Romney is running to become Liar-in_Chief

Rachel Maddow has called Romney out. Romney is not just a flip-flopper. He is a liar, who when called on his lies, then lies about them. Mitt Romney cannot be trusted. Nothing he says seems to be based on anything other than whether it will fool someone into giving him something he, personally, wants.

Here's Rachel Maddow's description of the lies Romney has been telling over and over again.

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That's not enough to convince you? Here is his flip-flop on Climate Science.

Homophobic politician? Probably Gay.

This is too good. Good music with a message.



By Katie Goodman.

This Presidential election is really going to be a culture clash between the agricultural rural conservative Republicans and the industrial urban Democrats, and the Republicans are in panic mode.

Romney will be the Republican nominee

Right now the four possible Republican candidates for President are Romney, Gingrich, Ron Paul and trailing the pack, Rick Perry. But the recent announcement that Gingrich and Perry failed to qualify for the very significant Virginia primary to be held March 6, 2012 pretty much establishes that Romney is going to be the nominee. Let's look at Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick perry individually.

Ron Paul

Ron Paul has a good chance to win the Iowa caucuses according to Nate Silver. But he isn't likely to be able to build on that relatively strong showing in Iowa. His support is quite strong, but very narrow. Nate estimates that at the very best Ron Paul might be able to get about one-third of the Republican votes.

Nate bases his opinion on a series of polls. But his analysis comes from before the Republican establishment really started going after Ron Paul because he was beginning to appear to be a real threat to Romney. The growing chorus quoting Ron Paul's racist writings in his 1980's and 1990's news letters will lower these numbers. So will wider distribution of his views regarding pulling American troops back to the American shores and entering a new period of American isolationism.

Ron Paul's fervant supporters will keep him in the Republican nomination process until it ends, but I think Nate Silver's estimate as high as one-third of Republican voters is highly optomistic.

Newt Gingrich

The next candidate to look at is Newt Gingrich. Newt's disorganization has jumped up to bite him big time. He has failed to qualify for the Virginia Primary which is to be held on Super Tuesday March 6, 2012. His campaign needed signatures from 10,000 registered voters, including 400 from each of the states 11 Congressional Districts. The Newt campaign could not organize itself well enough to achieve a relatively small admininstrative requirement by the deadline. This failure demonstrates what most observers already recognize - Newt is horribly disorganized.

It will be interesting to see if Newt's secretive backers and their Super Pacs who have funded Newt's recent rise from obscurity to being considered a viable candidate forthe Republican nomination as an alternate to Romney will continue throught the Spring.

Rick Perry

Rick Perry, the only other non-Romney candidate likely to be able to compete into the Spring, also failed to qualify for the Virginia primary. Like Newt, Rick Perry has had the appearance of being a well-funded alternative to Mitt Romney. His series of gaffes in the debates have clearly demonstrated that he is not Presidential quality, but his deep-pocketed funders in Texas have been willing to shell out the money for the primary season anyway. I'm not sure what his funders thought they were going to buy, but it's pretty sure Rick Perry will never deliver to them. America as a whole is the winner here.

Mitt Romney

Given the weaknesses of Romney's three major opponents and the fact that the Republican establishment is circling the wagons in support of Mitt it looks like Mitt Romney will, as previously expected, be the Republican nominee for President.

Is there a chance this line up will change this spring? There's always a chance, but that chance is getting smaller and smaller. Without the Virginia votes on Super Tuesday Gingrich and Perry are very unlikely to be able to effectively challenge Romney. Ron Paul will never get over 35% of the Republicans and I'll be surprised if he gets 20%. The more Paul moves to become a real challenger the more the fact that he is utterly insane will become clear even to the Republican voters. The field of candidates really has winnowed down that tightly.

Both the tea partiers and the evangelical Republicans are going to make a lot of noise objecting to Romney, but as spring moves forward their hatred of Obama and the hope that Romney can defeat him will damp down that noise. As much as the evangelicals dislike Romney's Mormon religion, they hate Obama and the Democrats worse. They will hold their collective noses and prepare to vote for Romney in November.

The media is going to hate this. Where is the conflict that drives ratings and advertising? No drama Obama isn't going to give it to them, and while Romney will try to lure the media in he doesn't have much to offer them until after the Republican convention in August. That leaves the media in about a six months long silly season from Super Tuesday until the conventions. Then it will be Obama vs Romney - just as has been clear since last summer.

Two interesting comments from Greg Sargent

Here are two interesting comments from Greg Sargent's Plum Line.

• GOP leaders to Fed: Don’t act on economy: GOP leaders send a letter to the Fed chairman, urging him not to adopt any further stimulus to help the economy — on the grounds that more action could hurt it by weakening the dollar, even though many economists think a weakened dollar would be good for the country.

  Ezra Klein sense a threat in the public pressure. Steve Benen suggests we’re seeing the latest sign of active GOP sabotage of the economy. And Matthew Yglesias says this should be the story of the day.

• Obama is tanking among independents: All that said, there’s no sugar-coating the fact that Obama’s overall numbers are terrible with indys. A new McClatchy-Marist poll finds that indys plan to vote against him by a whopping 53 to 28.

  This could be a referendum on the current economy, and Obama’s challenge is to change this by somehow leveraging the fact that indys approve of the actual fiscal policies he’s currently championing. Hence the newly aggressive approach.

So the Republicans, with nothing else to run on for 2012, are in the process of sabotaging the economy. Is there any doubt? They are doing it in public now. They aren't even trying to hide their efforts.

