Nobody will be surprised to see that Megan McArdle
is supporting the Koch candidate for president.
- Absent some completely unpredictable event, like Bill Clinton's death, Hillary Clinton is not going to walk to the presidency; at best, she is going to have a hard fight on her hands.
- Scott Walker starts looking like the candidate best positioned to take Clinton on: a regular guy, not an Ivy League technocrat, and one who has proven experience winning tough elections and curbing government spending.
McArdle, who is always wrong about everything ever, has decided that middle class economics is a losing issue.
The Obama administration is going in exactly the wrong direction with its "middle-class agenda," and this will hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016 unless she repudiates it. The middle class does not want to hear about all the awesome new spending they're going to get to help them out (did anyone cringe during the State of the Union speech when Obama identified a couple that needed help because they couldn't afford new cars and vacations?). The middle class wants to hear that they are going to be able to keep what they have.
McArdle is also evidently a Clinton truther.
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Walker had a good week. But he's got lots of vulnerabilities. It's true that he's won three statewide elections in Wisconsin. But he's never faced the electorate he would face as a presidential candidate in 2016. Wisconsin hasn't voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan, if memory serves. Just because Walker is a local boy won't change that. It's hard to overstate the degree of loathing in which he's held by Democrats in Wisconsin.
I suspect he's also got a glass jaw. He lives politically in a bubble; he's had a compliant legislature and judiciary and surprisingly little blowback from his dirty tricks habit. And there are persistent rumors that his career at Marquette University ended in scandal; perhaps confidentiality will prevent the facts from coming out, but I wouldn't bet on it. I don't think the other candidates are going to treat him with the deference that he's experienced from Republicans in Wisconsin.
Having said that, he's the one that's the most scary. He regards opponents as enemies to be destroyed, not fellow citizens. If we have another 9/11, he's the one candidate from either party that would be itching to lock up dissidents.
McMegan robertlevine • an hour ago
Unlike Hillary Clinton, who is well known for her kind and generous treatment of people who oppose her?
Months and months of McArdle supporting Walker will be fun. She will either have to come out of the Koch closet further or look like an idiot trying to support Walker without actually supporting Walker.
9 comments:
She's never going to get that phone call, though. Just not important (or useful) enough.
P.S. How appalling is it that someone could get caught being that craven a lackey, and not only be reelected Governor, be a serious candidate for a major party's nomination?
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Terribly appalling. And it shows the party itself has become irrelevant. The Koches can buy their own grass-roots organizations, set their own agenda, pick and choose their own front man, and don't need to raise funds. All they have to do is call their candidate a Republican and spend a bunch of money, which the media will lap up.
I see no bottom to this floor.
(It was encouraging to see a few of McArdle's commenters worry about reality however.)
All the Republicans are Koch Candidates. They're not even bothering in the primary, since they own every single one of them.
Walker's already been housebroken.
Are you saying McArdle sincerely likes Walker? Or sincerely likes whoever the Kochs tell her she sincerely likes? (That sounds snarky but I mean it literally.) If it's the former, I'm surprised. He's by far the worst of the lot. It's not like her, to commit to an extreme.
Arglebargle sincerely likes her big paychecks from the Kocks or Kock-associated 'foundations'. She's a lick-spittle, and pretty good at it for someone who's amazingly stupid.
Mr. Wonderful, yes, she always equivocates so I expect a lot of waffling.
I am not sure if she sincerely likes Walker. I think she divides everything into I-win and You-lose so it might be that she thinks Walker has the best chance. But she loves the you-can't-make-me attitude of the Koches and the fact that they seem like winners and everyone else so far like losers. He might not seem extreme to her because she tends to ignore anything she doesn't want to know.
Charles Pierce has a nice post today on the TEGEHSBTKBTRTS fka Wisconsin - http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Skeevy_Friends_Of_Scott_Walker
She will either have to come out of the Koch closet further or look like an idiot trying to support Walker without actually supporting Walker.
False choice! She can do both!
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