I know it’s silly to waste time discussing something like a Lou Dobbs presidency, but this made me laugh:
“I would assume he’s going independent, since he’s made a very strong case that that’s where he is,” said Bay Buchanan, who ran Pat Buchanan’s 2000 campaign for president as the Reform Party’s candidate. “There’s enormous movement out there, I think more so than when Pat ran. I think they’ve really given up on Republicans, they’ve given up on Democrats; so he would be stepping into something where a path had been laid.”
Buchanan added: “I think he can win.”
The idea that a xenophobe can win a three-way race with an electorate that’s at least 25% non-white is beyond ludicrous.
I imagine Bay is just angling to run his campaign. After the bang-up job she did in 2000….
Update. It took me a while, but I did think of a way that this can be good news for conservatives. Say that Obama wins 48-45 with Dobbs getting six percent of the vote (the other 1 going to the usual rogues gallery of XFLers). Forty-five plus six is a majority, so it proves we’re still a conservative country, conservatism is more popular than ever, Obama has no mandate, etc.
Rick Massimo
Dog poop? I couldn’t agree more.
Kryptik
Yeah, a candidate who seems bent on pissing off the one ethnic group in this country set to possibly overtake whites as the majority in the near future will win the presidency in 2012, as an independent.
They really have no grounding in reality these days do they?
MattF
For Bay, “I think he can win” means “I think he can persuade reporters to ignore his racism.”
BDeevDad
He was thoroughly schooled by Jon Stewart last week, so a run for President seems the correct, next move.
blahblahblah
How many people here believe that Pat Buchanan left the Republican Party to join the Reform ticket for any reason other than to destroy Perot’s party? Come on. He was selected to infiltrate and gut the party from within. Republicans must have been pretty pissed about ’92 and ’96.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
“I think he can win” means “SNL doesn’t have a dead-ringer lined up to deliver a devastating impersonation of him ala Tina Fey and Gov. Starbursts”.
That can change.
r€nato
Apparently Lou Dobbs is angling for the Grumpy Old Man voting bloc which carried President McCain to victory last November.
jwb
I must say that I’d be very curious to see how an independent campaign by Dobbs would affect the posturing of the Republican party.
John Cole
She can probably recycle a lot of Pitchfork Pat’s old speeches.
PeakVT
Run, Lou, Run! A three-way split on the right in 2012 might just get Obama re-elected even though he’s on track to piss his base off six ways ’til Sunday.
Brachiator
Yeah, he’ll be stepping into something, all right.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@PeakVT:
Be careful what you wish for. A hopelessly fractured right which is doing its best to make 2012 a replay of 1964 will just open up more room for Obama to move to the “middle” as he won’t need the left at all. At the rate we are going, Obama is on track to be the bestest Republican President in my lifetime; don’t encourage him in that vein any more than is necessary.
Carnacki
Just a Villager once again overestimating the importance of a Villager.
EEH
A Dobbs candidacy would be even more awesome with Tom Tancredo as his running mate.
r€nato
WTF is it about Obama, that his campaign opponents self-destruct over and over again?
It is uncanny. It’s like he has a voodoo doll or something.
EEH
@r€nato: That, or a Kenyan witch doctor casting spells.
If it walks like a duck...
I was wondering who is this “Bay Buchanan” after reading the first lines of the Wikipedia biography I got to LAUGH some more. Apples really DON’T fall far from the trees do they?
In 1976, Buchanan converted from Roman Catholicism to Mormonism.[2]
Buchanan was the national treasurer of the Reagan for President primary campaigns of 1976 and 1980, and the Reagan-Bush general election campaigns of 1980 and again in 1984.
Now there’s a winning strategy for the GOP in 2012 – just call yourself independents – who’s to know?
Zifnab
Worked on Clinton, amirite?
@r€nato:
Don’t give the ad guys any more ideas.
bemused
I hope he goes for it. Watching Lou, the two bickering teabagger groups, the purity panels & Palin throwing in her 2 cents daily would be a craptacular spectacle.
JGabriel
Damn. Nice title.