Well, apparently there is doubt among the independent voters. Remember that a major characteristic of "independent" voters is that they do not follow politics and have little in-depth information. They are probably reacting to the poor economy and blaming the President. Will they even hear of the letter from the Republican leadership to the Fed? If they do, will they understand what it means?

That reaction by the independent voters is exactly the one the Republican leadership is depending on.

The best description of modern American politics yet written

"As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself." This is quoted by Steve Benen this morning. He also adds:

There is one great overwhelming dilemma that dominates American politics in this early part of the 21st century. It is not the extent to which President Obama has failed to meet the expectations of the progressive base, though this matters. It is not the lazy, negligent, and incompetent establishment media, though this matters, too. The issue that should dominate the landscape is the radicalization of the modern Republican Party and the effects of having one of two major political parties descend into madness.

What brought Steve to write this? It is an article entitled "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult" by long-time Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren. Lofgreen recently retired after 28 years of working with Republicans on the Hill. Here are some excerpts:

Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

[...]

A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

[...]

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation.

[...]

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"

[...]

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

[...]

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.

[...]

I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink.

[...]

I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP. While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate.

Then he lets loose on the failures of the political Democrats. And he is dead right!

The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.

What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3]

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

He then explains what really matters to the Republican Party of 2011. I list here only his three categories.

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors.The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public.
2. They worship at the altar of Mars.While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries.
3. Give me that old time religion.>Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP.

There is a lot more in this great article. And it is written by a man who has been on the inside with the Republican leadership for nearly thirty years.

Remember "a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself." This article explains how it is happening to America right now. It is a process of the Republicans attacking to destroy American democracy and the hapless Democrats simply failing to defend democracy when it is under attack.

2012 is going to be a pivotal election for America, probably one as important as the election in 1860.

Obama to win in 2012

Allan Lichtman, professor at the American University, has a thirteen element formula which has successfully predicted which party would win the Presidency each election since 1984. US News has published his prediction for 2012. Obama will win, he says. Combine this with Steve Benen's report this morning that Obama is going to propose a big jobs initiative force the Republicans to continue to expose their anti-middle class agenda the 2012 election already seems rather easily predicted.

Here are the thirteen elements with Lichtman's scoring:

• Party mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections. Says Lichtman, “Even back in January 2010 when I first released my predictions, I was already counting on a significant loss.” Obama loses this key.
• Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. Says Lichtman on Obama’s unchallenged status, “I never thought there would be any serious contest against Barack Obama in the Democratic primary.” Obama wins this key.
• Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president. Easy win here for Obama.
• Third Party: There is no significant third party challenge. Obama wins this point.
• Short term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign. Here Lichtman declares an “undecided.”
• Long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms. Says Lichtman, “I discounted long term economy against Obama. Clearly we are in a recession.” Obama loses this key. [Read: Seven Ways Obama Can Gain Credibility on Jobs.]
• Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy. “There have been major policy changes in this administration. We’ve seen the biggest stimulus in history and an complete overhaul of the healthcare system so I gave him policy change,” says the scholar. Another win for Obama.
• Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term. Says Lichtman, “There wasn’t any social unrest when I made my predictions for 2012 and there still isn’t.” Obama wins a fifth key here.
• Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal. “This administration has been squeaky clean. There’s nothing on scandal,” says Lichtman. Another Obama win.
• Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs. Says Lichtman, “We haven’t seen any major failure that resembles something like the Bay of Pigs and don’t foresee anything.” Obama wins again.
• Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs. “Since Osama bin Laden was found and killed, I think Obama has achieved military success.” Obama wins his eighth key.
• Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero. Explains Lichtman, “I did not give President Obama the incumbent charisma key. I counted it against him. He’s really led from behind. He didn’t really take the lead in the healthcare debate, he didn’t use his speaking ability to move the American people during the recession. He’s lost his ability to connect since the 2008 election.” Obama loses this key. [See political cartoons about President Obama.]
• Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. Says Lichtman, “We haven’t seen any candidate in the GOP who meets this criteria and probably won’t.” Obama wins, bringing his total to nine keys, three more than needed to win reelection.

It's quite a way in advance of the election, of course, but the Republicans' only power is their conservative and socially conservative base who will not permit their politicians to even try to run on policies which might defeat Obama. While no election can really be predicted this far in advance, something really significant would have to change to make this prediction wrong.

2012 Election has started - Repubs working to paralyze government

The recent Pew poll clearly states two things - independents want Democrats to confront Republicans and Democrats are unhappy with Democratic leadership. The latest AP poll confirms this result, but also points to the fact that the public still blames the republicans for the Great Recession.

Essentially the Republicans are practicing a slow motion shutdown of the US government in order to prevent Obama from being able to claim any success as President. Yet even while holding the government hostage and shutting down as many government functions as they can get away with, the Republicans are trying to blame Obama for not getting things done.

The slow motion shutdown of government is an effort by the Republicans to conduct a political coup and retake the Presidency in 2012 even though the voters don't like them and disapprove of what they propose government does. Following the creation of a false crisis over the government debt that has damaged the financial markets worldwide while tying up the Congress and preventing it from acting to ameliorate the real jobs crisis. The Republicans will not permit the government they don't run to function. That is the message presented by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor When he told Brian Beutler that when Hurricane Irene hit his own Virginia Congressional District that he would hold the disaster relief that the government needs to provide hostage to force an equal amount of spending cuts from the rest of the federal budget.

So what does this have to do with the polls that show that the Republicans are unpopular but that Obama needs to lead? We know the Republicans are unpopular. THEY know they are unpopular. Why are they going out of their way to show why they are so unpopular? And why isn't Obama stepping up and leading America anyway?

