Dan said: I don't know about your side of the pond but here in the US we seem to be swinging to the right again. It is interesting how we seem to alternately elect leaders that are either brilliant thinkers (Bill Clinton, Barrack Obama) or complete nincompoops (George Bush, George Bush). Now the right is looking at the likes of Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, and Newt Gingrich as possible presidential candidates next year. Kind of scary when you think about it. But, this too shall pass...
Matt: I don't talk about politics much, but my perception is that Bush, Sr. was at least as smart as Clinton, though neither one had the visionary scope of Obama (so saying Clinton is a brilliant _thinker_ seems wrong, though he was a brilliant political tactician). Bush, Jr. isn't the obvious idiot that Palin is (but God, who is?), but he was very lazy and incurious, which are very bad qualities for an executive. The closest analogue to Bush, Jr. isn't his dad, but rather Reagan--he was smart, but neither that smart nor discerning, and a mere mouthpiece to whomever he was most recently convinced by (before he married his conservative wife and started working for GE, he was a liberal). I don't think Palin will ever recover from the (correct) national perception of her as an idiot. We could only (cynically and crassly) hope that either her or Michelle Bachmann are on the final Republican ticket, because unlike Palin who is simply motivated by power, Bachmann is sincerely a right-wing nutjob, but the country will not vote in someone who doesn't just bow at the waist to religious extremism and Tea-Party racist anarchism, but believes and espouses it. Gingrich, like Palin, is motivated by power, but he didn't bow low enough and tried to sound Presidential and reasonable too soon, so I don't know if he'll ever recover. Tim Pawlenty is too cream-corn to care about: he's a light weight like Dan Quayle was. He'll bow appropriately and he'll do whatever the smart folks want him to. Scary enough, but he doesn't have the charisma of Reagan, so he'll never be a powerhouse. I bet it's going to be Romney. If he can bow low enough to the extremists who run the table at the Primaries, he'll also get the votes of the politically smart, who see he's got a centrist enough pedigree to get "independent" votes: reasonable people who think that experimenting with different styles of health care can't be all bad. And he's basically got the backs of the rich, so they'll love him. There's a few dark horses out there, I hear though, that might swoop in and steal thunder. The field is so terrible right now, that I wouldn't be surprised if a smart, respectable politician we haven't even heard inkle yet wins. And for this person, they will not make the mistake of going crazy (Palin, Bachmann), because we already saw how a VP s election can bring down a campaign. Matt Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
