Good luck I say

Written By: - Date published: 11:10 am, September 14th, 2010 - 24 comments
Categories: International, us politics - Tags: , ,

It seems Sarah Palin is stepping up her campaign to be the Republican’s candidate to run against President Obama in 2012. The world couldn’t ask for a better candidate to oppose Obama: She won’t have a show in hell.

The Guardian reports Palin is on her way to Iowa, the starting point for candidate vying for a White House candidacy. It was Iowa where Obama claimed his first major victory against Hillary Clinton.

There are boxes that US presidential hopefuls have to tick early… Sarah Palin has ticked the first two and on Friday will tick the third when she is the main speaker at a $100-a-seat Republican dinner in Des Moines, Iowa. The party’s sole superstar has not yet said whether she will seek the nomination to take on Barack Obama in 2012. But all the indications point to a run, and Friday’s visit is the biggest sign yet.

This is great news for liberals. Not just in the United States, but the world over. Palin’s views are so incredibly out of whack with ordinary Americans, she doesn’t stand a chance. A recent Gallup poll found that 62% of independents would be put off voting for a candidate merely because they received Palin’s endorsement.

Democrats may detest her, and so does the Republican establishment, for her perceived lack of sophistication and polarising effect on the electorate. But neither will make the choice in the Iowa caucus. The party activists will, and they are shifting behind her. Long before the contest has formally begun, Palin is fast on the way to becoming unstoppable.

It’s clear that the extremist element within the Republican Party is growing rapidly. As the Tea Party gains more influence, watch the support for Palin’s candidacy swell.

A Des Moines Register poll in June gave Romney a 62% favourability rating among Republicans, Palin 58% and Gingrich 56%. Others trailed well behind. Mike Huckabee, who won in 2008, has ruled himself out of the race.

Romney, the establishment choice, at present represents the biggest obstacle to Palin. But his name does not generate much warmth or excitement among activists. At 67, Gingrich may be too old.

Romney has been a strong performer previously. But Palin’s momentum with the support of the Tea Party is looking unstoppable.

The dinner will provide firm evidence of Palin’s popularity. How many are prepared to stump up the $100? Charlie Gruschow, a Republican and founder of the Des Moines Tea Party, who has taken two tables, seating 20, and filled them, estimated the event could attract 2,500 to 3,000.

Let’s hope it’s a big number. Traditional U.S. Republicans are starting to realise the influence exerted by the extremists in the Tea Party could put off independents for years. It may not look positive now with the Republicans poised to take control of the House in the mid-term elections, but don’t worry about Obama. He’ll do just fine.

24 comments on “Good luck I say ”

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  1. nadis 1
    14 September 2010 at 12:19 pm

    Unfortunately the world doesn’t get to vote for the US president which might hurt obama’s chances in 2012……… unless the economy (ie unemployment) comes right and then he’ll be fine.

    Also recall that if the democrats used the same primary system as the republicans Hilary Clinton would have bolted in ahead of Obama.

    I really don’t want to see Palin as president or even republican candidate – more than anything she would be an isolationist president like the US hasnt seen since the 20s and 30s. And early momentum isn’t always a good thing. What often happens is a bolter comes in from nowhere (ie Obama or Palin in 08), but I think someone like Tim Pawlenty will do alright. Almost conservative for tea partiers but wont scare the independents. And Romney will always struggle – too wall street, too mormonny.

    I’m sure the US will do what it always does and vote on the economy. Unemployment less than 7%, Obama wins again. Greater than 7% and the republicans win despite their increasing factionalism.

  2. Bright Red 2
    14 September 2010 at 12:41 pm

    The Right in America is about to get a hard lesson in why FPP systems are two party systems, and why those two parties have to compete for the centre vote. Pander to your extremes and you leave the centre ground uncontested for the other side.

  3. Lew 3
    14 September 2010 at 12:43 pm

    Propaganda geeks like me are in for a wonderful couple of years.

    L

    • Rex Widerstrom 3.1
      14 September 2010 at 2:12 pm

      Perhaps we should dust off the archives and make a few dollars, Lew?

      Something with “Dancing Mujahideen” ought to be a winner, for a start 😉

      • Pascal's bookie 3.1.1
        14 September 2010 at 2:55 pm

        The latest line is that Obama was infected with kenyan anti colonialism via his father.

        “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich tells NR’s Robert Costa. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior. This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.”
        Gingrich says he had the epiphany while reading a Forbes article by writer Dinesh D’Souza titled, “How Obama Thinks”—calling it the most “profound insight” he’s read about Obama in the last six years.
        “I think (Obama) worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true,” Gingrich says. “In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve . . . He was authentically dishonest.”