.
slag
Just curious. Were you going for “Dobbson’s Choice” with this one? Or is there a “__obisan choice” with which I am unfamiliar?
NickM
Dobbs would have reason to go after Palin hammer-and-tongs as a moron. And his persona as a conservative curmudgeon probably would “allow” him to. That would be a nice thing to see play out.
jwb
@NickM: No doubt, that’s the plan. It’s also at least conceivable that Dobbs is part of a larger conservative strategy of de-Palinizing the teabaggers. It might be entertaining to speculate who would be running that game.
Quaker in a Basement
Paulbots and Lousers, come out wherever you are!
Zifnab
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I honestly disagree with you here. Obama might be a political centrist, but I don’t think he’s anything less than a liberal at heart.
The reality is that we’ve got a very center-right power structure in DC and Obama hasn’t been able to get as much traction as he’s liked in the last few years. Check Obama’s political history. He’d been very successful pushing a liberal agenda – cameras in interrogation rooms in Chicago, the work with Luger on nuclear containment, the various fiscal bills he worked through at the state and national level – by compromising with his opponents on issues he’s happy to give traction on.
But he’s not used to the race to the right from his Republican colleagues, and he’s really not used to bull-headed opposition that’s coming out of the lock-step cultish GOP behavior.
Obama didn’t think he’d just be bargaining with the conservatives in his own party, and he made a lot of mistakes out the gate, giving ground to folks like Olympia Snowe and Eric Cantor hoping he could win some support. But his policy has been as liberal as we’ve seen since Clinton. The fact that we’re even talking about universal health care, energy policy that isn’t “drill, baby, drill”, and immigration policy that doesn’t involve shoot-on-sight, is a massive departure from the Bush Administration.
Obama is far too compromising, but the Senate has him backed into a corner in a way that Bush simply didn’t have to worry about. Likewise, the House Blue Dogs have been leaning hard on Pelosi.
This is a legislature that is far more conservative than you give credit for. We’re dealing with a minority that refuses to give an inch on anything, and a “majority” composed of as many industry flaks and special interest shills as genuine Ted Kennedy style liberals.
Obama isn’t playing the Unitary Executive card, and he’s paying for it. He isn’t the radical that George Bush’s Admin was, and the system has been sandbagged against him over the last eight years. The only thing we can do at this point is oust easy kill Republicans and primary out DINO Dems, because Obama simply doesn’t have the traction he needs to move at this point.
still liberal
Any chance we can get one of those death panels to take a good look at Pat Buchanan?
Toni
The idea of running for President is great until you have to put in the hours on the ground to campaign. There is a lot of revisionist history about how Obama got to the WH, it’s like it was a cakewalk and the feeling I get about Dobbs and Palin is one of “If Obama could do it, so can I”. Maybe, but what I know is that Obama worked his a** off like a dog especially in Iowa to win there when everyone was already celebrating Clinton winning the democratic nomination. Maybe they’ll do the work, but I don’t see it. Can you really envision Lou Dobbs trudging through Iowa, going in rural areas giving the same stump speech day after day, having to answer questions about some of his views?
danimal
@r€nato: Obama and self-destructing opponents: It’s more design than accident (or voodoo). His positioning irritates the left, but he makes the right absolutely batshit insane.
low-tech cyclist
It took me a while, but I did think of a way that this can be good news for conservatives. Say that Obama wins 48-45 with Dobbs getting six percent of the vote (the other 1 going to the usual rogues gallery of XFLers). Forty-five plus six is a majority, so it proves we’re still a conservative country, conservatism is more popular than ever, Obama has no mandate, etc.
More important than such bloviating is the effect on down-ticket races. If the combination of a tepid GOP candidate and an independent run by Dobbs wind up drawing everyone to the polls who would either vote GOP or stay home, those folks are almost all going to vote for the House and Senate GOP candidates, and we might lose a number of seats we’d have otherwise hung onto.
Shell
Heard a quote from him on the radio. Yawn, another one of these ‘I want my country back!!” idiots.
eldorado
blahblahblah is entirely correct. pat destroyed perot’s party and for this service he has been guaranteed tv face time for as long as he wants it, despite his repellent racist remarks.
danimal
@Zifnab: As they say in the brain injury wards: Ditto.
