Posted on 09/26/2014 2:02:57 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I’ve been mostly ignoring the various “Romney 2016!” trial balloons floated by various parties over the last six months or so (including by some of my dear friends, alas), but now that someone as sober and well-informed as Byron York has weighed in with a “this could happen” column, it’s worth saying something about why the possibility keeps coming up.
Part of the answer can be found in Henry Olsen’s helpful analysis, from earlier this year, of how exactly Republican presidential primaries tend to shake out. Olsen offered a four-group typology of G.O.P. primary voters — secular conservatives, religious conservatives, moderate conservatives and Rockefeller-Republican centrists — and argued that the nomination almost always goes to the candidate who can rally the moderate conservatives and co-opt elements from the other constituencies while fending of challenges from the right and (sometimes, though less often) the center. There are different ways to do this (as evidenced by George W. Bush and John McCain’s very different paths to the nomination), but the trick doesn’t change that much from cycle to cycle — you want to seem conservative enough but not too right-wing, electable but not a liberal sellout, a safe choice for donors who also makes the party’s activists feel respected. You don’t win by running against those activists (as McCain did in 2000, and Jon Huntsman did in 2012), and you also don’t win by running as an ideological insurgent; you win by straddling dispositional and ideological conservatism, raising lots of money, and promising the best chance of victory in November....
(Excerpt) Read more at douthat.blogs.nytimes.com ...
If you haven’t noticed that Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Jeb Bush, Peter “Dementia” King, Gomer Huckleberry, Krispy Kreme and Marco Rubio are running, it’s not their fault.
They don’t send me five emails a day. Romney does.
Based on that, I’d say that a few engineers and princes in Nigeria are in the running, too.
No, Romney’s just got a lot of money and he’s funding his own campaign - pretty much the way he did last time, which I’d say is one of the reasons the GOP-e chose him.
He’s starting early and supposedly there’s a lot of value in that - there must be, because he was such a loser that nobody would even be considering him now unless he was creating the buzz himself.
No wonder we are $18 Trillion in debt, all our manufacturing jobs gone to China, 1 out of 4 in age group 25-55 without jobs, trade deficits growing every year. We need to dump all the lawyers running the country.
Hiring an employee without testing his/her abilities is close to insanity. If you hired people like that, I can understand why your employer did not make you rich.
Romney is a nice guy and a successful businessman and all that, but he will be no match with Hillary. He is too mild mannered, he can not counter punch on the stump and in debates.
No Romney in 2016!
In a sane world an orange juice can could beat Hillary Clinton.
Romney had a tough job running against a “Black President.” Heck, Romney beat Obama on the important points in all the debates (Russia, Behghazi, Terrorism, economy), but that crap about ‘war on women’ was the stuff that got him because the media played it up as if it was real. It’s tough to be a rich white guy when you’re running against a ‘Black Dude’ and I mean that seriously. It was real political advantage the dems had because a vote for Romney was a vote for racism and visa versa.
On the other hand, Romney will likely be up against Hillary if he gets that far. In a real sense, he’ll have experience running against a ‘minority’ having done it once already. I’m sure he’s learned lessons and Hillary isn’t the cool cucumber Obama was.
You're making it personal, which is a mistake many new people here make. As I said, my private sector employers were cautious enough not to get sued, which is only rational in this day-and-age. My public sector employers were trying to help their clients keep out of trouble. "Employers" aren't in the position of "making me rich" that is my job, whether I'm per hour, salaried, paid by commission or a contractor.
You can’t change the fact that he changed his core convictions just to be elected and has done it more than the average politician outside of Charlie Crist
I, Laz, should be the Republican nominee.
“Binders full of women.”
If I was one of the X-Men, my Mutant Power would be the ability to hit it, with any woman, nonstop.
Actually, I must revise that last one: If I was one of the X-Men, my Mutant Power would be the ability to hit it, with every woman, and with such speed that I could hit it with every single woman in the world in under 37 seconds. Kinda an X-rated teleporting super-speed thing.
Yes. Let’s talk about Mitt the Backstabbing Obama-supporter.
Jealous Mitt Romney Gave America Obama 1.
Impotent Mitt Romney Gave America Obama 2.
Romney should get on his knees and apologize
for RomneyCARE.
A box full of hammers would have done better than Romney,
and would have hurt America less.
Is that the main plank in your platform?
Do I need another?
I thought I fed you a good straightline Lou.
(signed)
Bud
Ross, the model doesn’t work. Didn’t work with Romney, didn’t work with McCain, didn’t work with Dole, and it just barely worked with Dubya. Against Democrat “talent” we should quite frankly have beat into grease. Trying it again with Mitt, Jeb and/or Chris in 2016 strikes me as entirely too close to not even trying to win.
Seriously, guys, would it kill you (you being the Republican/conservative political industrial complex) to consider Palin? I think she’d be an interesting matchup against Hillary or (if she runs) Liz Warren. And it might be fun to wrong-foot them for a change if they go with a guy. The worst thing that could happen is she could lose. And at the risk of repeating myself, you’ve been doing that anyway.
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