Posts Tagged ‘George Bush’
Bachmann Rises
Aug15
By John Feehery
I caught some of Michele Bachmann’s appearances as I drove down to Florida on my family vacation. She was doing one of the Sunday talk shows after her Ames, Iowa victory, and she sounded articulate and smart enough to hold her own.
The Republican Party of Iowa has already had an outsized influence on the GOP primary process. By elevating Bachmann and the Libertarian Ron Paul over Tim Pawlenty, the Straw poll voters knocked out the former Minnesota Governor.
Tim Pawlenty made an attractive candidate on paper. He had a good record. He is a nice guy. He is plenty conservative. What he didn’t have was a compelling message. He wasn’t crazy enough to appeal to either the Bachmann or Paul supporters (or the Herman Cainers either), and he wasn’t establishment enough to attract Mitt Romney type money.
I believe and continue to believe that if he portrayed himself as a warrior for the middle class, he could have made a bigger dent in the campaign. Instead, he kind of wandered from one message to another, at one point warning the party that it was becoming too isolationist, at another, claiming that he was a reformer with results, ala George Bush.
Talking about out-sized influence, Governor Rick Perry decided to announce that he was running for President at the Red State Convention of bloggers. The Red State website is not for the faint of heart. It spends the majority of its time attacking Republican leaders in Washington, and the rest of the time lacerating Mr. Obama.
By opening his campaign with the Red Staters right after praying with the evangelicals in Texas, Perry is making no secret of his campaign strategy. He is going hard right. It worked for him against Kay Bailey Hutchison, and he expects it to work this time around.
Perry’s candidacy is obviously pretty problematic for Michele Bachmann. He has a deeper record of accomplishment than the Minnesota dynamo, and he is every bit as right-wing as she is.
Mitt Romney, who decided not to play in the Ames Straw poll, has to be more concerned with Perry than with Bachmann. He wisely stayed out of any dustups in the last debate, and he is probably hoping that Perry and Bachmann attack each other instead of him. My guess, though, is that Perry will quietly go after Romney, publicly go after Obama and completely ignore Bachmann. And my guess is that Bachmann will do the same.
Bachmann is rising after the Ames Straw poll, but it is hard to see how high she can go with Rick Perry standing in her way. Can you say shooting star?
Obama Should Get A New Job
Aug9
By John Feehery
Barack Obama just turned 50 years old. He is still a young man (by contemporary standards). He still plays basketball regularly, he likes to golf, he enjoys spending quality time with his daughters.
I have an idea for him. He should announce that he is taking a break at the end of next year from politics. Instead of running for re-election, Mr. Obama should tell the country that he is going into private business.
He has plenty of time to run again should he discover that he still has some work he wants to finish as President.
He can always run again. He can pull a Cleveland. Grover Cleveland was the only President to win in two non-consecutive terms, although he lost to Benjamin Harrison in between. Obama can take the high road and leave while the leaving is good.
The President needs some real world experience. Imagine how much better he would do with the experience of having to meet a payroll or worry about the P&L Statement. Imagine how much more sympathetic he would be if he actually understood how his health care law would make it harder to hire people. Imagine if he actually understood that by “spreading the wealth around,” the government actually makes it harder for the economy to grow.
Mr. Obama could start small. Maybe he and Michelle could go into business together. That way he could understand the struggles of small business owners. Of course, as an ex-President, he would also serve on a couple of corporate boards. That’s okay too. Mr. Obama still has a lot to learn about how the big business sector thinks and acts.
By announcing that he is taking a break now, the President can take politics out of the fiscal crisis equation. He could do the right thing to cure the entitlement problem. Since he wouldn’t be running for re-election next year, he wouldn’t have to worry about a challenge from a left-wing primary. He could move to the center and actually get some real stuff done.
If the President did that, he would leave with his reputation in tact. Hillary Clinton would likely run in his place, and perhaps Jeb Bush would jump in the race. Either way, if Hillary or Jeb ran, they would likely win re-election, which would mean that in 8 years, Obama could run again. He would be 58, with a lot more experience under his belt. He would be a formidable candidate and because he would still have a good reputation (because he left at the right time), he would be more popular than ever.
The President care’s about his place in history (all Presidents do). He can be a true hero to all if he announces he is quitting now to gain some more experience in the private sector. Who knows, he might learn something.
