No Runny Eggs

James Taranto, who is still running the last surviving element of OpinionJournal.com, the Best of the Web, points out an interesting and disturbing trend in Republican Presidential nominees over the last 48 years. I’ll distill out the two one-person items in that trend, previous nominee (Richard Nixon) and immediate relative of a previous President (George W. Bush), and point out that, except for 1964 and 2000 (which have their own unique “next in line” aspects), Republican nominees have fallen into one (or more) of these three categories:

• Sitting President (1956, 1972, 1976, 1984, 1992, 2004)
• Sitting or former Vice President (1960, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1988, 1992)
• Runner-up in the previous seriously-contested nomination (1980, 1988, 1996*)

* Bob Dole was the runner-up in 1988 and Pat Buchanan finished 2nd in 1992; however, Buchanan did not win a single state in 1992 and had at the end 18 delegates.

In sum, every single Republican nominee the previous 13 election cycles has been either the incumbent or the one with the strongest “next-in-line” case. That’s bad news for those of us who would rather eat broken glass dipped in arsenic and radioactive goo than have John McCain as the next Republican nominee because McCain is undeniably the next in line.

Revisions/extensions (7:50 am 6/21/2008) – I thought I had expounded a bit on the special case of 1964, but I hadn’t. Barry Goldwater actually finished well down in the 1960 election season, but he was the highest-finishing serious candidate to run in 1964, as everybody who finished ahead of him either chose not to run or couldn’t due to death.

Also, I can’t explain why WordPress is claiming there are two comments, while there is only one. Fixed via database hack.

Jim Geraghty the Indispensible has the details of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s endorsement of John McCain, as well as the transcript of his impersonation of Arnold.

Don’t ask me why I did it, but in a (not-so-)rare bit of insanity, I did mine.

CNN goes live in 15 minutes. I go live now.

Others live-blogging:

– Michelle Malkin
– Hot Air
– Free Republic
– Stephen Green
– Heading Right

John “Breck Girl” Edwards made it official earlier today, and offered the quote of the day (spotted by Jon Sanders) – “It’s time for me to step aside so that history can blaze its path.”

Meanwhile, we’re still waiting on watching live Rudy Giuliani to officially ending what at one time was the all-but-official campaign of the Republican National Committee and endorse the man who will finish the job of excising conservatives from the GOP. The RNC may not have gotten their man, but they will have their result. I hope they’re satisfied with those results. </sarcasm>

For the record, there is no partisan registration in Wisconsin, and I’m not a member of the RPW, so I can’t honestly say that this will drive me out of the Republican Party. However, I’m starting to compile a short list of people to write in.

Revisions/extensions (5:14 pm 1/30/2008) – It’s official. DAMMIT!

The Alphabet Soup has long ago declared it for the team of John McCain, Mexico, and DhimmiRATs. With 64% of the precincts reporting, McCain’s up by just over 61,000 votes out of approximately 1.5 million. I’m too tired to unleash the required number of expletives, so instead, I’ll take the overnight to toss over just how I want to write American conservatism’s epitaph. I really could and should have done that the moment Fred Thompson was bounced from the race, but with the inevitability of spit-in-the-eye-of-conservatives McCain and the flop back to liberalist populism by Mitt Romney in his last gasp, it’s now well past time to start writing.

This thing will kick off at 6:45, 15 minutes before the Panhandle polls close. Mike is the CiL master, and because he’s anticipating a lot of people, he’ll have Curt from Flopping Aces doing the comment moderation.

I don’t know how long I’ll be in, but I’ll let them handle the work. Thanks, guys.

(H/T – Allahpundit/HotAir Headlines)

If you don’t bust a gut after reading The Onion‘s candidate profiles, please contact your favorite undertaker. It’s nice to see that some of the humor survived the years away from the looniest city on the planet, and that all of it got used on this.

Since they missed Tommy “The Other” Thompson, let me see if I can channel their energy….

Reason for Presidential bid:
Wanted to find new ways to “stick it to them.”

Reason for dropping Presidential bid:
Found out Secret Service wouldn’t let him ride their Harleys.

