The Potatoe Runs a Test...

Good afternoon people. Today, to welcome you all back to the Potatoe (or to find some new friends), we're going to highlight some of the headlines we've seen come across the ticker today...

"Dakota Fanning attends premeire of Twilight: New Moon movie and receives copy of Sarah Palin autobiography while mourning death of Ken Ober"

"Maersk Alabama crew fend off pirate attack while watching Jenna Jameson on Oprah and discussing Elizabeth Smart kidnapper situation"

"Obama to celebrate Thanksgiving by receiving H1N1 Swine Flu shot and shopping on Black Friday with Amanda Peet, Lady GaGa and Manny Pacquiao"

"Michelle Wie watches meteor shower with Dana Delaney and Michelle Obama while discussing 2012"

"Giant jellyfish to rock Sugar Bowl with Adam Sandler and Michael Scott"

Now, we could have gone dirty with this, but we decided to keep it clean. Shockingly, these are the top searches across the internet right now. Giant jellyfish? Meteor shower? What happened to the good old days when people searched for porn???

"Articulate Advocacy . . . Thank You, Sarah Palin"

A California-based political action committee, Our Country Deserves Better, will unveil a series of advertisements this Thanksgiving week giving . . . um . . . thanks . . . to vanquished GOP vice presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin. The group thanks Sarah for her "articulate advocacy of common sense conservative values" (hahaha - I'm sorry, but I did chuckle typing this snippet) and then closes with a female doppelganger of Wilford Brimley issuing an urgent request for the Governor's moose chili recipe:


Hahaha - articulate advocacy. Man that's a gut-buster there also, you betcha.

My holiday present to the good folks at Our Country Deserves Better (who had no love loss for Barack Obama during the final weeks of the campaign): A wonderful montage of Sarah's most articulate moments:


Thank you for those interviews, Sarah. Please run in 2012.

Gretawatch: The Lantern-Jawed Banshee Continues To Stalk Palin

Greta continues to shill for Governor Palin, declaring her "the front runner" for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2012. Interviewing a local Miami journalist about the Republican Governors Association conference this week (or, as Greta puts it, Sarah Palin's vetting process meet-n-greet for vice presidential hopefuls), Van Susteren and her lantern jaw gushed over Palin's big reception by the media covering her very first presser . . . um . . . eight days after the election. She fielded four questions, responding at times, unexpectedly, with a smattering of words. Still, sentences were conspicuously absent.

Staying fair and balanced, I cannot report that Greta verbally acknowledged her sapphic tendencies when she interacts with the Saracuda, but draw your own conclusions from wearing Palin's panties on her face during the entire broadcast of Friday's On The Record. I found it telling.

By the way, if Greta calls Todd Palin "the first dude" one more time I'm going to rip my clothes off and hug the sun:



***UPDATE***: Greta is a Scientologist. I'm just saying. Keep her away from couches, Oprah and questions about her feelings for Palin.

Sarah's Long Kiss Goodbye On Television

Vaya con dios tambien, senorita, tu "betchada".

From a Yglesias reader commenting on Sarah Palin's prospects in 2012:

[L]osing VP’s don’t take blame. But their track record post-defeat is abysmal. It’s a sure way to never get elected President, and almost as sure a way to never get your party’s nomination. Here’s a list, pre-Palin:

