Wednesday, January 30, 2008

ON ROMNEY & THE ROVE COALITION

MICHAEL SCHERER of TIME magazine has a take on Mittens, McCain & the GOP that I was trying to get at below. Scherer gives a nice functional description of the Rove Coalition:

In the old days, those who supported tax cuts for the wealthy worked closely with those who wanted to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage. Those who wanted to grow the size of the military made common cause with those who saw global warming as an environmentalist scare-tactic meant to interfere with free markets. Those who wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade also wanted to overturn campaign finance reform.

Scherer thinks that Romney tried to go for this coalition but a funny thing happened: It no longer exists!
He would run as the candidate ... with that three-legged stool of social, fiscal and national security conservatism. Romney may be running to lead a Republican Party that no longer exists.

As has become increasingly clear, the ideological coalition Romney so eagerly courted no longer controls the fate of the GOP, at least in the early voting states

Romney tried to run as the establishment candidate, only to find that the establishment no longer held the power.


Josh Marshall succinctly describes the folks who despise McCain:

Where McCain is extremely unpopular is among what you'd probably call professional conservatives -- talk radio hounds, full-time activists, heads of the major organizations, conservative opinion journalists, etc.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA31Ak01.html

good piece on McCain and Iraq War.

Buyer beware.

Steve J. said...

Ken,

McCain is another Cold Warrior who hasn't changed with the times. He recently "assured" an audience that there will be more wars. I suppose that will endear him to the neo-cons and the militarists.

Anonymous said...

Non-neocon Buchanan commented on MSNBC thusly about a McCain presidency:

"the jobs will never come home,
the illegals will never leave,
the wars will never end."