It's a high-stakes gamble by the Republicans that the American voters will vote in 2012 based on the economic conditions in 2012 and blame Obama because he is the face of the federal government. The Republican leadership is betting that we voters will on average forget the crap the Republicans are pulling to prevent government from functioning and instead blame the guy who is in charge for the previous three years.

The Republicans can (possibly) make this work because the Constitution created a Presidential system with shared powers. The President can tell Congress what he wants to do, but nothing gets into the budget that does not have the approval of the leadership of House of Representatives - currently John Boehner (R - OH.) And John Boehner is currently be led by the nose by the extremist social conservatives who call themselves the tea party who were elected in the 2010 election. Hey! American voters can't blame the Republicans if they are being forced to cater to extremist crazies, can they? No, the Republicans are betting that the American voters in 2012 will blame the bad economic conditions (caused by Bush and the Republicans) on the man who cannot get the House of Representatives (under Republican leadership) to pass a budget that includes programs that will actually increase employment in America.

This Republican high-stakes gamble is based on the idea that the (illegitimate foreign-born Muslim Black) President Barak Obama has failed to make things better for the average Americans in spite of the total obstruction he faces from the Republican Party, FOX News, and Rush Limbaugh.

Why do I call it a high-stakes gamble for the Republicans? Because they are betting the future of their party on the ignorance, stupidity and short memory of the average American voter. The Republican Party is already at low levels of disapproval never before reached by an American national party in the history of approval/Disapproval polls. But they have 14 months until the 2012 election and they have control of an amazing propaganda machine here in America (centered on FOX and on the right-wing talk shows of the Limbaugh type.)

The Republicans are also depending on the fact that Obama's polls are not that great right now, either. Again, they think that their efforts to neuter the effectiveness of government between now and the election and their propaganda machine can together drive those polls much lower by the time of the election.

At lot of liberals/progressives/Democrats probably agree with the Republicans about how low Obama's polls are and will be at the time of the election. But what is happening is that the Obama White House is doing two things. First, they are not having Obama stand up, present major policies that he has to have passed, and draw the automatic fire that will come from the Republicans. Obama simply cannot champion any program because it will automatically be vetoed by the Republicans, even if it was one they previously championed themselves. Second, Obama is doing his job as President, especially in foreign policy. The death of Osama bin Laden (which Bush found so difficult that he publicly abandoned the effort) and the overthrow of Ghadaffi based on a NATO coalition that Obama put together have clearly demonstrated that Obama is doing his job extremely well when no obstructed by the Republicans.

There will be no jobs bills or anything else of significance getting through the Republicans in Congress before the 2102 election. The Republicans cannot afford to let Obama succeed in anything. As I have said, this is high-stakes for the Republicans. They are going to have to respond to Obama by getting even more extreme right-wing.

Obama's high-stakes gamble is that the voters will recognize that the Republicans are the source of American failure. Obama has been and continues to let them prove that.

So we see a pair of political high-stakes gambles being played out between now and the 2012 election. The Republicans are doing everything they can do both legislatively and propaganda-wise to stop Obama from succeeding as President and then blaming his for his failure, while Obama is doing everything he can do to govern effectively in spite of Republican obstruction and working to force the Republicans to expose their anti-American anti-governance policies to the voters.

If this were a high-stakes poker game being played on TV it would be fun to watch. As it is the results in 2012 may well determine if America continues as a major industrial and political power in the world in the 21st century or is reduced to a secondary nation run by self-centered wealthy corporate and banking thugs who finance a proto-fascist political system.

Rick Perry's political donors and what he gives them if they donate to him

Who are Rick Perry's biggest donors? Can America afford to bring Rick Perry into striking range of becoming President?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Rick Perry has been selling off Texas government to make sure that he has the money he needs to run for office. Corrupt? Crooked? Yeah, what else is new? Perry is a Texas Republican and the governor.

Rick Perry is not stupid. He is a farm boy who is quite shrewd at getting what he wants and at selling his services. But he is governor of a state (Texas) which does not require any significant work from the governor (the state constitution was written right after Reconstruction to prevent carpetbaggers from controlling the state) and Perry has not demonstrated much knowledge of when the government really should do.

How Rick Perry funds his election campaigns

Want to know how Rick Perry raises money to run for office? Here's the story written by Ben Adler and published by The Nation.

One of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s oft-touted strengths in the Republican primary is his demonstrated prowess at fundraising. Less widely known is how he has raised that money and what he has done in return for it. According to Texas good government and environmental watchdogs, Perry has raised much of his campaign funds from business executives who have financial interests in state government decisions. Often Perry’s supporters come from the energy sector and Perry’s help for them has come at the expense of the environment.

Over his three campaigns for governor Perry raised a remarkable $102 million. Perry’s predecessor, George W. Bush, who was no slouch at fundraising himself, brought in $41 million over two campaigns.

Half of Perry’s haul, $51 million, has come from just 204 sources. Some are political action committees, but most are wealthy individuals. “He relies on a relatively small network of very big hitters, wealthy businessmen and their spouses who want something out of Texas government,” says Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, a nonprofit research group that tracks the influence of money in Texas politics. As the Dallas Morning News reported during Perry’s re-election bid last year, “Perry tapped scores of big-dollar donors—including some who have business before the state or have benefited from taxpayer subsidies,” to vastly outraise his Democratic opponent, Bill White.

Perry rewards those who make sizeable contributions with appointments and political favors. He also works hard to do what his contributores want him to do. His seond largest all time donor is the owner of a nuclear waste dump, Harold Simmons.

