{"id":14221,"date":"2008-01-13T11:16:03","date_gmt":"2008-01-13T16:16:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/14221.html"},"modified":"2008-01-13T11:16:03","modified_gmt":"2008-01-13T16:16:03","slug":"i-wonder-who-jonah-goldbergs-favorite-candidate-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/i-wonder-who-jonah-goldbergs-favorite-candidate-is\/","title":{"rendered":"I Wonder Who Jonah Goldberg’s Favorite Candidate Is?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by dnA<\/a><\/p>\n

Within the first three paragraphs of Jonah Goldberg’s Sunday Outlook piece for the WaPo, which is inundated with clich\u00e9s (example: “spiked like Dick Cheney’s EKG,” hyuk!) Goldberg makes this disclaimer:<\/a><\/p>\n

As National Review put it in its editorial endorsement of Romney (I am undecided, for the record)<\/strong>: “Each of the men running for the Republican nomination has strengths, and none has everything — all the traits, all the positions — we are looking for.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Izzat so? Because it looks to me like Goldberg’s preferred candidate is Fred Thompson.
\n<\/p>\n

This is a keen problem for a candidate like Romney, because it forces him to vacillate between his credible competence message — “I can make government work” — and his strategic need to fill the “Reaganite” space left vacant by former senator George Allen’s failure to seize it and<\/strong> Thompson’s inability to get anyone to notice that he occupies it<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m not sure why I get that feeling…<\/p>\n

Thompson is a solid, traditional, mainstream conservative. He’d be equally comfortable at an American Enterprise Institute conference, a Federalist Society luncheon or a county fair<\/a><\/strong>. Taken at his word, Thompson is a card-carrying Reaganite, favoring low taxes, a strong defense and a shrunken role for the federal government.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Call it an instinct.<\/p>\n

Do you think conservatives ever notice the inherent contradiction between what they see as a “strong defense” (i.e. increased military spending) and a “shrunken role for the federal government”? Of course, with the Goldberg Principle<\/a>, avoiding contradiction is a snap!<\/p>\n

I agree with Morbo<\/a> that Republicans are in much better shape<\/a> than they sound like they are, especially given that the Roberts\/Alito Supreme Court is poised to put a rubber stamp on voter disenfranchisement<\/a>. I think the anxiety on the Right about who to choose is based less off a real substantive disagreement (because most of the electorate who went for Bush in ’04 will do so for the Republican candidate in ’08) and far more based on a desire to pick someone who they see as “electable”.<\/p>\n

I also feel obliged to note that while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both faced criticism based on their “lack of experience,” Fred Thompson’s lack of qualifications, his one and a half term spent in elected office, have drawn less scrutiny. Likewise, Rudy Giuliani’s campaign may be plummeting to Earth, but it’s not because the press did an effective job of vetting his claims of “foreign policy experience”.<\/p>\n

Questions about the qualifications of Republican candidates are better discerned not by their expertise in matters of policy, but by the width of their shoulders<\/a> or what they smell like<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by dnA Within the first three paragraphs of Jonah Goldberg’s Sunday Outlook piece for the WaPo, which is inundated with clich\u00e9s (example: “spiked like Dick Cheney’s EKG,” hyuk!) Goldberg makes this disclaimer: As National Review put it in its editorial endorsement of Romney (I am undecided, for the record): “Each of the men […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14221","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\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}