More fantastic stuff from Newt - out of all the people in the race or on the fringes (on both sides), he really is the only one saying anything that really rings true. http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/08/gingrich/index.html Modern road to White House 'verges on insane,' says Gingrich Potential presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich on Tuesday blasted the modern-day road to the White House as too long, too expensive and verging on "insane." Ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich says the presidential campaign structure is "stunningly dangerous." The former House speaker from Georgia said he will decide whether to enter the GOP presidential field in October. But in a wide-ranging speech at the National Press Club in Washington, he ridiculed campaign consultants and spin doctors who he said are extending the 2008 campaign. He said presidential debates have become "almost unendurable." "These aren't debates," the former Georgia congressman said. "This is a cross between [TV shows] 'The Bachelor,' 'American Idol' and 'Who's Smarter than a Fifth-Grader.'" "What's the job of the candidate in this world?" asked Gingrich. "The job of the candidate is to raise the money to hire the consultants to do the focus groups to figure out the 30-second answers to be memorized by the candidate. This is stunningly dangerous." Gingrich said the need to raise tens of millions of dollars has driven campaigns to begin cranking up much earlier than ever. Meanwhile, he said, advisers are telling candidates to begin campaigning "as soon as possible -- I need a check." "Go look at all the analysis," said Gingrich. "Why are people starting early? Because you can't build the organization. What are you building the organization for? So you can raise the money." But for most voters, he said, the race "begins after Christmas, no matter what the news media has to cover." He cited the example of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who was the Democratic front-runner until the first votes of the 2004 campaign were cast. "Normal, rational Iowans who had rigorously avoided politics for the entire previous year looked up and said, 'He's weird.' And they looked back down, and Howard Dean disintegrated," Gingrich said. At the same time, he said, any candidate who dares to change position on an issue during a two-year campaign risks being labeled a "flip-flopper" -- an epithet used to undercut 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry and one being waved at current Republican hopeful Mitt Romney. "You begin to trap people," Gingrich said. "As the campaigns get longer, you're asking a person who's going to be sworn in in January of 2009 to tell you what they'll do in January of 2007, when they haven't got a clue -- because they don't know what the world will be like, and you're suggesting they won't learn anything through the two years of campaigning." "For the most powerful nation on Earth to have an election in which Swift Boat veterans versus National Guard papers becomes a major theme verges on insane," said Gingrich, referring to 2004 campaign controversies that targeted Kerry and President Bush. "I mean, it's just -- and to watch those debates, I found painful -- for both people. They're both smarter than the debates." He blamed the pressures of sound-bite campaigning for the recent controversy over Sen. Barack Obama's declaration that he would dispatch U.S. troops to Pakistan to attack leaders of the al Qaeda terrorist network if Pakistani authorities fail to get them. Gingrich said the Illinois Democrat, one of his party's leading presidential candidates, "said a very insightful thing in a very dangerous way." But the response, he said, "was to attack Senator Obama, not to explore the underlying kernel of what he said." Gingrich's answer to the problems would be to get rid of limits on campaign financing, which he said have made the problems worse by requiring more individual donations to meet the same goals, and to stage a series of "dialogues" among the major-party candidates -- once a week, for 90 minutes, for nine weeks before the elections. Candidates would pick the topics, and their answers would be uninterrupted "except for fairness on time," he said. "After nine 90-minute conversations in their living rooms, the American people would have a remarkable sense of the two personalities and which person had the right ideas, the right character, the right capacity to be a leader," he said. Gingrich, who has long billed himself as a visionary, led the Republicans who captured both houses of Congress in 1994 elections. National polls in July ranked him fifth among current GOP contenders, with average support of 7 percent, according to a CNN poll released Monday. Gingrich stepped down as House speaker in 1998, after Republicans lost seats amid the drive to impeach then-President Bill Clinton over allegations that he lied under oath about a sexual relationship with a White House intern. advertisement In March, Gingrich acknowledged he was having an affair of his own around the same time. He insisted he was not a hypocrite because Clinton was not impeached for the affair -- but for lying about it. The Senate acquitted Clinton the following year, and his wife, former first lady-turned-New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, is among the current Democratic front-runners.
God help me, I find myself agreeing with Newt Gingrich. question..... is this a pose or did Newt decide to reinvent himself in much the same way Gore has done?
Newt has always had a fractional but significant degree of insight. In the way he approaches the world and thinks about it he is much more like a liberal than a conservative, he just does it with a conservative agenda. In this respect he is much more difficult to pidgonhole than some of his contemps, like Trent Lott or Phil Gramm. He is very much a guy who is not afraid to go against tradition and is a bit of a futurist. I guess in this way he sort of has some 'Neocon' qualities, but more intellectually than some people like dubbyah make the philosophy appear.
