I can't believe it; the Monster Spendfest known as the 2012 Presidential (Ad) Campaign is being kicked off tonight, and we haven't told you about it yet. Our bad.
To make up for it, here's a dose of Matt Taibbi on the subject, offered for your reading or listening pleasure:
Yes, you read the news right: there is going to be a 2012 presidential debate this evening. Five Republicans are getting together in Greenville, South Carolina to kick off the long process of burying their party as a mainstream political force for the next decade or so.In Taibbi's view, things don't look good at Casa Republicana:
First of all, for the next eighteen months, Obama is going to respond to every single foreign-policy question by holding up Bin Laden’s head and swinging it in front of him like a lantern (metaphorically speaking, of course).On the domestic front, Taibbi sees even more trouble for the Home of the Brave team:
[F]or the next eighteen months, Barack Obama can walk into Florida and Arizona and California and explain to every person over 50 that the Republicans want to eliminate the Medicare program as they know it. The Republicans meanwhile are already running sideways away from Ryan’s program[.] ... And this is without even taking into consideration the highly negative (for the Republicans) demographic picture heading into 2012, in which a Republican base that skews older, male, and white is slowly shrinking, while Obama’s urban, ethnic, and young base is growing.What's a lily-white party to do?
Of course the one way to combat all of this would be to put forward a unifying, charismatic candidate whose personality reaches across the middle and snags that extra 4-5 percent of middle-ground undecideds who would put the Republicans back on top. But that’s exactly who the Republicans do not have. Instead, the potential Republican field is made up of two distinct types of candidates: loony-ass, polarizing insurgents drunk on Christian mysticism and/or ego sickness (Michelle Bachmann, Donald Trump, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin) and waffling, opportunistic bores destined to spend most of the primary campaign arguing that they are less terrifying to imagine holding the nuclear briefcase than anyone from the first group (Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney).It's a nice read; the phrase "God-humping" turns up, and the take-down of Mitt Romney is especially well-considered.
Me, I don't think they're as screwed as Taibbi says. As I noted at the beginning of this piece, the 2012 campaign is not going to be a national discussion, but the most expensive ad campaign we've ever been subjected to. And we do love our ad campaigns. Properly funded, God-humping hubris could just pull it off.
Besides, you should never underestimate Team Where Else You Gonna Go? — their hubristic disregard of the base they danced with in 2008 is a force to be reckoned with. They must think they're bullet-proof at this point.
Hubris vs. Hubris — this could be a spectacle for the ages. Either way it ends, the show starts tonight; enjoy.
GP