Stance on pig races:
Strongly for

Campaign accomplishments:
Beat Fred Thompson to both the entrance and the exit.

Key Issues:
Health Care:
Listen to my wife, Sue Ann.

Iraq War:
Was heard to say to Sam Brownback, “I’ll see your 3 Iraqs and raise you sextuple.”

(H/T – Emperor Misha I)

I’m not about to endorse Mitt Romney (partly because he re-endorsed gun control just like the current Administration did last night in such a way as to, if accepted by SCOTUS, render the 2nd Amendment completely moot), but his campaign has a devastating video about John McShame (Amnesty-Media) on the same day the New Sedition Slimes (dammit, there I go again), er, New York Times gives him their unqualified “We’re endorsing him because he’s basically a ‘Rat, but we wish he’d adopt the Paul-Nut surrender line of Bravo Sierra” endorsement…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGrWt-XICHc[/youtube]

The Emperor has it exactly right regarding holding my nose and voting for him (below the fold only because I don’t have enough separation between this and the latest roll bloat, which is also why I used the phonetic alphabet rather than the actual words I wanted to use)….
(more…)

Michelle Malkin has the bouncing ball. Tell me again how the f*ck (since this is going to generate a trackback to Michelle’s site, I won’t add the vowel, but rest assured it isn’t ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’ or ‘o’) John S. McShame (Amnesty-Media) is the presumptive front-runner in the “Republican” Presidential primary.

That brings me to a Photoshop from Slublog, unleased onto the world by Ace….

I think Slu nailed this one.

Revisions/extensions (7:37 pm 1/25/2008) – I knew I should’ve refreshed the feed reader; Slu has his own post up on this. I think the Devil is a smoother operator than $oro$.

Sorry about the lack of notice, but I may as well step once more into the breach…

As usual, I paraphrase a lot (I don’t type that quickly, and even slower on the laptop), questions are in italics, answers are in normal type, and my comments in-line with either a question or answer are in parentheses.

As long as I’m trying to put off the inevitable, I’ll steer you toward Slublog’s analysis of how the remaining candidates resemble the characters in “The Breakfast Club”. He’s pretty much nailed it, and since he cross-posted it over at AoS, the morons are all commenting over there (at least until Minx crashes again; it’s overdue for one).

Jim Geraghty lays out the case from a Louisiana pro. I’ll bet you didn’t know that Louisiana had a convoluted caucus last night, but they did, and “Undecided/Pro-Life” took a plurality of the caucus portion of the slate. Louisiana’s system is a bit more-complicated than that, with a combination of an Iowa/Nevada-style caucus to determine who goes to the state convention to decide who goes to the national convention (held last night) and a primary to be held on February 9. Like Iowa and Nevada, all of the delegates are supposedly “uncommitted” (at least at this point); however, not only are they expected to follow the will of the caucus-goers, but should a candidate get a majority in the primary, 20 of the 47 delegates are bound to support the primary winner, with the other 27 still officially “uncommitted”.

As an aside, both “Undecided/Pro-Life” (largely FredHeads, according to multiple sources in multiple campaigns, important because Thompson did put at least some resources in Louisiana) and John McCain (who did nothing) did better than Ron Paul (who did make a last-minute appearance).

(H/T – Michelle)

Here we go again with the whacked-out endorsements. Fresh from dropping out after getting 2% in a state where only he and 2 other candidates put any significant resources, Duncan Hunter has endorsed open-borders advocate Mike Huckabee. The wide speculation is that the Huckster has offered Hunter a spot in a Huck administration. Allow me to throw another thing on the wall; Huckabee is the only “Republican” left in the race that supports the “Fair”Tax, a 23% 30% sales tax designed to replace every other tax. Hunter supported the “Fair”Tax as well.

I have to echo Jib – The respect I had for Hunter and his doomed campaign is pretty much in shambles right now.

Let this be a lesson to Fred Thompson; do NOT endorse any third of the Rudy McCabee axis.