Newt nailed the problems with the campaign on the head. I think Newt is so far out of it that it doesn't matter to him anymore. He has nothing to lose by pointing at the emperor and saying he's not wearing clothes. Everyone else is playing the game.
I know! It's crazy. Apparently it's genuine. http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=133077 We’ll see
This is funny 'cause it's just about the opposite of public financing, but the goal is by and large the same. (And it's a goal I support.) I disagree ever so strongly with Newt's position on this because unlimited contributions would make it that much more attractive to politicians to cater to the wealthy. I agree equally strongly with his "dialogues" thing.
Campaign Finance Reform laws really don't even work anymore. I'd argue that the McCain-Feingold bill (The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act) actually made the system worse. Basically what they did was ban soft money donations to the parties, so instead corporations and individuals started funneling money to Political Action Committees who then run ads using former soft money. And guess what that produces, the bull**** swift boat advertisements. Only before, since all the money was going to the parties, the parties could actually be held accountable for bs ads like swift boats. Now with BCRA, Parties can deflect blame by saying that they had nothing to do with the advertisements. (as bush did with the swift boat people) There are so many easy ways to abuse the system. You can bundle money and send it to the parties. You can just run ads by yourself (the only rule being that you can't explicitly say who to vote for, so ads generally just trash one candidate but don't actually tell you not to vote for them) Or you can donate to PACs, who will then produce the same crap we saw in the last election. That's not to say all campaign finance laws are bad. I'd keep laws in place that require people to file with the FEC and report their contributions and I'd require candidates to report how much they get and how much they spend. Transparency is actually a very good thing that came about campaign finance laws. But real campaign finance reform is impossible without getting struck down on free speech grounds. So instead we get these half-ass solutions that limit things but can't really place true limits because that infringes on the 1st amendment. I would rather have money flowing into parties than have it flowing into unaccountable 3rd party PACs with no reporting rules or regulations on what they can or can't do. They can get away with murder with those ads and no candidate gets held accountable.
McCain is done for... he trails Obama in Iowa... among Republican voters! Also, the fact that Obama is pulling almost 7% in a Republican poll does not bode well for the GOP...
Rudy is just one of the guys... http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2007/08/giuliani-says-h.html Yep, he's one of them...
More on Rudy's work at the pile... "That's insulting and disgraceful. He's a liar. I was down there on my hands and knees looking for my son." -- Fire Captain and Giuliani foe James Riches, whose firefighter son died on 9/11, lashing out at Rudy for saying that he was at Ground Zero "as often, if not more, than most of the workers." http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/aug/10/quote_of_the_day
Iowa Straw Poll 1. Mitt Romney 4,516 31.6% 2. Mike Huckabee 2,587 18.1% 3. Sam Brownback 2,192 15.3% 4. Tom Tancredo 1,960 13.7% 5. Ron Paul 1,305 9.1% 6. Tommy Thompson 1,039 7.3% 7. Fred Thompson 203 1.4% 8. Rudy Giuliani 183 1.3% 9. Duncan Hunter 174 1.2% 10. John McCain 101 0.7% 11. John Cox 41 0.3% McCain, Fred, and Rudy didn't really compete, but it still has to hurt McCain to finish with 0.7%. Paul did pretty well considering he didn't spend a lot. Mitt, of course, spent by far the most and was always expected to win this, as it depends on paying an entry fee for your people and transporting them there. In 1999, 24,000 Repubs voted in the straw poll. This year? 14,000.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-...utube_debate_is_back_1.html#more?hpid=topnews YouTube debate back on, scheduled for 11/28. Romney is the only one who hasn't committed to it.
