I’m a Mitt girl until the end and even then I think he should run as an Independent. I’ll happily leave the GOP for him (actually I’m going to anyway if Huck gets any part of the GOP nod Prez or VP). I’m so sick of the GOP and the state it’s in, we’ve been completely infested with pastors and their flock.

With Huckabee, we are seeing a re-run of what happened when pastors “got out the vote” for Mel Gibson’s The Passion. This grassroots effort is going to get us either the GOP’s first Jimmy Carter or John McCain which is going to look Bob Dole redux.

I won’t cast a vote for either because they aren’t conservatives so the White House might as well go to Hillary or Obama.

Plus I just don’t like that every negative sterotype about the GOP being the party of grumpy old white men and overly religious zealots will come to fruition with Huck or MiCain.

Sorry I’m not staying around to see every far left Daily Kos/Huffington Post/Media Matter group thinkers biased about my party come true.

It will feel good to leave on that principle alone.

sheryl on January 9, 2008 at 2:41 PM

Jay Nordlinger has it right:

I don’t intend to comment much about presidential politics in today’s column, but let me say this: I find the ganging up on Romney a little unseemly. I mean, not the fact of it, because this is politics, and we’re all grownups (allegedly). I’m talking about the manner and tone. There seems to be some envy about — to go with some other ugly qualities.

I know that a lot of people — anti-Romneyites — are fired up by that line of Huckabee’s: “People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off.” Apparently, he was alluding to Romney. And I find Huckabee’s one of the most depressing lines I have heard in ages — depressing from every point of view.

First, grammatical: They say Bush can’t talk? I thought Huckabee was supposed to be silver-tongued.
Second, philosophical, or political, if you like: Huckabee expressed low populism, or “sheer demagoguery,” as Ronald Reagan used to say. Huckabee’s line could have come out of the mouth of John Edwards, or John Sweeney, or David Bonior. Is this what we want in the Republican party now? Why not have just one big Democratic party?

And third — oh, call it moral: It seems we’re now campaigning on the basis of what the other guy looks like. What do we say about how Huckabee looks? Frankly, I think I would have liked him better when he was fat — he might have been humbler.

If I were a Romney spokesman, I might have responded roughly as follows: “To me, Mitt looks like a guy who can create jobs, create businesses, and create wealth — who can make the economy go, so that people like Mike Huckabee can spend their lives preachin’, gettin’ votes, and taxing people.”

It seems that there is a fair amount of resentment of Romney — for his wealth, success, etc. For the whole package he represents. And is there a worse human trait than resentment or envy? I also might note that I hear a fair amount of denigration of Romney’s business background — I mean, from Republicans. Which is terribly odd and dispiriting.

Romney has his faults, heaven knows — for one thing, his shifts in position are disquieting, smacking of opportunism as they do. (Of course, he also might have just changed his mind about some things.) But Republicans should welcome Romney at the highest levels of our politics. Are we so petty and crabbed and hidebound that we can’t make room for someone like him?

Years ago, Thomas Sowell wrote a column that I have never forgotten. He said that liberals field their A team, while conservatives field their B team. What did he mean by that? He meant that the “best and the brightest” of the liberals slaver to enter politics, or journalism, in order to control other people’s lives. But our best and brightest — the Right’s elite — are in the economy, inventing things, establishing businesses, and making the country grow.

Well, here is Romney, a clear member of our A team, who segued from business into politics, and succeeded. He is a mixture of private-sector accomplishment and political accomplishment. So boo, hiss, right? Wouldn’t we rather have our old, familiar pols, who have been in politics for about 8,000 years? When did John McCain start running for president? 1928?
I was reading an AP story yesterday — here — and saw something quite surprising: “millionaire Mitt Romney.” Here is the full sentence: “Among those listening to the affable Arkansas governor were evangelical Christians, who on Thursday night helped propel Huckabee past millionaire Mitt Romney to win the race’s first test of strength, the Iowa caucuses.”

So that’s how he’s to be described now? “Millionaire Romney,” as though he were merely some rich boy, running on his trust fund — to hell with the Olympics, to hell with Bain Capital, to hell with the governorship of Massachusetts? Was the 2004 Democratic nominee ever described as “millionaire John Kerry”? How about the other candidates this time? How much does Fred Thompson have? Will we ever read “millionaire Fred Thompson”?

One more word about politics, while I’m fulminating: In early days, when Huckabee was a fringe candidate, he was kind of entertaining and endearing — a charming goober, adorning the campaign. Now that he is a major candidate, he is positively unnerving — with his incredibly naïve views about foreign policy. Views not so different from Barack Obama’s.

And we’re in the middle of a war, both the shooting kind and the “cold” kind (if you consider the war against Islamofascism another long, twilight struggle, as I do).

If the two major-party nominees are Obama and Huckabee: What differences will they stress? Their skin color?

sheryl on January 9, 2008 at 2:49 PM