A few primary challenges or Green Party runs could do a lot to push back on the conservaDems.
bedtimeforbonzo
“Dobbsian choice.”
Good headline.
GambitRF
Early frontrunner for campaign slogan: DEY TOOK OUR JARRBS
vickie leonard
Re: Bay Buchanan
Was there ever a public accounting of what her brother’s campain did with their $12 million in federal matching funds?
Punchy
You’d better fuckin believe he’s siphon off WAY more than enough Repub votes to have O coast to victory. This “Independent” label is merely “Republican-lite”, and everyone with a brain cell (libs) know it.
Phaedrus
What’s to say. Obama has gone to the dark side on so many issues – war, civil rights, economic policy – and yet the “progressives” still see him as a beacon of hope.
Look, there was a progressive answer to all of these questions, and a conservative one – Obama has chosen the conservative answer… every… single… time.
And the progressive’s answer to this situation is to recognize the political “reality” that Obama is faced with – a conservative congress. Create your own damn reality, a progressive reality, where a politician loses your support if he trammels your ideals, where he gets called out if says one thing to your face and then does something exactly different when elected, where you DON’T find excuses for his behavior simply because he has a stupid D after his name.
Look what happens when Grayson articulates real live progressive ideals, looking out for the little guy. He’s a friggin hero – imagine what could be accomplished if someone like THAT were president, you know, a leader. The people of this country aren’t stupid, but they see the leaders of the Democratic party as spineless and wishy washy, and they’re right!
Ash Can
I’m all for Dobbs running, regardless of what party affiliation or non-affiliation he chooses. First, there’s the entertainment value of (further) fracturing the right. And make no mistake, it will be the right, as opposed to the center. How many centrist/independent voters willing to vote for Obama in 2008 will suddenly turn around and vote for a racist xenophobe in 2012? Second, and more important, it would very likely spur a national examination of Hispanics in America (despite the best efforts of the Very Serious Pundits, who can be expected to punctuate the narrative with off-the-wall horseshit and be rewarded with far more attention than they deserve).
Then, after his paranoid old ass gets trounced, he can do the usual asshole-pundit schtick in the corporate media until Pat Buchanan gets sick of him and finally sues him for copyright infringement.
Bob (Not B.o.B.)
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Really? Do you really think that? So anything to the right of Dennis Kucinich is just a Republican?
Please.
The Moar You Know
@Phaedrus: Obama didn’t run as a progressive. Not even close. He ran as a business and bank friendly middle-of-the-roader who, incidentally, promised to increase our troop presence in Afghanistan.
I’m not quite sure what all your butthurt is all about – he’s largely done exactly what he said he was going to.
sparky
@The Moar You Know: i’d agree with you except for those funny words like change and hope.
and, no i did NOT expect GWB lite on national security & civil liberties (national security state notwithstanding), but that’s apparently what we got.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Bob (Not B.o.B.):
I’m talking in the John Rogers “I miss Republicans” sort of way. Once upon a time it was pretty well understood in progressive circles that the Clinton admin was for all intents and purposes a restoration of Eisenhower Republican values and policies. Fiscally prudent budgets, a sane (by US standards) foreign policy, don’t rock the boat on culture war issues, etc. Show me where the Obama admin is looking any different. What we are getting from Obama so far is a replay of the Clinton admin without the family drama. That still makes it the best admin in my lifetime, but liberal it ain’t. Nixon signed more liberal legislation into law than Obama has.
And I’m not buying the “he’s a secret liberal / 11-dimensional chess story”. It is what it is. If liberals were expecting FDR when Obama swore the oath of office, they were thinking of the wrong Roosevelt. So far Obama’s political methods bear a much closer resemblence to TR’s than they do FDR’s. He always seeks to be the fulcrum in the balance of power between opposite and equal forces.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Sadly, that logic is bang-on in Texas. You may be tempted to see Perry’s 39% plurality in ’06 as a sign the state is purpling, but add in the votes that Kinky and Grandma split and the actual R vote was somewhere in the high 60s.
