Huck announced two weeks ago that he will not run.

Maybe if there’s a gun to his head.

Mitt Romney is a perfectly respectable moderate Republican, who has to be considered the odds on favorite for the GOP nomination at this point. Most of the people who could beat him are still on the sidelines – Giuliani or Perry maybe.

I tend to think that Romneycare is so similar to Obamacare that it will be a serious handicap in the general election, but of the others who are running I wouldn’t give anyone other than Pawlenty a decent chance of beating him.

jjohnsen, I have been misspelling your name!! Sorry.

I kind of like Huckabee, too, with reservations, and didn’t know he’d decided not to run. Why? Firm decision? The thing that bothered me about him was his criticism of Mitt’s Mormonism during the last election.

Huffington had something this morning to the effect that Palin could defeat Obama. I just do not think so.

Why do you believe the media? They lie. Sometimes outright lies, but mostly they lie by misdirection and what they are _not_ telling you. They’re attacking Palin because she just might be electable.

You can tell who the Left fear the most by who they attack the most. Who are they attacking the most?

The media makes fun of and attacks Palin the most because she’s an easy target and because she’s a polarizing figure. Easy to write about, and it sells.

Liberals only actually fear Palin when she has a chance of becoming politically powerful. They certainly don’t fear her anymore, as she seems intent on being a tabloid celebrity instead of a political leader. If she really wanted to be president, she would have done the respectable thing and served out her term as governor.

Pros look at winning the Presidency differently than do most folks. A few simple examples of the reasoning of the pros:

1. The Republican Party has been losing members (not general election voters). Large numbers of moderate or slightly conservative members have left the party and became “decline to state.” In most cases that means primary voters are slightly to the right of Genghis Kahn. There are a number of candidates who are too liberal for the base and making the nomination that much harder to obtain.

2. Tip O’Neill’s quote that “money is the mothers milk of politics” is very apt. It will take, by some estimates, it will take well over 50 million dollars for a candidate to get the nomination. If you look like a loser, your money sources will dry up. Haley Barbour soon realized he was not going to get the donations he needed and pulled out of the race early.

3. The early Republican primaries/caucuses are absolutely important to the front runners. If you do not win where you should or make a good showing where you were supposed to do that, you are usually toast. The media will label you a loser and the money people will flee.

Iowa: a caucas state that favors religious right
and Tea Party types who can organize and get their
poeople out. Neither Romney or Huntsman expected to
do well. A second or third place finish would be
impressive

New Hampshire: Romney has to win, Its avery
conservative pro-business state without much
anti-Mormon feeling

South Carolina: This is the state that destroyed
John McCain in 2000 and made him in 2008. Romney has
to do well.

4. The Presidential race is about winning 270 electoral votes. The nominees will decide which states to wage strong campaigns in. Why would either party waste money in California because it will vote Democratic or Texas because it will go Republican? Which are the battleground states? The same as 2000, 2004 and 2008: Ohio, Michigan, Florida and Pennsylvania.

5. The best spot to see how races are progressing is cookpolitical.com. Charlie Cook and his group focus on individual states and what is happening in them. In the past he has been very accurate.

I’m afraid of Sarah Palin not because I think she has a good chance of being elected, but because even though she has a very small chance of being elected, the damage she would do if elected is enormous. She’s a dangerous combination of arrogant and stupid (see her recent refusal to retract her moronic statements about Paul Revere) and the fact that she has any support at all makes me worry for our country.

Anne,

The simple reason for Romney’s withdrawl in 2008 was that he got his clock cleaned on Super Tuesday. Previously, he had not won in the early primaries of New Hampshire and South Carolina as well as the Iowa Caucuses. On Super Tuesday He won 176 delegates to McCain’s 511. The media had declared him a loser and the money would not come. It was the only logical thing for him to do.

Romney has been campaigning. Honestly, that’s it (even though he hasn’t been calling it that). He has built an enormous lead in money and endorsements. Some are writing him off, but they have no idea what he has been doing behind the scenes. He has an enormous amount of IOUs from other politicians and leaders from many battleground states. He has been working in those states non-stop since 2008. If he doesn’t get the nomination, it won’t be because he didn’t work hard enough. He has put in the time to win.

I don’t know if Romney has the support in the south, and among evangelicals, to win the nomination. It still looks sketchy. But unlike last time, there is no southern polititian running, so the choices are more limited and Romney may get enough of that vote to survive.

Arj: that’s EXACTLY what I think.

Stan, I think my theory is the true one. As far as anything he said, well, criminently, who believes what they say?

You know, I like the governor of New Jersey! Is he Republican?

“The Tea Party types are losing public approval.”

Let’s hope so. This brainless movement is ultimately doomed to abysmal failure, but I really hope we don’t have to watch them try to actually govern before it goes down in flames. It should happen as soon as the trailer park runs out of red bull and everyone goes back to sleep scratching their bellies.

I was thinking last night about how cool it would have been if, instead of spending the last three years buttering up every state and local party chairman in the land, Mitt Romney had instead had gone back to work being a master expert capitalist. Then last week when he announced the start of his campaign, he could have said something like “With our country facing difficult times, I did what I personally could to keep us moving forward.” Then he would lay out the quarter billion in new wealth creation he had overseen and what that meant for employment, and everyone would think “Yes, this is who we should have had running the country. Time to fix our mistake.”

But he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have. So now it’s all tell and no show.

I’m with MCQ. That would have been a huge risk, and even if the business had been spectacular the political rewards might not have been there. Of course, I thought Obama should have offered Romney the job of running GM after they got basically bailed out. It would have seemed magnanimous to acknowledge the turn-around expertise of a potential rival, and might have been a political hand grenade as well.

That statement was offensive to me at the time but that type of low blow comes out occasionally during a campaign, especially once a candidate has left the race and is playing cheerleader for the one who is left. I don’t think it will have any impact this time around.