Tim Cahill’s running mate quitting race

Boston Herald ^ | Oct 1, 2010 | Associated Press

[fieldmarshaldj]

For about 5 minutes, she looked like a potential star after she nearly beat that stagnant Socialist fossil John Olver, but she disavowed us all of that notion once she was thrust into the Governorship. No Palin was she, nor even a Peg Heckler for that matter...

What’s so shocking is Baker taking a play from her book by picking an open homosexual running mate (in her case, Patrick Guerriero). As I said, you don’t get more “middle finger to the base” than that.

[Impy]

Yeah that’s amusing how no one wanted the job. Cellucci was a puzzler. Weld and Romney are egomaniacs who were/are pathologically obsessed with power (good call on Mitt’s daddy issues I’ve thought the same thing) makes sense they’d chuck the job when they no longer had any use for it. But Ambassador to Canada? Maybe it was actually pure boredom, with the legislature in firm control an Ambassador to an important ally maybe had more to do.

Governor Carcieri of RI doesn’t seem to have that boredom problem.

As to Baker’s running mate, I’ve seen not 1 but 2 MA Freepers praising him (”my family knows him blah blah blah good guy blah”) They’re nuts.

[Galactic Overlord-In-Chief]

You look at Reagan’s landslide in 1984, but aside from a few instances, he largely came up short on the House side (by all accounts, we should’ve won the House), but he did campaign for others, but there were dynamics afoot that made it difficult in a lot of places for us to make some headway (Nixon faced a similar obstacle in 1972). I think at least in a lot more states now, we’ve gotten more sophisticated, whereas 30 or 40 years ago (especially down South), you had very little GOP presence.

Was the House that much in play in 84? My materials on the 84 House races are slight, but I have to admit I'm mildly surprised that Reagan couldn't recoup the GOP back even to 1980 levels in the House.

[fieldmarshaldj]

"Was the House that much in play in 84? My materials on the 84 House races are slight, but I have to admit I'm mildly surprised that Reagan couldn't recoup the GOP back even to 1980 levels in the House."

I'd have to go and look at it state by state to definitively tell how many first-tier challengers we put up in the House races. I think there may have been some hope for potential coattails in the landslide, and there were a few that did benefit (in TX, for example, the Dems drew the lines to have an astonishing 22D-5R majority, but the GOP doubled their numbers to 17D-10R in the '84 election, where some famous names made their first appearances: Dick Armey, Tom DeLay (who succeeded Ron Paul), Larry Combest & Joe Barton, along with weaker sisters Beau Boulter and the turdbomb Mac Sweeney, for which the latter two would see their seats go back to the Dems in 1988).

The biggest problem, again, was that the Dems essentially had most of the control over redistricting nationwide, which partly accounted for our 1982 wipeout (look at VA, for example, we won a whopping 9 out of 10 seats in 1980, and by the time the full effects of the Dem plan were felt, which wasn't until 1990, we dropped from 9 seats to 4). Even in my state of TN, which reached 5R-3D prior to Watergate, only to see it flip to 5D-3R in 1974, the Dems almost succeeded in reducing our numbers down to almost just 2 out of 7 in 1982 (we won what is now the most GOP district in TN, the 7th, by a nailbiter). It would take from 1972 until 1994 to go above 3 members again.

I think even in the '80s, we never fully recovered from the Watergate fiasco, which partly accounted for our less-than-stellar numbers in the South. Absent it, I think we would've reached a House majority before 1994 (and there was talk of a Republican/Conservative Democrat coalition to elect a Speaker to get control of the House even in 1972, and 1981).