Waynski
Should be Dobbsian, not Dobbisan, no?
licensed to kill time
Do the Republicans/Independents have any candidates that aren’t walking cartoons? Rhetorical question, never mind.
licensed to kill time
__
Well, he’d be good in this respect:
Lou Dobbs, Effective Leader.
Toni
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
On the left, he is seen as by many as too far to the right even republican-like. On the right, he is seen as a dangerous liberal cue Pawlenty .
parksideq
@EEH: I see your Tancredo and raise you a Joe Arpaio. That racist fuck needs to be deported to Ciudad Juarez; we’ll see how he feels about immigration then.
Shell
No problemo. Us cheatin’ libruls will just sic ACORN on him.
LD50
Uh oh. You’re getting too good at that.
LD50
@r€nato:
Fixed.
Zuzu's Petals
Look for him to put his Mexican-American wife front and center.
LD50
@Zuzu’s Petals: Oh, well, he’s got 1.5% of Hispanic in the bag, right there.
LD50
Argh. That should read “Oh, well, he’s got 1.5% of the Hispanic vote in the bag, right there.”
Why can’t we edit no more????
Splitting Image
He also built the political machine that eventually allowed the conservatives to overturn many of those changes.
That’s the thing about the “liberal” Obama. There are a lot of limits to what he can actually do unless he is willing to go all Unitary Executive on everybody. To create an environment where more liberal legislation can be passed, political moderates need to be convinced to vote with the country’s liberal wing most of the time. Nixon’s legacy was creating an environment (i.e. the “culture wars”) where they typically voted with the conservative wing.
I would say Nixon did two things. He divided the country into the Christian right and the non-Christian left, and divided it again into the pro-business right and the anti-business left. The vast majority of Christians may have more liberal values than the maniacs on TV would lead you to believe, but if moral questions (abortion, gay marriage, etc) are assumed to have a Christian answer and a non-Christian one, the majority of the country will lean Christian, which is to say right.
Similarly with business: the majority of the country may support changing the way business is done (environmental issues, how health care is delivered, etc) but if everything is couched in terms of being pro-business or anti-business, most people will say they support business, again leaning right.
What Obama has to do is make the majority of Christians feel that the psychopaths on the right are a bigger danger to their religion than the secularists on the left. He has had some success in this. There has been an enormous amount of progress on culture war issues this year, particularly gay marriage. The Iowa decision on marriage and the Lutherans’ social statement on sexuality were big victories and even the Mormon church has showed some signs of opening up. The Catholic church right now seems to be moving in the other direction, but the Republicans’ decision to more or less purge Hispanics from their party may stop them from capitalizing on this.
I don’t think Obama has had as much success on the business front. In spite of the fact that the Republicans are openly plotting the country’s ruin, people still talk as though the Democrats are the dangerous ones. If they can get a health care bill done and a wide enough array of businesses support it, there’s still hope.
eemom
there’s also the fact that Nixon was in office six years, and Obama 10 months so far. Helloooo.
Savage Henry
There seem to be a lot of potential candidates gunning for the angry, ignorant, racist religious nutter vote in 2012. Let’s see: Palin, Dobbs, and Huckabee don’t have any appeal at all outside that demographic. Multiple Choice Mitt is constantly pandering to them. Even T-Paw is trying to get in on the act.
Apparently objective facts have fallen so out of favor on the right side of the political spectrum that noboby has bothered to run the numbers to figure out that there just aren’t enough of these people around to win a national campaign with them. Also, if you carry this group you are pretty much guaranteed to lose pretty much every other group.
2012 is going to be so much fun.
catclub
slag @ 21
I think he was going more for Hobbsian Dilemma.
Hobbs, I think, is noted for noting that life
is nasty, brutal, and short.
How tall is Dobbs, by the way?