        Cite for the crazy

        Obviously yeah, ok. It’s birther 2.0.

        That there foreign fellow who has usurped I say, usurped himself into the presidency of this fine nation is obviously an african Manchurian candidate who has fooled even himself. Why, alinsky I say, alinsky did suggest. From little ACORNs doth mighty black panthers grow. Now what would he want to do with this power but kill all the white folks and give all their property to the blacks? I didn’t say that, so don’t quote me y’all. But amirite?

        • Rex Widerstrom 3.1.1.1
          14 September 2010 at 4:44 pm

          Oh sweet geezus… I made the mistake of sourcing the original article, thinking that perhaps Forbes would have some concern for its editorial standing and that Newt was taking some minor point in an otherwise rational article and taking it on a ride to crazy land. But no:

          It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a “new order for the ages.” A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating “a distinct species of mankind.” This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country.

          OMG!!111!! He don’t bleve ‘mericans r speshul! Betsy, git me muh shotgum, Ima goin ta Washington!!

          Barack Obama Sr…was also a regular drunk driver

          Tarnashun Betsy! We shoulda elected his old man prezdent! Dubya was a reglar drunk driver and therw eren’t nothin’ wrong with him!!

          Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called “Problems Facing Our Socialism.”

          What the? This fella’s just darn told us the prezdent’s pappy was a wife beatin’ polygamist, bastard-fatherin’ serial drunk drivin no good… now hez some sorta fancy pants professa? I’m ah gittin confused, Betsy.

          9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.

          But hold on a second here! Fox News is always tellin us that all them damn Eurpeens and suchlike think we wuz wrong to go bombin an that. So is them Eurpeens anticolonialists? I dun thought Miss Harper – muh teacher afore I got kicked outta third grade – taught that them Eurpeens were the colonisers?! Ah’m a gittin more confused! Betsy, bring me muh sippin whiskey!

          From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama … adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America.

          Hah! So that’s why he went and gave all muh damn taxes to them Wall St types to save their big banks, coz… hang on…

          For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers… [he] even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.

          Betsy! My brain is startin ta hurt! I’m just gona wait for Newt or Rush or Glenn to make this all make sense for me…

          • Pascal's bookie 3.1.1.1.1
            14 September 2010 at 8:22 pm

            It’s a little piece of awesomeness isn’t it?

            Here’s a well meaning liberal dissecting it whilst being all confused and thinking it’s supposed to make sense…

            http://www.thefourthbranch.com/newt-gingrichs-dirty-politics/

            Shorter fourth branch post: “Hey now, that doesn’t make sense, and most of it is based on what must be deliberate lies and misrepresentations! I never saw such, bah, well I’m just hurrumphed I can tell you. Forbes! My lord. Such nonsense. It’s so obvious, and well, if Gingrich believes this stuff he’s an idiot, with God as my witness I do declare that if he doesn’t believe it, then bad form Newt Gingrich, bad form”

            and here’s a liberal who gets it. Though he is probably not everybody’s cup of arsenic laden tea, so those liberals of a gentle disposition can consider themselves fairly fucking warned:

            http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2010/09/gingrich-and-dsouza-fear-secret-african.html

            Verbatim Rude Pundit Isn’t this convenient? One no longer has to argue about whether or not Obama was born in Kenya. One only has to say that he’s turning the United States into Kenya. Now that’s a scary-ass nigger.

            • Rex Widerstrom 3.1.1.1.1.1
              14 September 2010 at 8:41 pm

              Oh I dunno. If ya can’t stand a bit of gay necrophiliac incest allusion in your political discourse, you just need to HTFU, I say 😀

              Brilliant. Hadn’t read that blog before, it’s now on my (very, very, very short) list.

    • Pascal's bookie 3.2
      14 September 2010 at 4:38 pm

      Lew, What do you make of the cover art on Glen Beck’s novel?

      here

  4. Blighty 4
    14 September 2010 at 12:44 pm

    this rise in reactionarism is typical of a country at the brink of economic and social collapse.

    It will actually give room for democrats to move to the left somewhat – as long as centrists are more scared of the rightwing nutters than of leftwing reforms.

  5. mickysavage 5
    14 September 2010 at 12:46 pm

    This almost reads like satire, I mean she cannot be serious!

    Imagine if she won?

    • BLiP 5.1
      14 September 2010 at 1:01 pm

      heh! My thoughts exactly . . . it would just be . . . oh, I dunno, what;s the word?

