It’s Huckabee bullheadedly plowing ahead of Thompson by sheer belief in his own holiness all over again. The story always starts out the same: Conservatives get a credible alternative to the Establishment front-runner, and he starts getting attacked.
Then the SoCon who stayed under the radar (Huckabee then, Santorum now) becomes everyone’s plan B, because the guy who could have won (Thompson, Gingrich) was unloaded upon by the GOP-E money machine. Then the smug supporters of the upstart underdog all thump their chest and say “NO.....YOUR GUY SHOULD DROP OUT!!”
Then the vote is already split, the credible candidate becomes non-credible because of vote-splitting, and the upstart winds-up in second place because folks trying to beat the Establishment liberal switch to plan B because the smug voters of the only holy candidate make it loudly clear that they’re going to support the holy upstart candidate even if it means the Liberals win.
It JUST KEEPS HAPPENING.
In reality, what needed to happen was for Santorum to drop out early, when it became apparent that there was someone who could lead Romney in the polls for a long time, and when it was clear he had a friggin’ LITANY of ballot and delegate issues. Even if it was not Newt at the time (heck, replace Newt with Perry), Conservatives should have united around a single candidate with a full organization and little to no ballot and delegate issues, and there SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN A PLAN B. Conservative should have been forced to STAY united, learn to DEFEND their candidate rather than defect because the rich, Establishment Liberal was able to smear the credible Conservative with overwhelming cash.
If there had been no Santorum, Newt would be leading right now. He would be leading because we would have been united against Romney from day one, and there would have been no defections based on the fact that - by simply running under the radar - someone else rises because they haven’t been unloaded on.
We CANNOT keep doing this. We CANNOT keep Santoruming and Huckabeeing ourselves based on some sick notion of the holiness of a politician. We cannot keep some broke one-percenter in the race because they were able to show well in Iowa after living there for two years and facing almost no attacks because of their low polling. We cannot keep rewarding these guys for throwing Hail Mary passes when we have a chance to defeat the Liberals. No more “shoestring” campaigns, no more one-percenters who surge in time to do well in Iowa, no more long-shot dreams based on the notion that some candidate is the mostest Christianest candidate of them all.
No more Huckabees, no more Santorums. No more long-shots who surge in Iowa. Rule them out before they ruin another Primary season. Santorum was never going to get 1144 delegates - it was NEVER going to happen. The fact that people bull-headedly refused to waver from him KILLED us - and then they turned around and taunted Newt and Perry voters for voting for Santorum in desperation, citing the vote count as if nobody knows what was actually happening.
No more Santorums, no more Huckabees. No more long shots, period.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2861639/posts?page=96#96
THANK YOU for bringing that post to this thread.
B-U-M-P!
Didn’t see that yesterday, so I’ll just talk about it here.
Thompson did not rise to the top and then get torn down.
If there is a comparison in 2012 to Thompson, it isn’t Gingrich, it’s Perry. Both Thompson and Perry entered the contest late as shining knights to rescue the conservatives. Both entered the contest with great media coverage, and both started with high poll numbers. For a while, both were leading in national polls, and were showing strength in multiple states. They both had a good deal of money, and received good endorsements.
Then both of them turned out to be bad campaigners. They couldn’t generate excitement, sparks, or a sense of excitement. Each of course had their negatives, Thompson was the catalyst for Campaign Finance Reform, and was weak on illegals; Perry had the in-state tuition issue, the border fence being demagauged by his detractors, and other similarly minor but pesky problems.
But what blew them both up was the inability to keep people’s interest. So by the time votes actually started, neither could win a contest. Both worked very hard at Iowa, and both failed miserably at it, (losing in both cases to the SoCon candidate, as TitanAFC does point out).
Both soldiered on, vowing to win South Carolina. Both failed at that, and the only difference is that Thompson waited until that contest was over to drop out, while Perry was quicker to the punch, dropping out ahead of time and throwing his support to Gingrich, which may have helped Newt win a couple of delegates.
Newt Gingrich was actually following the McCain pattern, not to make a philosophical comparison though. He entered the race early, but never caught hold, faltered, ran out of money, and at one point was imploding so badly that his campaign staff went to another candidate — Thompson in 2008 for McCain, Perry in 2012 for Gingrich.
Then, as Iowa rolled around, he got some traction, started coming up in the polls while others failed. He did respectably in Iowa, like Gingrich did. Then McCain won New Hampshire which gave him instant credibility — while Gingrich, being a southern conservative, had to wait for his big win until South Carolina. But if you look at their poll numbers, they track relatively well through that point.
Not only that, but note that Perry and Gingrich were good friends, and Thompson and McCain were good friends. At the end, people said Thompson was just placeholding until McCain could come back. With Perry, he endorsed Gingrich and gave him his organization back.
And in 2008, McCain and Huckabee teamed up to stop Romney. In 2012, Gingrich and Santorum have teamed up to stop Romney.
The only difference between 2008 and 2012? It worked in 2008. It isn’t working in 2012. Probably because McCain was actually an acceptable GOP establishment candidate, while Gingrich was on the outs with that group; meanwhile, in 2008 Romney wasn’t in with the GOP, but he spent 4 years fixing that.
Gingrich wasn’t the conservative frontrunner who got crushed. He was the 2nd-to-last man standing, after every other (and possibly better) candidates failed.
If Gingrich was the true conservative darling, he would have caught fire back in March of 2011. If he had, his debate skills would have been seen as golden for front-runner status, ROmney would have been stopped in his tracks, and we’d have spent months deciding if any of the other conservatives might be a better pick than the “maverick” Gingrich with his Pelosi and other occasional missteps.
But Gingrich was no conservative darling. He was dismissed as a failed, flawed candidate. Even when he did well in debates, conservatives just expressed pleasure that someone was able to make our points, even if he couldn’t be the nominee.
Now, I know some people here supported Gingrich from the beginning. But if everybody had, Perry never would have entered the race, nobody would have been pining all summer for Palin, and the world would look a lot different now.
It turns out that November was way too late to decide to start supporting Gingrich. Too late for him to put a team together. Too late for him to get organized, to get a clear message, to get registered in all the states, to unite the conservatives.
But don’t blame Santorum. Santorum got screwed by a process that failed to recognize his win in Iowa until after he was blown away in New Hampshire. But he wasn’t rabidly attacking Gingrich. In fact, Conservatives were rallying around Gingrich before, during, and after South Carolina. He was riding high in the polls, pulled off a great win in South Carolina, and Santorum had given up on Florida.
What happened to Gingrich in Florida wasn’t Santorum’s fault.
That’s good stuff right there.
Very well expressed. Many people here probably don't recall it, but the holiness vote is how Jimmy Carter got elected. He won the election, but the voters (the same Evangelicals who wept and prayed when he won) were sunk in utter misery a year later and then you couldn't find anybody who admitted voting for him.