Fred Thompson is out. I’d have more fresh react (instead of the not-so–fresh), but after a long day in Madison (1 hour from 30/151 to the Capitol; doesn’t Madison know what salt is?), I’m wiped out. I missed most of Judge Gableman’s appearance at the Center-Right Coalition (somehow, I beat Mark Block, who never got off of Washington), and I do have a couple of interesting side notes on the “FAN” bill before the Assembly (that very-quick recap will be up momentarily).

(H/T – MKH)

This video of the various Presidential candidates belting out David Bowie’s “Changes” ought to keep you from playing Russian Roulette with all the chambers loaded (I’ve gone back to the safer practice of leaving one chamber empty):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJtgEfIla0A[/youtube]

It’s either this or reflection on the end of the Packer season, and this happened first (besides, I’m more-apt to put the latter over at TheWisconsinSportsBar, and my fellow bartenders pretty much already summed it up complete with expletives). First, let me state for the record that I’m nowhere near a professional political operative (the rambling nature of this post ought to be a dead giveaway), and that while the anticipated pronouncement that the boat is below the waves is tomorrow, it isn’t official yet.

A lot of people are saying and are going to say that Fred Thompson got into the race too late. If by late, you mean he got in later by an “absolute” calendar standard than successful candidates got in previous cycles, no. If by late, you mean he got in after everybody else did, yes. The “buzz” in politics, specifically press coverage and fundraising, is much like the time near the end of a race at Darlington, with only one green-flag pit stop left to go (I’ll ignore that Darlington tends not to have a lot of long green-flag runs). For those of you not familiar with NASCAR or Darlington Raceway, the surface at Darlington is very abrasive, and cars with a fresh set of tires turn laps that tend to be at least 2 seconds faster than cars that are at the end of their runs.

Yet, that was not nearly the fatal blow. Thompson did get a lot of buzz, especially in the conservative blogosphere, and more than enough cash to compete with at least John McCain and Mike Huckabee once he got in the race. Morever, all of the states had significant moves in support well after Thompson got into the race, so the “late” argument doesn’t exactly hold a lot of water for me.

That “late” argument does not explain why Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo, both of whom ran credibly on what was supposedly the number one conservative issue in 2007 (opposition to illegal immigration) and both of whom entered the race at the same time as everybody else, never gained more than token support and ultimately dropped out. It also does not explain why Mitt Romney, who poured a lot of money and time into every pre-Florida state and who ran to the right of Rudy McCabee for much of the pre-primaries/caucii portion of the campaign, essentially collapsed in every state contested by any third of that three-headed monster. I know, Romney did take a contested Michigan; however, there are a pair of mitigating circumstances. First, the Romney name is still remembered fondly in the state across the lake. Second, Romney went away from his previous broad-based conservatism message, especially in the economic department.

I’m left asking the same question the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute asked last April in “Wisconsin Interest” (Volume 16, Number 2), “Is conservatism out of gas?” I’m now leaning more toward my very-pessimistic Wisconsin-specific answer than my somewhat-more-optimistic national one, with the further revision that there are no gains to be had by focusing solely on social conservatism. Indeed, I’m almost ready to ask the follow-on question of whether conservatism is dead.

I’m also just about ready to ask and answer the question on whether the right-of-center part of the blogosphere has any actual influence. That really deserves its own missive, but I’ll give the upshot now; whatever influence we have is with the politicians themselves, not with the masses.

Ultimately, it was a combination of the cumulative effects of 70 years of almost-unchecked liberalism and complete chaos that was the Thompson campaign that doomed Thompson to the scrap heap of political history.

Time for some cold, hard facts of life to intrude on some delusions beyond my own (I’ll get back to those shattered dreams in a while, and I’ll come back here):

– Cold, hard fact #1A (from Bruce): John McCain’s vote total in the 2000 South Carolina Republican Presidential primary – 238,000. John McCain’s vote total in the 2008 South Carolina Republican Presidential primary – 143,000 (with 3% of the precincts left to report)

– Cold, hard fact #1B (same source): Total number of votes cast in the 2000 South Carolina Republican Presidential primary – 556,000. Total number of votes cast in the 2008 South Carolina Republican Presidential primary (again, with 3% of the precincts left to report) – 431,000.

