Posts Tagged ‘Bill Clinton’
BTW, BHO Could Still Win
Oct14
By John Feehery
Never assume.
I usually get in trouble when I make assumptions and then challenge them.
I have been assuming for some time that the Republicans will easily beat Barack Hussein Obama.
I have been assuming that for some very good reasons.
For example, Obama is just not a very good President. He doesn’t have a clue how the private market place works. He is not much of a leader. His neo-Marxist philosophy is all out of step with our free-market system.
Even if you do like the President personally, it is still hard to make the case that he deserves to be re-hired. The economy is in terrible shape. Our country is “this close” to going completely broke. He has failed to take on entitlements in any serious way.
He has had some successes in the war on terror, but unfortunately for him, this election won’t hinge on Mr. Obama’s ability to give the order to kill terrorists.
That is what we all know, and that is why he is cracking 50% in his disapproval ratings.
But the Republicans can still screw this up. Here are a few ways BHO could still win:
• Republicans can nominate Hermann Cain: He’s a nice guy, but he is not ready to become President. Obama will tear him apart in the debates. His 9-9-9 plan will be torn apart by both right and the left. He doesn’t have any clue about foreign policy. And independents will go with the devil they know rather than the angel they don’t.
• Republicans can piss off Hispanic voters: Immigration is an important issue, but the GOP better learn to handle it better than they have in the past. Rick Perry stepped in it when he said that Republicans who didn’t support his views on immigration didn’t “have a heart,” but his sentiment is right on this front: He knows how to get Hispanic votes.
• The Tea Party can run its own candidate: Ross Perot helped elect Bill Clinton twice. The Tea Party could re-elect Barack Obama. Matt Kibbe, the man behind Freedom Works, so dislikes Mitt Romney he has threatened to run a third party candidate. If he does, he deserves an appointment to the Obama cabinet in 2013.
• Money: Obama has a huge money edge on whoever the Republican candidate is. It is nice that the Republicans have all kinds of Super Pacs doing this thing and that thing. But Super Pacs, by law, can’t coordinate with other campaigns, and nothing is more frustrating than a bunch of conflicting messages coming out of a variety of different campaigns. Obama has already raised a shit-load of money and pretty soon, he is going to start using it.
• The economy: The economy can turn around, and if it turns around quick enough, it might save BHO. The irony, of course, is that the President is doing his level-best to keep that from happening. From Dodd-Frank regulations to Obamacare, from the minimum wage increases to the extension of unemployment insurance, the President and his team are doing all they can to keep the economic growth to a minimum. Despite that fact, the American economy still might roar back.
• The Republican base goes to war against swing voters: The GOP still hasn’t successfully litigated many of its internal disagreements. Should we be libertarian? Neo-cons? Paleo? Should we push to get out of Afghanistan? Should we legalize pot? Should cut the hell out of defense spending? Should we end the Fed or simply audit it? So many questions. So little time.
This election is in no way over, and to all of my Republican friends (and this is a memo to myself too), let’s not assume that this race is over. It ain’t over. It is really just beginning.
Fat People Have No Reason
Oct3
By John Feehery
In 1977, Randy Newman had a hit with his song, “Short People”, with the immortal line, “short people, short people, short people have no reason to live.”
Newman later said that the song was about prejudice, but if you were a short person, that distinction was probably lost on you.
Substitute fat people for short people, and you have the campaign song against Chris Christie. That’s because many liberal commentators have already said that the New Jersey governor is too fat to run for President. How’s that for insightful and penetrating analysis.
Christie is a big guy with a big personality. And should he run and then become President, he would be the biggest guy to be President since William Howard Taft.
Taft was the fattest President in United States history, but his girth didn’t necessarily hold him back. In fact, Taft was simply the fattest in a string of fat Presidents, including Grover Cleveland, William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt. (Yes, despite his reputation as a great adventurer and outdoorsman, T.R. weighed in around 230 pounds.
Taft and Roosevelt were also the last two Presidents to have mustaches. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Let’s face it. Neither facial hair nor excessive poundage play that well on television. And the last President to have a bit of a weight problem, Bill Clinton, did a pretty good job of distributing it around his ample frame.
Television might be part of the reason that fat candidates haven’t done well, but I have another thought. Women got the right to vote in 1920. There hasn’t been a really fat President since then. Clinton didn’t to seem to have much of a problem with the ladies, so it wasn’t much of a political issue for him (although Saturday Night Live would have fun with his predilection to chow down on Big Macs at McDonald’s from time to time).
Haley Barbour, the smart and always quotable Mississippi governor, said last year that if you saw him start to lose weight, you knew he was either running for President or he had cancer. Barbour understands the ladies don’t flock to the fat guys running for the top job, and if he wanted to be a contender, he would have to drop the lbs.
Chris Christie has the same issues, although he makes Barbour look like the Thin Man.
I have great appreciation for what Christie is going through. As somebody who was last skinny at age 14, I understand how tempting a big meal can be, especially when I am stressed out (or, let’s face it, when I am not stressed out). And if your calendar makes it impossible to work out, things can get out of whack in a hurry.
Christie’s struggles are America’s struggles. We are now officially a very big country with very big people. I don’t know what the latest studies show, but my guess is that at least half of America should be classified as fat, with a healthy percentage of them being classified as really fat.
Is now the time for fat America to be led by a proud member of their clan?
Liberal columnists like Eugene Robinson and Mike Kinsley – members of the skinny caucus – have already basically said that Christie is too fat to be President.
But that shouldn’t be surprising. Liberal America hates fat America. They see is a further example of the evils of American capitalism, overindulgence and flat out greed.
Obesity, though, afflicts the middle and lower middle classes far harder than it afflicts the wealthy. Indeed, one of the historically interesting things about the fattening of America is that, unlike in times past, when kings (think King Henry VIII) and burghers were the fat ones, now it is the lower classes that face the biggest problems of being too big.
I don’t know if Chris Christie is going to run for President or not, but I do know that if he chooses to run, his size will be a campaign issue, for good or for ill. He ought to learn a thing or two from Mike Huckabee and start a weight loss program. To be the biggest winner politically, it wouldn’t hurt to be the biggest loser in the weight department.