Perry led the charge in 2010, while Simmons gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Perry’s re-election campaign, to allow Simmons to import nuclear waste from thirty-eight states. On June 27 of this year, ten days after Perry signed the legislation, Simmons gave $100,000 to Americans for Rick Perry. Tom Smith, director of Public Citizen’s Texas office, estimates that the rule change will bring upward of $2 billion for Simmons. “If you put money in Perry’s purse, he’ll create policies you need,” says Smith.

Perry has been similarly accommodating of various other energy interests in the state. Texas has violated the Clean Air Act by allowing industrial plants such as oil refineries to reduce emissions overall rather than at each emissions point. When the Environmental Protection Agency informed Texas that they would have to take over Clean Air Act implementation in the state, Perry complained. “Perry’s on the cutting edge of this whole ‘job-killing EPA’ strategy that Republicans have used,” says Smith. There’s a saying Texas, according to Smith that “it’s cheaper to invest in politicians than in pollution controls.” Perry has been similarly critical of the EPA’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gases nationally.

Perry has been carrying water for environmentally destructive industries since his days in the Texas legislature. Back then, in the late 1980s, he led efforts to prevent species such as the golden cheek warbler from being listed as endangered, because their habitats in West Texas were threatened by suburban sprawl. Developers feared that they would be unable to pave over sensitive lands. Perry’s all-time biggest donor is home builder Bob Perry (no relation).

Essentially Rick Perry is owned by Bob Perry, Harold Simmons, and a few similar very wealthy individuals. Rick Perry has been happy to sell the health and economic well-being of Texans to these people.

Now those same people want to buy the government of the United States. That's why Rick Perry is running for President.

The prospects of Perry for President

Romney is running primarily based on his supposed electability (which is why the amount of money he brings in is so very important), but that ignores the fact that he is unnominatable. It really is the Sharon Angle dynamic. The social conservatives simply will not vote for a mormon cult member. It's not a political decision to them, it's a religious one.

That leaves Ron Paul and Bachmann as Perry's only significant opponents. Neither can get over 20% of the Republican nomination voters. I think we will see Perry for President with a veep who is attractive to the money Republicans. It'll be interesting to see if Perry can bury the hatchet with Karl Rove and the Bush people. The Republican desire to win over Obama is going to be one of Perry's strongest selling points.

Perry's shift to the center after locking up the nomination is going to be eye-ball jarring, but the right-wing media will facilitate it by burying all his pandering to secessionists and to the tea partiers. Anyone who dares bring those things up will be attacked.

Perry locked up the social conservatives with his christian "renewal" service last week. And as a Democrat who changed parties to the Republicans he has crafted an image that he will never be out-flanked to the right.

Sneer if you will, but from what I have seen Perry is probably the most talented, determined and well-organized politician on the Republican national stage. He will give Obama one hell of a run for his money.

And remember, I say this as a Texas Democrat. Do not underestimate what Perry brings to the table. John Henry at 12:58 PM has the right idea.

I do not know if there is enough "Texas Fatigue" outside of Texas in the colonies ... uh, the rest of the US ... to be a barrier to a Perry win for President.

Here, from Redstate, is a conservative view of Rick Perry. This is, of course, during the primary season, though, and may not last beyond that time.

An older article on Rick Perry. Burka was quite prescient.

Here is an excerpt from a February 2010 Texas Monthly article on Rick Perry. Don't ever forget that Rick Perry started out in politics as a Democrat and supported Al Gore for President in Texas in 1988. The media image you see of him today is carefully crafted to get him elected to office.

Remember, this article was published early in 2010. Much of what Rick Perry anticipated in politics appears to have occurred, and he is set to take advantage of those changes.

by Paul Burka

One year ago, I wrote a story about the upcoming Republican gubernatorial primary between Governor Rick Perry and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. At the time, Hutchison had recently announced her intention to form a committee to explore a race for governor, and her campaign had released a poll showing her 24 points ahead of Perry, 55 percent to 31 percent. The governor’s political career appeared to be in deep trouble. Among Hutchison supporters, 58 percent had a “very favorable” opinion of her. Only 30 percent of Perry supporters felt the same way about him. She led him in every geographical section of the state.

What a difference a year makes. Since then, their fortunes have gone in opposite directions. Perry has held a lead, typically in the low double digits, in almost every poll taken since early summer, and now it is Hutchison’s political career that is in peril: Her Senate term expires on January 1, 2013, and she has said she will not seek reelection. Meanwhile, Perry’s prospects have never been rosier. Just a year after it appeared that he was on the brink of his last race, he is poised to become one of the leaders of his party. His travel schedule, speaking engagements, and television appearances in recent months give every indication that he and his team of advisers are looking beyond Texas to national politics. If Perry defeats Hutchison in the March 2 Republican primary and goes on to win a third full term in November, he will immediately join the crowd of potential presidential aspirants in 2012—if he hasn’t done so already.

Throughout his career, Perry has always benefited from an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time, and once again, his luck seems to be working. The Republican field for 2012 is not deep. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee are the leftovers, Mark Sanford self-destructed, Sarah Palin is too polarizing, Newt Gingrich is old news, and that leaves . . . well, why not Rick Perry? Who among the contenders has a better conservative record? Who better expresses the anger of the average Republican voter? Who has a more robust fundraising base? Of the governors commonly mentioned—Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota; Haley Barbour, of Mississippi; Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana; Mitch Daniels, of Indiana—whose state has weathered the recession more successfully?

