OH, NO -- THEY WOULDN'T...
(updated)
When Olympia Snowe announced her resignation from the Senate, Dave Weigel tweeted:
Bayh/Snowe 2012? #americanselect
Other people imagined a Snowe/Huntsman ticket. And in the comments to my last post, Jack wrote about Snowe:
Maybe she wants to be the Americans Elect candidate. Her excuse for quitting is identical to their excuse for existing.
Could that possibly be her plan? And could it be the GOP's plan?
Maybe this is a cockamamie theory, but what if the GOP thinks the way to salvage the Romney candidacy is to persuade a Republican who'd get mostly Democratic votes to pursue the Americans Elect nomination? What if the Republicans made it worth Snowe's while to do this? And wouldn't Romney (or at least the old Romney) be her kind of guy?
Remember that Obama does much better among women than among men. A Snowe candidacy might really go right at that advantage.
Am I crazy to speculate about this?
****
UPDATE: Haters gonna hate (see the comments), but they should hate Jonathan Chait as well, because he's speculating the same way about Snowe's retirement statement:
This sounds exactly like the kind of rhetoric emanating from Americans Elect ...
I suspect it may not be coincidental that David Boren, the former Democratic senator from Oklahoma and oil industry lickspittle, came out for Americans Elect today. The group is set up so that its presidential and vice-presidential candidates need to come from opposing parties....
Snowe and Boren would make for the kind of ticket Americans Elect is looking for. Is that the plan?
Not crazy, just wildly gullible - open to absolutely any fantastic vision that seems harmful to Democrats.
ReplyDeletePhil, is all of your reading limited to things you absolutely despise? Or is it just my blog?
ReplyDeleteYes.
ReplyDeleteIn some alternate universe where women automatically vote for vagina-enabled candidates, this might be plausible.
In this one, it probably just means she's tired of dealing with the wingnuts, & wants to spend more time with her grandkids.
I know it takes some of the fun out of it, but Mittens is going to be the candidate. He will bore/piss off/disgust the electorate within the 1st month of general election exposure. Any 3rd party will have to match his funds & establishment backing, a hard thing to do on short notice.
Also, fuck Evan Bayh. Fuck him up his stoopid ass.
Agree 100% with this...
ReplyDelete"We don't have a civility crisis -- we have a Republican intransigence crisis. If sane people leave the party, the party will suffer diminished clout and its public image will worsen. That's precisely what needs to happen."
It's gonna take a real drubbing in November for this to happen, tho...
Yes. Clearly.
ReplyDeleteIt may not be crazy to speculate about this but it is pointless.
ReplyDeleteI like this blog an all but you do spend a lot of time analyzing things that have not happened, or wondering what people would say or how they'd react in some hypothetical future situation.
Frankly it's sort of weird. Isn't there enough stuff to react to in reality? Or are you hoping to become a sort of political wonk Philip K. Dick but without, you know, the whole interesting story part of the project?
If I'm an idiot for speculating about this, so is Jonathan Chait -- see the update.
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of a fool uses a picture of George AWOL Bush for an avatar?
ReplyDeletesteve, i thought you were crazy when i read this last night, wildly speculating worst-case-scenarios out of thin air. but now i've read the same speculation elsewhere, and it doesn't seem so crazy.
ReplyDeletethe first question is: is snowe that crass and willing to do this in order to remain in power? her career would indicate that she isn't, but her actions during the healthcare debate kinda changed my mind about her. all the handholding and putting her on the committee to craft the law, and she still voted against it in the end.
second: she likely would have won another term in the senate had she run again, why is she retiring? she is 65 for one thing, that's a pretty good age to retire, especially with government benefits like she has. plus, maybe she really has had it with the teabaggers, and rather than becoming an independent, she's just getting out. she's kinda an anachronism is american politics, the moderate republican. is she just tired of what politics has become, especially from the team that she has been on, and doesn't want to be associated with those people anymore?
the third question is who falls for this? the squishy middle, uninformed voter i would assume. and here is when i feel your alarm. i'm going to stop there, cuz right now until more information comes out, i dont even want to think about it.
One thing about it, though: if you were searching for a snore-provoking pair of candidates, you couldn't do much better than Snowe & Boren (possibly the most aptly named pol of his time).
ReplyDeleteI was going to say something like "haven't we all learned our lesson in 2000 from the Nader fiasco?" but then I remembered that there are probably plenty of folks who don't like Romney but still don't like voting for the "black guy". I am really disgusted by the way that racism is everywhere.
ReplyDelete