
I think most observers would agree that if that rescue attempt had been succesful Carter would have been reelected rather comfortably.
Reagan would have still won. It was the economy.
I would like to see that exact OPORD but from what I know of the Carter era hostage rescue plan it was overly complicated and dedicated to keeping Iranian casualties low.
Perhaps the plan was doomed without Murphy’s Law.
Maybe. But that would have been a pretty big feather in Carter’s cap. There would have been a big welcome home ceremony and he would have been flashing his grin and soaking it in as the hostages all came back as heroes and the media fell all over themselves to give Carter the credit.
I guess it’s a good thing we never found out the answer.
"There's a vacuum of leadership at the national level; and what appears to be the Republican Party's response? A 69-year-old man who has done virtually nothing for years. We're at the same stage the Whigs were. There's no choice."
Whoever that "operative" was, he's been talking to the press a lot since 1980. I hear an unnamed GOP insider say the same general thing in different words every election.
More history repeating....”Reagan has a history of committing rhetorical blunders that drive away voters. His quest in 1976 was damaged when he suggested vaguely, without proper research and consideration, that $90 billion in federal programs should be turned back to the states. He then spent months explaining that the affected programs would not be eliminated, only transferred. As Governor, Reagan was outraged by student unrest and once proclaimed: “The state of California has no business subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” “
“Worse perhaps than the verbal gaffe is Reagan’s relentlessly simple-minded discussion of complex problems. He is aware that he is charged with this failing, and in his 1967 inaugural address on becoming Governor of California, he asserted: “We have been told there are no simple answers to complex problems. Well, the truth is there are simple answers, just not easy ones.” “
It's sad that 30 years later the same hell-holes are still giving us grief.
S + F + W = 2 GF
0+0+0= 2(0)
0=0
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