Most people who follow Texas politics know by now the conventional wisdom about Perry: that he is an accidental governor who inherited the job when George W. Bush became president; that he is “Governor Goodhair” or “Governor 39 Percent” or some similar appellation of mild disrespect accompanied by a twist of humor; that he doesn’t really do anything well except win elections, which he has done with regularity. There is truth in the conventional wisdom, but there is also blindness. Perry has been so often viewed as a caricature that many Texans have failed to recognize his talent. The fact is that no Republican has so ably surfed the wave of populist anger that has swept through the party in the past year.

That Perry has both the potential and the plan to aim higher than the Governor’s Mansion is underscored by the contrast between his campaign and Hutchison’s. Last fall, I attended events at which each candidate appeared. In October, I watched Perry address the Texas Association of Realtors in a banquet room on the second floor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in central Austin. TAR is one of the largest and most politically active trade associations in the Austin lobby and one of the biggest financial contributors. Its members are exactly the kind of folks a Republican candidate for governor would want in his corner—individual entrepreneurs and hustlers offering the good life in the suburbs to those who seek it, for a 6 percent commission. And Rick Perry has them in his corner.

As I watched him speak I could appreciate the skills that he has acquired during what is now nine years in office, foremost among which is his ability to connect with his constituency. Early in his remarks, he began an anecdote by saying, “I don’t know how many of you watch Fox News,” before adding, in a knowing tone, “but I suppose most of you do.” Later in the speech, he interrupted himself to urge the people in the audience to take out their cell phones. In an instant he transformed himself into the Aggie yell leader he once was. “Put in that you’re fed up,” he prodded them. “No, put in that you’re fired up. Then text it to 956-13. It comes directly to me.” And, of course, there was the inevitable jab at Washington: “It’s frustrating to deal with the federal government. They are supposed to provide a strong military, secure our borders, and deliver the mail.” He paused for effect. “Well, one out of three ain’t bad.”

Several weeks later, I drove to San Antonio, where Hutchison was making an appearance at the Young Women’s Leadership Academy to talk about education, following an earlier stop in Houston, where she spoke on the same subject. The academy is part of a promising but controversial educational experiment—single-sex public schools for girls—that some women’s and educational advocacy groups have condemned as discriminatory. The person who made schools like this possible was Hutchison herself, through an amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act, in 2001.

The event took place in the library. Hutchison spoke from a lectern on the floor, surrounded by girls from the school. Most of them were black or Hispanic. They wore uniforms of white blouses, pleated plaid skirts, and blue cardigans. The rest of the people in attendance were from the school and the school district. No Hutchison supporters were in evidence; no refreshments were provided. This was not a rally; it was a media event, the object of which was to get free airtime in the state’s third-largest TV market. The most important people in the room were not the school officials but four television reporters with tripods.

Hutchison has been critical of Perry’s record on public education—a dropout pandemic, stagnant test scores—and her remarks were primarily about her support of more innovations. “Single-sex schools are very close to my heart,” she said. She also embraced charter schools, magnet schools, and accelerated high schools. She wants the state to switch to electronic textbooks and provide students with a hybrid device similar to the Amazon Kindle.

The two campaign events seemed to have been part of entirely different races. Perry’s speech to the realtors evoked national themes and aimed to tap into a powerful feeling of discontent toward Washington. Hutchison’s appearance in San Antonio, on the other hand, was designed to portray her as a smart policy maker on an important state issue. She did it well. If you didn’t know they were in the same race, you might conclude that they were running for different offices, Perry for president (or perhaps the second spot on the national ticket), Hutchison for governor or lieutenant governor. The problem for Hutchison is that the energy in the Republican party today is not directed at how to make government work better. It is directed against government, and no one channels that anger better than Rick Perry.

That Perry has his sights set on Washington, the place he professes to loathe, would explain a lot—for starters, why he decided to seek four more years as governor, despite rumors that he had told many of his key supporters that if they stuck with him in 2006 (when Hutchison was openly considering running against him) he wouldn’t run again. Hutchison declined to challenge him, no doubt expecting a clear field in 2010, and Perry became Governor 39 Percent after a four-way race. Following this poor showing, most people, myself included, thought there was no way he could face the voters again. He would become Texas’s longest-serving governor, take a victory lap, and make easy money on the boards of companies that had benefited from his governorship.

But that is not how events played out. Perry’s inner circle, particularly his consultant Dave Carney, has believed that he has had national potential at least since 2006. Carney made that point during an interview I had with the Perry team that summer for a story about the upcoming governor’s race. Carney is from New Hampshire, the incubator of presidential ambitions, and he knows what it takes to succeed on a national level. The rest is my hypothesis: Sometime in 2007, after Perry had been sworn in for his second term, his team surveyed the Republican field and the wreckage of the Bush presidency and recognized that 2008 was destined to be a Democratic year. They saw no one in the GOP field who was capable of defeating Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. (Best not to mention John Edwards.) But they also saw that the two leading Democrats were destined to be unpopular with older white males, the core constituency of the Republican party. The Democratic winner in 2008 was at risk of being a one-term president.

Will Perry's talent for identifying voter blocs, separating them and catering to those blocs which will make a difference transfer to the national stage?

Obama spent at least six years making those calculations and we can see the results. Rick Perry may well be the person the Republican Party has been looking for to defeat Obama in 2012 and if it looks like he is, nothing is going to stop him from getting the Republican nomination for President and taking a strong run against Obama.

Obama finds the ACA is a political positive for the Democrats.

Steve Benen has two interesting and fun posts up about the Affordable Care Act. First, he praised Mitt Romney for his work on health care policy as governor of Massachusetts. It's quite clear that Obama's health care plan was based largely on the system that Mitt Romney had previously installed in Massachusetts. Since Mitt is going to be running for President in the Republican Primaries, Obama's praise will create any number of right-wing attack ads against Romney.

