Bill Maher does a Downtime after each show where he responds to people in his Twitter feed. This week, he got handed an intersting question about the 2012 Election, and he didn't get the meaning behind it. Watch here; it happens around the four-minute mark:-
A tweeter asks Bill if he thinks the Republicans don't really want a viable candidate in the 2012 race, and Bill laughs it off with a pithy, faux-jokey remark, which isn't even memorable.
But that was a good and very valid question, and it's a question that a pundit - or even a sharp political satirist - at the top of his game would consider very seriously.
It's absolutely plausible that the Republicans don't want a viable Presidential candidate this time around. The Republicans play the long game. They're in the cycle for long-term gain, and they also know that their ultimate aim can be achieved in more than one way - unlike the tunnel-visioned Left.
The GOP knows that none of the candidates in this cycle are electable - with the possible exceptions of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman; but Huntsman and Romney would never carry the South and the Midwest because of misconceptions about their religion and their moderate pasts. The rest of the field are a Republican's collective nightmare.
No, the GOP will happily surrender the White House to President Obama's second term ... because they want the Senate.
If they retain a majority in the House and gain a majority in the Senate, you have an entire Congress with a majority membership allied against the President. You have gridlock. If the President wants to achieve anything, it's going to be at the cost of compromise. Please, don't think back to Clinton parleying with Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott; this is not the same Republican Party, and its tail is being wagged by the Tea Party.
Four years of gridlock and continuous veto, in which nothing is happening, sours the public to the Democrats in general and sets the stage for 2016, when the Republicans can choose from the likes of Chris Christie, John Thune and Marco Rubio; and the Democrats will have .... whom exactly?
That's the significance of that question, and all a leading voice of the Professional Left could do was crack a pretty lame joke.
A tweeter asks Bill if he thinks the Republicans don't really want a viable candidate in the 2012 race, and Bill laughs it off with a pithy, faux-jokey remark, which isn't even memorable.
But that was a good and very valid question, and it's a question that a pundit - or even a sharp political satirist - at the top of his game would consider very seriously.
It's absolutely plausible that the Republicans don't want a viable Presidential candidate this time around. The Republicans play the long game. They're in the cycle for long-term gain, and they also know that their ultimate aim can be achieved in more than one way - unlike the tunnel-visioned Left.
The GOP knows that none of the candidates in this cycle are electable - with the possible exceptions of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman; but Huntsman and Romney would never carry the South and the Midwest because of misconceptions about their religion and their moderate pasts. The rest of the field are a Republican's collective nightmare.
No, the GOP will happily surrender the White House to President Obama's second term ... because they want the Senate.
If they retain a majority in the House and gain a majority in the Senate, you have an entire Congress with a majority membership allied against the President. You have gridlock. If the President wants to achieve anything, it's going to be at the cost of compromise. Please, don't think back to Clinton parleying with Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott; this is not the same Republican Party, and its tail is being wagged by the Tea Party.
Four years of gridlock and continuous veto, in which nothing is happening, sours the public to the Democrats in general and sets the stage for 2016, when the Republicans can choose from the likes of Chris Christie, John Thune and Marco Rubio; and the Democrats will have .... whom exactly?
That's the significance of that question, and all a leading voice of the Professional Left could do was crack a pretty lame joke.
You are correct. The Tea party extremists are setting their sites on the Senate. I do not want to think about that possibility! Please Dems/liberals! Take this seriously! We have to take the whole thing in 2012 or America is OVER. I am NOT kidding!
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