      Have I posted this already, its a fascinating glimpse into the Palin road show:

      This spring and summer I traveled to Alaska and followed Palin’s road show through four midwestern states, speaking with whomever I could induce to talk under whatever conditions of anonymity they imposed—political strategists, longtime Palin friends and political associates, hotel staff, shopkeepers and hairstylists, and high-school friends of the Palin children. There’s a long and detailed version of what they had to say, but there’s also a short and simple one: anywhere you peel back the skin of Sarah Palin’s life, a sad and moldering strangeness lies beneath.

  6. ABC 6
    14 September 2010 at 12:58 pm

    People were having a similar conversation not so long ago…

    “…imagine if George Bush won!”
    “Oh don’t be ridiculous.”
    “It could happen.”
    “Only if the ballot was tampered with.”
    “Yeah, suppose so. Another beer?”

  7. john 7
    14 September 2010 at 1:11 pm

    The Neo-Liberal disaster zone, the US,continues to collapse economically and socially,but the rich continue to get richer! Any connection? This is the Country our Nact outfit takes its ideology from! They want us to go down the same road! It doesn’t matter who is elected the US is history except for Harvard,Princeton,Yale, Bombs and Bullets and of course BANKS!
    Refer link
    http://www.businessinsider.com/15-shocking-facts-about-poverty-in-america-2010-9

  8. joe90 8
    14 September 2010 at 2:52 pm

    If you’re going to follow SarahPalinUSA on twitter you’ll need Palinslation to make sense of the gibberish she posts.

  9. joe90 9
    14 September 2010 at 3:09 pm

    Going Rouge, an American nightmare.

  10. Augustus 10
    14 September 2010 at 3:58 pm

    She wouldn’t have a show in hell? Never underestimate the stupidity of the american electorate, they voted GWB in twice.

  11. millsy 11
    14 September 2010 at 6:43 pm

    Dont write her off people.

    There were probably people out there in 1980 thinking that a senile ex-actor would never be elected president….

    Given the rise of the Tea Party movement and the fact that with their assistance, SOMEHOW the Republicans managed to seize the political agenda from an administration that was voted in with one of the biggest mandates in recent history, all bets are pretty much off at the moment.

    We live in interesting fearful times.

  12. RedLogix 12
    14 September 2010 at 8:37 pm

    Well the underlying point is simple. Washington and the agenda has long been hijacked by powerful forces inimicable to the interests of the average American.

    With 40m Americans on foodstamps, with the good jobs gone or going, with all the remaining wealth concentrated into fewer and fewer hands the ordinary people KNOW something is wrong, that their govt is no longer working for them. It was only a matter of time before they pushed back, it was inevitable.

    Hell you only have to work there for a while to know that there’s a big streak of Southern/Midwestern USA still quietly resenting the idea that they lost the Civil War and the govt won’t let them keep nigger slaves anymore.

    More potently as Joe Bageant points out, the ideological divide between a red-neck rural America, still deeply wedded to values of individualism, thrift, hard-work and personal responsibility that are vital to a subsistence agrarian economy… and the contrasting collective virtues of urban life, has proven fertile ground indeed for sowing seeds of dissension.

    But of course that agrarian subsistence economy that authentically supported the ‘red-neck’ culture has vanished in the years since WW2. The vacuum being filled by an ugly, bloated carcass of a culture…. a guns,n religion NASCAR cult of the stupid….spiralling slowly into poverty and collapse. And their federal govt, based in big cities, mostly patronises them. Of course they are resentful.

    The Tea Party has merely reaped this sullen harvest and re-directed the energy of it to deflect American anger AWAY from the capitalists and big corporates. Big money has funded and orchestrated the Tea Party activists, focussing their anger on the easy notion that it was the liberals who have wrecked America. Although ironically there is almost no actual liberals left in Washington, that mere detail was never going to stop them. It was only ever essential for the capitalists that the incipient liberal left reaction to their greed and hubris should remain still-born.

    Will it be enough to make Sarah Palin the next US President? It’s far too soon to tell, but personally I think so.

    • Red Rosa 12.1
      15 September 2010 at 7:18 pm

      Well said RL. America is different. It does not elect Oxbridge elitists or the pick of the London chattering classes as President. It elects Americans. It elected Nixon twice and George W Bush twice, and it may very well elect Sarah Palin. Only time will tell.

  13. Tiger Mountain 13
    15 September 2010 at 8:21 am

    “She won’t have a show in hell”
    …but this is hell on earth, 21st century America. The ‘ugly Americans’ are suffering from transference as logix points to above. On one level you feel pity for them, but they are nasty bastards alright and quite likely to vote Obama off the island.

  14. Jum 14
    22 September 2010 at 1:58 pm

    Welcome to Hell, then. She can see it from her back door.

    Captcha: SUFFER

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