The second post is also about Obama's efforts to implement the Affordable Care Act. Obama has announced that he is open to state-level changes in health care policy. The announcement says:

Seeking to appease disgruntled governors, President Obama announced Monday that he supported amending the 2010 health care law to allow states to opt out of its most burdensome requirements three years earlier than currently permitted.

In remarks to the National Governors Association, Mr. Obama said he backed legislation that would enable states to request federal permission to withdraw from the law's mandates in 2014 rather than in 2017 as long as they could prove that they could find other ways to cover as many people as the original law would and at the same cost. The earlier date is when many of the act's central provisions take effect, including requirements that most individuals obtain health insurance and that employers of a certain size offer coverage to workers or pay a penalty.

Steve Benen points out what this means: If the Governors can come up with an alternate system that provides health care to as many people as the ACA does without adding to the deficit and in such a way that costs are controlled as well as the federal ACA does, great! Obama will support them.

Interestingly, the only states that might develop an effective alternate that meets the requirements are Vermont and Oregon, two Democratic states, who might try to implement a single payer system.

Both of these White House initiatives put the Republicans into the position where they have to explain the value of the ACA or offer an alternative to it that is somehow better.

They're off! Who will the Republicans nominate for 2012?

I'm wondering about the Republican nomination. Will the crazies cancel each other out while the sane Republicans nominate Romney?

I mean, Palin (won't run), Bachman (dies in the first states), Giuliani (won't actually run), Gingrich (sells books, won't run), Huckabee might get 20%. Who else is Fox "news" grooming in its candidate stable?

I know almost nothing about Thune, and Pawlenty is remarkably forgettable. But neither seems to be ready for the money primary against Romney. Other than them there are no apparently credible "surprise" candidates currently in the wings warming up to undertake an Obama-style outsiders campaign by someone new.

I left Rick Perry off the list but I think Rick Perry may have been serious when he said he was not going to run and his efforts to deal with the currently $27 billion (and counting) Texas shortfall of revenues vs expenses will clobber any chance he might have had. That deficit is roughly a quarter of total anticipated revenues in a low-tax low-service state that spends on almost nothing now except health care and education. Texas is going to look like Arizona on a much larger scale. Perry has no more chance to run for President than does Arizona's Gov. Brewer.

Who does Romney have to run against to get the more sane voters in the Republican primaries? The crazies are going to cancel each other out and leave the field to Romney by default. That makes the nomination Romney's the same way 2008 belonged to McCain. That's a problem of its own, of course.

The problem McCain had was that the social conservatives detested him and he couldn't get a majority at first. It was only when everyone else was proven unable to get the nomination that they settled on McCain. But the social conservatives still detested him, so he was forced to go with one of theirs - Palin. He also had to abandon all his carefully established sensible persona to cater to the Dominionists who want a Biblical-based government over the Constitution. It didn't get McCain elected (nothing could have done that right after Bush) but Palin on the ticket kept the social conservatives from sitting at home and not voting. The choice of Palin and the shift of political positions to appease the radical Christianists avoided a Goldwater-style blow out.

I see the same social conservative - movement conservative split doing much the same thing this year and next, with the Tea Partiers acting as the wild card. The social conservatives don't like Romney any more than they did McCain. But the party is going to reluctantly go with Romney and try to patch up with the social conservatives.

With money behind him, I think that still means Romney and a social conservative to be named later as their ticket. No one is going to love it, but they can unify the Republicans after the nomination through their hatred for Democrats and especially for Obama.

The hatred will be above ground mostly lies and hatred for liberals, and below ground it will be another round of Racism. Anti-immigration will fit about half-way in the middle of that, with anger at any immigrant mixed with race hatred for Mexicans.

That's my best guess right now. Of course, in fall of 2007 I was expecting Guiliani to be the Republican nominee. This time, though, I don't expect Romney to self-destruct the way "G" did.

One last thing - This is going to be the Citizen's United Presidential race in 2012. It's going to be massive amounts of corporate money and wealthy family money, combined with the radical right organizing power of FOX News against the grass-roots organization and fund-raising power of Obama. Since the Citizens United money will be mostly secret (no one will know who is paying for the ads) the lies from the right are going to swamp the airwaves. It will all be seasoned with more shootings like that of Gabby Giffords in Tucson. (See link below.)

This is a prediction for the next 21 months, and we all know that predictions run into reality and become unrecognizable. It'll be interesting to see how close this one turns out to being true.

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Addendum: 01/24/2011 at 11:56:37 PM CT
I predicted these shootings above, but I really expected them to take longer to happen. Apparently they are already in progress. Police fear 'war on cops' At least 11 shot in 24 hours; death toll apace with 2010 uptick . This is from MSNBC This evening.

The only questions are (1)whether the shootings will be more frequent and (2) whether the quite inadequate media will bother to report them or aggregate the reports to show what is happening.

Cheney and/or Palin in 2012? Ridiculous.

I have read that there are people proposing a run for President by Sarah Palin and possibly a run by a Cheney/Palin ticket. While nothing is impossible, the likelihood of such a ticket is - let's just say extremely limited. Here's my reasoning.

Palin has a truly fervent support group, but it's probably not as large by itself as Huckabee's was in 2008. She's a Dominionist with the belief that government should be controlled by evangelicals (like herself) who rule with the Bible as the ultimate source of law. That's the identical belief held by the Ayatollah in Iran and by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That belief leads to that same philosophy and structure of government as in current Iran, except with a different book. Since Palin is an evangelical herself, she has the support of those like her who vote identity politics. They'll never dominate America, although they certainly do dominate much of the South, Texas and some of the Midwest. But they are a minority even there, who only get political dominance because of the fervency of their beliefs.

