{"id":11464,"date":"2007-07-15T09:00:44","date_gmt":"2007-07-15T13:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/11464.html"},"modified":"2007-07-15T09:00:44","modified_gmt":"2007-07-15T13:00:44","slug":"sunday-discussion-group-108","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/sunday-discussion-group-108\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday Discussion Group"},"content":{"rendered":"

A month ago, we had a terrific discussion<\/a>, with a number of fascinating insights, exploring which of the Republicans presidential hopefuls is the “most genuinely scary.” Today, I thought we’d consider the inverse.<\/p>\n

Whenever I consider the Republican field in the abstract, I’m amazed. “One of these guys,” I think to myself, “is going to be the GOP nominee next year. There’s a chance that one of them will take the oath of office in January 2009.” This is usually accompanied by the beginnings of a cold sweat. Josh Marshall recently said<\/a> he’s “never seen a presidential cycle when the Republican field looks more feeble, dispirited and generally languid than this year.” I’m inclined to agree.<\/p>\n

It got me wondering, though, who is the least<\/i> scary candidate in the GOP field? Under no circumstances would I vote for any of them, but if I had<\/i> to pick one of them, who’s the least offensive choice? Who, in other words, is the best of the worst?<\/p>\n

What got me thinking about this was an item the other day from M.J. Rosenberg, who wrote a piece<\/a> suggesting Romney is the least-bad.<\/p>\n

He is smart (he was an incredibly successful businessman). He was, for a Republican, not a terrible governor and the Kennedy-Romney health care plan is better than most states have.<\/p>\n

He is a flip-flopper. To me that means he does not believe the rightwing garbage he puts out with such abandon. Am I really to believe that he used to be accepting of gays but, with time, learned to be a bigot? Or that he used to be pro-choice but stem cell research (stem cell research!) made him favor back alley abortions? Or that a guy who never fired a gun in his life is now a die-hard gun nut.<\/p>\n

Nope. I don’t believe it. I think he is lying through his teeth to get the GOP nomination and that, as President, could well flip flop again…. It’s a scary thought but compared to Presidents Giuliani, McCain, Brownback or any of the others, Romney is only half a nightmare.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Maybe you’d find this persuasive, maybe not, but given the current field, it’s slim pickings.
\n
\nAs far as I can tell, these are the possible up-sides to the various candidates:<\/p>\n

* John McCain<\/strong> — He’s not that bad on campaign-finance reform.<\/p>\n

* Rudy Giuliani<\/strong> — If he chose to govern based on his actual beliefs, he’s moderate on a handful of social issues (abortion and gay rights).<\/p>\n

* Mitt Romney<\/strong> — See above.<\/p>\n

* Fred Thompson<\/strong> — He might be too lazy to actually try to do anything too damaging.<\/p>\n

* Sam Brownback<\/strong> — He’s not bad on Darfur.<\/p>\n

* Mike Huckabee<\/strong> — He once showed a semblance of fiscal responsibility by raising taxes in Arkansas.<\/p>\n

* Ron Paul<\/strong> — He’d probably withdraw troops from Iraq.<\/p>\n

* Tommy Thompson<\/strong>, Duncan Hunter<\/strong>, and Tom Tancredo<\/strong> — Um, give me a minute…. I’m sure I’ll think of something….<\/p>\n

Obviously, we know all the reasons why these men would all make awful presidents. Equally obvious, at least to me, is the fact that the nation desperately needs to elect a Dem in 2008.<\/p>\n

But this is just for the sake of discussion. Of the bad, who’s the least bad?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A month ago, we had a terrific discussion, with a number of fascinating insights, exploring which of the Republicans presidential hopefuls is the “most genuinely scary.” Today, I thought we’d consider the inverse. Whenever I consider the Republican field in the abstract, I’m amazed. “One of these guys,” I think to myself, “is going to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}