John Edwards
Joe Lieberman
Jack Kemp
Dan Quayle
Lloyd Bentsen
Geraldine Ferraro
Walter Mondale (and he had already won once)
Bob Dole (here’s an exception - helped out, perhaps, by the fact that no one seems to remember him being Ford’s running mate)
Sergeant Shriver
Edward Muskie
William Miller
Henry Cabot Lodge
Estes Kefauver
John Sparkman
Earl Warren (yeah, he became Chief Justice, but his political career was finished)
John Bricker
Charles McNary
Frank Knox (FDR kindly put him in his cabinet after trouncing him and Landon in 1936)
Charles Curtis
Joseph Robinson (he did become Senate Majority Leader and a key FDR ally after his defeat)Charles W. Bryan (went on to lose his gubernatorial campaign in Nebraska)FDR (big-time exception)
Charles Fairbanks
(went back to practicing law in Indianapolis)
Nicholas Murray Butler
Hiram Johnson (Taft and TR’s veeps, respectively)
John Worth Kern
Henry Gassaway Davis (fun fact - he was 81 when he was nominated to be Vice President. I guess the Dems realized they had no shot at TR)
Adlai Stevenson
Adlai Stevenson’s grandfatherArthur Sewall, a Swedenborgian shipbuilder

So from 1896-2004, losing Vice Presidential nominees went on to be elected President once, and nominated by their party three times.

A veritable "who's who" list of political also-rans, has-been's and never-was's. Perhaps Palin is gearing up to challenge Rachel Ray in 2012 with her indomitable moose stew.

November 5, 2012

James Pethokoukis predicts a one-term Obama presidency only negative 63 days into an Obama administration. What happened to the media honeymoon for the first negative 100 days?:

That's right, the "O" in "Obama" may stand for "One Term." For starters, there's a strong chance that when voters head to the polls on Nov. 2, 2010, they likely will still think the economy is awful. Not much debate about that. (Good chance the Democrats' two-election winning streak comes to an end.) And while voters may be somewhat patient for two years, patient for four years? Really unlikely. If history is any guide at all, voters may still be terribly cranky about the economy when they cast their ballots on Nov. 6, 2012 and thus likely choose the 45th president of the United States -- be it Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal or some other Republican without "Bush" for a last name. Once again a "change" election for an impatient America. The same bad economy that doomed John McCain in 2008 will have sunk Obama, as well.

Who can argue with Petho-kook-is? I mean Obama's first week helming the whimsical "Office of the President-Elect" has been an unmitigated disappointment. What pretend legislation has he passed? What dress-rehearsal policy has he put in place? How about appointing some hypothetical judges? I'm not buying this "I'm not the President yet" pretext for inaction. Way to not fix the obvious problem of the potentially improved economy of four years hence.

And another thing: Mitt Romney? Sarah Palin? Bobby Jindal? You mean Tin Man (i.e., stiff joints, no heart, needs oil, "who let the dogs out, woot, woot"), Scarecrow (i.e., babbling mouth, no brain, needs to read all the papers, any of the papers, "in what respect, Charlie"), and the Cowardly Lion (i.e., tremulous intellect, no courage, scared of science, scared of ghosts, likes exorcisms, "I began to think that the demon would only attack me if I tried to pray or fight back")?

Yikes!

In a related story, Barack Obama has been speculatively elected President for a possible second term in the imaginary election that probably didn't occur today. "Don't these haters know that I'm the mutha f**kin' Wizard," a grinning Obama joked at his made up victory rally at a location to be determined.

"The Perils Of 'Populist Chic'"

Mark Lilla of the Wall Street Journal proffers "what the rise of Sarah Palin and populism means for the conservative intellectual tradition" and mourns the death of the conservative elitism:

So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It's a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an "adversary culture of intellectuals." It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with "ordinary Americans" whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that "populist paranoia" was "subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government." But by the mid-'80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the "common sense" of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by "our disoriented elites," which is why "so many people -- and I include myself among them -- who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism."

The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

In the wake of a good walloping by the Democrats, there remains considerable (albeit surprising) clamor on the right for a Palin run in 2012. Word of advice: Think long and hard about your next nominee, Republicans. Don't rush to judgment with the wounds of the election still fresh. Take some time to convalesce. Embrace the back bench for a spell, react and dissent, play the watchdog, then methodically and pragmatically form your shadow cabinet. Each passing day brings a different world and a different political milieu. Be reflexive, yet patient - you cannot defeat Obama today or tomorrow.

