’08/12 Election

Ever get the feeling the Republican Party as a whole is not expecting to win next year’s presidental elections, nor much wanting to? When your strongest candidates are Mitt Romney, Rudy Guliani and Fred Thompson (who hasn’t even declared its candidacy yet), outsiders all, it doesn’t show any great enthusiasm for the job… Where are the
true Republican heavyweights? Where are the Bushes?

Waiting for somebody else to clean up the mess Georgey made is my bet. It won’t be fun to be the next president, as all the chickens come to roost: the War on Iraq, the War on Terror, the dire economic situation domestically, the loss of power internationally. Far better to let a Democratic president clean up the mess and take the blame for everything. Then, in 2012 or 2016, depending on how bad things get, enter a brand new Republican superstar, unsullied by any of the current nastiness, but funnily enough surrounded by the same sort of people who now surround Bush and who earlier surrounded Reagan and Nixon. Karl Rove has already taken a leave of absence in preparation…

Meanwhile, in the Democratic camp, the Clintons and Obamas see that their wait it out strategy is working. Instead of taking a firm oppositional stance against Bush and his wars, like their base wanted, they thought they could have their cake and eat it. Get Bush to do their dirty work for them, invading Iraq (Bill Clinton was fond of bombing the place himself and Hilary hasn’t exactly been a dove herself) and getting all those nasty illiberal policies through they’re supposed to oppose as Democrats but wouldn’t mind using themselves once president, while providing a handy enemy for the peons to hate. They’ll get back into power in 2008, make some sops at home, more or less continue the wars only smarter and work on ways to win the important elections, in 2012 or 16, once Iraq has receded in the background.

An arrangment then that suits everybody, apart from the voters…

Shadow of the Hegemon has the answer:

The problem is that while having people provide your content for you is pretty much what “Web 2.0” is about, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Markos is going to be seen as anything but a representative for his own community. They’ll pander to him as much as they need to ensure that he keeps his people on-message and donating time and cash, but don’t really care about anything his diarists write. DailyKos isn’t like the “institutes”: nothing the diarists or commentators write is being cited on television or in print, or really acknowledged by anybody outside the community. None of them are going to be talking heads on television, and while some may have books, they aren’t going to be pushed like the right’s think-tank stuff. It seems to have stalled as being seen as a “community”, nothing more.

(Not surprising: a lot of the “netroots” seemed to stop paying attention to the actual generation and discussion of ideas back in 2004 or so, and for all their faults that’s what think tanks and instututes and the like are for. If Kos et al don’t care about anything other than scooping up as many bodies as possible under the label “Kossack”, not caring about what they’ve got to say, then why on earth should the Dem leadership?)

I must admit to feeling a bit of schadenfreude at seeing the socalled big boys of the liberal blogging world being treated as beyond consideration, since they themselves decided they didn’t need the little people anymore. It was Kos and co who decided to purge their blogrolls, to turn the open network of the liberal blogs into a closed, oneway pyramid with themselves at the top and all the little blogs feeding into them, but not the other way around. They thought they didn’t need to built a proper infrastructure, didn’t need to support smaller players, and now it turns out the Democratic apparatniks they’ve been chasing only want them for their readers? That’s worth a “ha-ha!”