Or maybe that would be the life of his campaign.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@eemom:
I think you (and others above) have missed the point of the Obama-Nixon comparison I made. There used to be a liberal wing of the GOP. In Nixon’s time it was still fairly large and a force to be accounted for in national politics. Within the national GOP of that era Nixon was an opportunistic centrist who played the left and right wings of his own party off of each other in order to grab the nomination in ’68, and then proceeded to work with a largely Democratic Congress to sign domestic legislation whose ideological tone came more from the Hill than from the WH. That is what pragmatic centrist Presidents do – they straddle the balance of power in Congress and then go where ever that leads. Eisenhower and Clinton were the same way, as was JFK, briefly.
Obama shows every indication thus far of following the same path – which means that progressives looking for a champion to push their causes are going to have to look elsewhere. To the extent that Obama is filling that progressive role he is doing so in the same way that TR did circa 1902-1907, with lots of rhetoric but less in the way of deeds, and always looking to compromise and try to split the difference between opposing factions so as to break an otherwise intolerable logjam. Note that TR turned strongly to the Left only at the very end of his term in office (c.f. TR’s message to Congress in Jan 1908) when the legislative initiative was already passing out of his hands and he had little left but rhetoric with which to work.
I expect Obama will be the same – the “liberal Obama” will emerge only at the end of his term in office when relations with Congress are less pivotal than they are now. But right now his political method is more that of somebody who is in charge of binding arbitration between opposing factions – his job is to bring people to the table (no matter how badly they may not want to be there), make them show their cards, and then after all the arguments have been hashed out to impose an acceptable middle ground compromise solution on all concerned.
In order to do that, and to do it with success on issues over which the nation is split into near-irreconcilable factions, requires that he not be too much of a partisan for one side. That is why in his speeches he always balances attacks on the Right with criticism of the Left – because he is styling himself as the Difference Splitter in Chief. And the Overton Window being where it is today, this requires that he take an ideological position which would have been well within the northeastern liberal wing of the GOP back in Nixon’s day. Today those folks are Democrats, not Republicans, but their ideology has shifted little as they migrated from one party to the other over the last 40 years. That is what I mean by calling Obama a “Good Republican”.
Paul in KY
If he runs, it would be as a Republican.
He won’t run though. Guys who make megamoney working 3 hours a day on TV just don’t want to put in the 18 hours days you have to when you’re running for Pres.
Plus, he would figure out he can’t win.
Catsy
Talking to people who call Obama Bush-lite or who are nursing major butthurt because he isn’t doing everything they hoped remind me of the arguments I sometimes have with my wife about chores. It can’t just be “you didn’t take the trash out last night”. It’s “can you start taking the trash out like I asked” (with the passive-aggressive, disingenuous implication that I never have), or “I’m sick of you always leaving this for me to do”, etc. Every complaint in question is magnified and exaggerated until it’s not just this one instance in which I failed, or even a handful, it’s every fucking time in the history of the world.
Likewise with these progressive concern trolls, there’s no sense of perspective, no recognition that this kind of hyperbole gets rightfully dismissed as noise, no room for nuance–either Obama does everything progressives want, RIGHT FUCKING NOW, or he’s Bush in blackface.
I put up with this kind of crap from my wife because I love her and can tell her she’s full of shit when she is. The fools hyperventilating over how Obama is just like Bush can go find a fainting couch somewhere and write poetry about how disappointed you are.
phoebes-in-santa fe
@Catsy: Couldn’t have said it any better, Catsy.
eyelessgame
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Sorry, that position has already been filled by Bill Clinton. Obama will have to be something else.
eyelessgame
@Catsy: this.
Chuck Butcher
If there is anything encouraging in all this it is that the left in the Senate and the House is a hell of a lot larger than it was 4 or 8 years ago. No, it is nowhere near large enought to bring wholesale changes, it is large enough to keep some rightward compromises from happening and get some leftward tilt to what otherwise would be disasterous. It certainly remains to be seen where that will get us, but there is an effect.
TG Chicago
Another way it could be good for the Right:
*The GOP nominates a moderate like Pawlenty or Romney.
*Dobbs threatens to run
*The GOP moderate co-opts Dobbs’ immigration stance to take the oxygen out of his candidacy. Dobbs folds prior to the election.
If the GOP moderate wins the election, then they have a president with a more anti-immigrant platform than it might have otherwise been.