Then there is the fact that Palin has always quit her state-wide offices before the end of the term when she could not do the job successfully and began to fail. She can't deliver what she promises her supporters. She is an inherent outsider. She is not competent to perform as someone who is an insider and who has to be depended on. That's simply beyond her.

Palin only got state-wide jobs in the first place because Alaska is such a small and insular state and because she represents the small but fervent evangelical political group who votes identity politics. She'll never stand up to real competition. Her incompetence is now clear, her actual record of performance is too checkered, and her sick evangelical dominionist religious beliefs will scare off too many voters. She'll wither like a snowflake in front of a blast furnace. Which, of course, is why she resigned from the previous council she was on as well as resigning as governor. When I was in the artillery I would have described enemy on a battleground like that as a target-rich environment.

Then there's Dick Cheney. With Cheney's heart troubles, he isn't going to run for President, assuming he lives that long, and that's not very likely. He's on borrowed time right now. The stress of running would kill him, and if that didn't happen, he wouldn't last a single term. And he knows it himself. Don't expect him to run or to be open to an invitation to run. He'd rather live longer and influence the debates.

Cheney for President in 2012? He is not likely to live that long.

Neither person is any more likely to get the Republican nomination than Ron Paul or Mike Huckabee was in 2008. Plan on it. It ain't going to happen, folks.

Palin announces resignation as AK Governor effective this month

Sarah Palin has announced and promised this morning to resign as Governor of Alaska before the end of July. This decision is firm enough so that the Lt. Governor has been scheduled to be sworn in Sunday, July 26.

Alaska's Channel 2 has this includes this about her announcement:

The former vice presidential candidate has long been rumored to be considering a run at the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

Palin did not address those rumors at the press conference at her Wasilla home, during which she did not take questions from reporters.

She implied that her real decision was not to seek re-election, and that the resignation was a natural step after that in order to avoid a lame-duck final 18 months of her term.

"With this announcement that I'm not seeking re-election, I've determined it's best to transfer the authority of governor to Lieutenant Governor (Sean) Parnell," Palin said. "I'm determined to take the right path for Alaska, even though it is unconventional and is not so comfortable.

"And I am willing to do this so this administration, with its positive agenda and its accomplishments and its successful road to an incredible future for Alaska, so that it can continue without interruption and with great administrative and legislative success."

[...]

Already among the Democrats, Bob Poe has announced he will run, state Sen. Hollis French has started the ball rolling toward a run, and former congressional candidate Ethan Berkowitz said that if he were to run for anything in 2010 it would be for governor.

"With so many fronts that have been left in a state of stagnation while Governor Palin has been pursuing her national goals, I think that it's a good statement on the governor's part that she's recognizing we do need a fulltime governor," Poe said. "She's stepping aside from that, I think that the campaign is obviously going to get much more interesting very quickly and I look forward to the debate and discussing with the future candidates how we can move Alaska forward."

Talking Points Memo has posted the Full Text of Palin's Resignation Speech.

There has been strong speculation that Palin was going to announce that she would not run for reelection as Governor next year, and that seems to be a significant part of the reason she is announcing her resignation at this time. There is also further speculation that since she is a wildly unethical politician, even by Alaska standard, she has been caught out on something big enough to scare her into the resignation in hopes of heading off the investigation and prosecution.

Talking Points Memo also reports:

Andrea Mitchell says sources close to Gov. Palin say she is now "out of politics for good."

I'd give the rumors and speculation about her concern about an investigation as high likelihood of being right. But if they are not right, (or if by resigning now she heads off serious investigation of a crime that cannot be covered up) then my own speculation is that she still maintains Presidential ambitions for 2012, and feels that between the blizzard of ethics complaints (handled by her own appointees and dismissed) and the heavy national media attention that goes along with having been Republican nominee for Veep and who is talked of by many as a strong candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2012, her advisers may have noted that she is failing as Alaska's Governor. It's reasonably certain that her failure is becoming more widely accepted in Alaska.

If she actually still harbors the fantasy of running for President, it will be impossible with a record of failure as Governor. That is no doubt a fact big enough to sink into Sarah Palin's narcissistic self-centered world. Of course, the problem is not her performance. It is that her enemies want to find any weapon possible to stop her. (Blame other for the reactions to her own failures.) In any case, the media is finding the cracks in her protective armor, and can't be stopped.

So she may have decided that her best bet is to resign and try to run for President as an outsider rather than as a sitting (failed) governor. She is rather clearly narcissist enough to think that she alone made John McCain's Presidential Campaign work, and to think that all she has to do is get back into the National Limelight without the damage of being a (failed or failing) sitting governor. About the only other politician recently in the media limelight that would think that way is Rod Blagojevich.

My last thought, though, is that unless something terrifically bad has already happened, this is a disastrous decision on her part. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to hear that she has reconsidered and announces that so many supporters are unhappy with her resignation that she simply cannot disappoint them that way and will not resign this month after all. She really is that erratic - as this announced resignation with only thin rationale strongly suggests.

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Addendum 9:19 pm CDT
Howard Fineman makes the case for why Sarah Palin is still a leading candidate to win the Republican Presidential nomination for the 2012 election. Frankly, I don't doubt that she could win a plurality in a multi-candidate race for the nomination. Especially considering the fact that the Republican Party is rapidly shrinking to where it consists entirely of the radical right-wing extremists.

