Why Won’t He Leave Us In Peace?
Posted on May 31st, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
|
I suppose this will make James happy:
Political donors report Sen. John McCain complains he is under pressure from President Bush and his former political adviser Karl Rove to select former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney as his vice presidential running mate.
If someone were telling me I had to associate myself with Mitt Romney, I would complain, too, but the striking thing about this report is how Bush has continued not-so-secretly to prefer the one candidate of the 2008 major Republican candidates possibly less electable than he would be if he could run for a third term. (No, I’m not kidding.) If Mr. Bush is preoccupied with legacy-building at this point, it is quite odd that he would be pushing McCain to take on the dead weight political strength of Mitt Romney, who demonstrated a remarkable ability to become less popular the more people saw of him. Perhaps this is an expression of Bush’s unconscious desire to see McCain fail, the product of some leftover animus from years ago?
What do they say the first rule of VP selecting is? Isn’t it “do no harm”? You don’t need to be as much of an inveterate Romney foe as I am to see that this choice would do a great deal of harm to McCain. Where McCain is beloved by the press, Romney is hated. McCain is considered, rightly or not, to be genuine and honest, while Romney is widely held to be a fraud. McCain wants to close Guantanamo as a detention facility, and Romney famously wanted to “double” it. McCain is supposed to run against Obama’s health care plan with a running mate who signed into law health care legislation that was effectively to the left of Obama’s position on mandates? McCain is going to compete in the Rust Belt with the living embodiment of corporate America standing by his side? Romney might help in Michigan and (marginally) in Massachusetts, but he would cost McCain dozens of electoral votes elsewhere. In the spirit of Romney’s withdrawal speech at CPAC, I think Romney should withdraw himself from consideration for VP, since he said he didn’t want to contribute to a Democratic victory and putting him on the ticket would all but guarantee one.
Filed under: politics
9 Responses to “Why Won’t He Leave Us In Peace?”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
There is no way McCain can win MA. The people from MA saying that for some reason the state is in play are the same people that thought Deval Patrick was too liberal to win MA and that it was going to be a very close election. Also remember that Ogonowski when running for Congress eseentially held McCain’s “stay until we win” position on Iraq. That plus anti-immigration rhetoric didn’t carry Ogo over the top in what was believed to be a very winnable district.
I wouldn’t (and didn’t) say that he can win there. Romney would not help him carry the state, since Romney is not terribly popular outside the GOP there anyway, but he might swing a few additional independent votes to McCain on the basis of being a resident of the state and a former governor. Obama’s polling in MA is pretty awful for a Democratic presidential candidate, but the idea that he could lose Massachusetts is a crazy idea and I wouldn’t agree with it if someone said that it was going to happen.
If anyone believed that MA-05 was “very winnable,” I suggest that this person was not paying attention to the make-up of the district. Ogonowski did about as well as he could have ever been expected to do there.
He could have done a lot better. Nikki Tsongas did not run a very good campaign and wasn’t that great a candidate. Ogonowski underperformed Romney in 2002 by 10 points and Kerry Healey in 2006 by I think 3 points. At no time has Jim Ogonowski ever had an issues page on his website. That’s how he ran his campaign, by saying as little as possible. He still doesn’t have an issues page even now that he’s running for Senate.
http://www.jimogonowski.com
I would agree with your analysis, but hope that McCain’s people don’t read this blog, and are stupid enough to cave in to the Romney pressure. As a Democrat, I can’t imagine a better way for McCain to sink whatever chances he’s got than to pick Romney. He’s our wet dream. But even I am not optimistic enough, or think lowly enough of McCain, to think he’d actually make this kind of blunder. Still, there’s always reason to hope for the best.
How about picking Lieberman?
I found this blog yesterday and have been reading it off and on all weekend. Just thought I’d say hi and let you know you’ve got a new regular reader. Love it.
Welcome, Melissa. I’m glad that you’re finding Eunomia worthwhile. I’ll keep working to make sure that it stays that way. Thanks very much.
Lieberman’s a close second, but though he’s full of shit, he at least consistently believes in his own shit.
One can go back and think of previous pairings (Kennedy/Johnson, Reagan/Bush) where the top and the bottom of the ticket didn’t like each other very much, but that seems to pale in comparison to the white hot hatred McCain holds for Romney. Not gonna happen.