Posted by
Bill Crawford on Friday, May 20, 2011 2:50:07 PM
Sometimes you gain a little clarity when you are out of the chain. I am down in the grass here, watching the great parade but not near committed to any one Republican Presidential hopeful- yet I think I may be able to help them along, if they want it.
The herd waxes and wanes every week it seems, and they all seem to be groping in the dark, looking for the end of the tunnel. I would like to raise a few of them here, for illustrative purposes. Then we'll move on to what their audiences seem to be looking for.
Newt Gingrich is now officially in, pointlessly. I stated here months ago that he didn't stand a chance because he was an idea man at heart, and that is not what the base is looking for. The party minions are so used to having their ideas ignored that they effectively took over the job in 2009-10, looking instead for candidates that would sign on to their provided agenda. Gingrich was thereby dead already, although he sped up the process exponentially when he uttered the phrase "right wing social engineering" on Meet The Press last Sunday.
Mitt Romney is in the process of deciding whether or not to declare the nomination as his due to his fundraising acumen. He spent last week trying once again to push his Massachusetts health care off the radar. I say, why bother? Whose mind are you going to change? Drop it and move forward. Ah, but which way is forward? - the ubiquitous question.
Then there is the Donald, who I never thought was really going to run. Trump provides, through reverse engineering, the answer to the great question. Yes, he was focused, probably on himself. And even though I wasn't the only one who doubted he was serious about this, his party polling put him at the top of the heap. How does that happen?
It happened because he focused on the proper target, and let him have it with both barrels, every time he opened his mouth. I could have found him a thousand more constructive things to concentrate on, but he let it rip and kept going, even when the press who talked with him bleated about it being unseemly and inappropriate. This put the White House on the defensive, which is the only way to play them.
The first candidate that puts this together will sweep to nomination. It is what the grass roots are waiting for. It is why they still pant after Chris Christie, despite his recusals that go way past Shermanesque. If Newt were the first to figure this out, even he could get the party nod.
On the other hand, if nobody does and somebody manages to win without it, Obama sweeps to re-election.
It won't be easy. The number of people out there flinging racism charges at you will be beyond belief. But it's what has to be done to win. There's no getting around it. You fight fire with fire.