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Addendum II 12:22 am CDT July 25, 2009
Think Progress posted an interesting article yesterday evening about the strong rumors in Alaska that the FBI is investigating a Construction Company [Spenard Building Supplies (SBS)] which may have been bribing Sarah Palin to get the government contracts they have recently received.

Will Jeb Bush run for President?

George H. W. Bush himself brought up the possibility.

I'm just thinking about a Republican Presidential Primary in 2012 that pits Jeb Bush against Sarah Palin. Wow!

What do Republicans want from a national political leader?

What's your opinion of Sarah Palin as a likely leader for the Republican Party in 2012? According to this Rasmussen poll-based report, your answer to that will depend on whether you consider yourself a Republican, Independent or Democrat. More importantly, it says a lot about the qualities you want in a national party leader.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Republican voters say Alaska Governor Sarah Palin helped John McCain’s bid for the presidency, even as news reports surface that some McCain staffers think she was a liability.

Only 20% of GOP voters say Palin hurt the party’s ticket, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Six percent (6%) say she had no impact, and five percent (5%) are undecided.

Ninety-one percent (91%) of Republicans have a favorable view of Palin, including 65% who say their view is Very Favorable. Only eight percent (8%) have an unfavorable view of her, including three percent (3%) Very Unfavorable. [Snip]

The key for the 44-year-old Palin will be whether she can broaden her base of support. An Election Day survey found that 81% of Democrats and, more importantly, 57% of unaffiliated voters had an unfavorable view of her.

Essentially committed Republicans really like Palin while Democrats and Independents really don't. It's like the two groups are getting their information on her from completely different sources or they want something very different in a leader.

Palin for President 2012! Not likely.

OK. So Sarah Palin is ambitious (we knew that) and thinks that she might be able to parlay her short time on the national stage into a run for the Presidency in four or eight years. What does she face if she tries that? Let’s look at her positive and negative characteristics as a national candidate for office.

1. She has her strong ambition, her good looks and her good health.

2. She has the skills that helped her achieve success in a beauty pageant. Those are some formidable political skills. They include poise, a gift of gab and an ability to read and please a crowd. She's not afraid of the media, although she avoids the better media hounds.

3. She is also a well-respected member of the Christian fundamentalist crowd, so she has a built-in base of fervent supporters.

4. She has a track record of political success in Alaska. Being elected Governor is no small feat. However, Alaska is a small sandbox to work in. That and the age and corruption of the existing powers in Alaska allowed her to use the advantages she brought to the game to win the governorship. Whether she can keep it will be another issue.

5. Going forward, she has the fantastic publicity that McCain gave her by bringing her in as his Veep candidate. This will be a mixed bag.

On the other side it has become quite clear that Mrs. Palin has several negatives which we can see.

1. She has no innate interest in either actually governing or in learning in general. Her general ignorance is quite obvious. Her intolerance and impatience is also rather clear. She does not appear to separate the job she has as Governor from her own personal wants and desires, nor does she understand much about how government works. She offers her personality for election, not her ability to govern. The general awareness of this is part of the negative side of the publicity she has received.

2. She has been exposed in Alaska as not beyond attack. It looks like she has not gotten along well with either the legislature or with the Republican Party in Alaska. This is going to be a big fight for her, beginning when the Alaska legislature reconvenes. Whatever the outcome, she runs for reelection in two years. Without any real knowledge of Alaska politics, I'd bet that her potential opponents are heavily mining the last two months for ammunition to attack her and finding a great deal.

3. Her base of support is the Christian conservatives. That support, taken together with her being relatively unknown, probably were critical in electing her governor. That being an unknown is now gone. Her national exposure will be at best a mixed blessing.

4. Nationally the Christian conservatives are becoming less interested in political activities. They have not gotten much back for all the political effort they have expended in the last three decades and the Reagan era Christian Coalition leaders are gone. Even with Palin on the ticket, they didn't do a lot for McCain.

5. If she goes national, she no longer has the small sandbox to operate in. She will have a lot of competition even for the Christian conservatives, starting with Huckabee.

6. Insiders from the McCain campaign have already shown they are ready to torpedo any effort Palin makes to run nationally. Any attempt to run for President will draw a great deal of opposition inside the Republican Party.

So it appears that Sarah Palin has gotten a great deal of national attention, both good and bad. She is going to take that back to Alaska where she has the upcoming legislature to deal with, her investigation for misuse of her office when she fired the Security Director for what appear to be personal reasons, and then she has to run for reelection before the next Presidential cycle. Each of these situations presents her with a minefield to traverse, although the misuse of her office may just be more a problem for her image than a threat to her has governor.

Assuming that she lasts and gets reelected governor, she is in the same position that Bush was in 1998, except that her potential base is the Christian Social Conservatives rather than the financial conservatives who supported Bush. Even if she did get the Christian Conservatives to support her in the national arena, they could not nominate Huckabee in the 2008 Republican primaries, and Huckabee is clearly a more capable leader than Sarah Palin is. The Republicans who worked in the McCain campaign have already demonstrated opposition to her. It is very unlikely that the Republican Party would ever nominate her for President.

But even if the Republicans were to nominate Palin for President, what issues does she run on? McCain just ran a campaign without offering any solutions for serious issues, and he lost. Palin has only her personality and her social conservatism to offer. Her personality is not all favorable, in spite of her ability to charm some selected audiences. It is almost impossible to imagine the American voters electing her President.

It’s obvious that Sarah Palin has the ambition to run for President in 2012 or 2016, but with her lack of preparation for governing and the torturous path she will have to negotiate between now and then it is extremely unlikely that she is going to make it back to the national stage any time soon. But she believes in miracles. That will keep her hopes up. The odds against her success are extremely high.