Roll Call reports:
Last week, during an interview with conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt, likely presidential candidate and former Speaker Newt Gingrich ... recommend[ed] that Congressional Republicans insist that Obama agree to repeal the health care reform law in exchange for GOP support to raise the debt ceiling.
Against which, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl observed:
I always appreciate an idea from Newt, and the others. But sometimes they may be out on the hustings and not be aware of internal negotiations or procedures or time constraints or something like that.
Something like ... a seriousness of purpose? Or a serious purposefulness?
The point of Roll Call's piece was that GOP "hopefuls" -- a euphemism for predestined "losers" -- are stumping the country self-centeredly, paying little to no attention to their party's legislative realities and in general making a mockery of presidential campaigning.
These are also the folks who relish promoting our nation's founding ways, as well as what they chronologically mistake for the nation's founding ways. And in one unmistakable sense, they are, yea, verily, imitating them. The presidential campaigns of 1796 and 1800, for example, or those of 1824 and 1828 were, among other characterizations, political tutorials in the most preposterous of electoral degradation.
Yet fast-forward to, say, 1860, or 1896, or 1912, 1932, 1948, 1960, 1980 or 2008, and one encounters presidential campaigns of the most profound seriousness -- even if occasionally one-sided, and even if voters didn't everywhere appreciate them -- about this country's very soul, and its direction, its purpose.
Which is the very subject the "hopefuls" contend they wish to reintroduce. Perhaps, however, they're retrogressing a bit too far. Rather, that is, than imitating the often mindless and invariably vicious campaigns of 1796 et al, they should ponder their successors -- the ones in which real and serious debates took hold. If they did so, they just might find that by 2016 or 2020, GOP "hopeful" isn't by definition a mere euphemism.
A total denial of political reality would be an apt description for the majority of the 2012 GOP candidates.
Posted by: majii | March 30, 2011 at 12:18 PM
Shorten that to "a total denial of reality."
Posted by: janicket | March 30, 2011 at 02:32 PM