If she ran she'd be a spoiler and she and everyone backing her would know it. She'd pretty much give up her shot at running for President as a viable candidate to keep Trump from winning. That would be great for her party and admirable from outside of it, but it doesn't seem like a great move for her.
I thought about that. Thing is, Hilary Clinton is 68. Nikki Haley is 44. She's got at least six more swings at bat and I didn't see a single mention of Joe Biden's plagiarism in 2008. I can see the logic of tossing her in the ring this time the way you let the bench play in the 4th quarter of a hopeless match just so they can get some game time. That's what Gobry is driving at: spoil the shit out of this election because Trump ain't a conservative and the True Conservative Believers need a fire drill to build a base. Campaigns, especially quixotic campaigns, forge armies. They create battle scars, and they create camaraderie and esprit-de-corps. They leave behind infrastructure, email lists, and donor lists. And this anti-Trump campaign will self-select for conservatives who have more honor than careerism, and will therefore attract exactly the people who should be the heart and soul of a new Republican Party.
Is Nikki Haley crazy? She doesn't seem crazy. Is this article suggesting we've got a viable-ish candidate-ish for the Republican party who isn't str8 bananas? edit: (rip kasich)
"Survey says..." Methinks the bananaposts been moved. Michelle Bachman she ain't, but I wouldn't be particularly comfortable under her rule.
Wow, I thought they'd go with Romney - There were rumblings in that direction. How susceptible to bi-partisan attacks would this make Haley?
Romney's a proven loser. That shit been writ. I think they might try and use Romney to spoil the nomination process and then toss him some phat lobbyist position but Romney ain't winning against Clinton or Sanders or Trump or anybody else. The goob and I were talking about this stuff a couple-three days ago. His hypothesis is the Republicans run some Bright Young Thing in 2020 and bum-rush the middle. This article bears out his thinking - this is A True Scotsman arguing that 2020 ain't near soon enough and that nuking this election in order to build a base from which to launch 2020 is time and effort well-spent. From that perspective, if they could talk Nikki Haley into running Dixiecrat-style they can almost guarantee that Team Drumpf wastes salvo after salvo after salvo on who she is, not on what she says or does and that only disgusts the few brown-shirts that they might be able to bring back into the fold. Clinton (or, there's still a possibility, Sanders) won't really have any reason to say shit about a rear-flank attack, leaving Haley well-positioned for any future run. She's young - assuming she doesn't blow herself up, she's probably got 30-plus years in politics so it doesn't really matter how she does. Most importantly, though, "they" could try any and all of this because "they" have lost the script and there are all sorts of factions trying to figure out what the fuck to do. When even the Koch bros are keeping their powder dry, we can expect an electoral season of much improvisation, methinks.
Romney was out the moment he dove headlong into the Trump maelstrom. You can't basically insult the entire grassroots voting movement, questioning their sanity for backing the candidate they picked. Not after you just lost an election last go-around. Propping up Romney as the "face of the party" would result in a worse smattering than when he went up against Obama, if for no other reason than to enforce to the Republican establishment that the base no longer cares for how they're running things.
It's an interesting moment politically, isn't it? You've got part of the party attempting to out-Taliban each other, and you've got another part of the party trying to cut off the Southern Strategy baggage before it drags them out of their free-market limited-government ivory towers and into the mud of moralistic pandering. From that perspective, Romney is a clear "pool's closed" moment. I just don't think the Buckley Wing has the numbers.
He is out of touch enough that he assumed that 100% of his "47%" were democratic voters. Turns out to be half and half at best, probably skewed GOP if anything. I was surprised at the time that Obama didn't point more forcefully out how many of his own voters he was referring to (or that it's not even an accurate stat).