Most important, in the words of Bobby Jindal, be "authentic." Denounce greed and graft without hesitation. Be loyal to the American people, not partisan obligation. Earn our trust back.

The GOP Parasite

Shows the districts that voted more Republican this election cycle than in 2004. Fascinating. Writes the epilogue of the McCain-Palin ticket. The two-week march of "spread the wealth" bogyphobia (which most conservative pundits lauded as McCain getting back on message) fell on nationally deaf ears. Apparently "Fake Americans" weren't the only ones who found the ubiquitous presence of the deplorably dense Joe the Plumber on par with scrapes of a metal fork against a ceramic plate.

More significantly, fear mongering and encrypted race-baiting still plays and plays well along the Appalachian Trail into Tornado Alley. Perhaps this election distilled the toxic elements from the Republican Party. Perhaps pure conservatism will rise out of the tenuous pastiche of disparate elements once Scotch-taped together by Karl Rove. Perhaps fiscal conservatives, libertarians, populists and open-minded moralists will coalesce and offer new, promising ideas in 2012.

Ronald Reagan once defined conservatism: If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals -- if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is

Less government interference. Less centralized authority. More individual freedom. These are principles that many of us could get behind. But for the Republican Party of the past decade, these values are puffed up and marketed with no movable inventory on the sales floor. They gather dust in the partisan stock room. We've been waiting for the offer of merchantable goods by the GOP longer than Guns N' Roses's Chinese Democracy.

For me, for my vote, a purging of the Neocons and inexorable religious fundamentalists is a good place to start. If that's too big a step today, how about some restraints on the ceaseless pandering to unbridled prejudice and bigotry masquerading around the back country as moral piety.

Trouble in GOP Shangri-La?

Watch very closely for signs of a McCain-Palin meltdown as next week progresses. Often, in the final days of an ill-fated campaign, after the sobering realization that almost two years of yeoman work will go unrewarded, personal enmity springs forth from the candidate's inner sanctum and the invidious rot quickly spreads outward. From CNN:

With 10 days until Election Day, long-brewing tensions between GOP vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin and key aides to Sen. John McCain have become so intense, they are spilling out in public, sources say.

Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN that they have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin "going rogue."

A Palin associate, however, said the candidate is simply trying to "bust free" of what she believes was a damaging and mismanaged roll-out . . .

. . . A second McCain source says she appears to be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.

"She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone," said this McCain adviser. "She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else."

"Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom."

Count me in the camp assessing this election as still too close to call and teetering ever so close to the margin-of-error. However, if John McCain's campaign truly now finds itself on the brink, it is customary for the vanquished party to air the dirty laundry and reconfigure the power structure for future prospects. Remember: The 2012 campaign begins on November 5, 2008.

***UPDATE***: Christian Science Monitor reports senior advisors for the McCain campaign are distancing themselves from Governor Palin. Palin, in turn, is distancing herself from John McCain's policies.

Palin in 2012

Goin' fishing . . . for votes in 2012 . . . you betcha!

Fred Barnes inventories the Reagan-esque skills making Governor Sarah Palin the brightest rising star of the Republican Party beyond the 2008 election even if Obama should triumph:

But Palin does have a few of Reagan's skills. Reagan used to say that having been an actor often came in handy in politics. Palin tosses off corny lines like "Say it ain't so, Joe," the one she ad-libbed in her debate with Joe Biden. She knows how to speed to the end of a sentence when a burst of applause is coming. She's adept at accentuating a point--for instance, the "news flash" for the media in her convention speech. She can act. And of course she winks.

Barnes chronicles quite a skill-set for the prototypical GOP leader of the future - winks, corny lines, acting, talking faster - as the Republicans sloooooooooooooooooooooowly transition towards a meritocracy.

A brilliant smile and creation of little starbursts that scream through American televisions and flutter around folks' living rooms like magical fairies remain optional.