I thought this was an interesting analysis of today's GOP and their difficulties, to put it mildly... Back to School for The GOP By Peter Beinart Wednesday, August 15, 2007; A11 In the past few years, Democrats have gotten pretty good at mimicking Republicans. They've been training college activists, establishing think tanks and, more generally, trying to turn their party into a movement -- just what conservatives did during their years in the pre-Reagan wilderness. As John Podesta, head of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, told the New York Times Magazine a while back, "I describe myself as having a master's degree in the right-wing conspiracy." Imitation may be flattering, but in this case, it comes with a large scoop of irony. Because while Democrats are enrolling in GOP 101, the GOP itself is in free fall. According to a recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, only 28 percent of Americans view the party positively. Asked which party they'd like to take the White House in 2008, respondents favored the Democrats by almost 20 points. To recover, Republicans will have to do something they haven't done in decades: learn from the other guys. Democrats 101 starts with a little history. In the 1980s, it was Democrats who were politically radioactive. They were hemorrhaging swing voters, especially independents and the young. And on such issues as welfare and crime, the party's activist base imposed litmus tests that rendered Democratic presidential candidates unelectable in most places south and west of Harvard Square. Today, by contrast, it is the GOP that can't buy a swing voter. Last fall, Republicans lost independents by 18 percentage points, young voters by 22 points and Hispanics by 40 points. And on today's hot issues -- Iraq, stem cells, global warming, health care -- it is conservative activists who are badly out of touch. In the states, shrewd Republican officeholders are getting the message and adjusting course. In California, Arnold Schwarzenegger has put universal health care, a cap on greenhouse gases and a stem cell partnership with Canada at the top of his second-term agenda. In Florida, newly elected Gov. Charlie Crist is following suit -- and reaping approval ratings north of 70 percent. But nationally, the GOP is hostage to a hard-core base that considers those positions a betrayal. To have a shot at their party's presidential nomination, Mitt Romney has had to adopt the Christian right's wildly unpopular line on stem cells, Rudy Giuliani has journeyed to Virginia Beach to kiss Pat Robertson's ring, and John McCain has endorsed a South Dakota abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. That's the problem with a party becoming a movement. For decades, Republicans have built institutions that empower conservative activists and marginalize everybody else. Think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation dream up innovative new ways to repeal the welfare state, even though most Americans want it extended. Pressure groups such as the Family Research Council fight evolution. And to escape their wrath, Republican presidential candidates take positions that alienate even the moderates in their own party, to say nothing of the swing voters outside. In the 1980s, Democrats solved this problem with a three-letter abbreviation: DLC. Today, the Democratic Leadership Council is under attack from liberal activists. But two decades ago, it saved the party from many of the problems now afflicting the GOP. Founded after Walter Mondale's blowout loss in 1984, the DLC worked to free Democratic politicians from candidate-killing litmus tests. It supported early primaries in the South and called for letting independents take part, so the people choosing Democratic presidential nominees would have more in common with the people choosing the president. It championed more police on the street, which made Democrats look tough on crime, and an increased tax exemption for children, which made them look pro-family. And while the DLC's first contender, a hawkish young Tennessee senator named Al Gore, flamed out in 1988, it struck gold in 1992 with Bill Clinton. Thanks in large part to the DLC, Clinton won the Democratic nomination despite supporting welfare reform and capital punishment, heresies that helped make him electable come fall. Republicans should be taking notes. There is a Republican Leadership Council, but like other moderate Republican groups, it lacks intellectual heft and political muscle. Today's GOP needs an organization strong enough to fight the hegemony of the Iowa caucuses, where hard-right activists dominate and centrist candidates go to die. It needs think tanks that offer serious answers on global warming and universal health care, where conservative orthodoxy is increasingly detached from political reality. And it needs to open up more primary voting to independents, the people who powered John McCain's crusade against the party base in 2000. It may be too late for 2008; the front-runners may already have pandered themselves into a corner. But the more elections the GOP loses, the better chance a souped-up RLC will have. If Republicans aren't desperate enough to start learning from Democrats yet, they'll be sharpening their pencils come 2012. Peter Beinart, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes a monthly column for The Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy.../08/14/AR2007081401329.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/08/16/mitt-romney-wins-illinois-straw-poll/ Illinois Straw Poll Results 1. Mitt Romney – 40.35% 2. Fred Thompson – 19.96% 3. Ron Paul – 18.87% 4. Rudy Giuliani – 11.61% 5. John McCain – 4.12% 6. Mike Huckabee – 3.04% 7. Sam Brownback – 1.08% 8. Duncan Hunter - .65% 9. Tom Tancredo - .33%
Retirement ‘Wave’ Building Among House Republicans? Greg Giroux Fri Aug 17, 4:45 PM ET The announcement Friday by former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., that he will not seek re-election in 2008 capped a week in which three veteran House Republicans in a 24-hour span declared that the current 110th Congress would be their last. Hastert’s announcement — coupled with similar ones Thursday by Ohio Rep. Deborah Pryce and Mississippi Rep. Charles W. “Chip” Pickering Jr. — brought to five the number of House Republicans who are not seeking re-election next year, compared with two on the Democratic side. While nearly 15 months remain until the November 2008 election, the retirement decisions of Hastert, Pryce and Pickering will stoke speculation of a larger “wave” of GOP departures that would seriously hamper the party’s quest to make the 16-seat gain that they need to regain the House majority they lost last November. http://news.yahoo.com/s/cq/20070817...republicans;_ylt=AmbZkPVme3HFxdXPyeLlHln4R9AF