– Cold, hard fact #2 (from Jim Geraghty; a special for the gang at On the Borderline) – Mitt Romney’s non-Mormon vote total in Nevada – 12,524. Ron Paul’s vote total in Nevada – 6,077.

Somewhere in my feed reader, there’s a compilation of the total number of votes to Romney, McCain and Mike Huckabee. Let’s just say that the leader isn’t who the presstitutes would lead you to believe.

Nevada and South Carolina have knocked out my first backup, Duncan Hunter, and have all-but-sunk my boat of Fred Thompson. I’ll keep rowing until I have to swim back to the surface, but with the almost-concession, it’s time to ask the Marcellus Wallace question, “What now?”

First, we have to answer what happened today. There are two winners today; the media winner of John McCain, and the delegate winner of Mitt Romney. First, I’ll take Nevada, because outside the blogosphere, you won’t hear much about this. Yes, it was another “no-contest”, but it has become clear that the non-evangelical conservative end of the Republican base has coalesced around Romney. Thus far, only Romney has been able to get an absolute majority, and he’s done that twice. After the abberation of Iowa, Romney has literally cleaned up in contests where only Republicans participate. Morever, he has proven that he can survive in a contested race by taking Michigan. Yes, he had the “favorite son” factor working, but not only was it his father that was the popular Michigan politician, but because no actual delegates were up on the Democratic side, there was a significant “crossover” vote.

Now, onto South Carolina. Even though there will eventually be a Dem primary that does matter, once again, that is a a state that allows “independents” to vote in the Republican primary. That is what delivered the state to McCain.

So, who lost? Mike Huckabee. South Carolina seemed tailor-made to keep him afloat; indeed, it was the SC evangelicals that rejected McCain back in 2000 that were instrumental in giving us President Bush. That Huckabee could not repeat that despite a much heavier push on the evangelicals is telling.

So, what now? Let me tell you what now. I’m going to call my sister tomorrow and head over there to watch the Packers whup up on the Giants with a pair of shut-down corners and sideline heaters. You hear me talking, Manning boy? The cold ain’t through with you by a damn sight. Aaron Kampmann’s going to get medevial on the grass.

You’re probably saying, “I meant what now between you and the race?” Oh, that what now. Let me tell you what now between me and the race. If and when Thompson makes that exit official, I’m going to be left with much the same choice I had in 2000 after Steve Forbes departed the race; either support someone who would merely slouch toward liberal socialism, let it be a “spread-eagled” free-fall, or let it be an all-out streamlined free-fall. I rationalized that there would be a bit more conservatism in “compassionate ‘conservatism'”, and I swore that I wouldn’t delude myself again, and that I would do what I could to reverse the slide rather than merely quibble over the pace toward liberal socialism. In that eventuality, nay, likelyhood, I will have failed to reverse the slide, and I once again have been reduced to quibbling over the pace toward liberal socialism.

I’ll be walking into this one with my eyes wide open. I’ve already described Romney as slightly accelerating that slouch. I’ve also described McCain, Huckabee and the thus-far-absent Rudy Giuliani as turning that slouch into a free-fall, and Ron Paul as an anarchist (that’s a small-“a”) that will enable those that want to create a worldwide caliphate more than anybody else. In that fivesome, I’ll take the least-evil of the remaining five choices, Mitt Romney. I almost certainly will not be pouring as much energy into that as I did Thompson’s campaign because I’ve been drained.

As for the race itself, the Huck-a-Boom has gone Huck-a-Bust. Further, if Giuliani’s firewall of Florida fails him, and that’s looking more and more likely, he’s done. That leaves this thing as a two-man race between McCain and Romney, and that is setting up pretty much along the lines that the last two general Presidential elections have gone. I don’t know off-hand which primaries/caucuses/conventions are “open” versus “closed”, or beyond Florida’s fresh winner-take-all, how the delegates are apportioned, so I can’t tell yet whether the Dems and independents will choose the Republican nominee. Morever, if Paul remains in the race, and the Democratic nomination gets settled quickly, there is a significant chance of mischief. However, this will not, repeat, not go to a brokered convention.

That’s what CNN was reporting (H/T – the indispensible Jim Geraghty)