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View Full Version : MSNBC's Joe Scarborough Rips into CPAC and Potential GOP Presidential Candidates as Tumult




HOLLYWOOD
02-15-2011, 06:17 AM
Morning Joe's OP-ED piece... really rips into Mitch Daniels and his accomplice to massive debt, spending and way off in his figures and projections while running Dubya W Bush's OMB. Daniels is done. I like the Romney analogy of "support a mile wide and inch deep". No way he'll get past RomneyCare and Bain Capital destruction. Glad Scarborough brought up the piece on FOX POLITICAL PUNDITS making good money from NEWSCORP paychecks... because I brought this up a few days ago in posts. ;)

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/49509.html

The Muslim Brotherhood accusations makes some at CPAC look ridiculous.

Washington as Cairo: Tumult reigns at CPAC
http://images.politico.com/global/news/Opinion-Scarborough_605.jpg

Answers to the question, 'Who will win in the straw poll?' are written on a large pad at CPAC. |

By JOE SCARBOROUGH (http://www.politico.com/reporters/JoeScarborough.html) | 2/15/11 4:33 AM EST Updated: 2/15/11 6:37 AM EST

While Egypt was sorting out its political crisis on the streets of Cairo, Republicans gathered in a Washington ballroom to bring order to their jumbled world. The events at the CPAC gathering may not have been as epic as the scenes unfolding in Egypt, but for a party obsessed with beating Barack Obama next year, much was at stake.
That’s too bad for Republicans, since the conservative conference raised more questions for the party than it answered. Like most Egyptians, the conservative movement still has no idea who will lead it through the next election.

That’s not to say there were not standouts at the conference. Ron Paul grabbed headlines with another straw poll victory, but most observers echoed Donald Trump’s blunt assessment that the libertarian leader has “zero chance of getting elected.” The same was said of Mitt Romney, the man many consider to be the GOP’s presumptive front-runner.


“Romney’s support is a mile wide and an inch deep” was a refrain repeated around the Omni Shoreham ballroom as often as “Rocky Top” gets played at Tennessee football games.


Another governor, Mississippi’s Haley Barbour, drawled his way into the hearts of some CPAC attendees, while the caucus representing Northeast elite media outlets swooned in unison over Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Indiana’s answer to Adlai Stevenson has long been adored by a slew of national media types who almost certainly have never voted in a Republican primary.
Politics Daily columnist Walter Shapiro was even thoughtful enough to compose an early Valentine’s Day note to Daniels, calling his CPAC speech “eloquently crafted” and “intellectually compelling.” The self-described liberal found the Indiana governor’s rhetoric so moving that he claimed the lofty address “inspired careful listening rather than pep-rally applause.”
Overlooked by Mr. Daniels’s Upper West Side coterie was the fact that before he was sworn in as governor, Daniels was director of George W. Bush’s Office of Management and Budget during the years that the national debt exploded to record levels. While the media dutifully reported on Daniels’s dark warning concerning the new “red menace” of debt, they somehow overlooked the fact that Daniels himself was a central player on the economic team that led us directly into that very crisis.


The “arsonist as fireman” metaphor is a particularly tight fit for Daniels. And while many New York media figures find his candidacy promising, I suspect they will become even more excited if given the chance to write general election headlines involving the Indiana governor.
I can see it now: “GOP Nominee Turned $236 Billion Surplus Into $400 Billion Deficit in Two Years.”


That page-turner would be followed, I suspect, by a snappy story explaining how Daniels was used by Donald Rumsfeld to discredit cost estimates on the Iraq War that embarrassed the White House. OMB Director Daniels mocked Lawrence Lindsey’s $200 billion Iraq estimate as “very, very high” and assured Congress that the costs would reach only between $50 billion and $60 billion.


In Daniels’s defense, it was only a trillion dollars or so off his original estimate. He was not 100 percent wrong about Iraq. His estimate was actually 1,000 percent wrong. But no matter. It was mission accomplished for Bush’s OMB director, as America went along with the invasion, Lindsey got fired and Daniels moved on to the governor’s mansion.
Given Daniels’s record on the national debt when it mattered most, you can count me as one Upper West Sider who has yet to be swept up by the excitement of “Mitch Mania.”
But there were few candidates at CPAC who stirred the crowd. If you needed any evidence of just how hungry CPAC attendees were for a strong alternative to Obama, look no further than Trump’s rock star welcome. The New York billionaire took a few hours off from printing money to deliver a speech that bashed Obama, Paul and just about everything associated with China. Still, even the excitement of The Donald’s magical moment was eclipsed by the dark cloud that hung over a conference cursed with dull speechmaking and intraparty battles.

The CPAC sessions became so contentious at one point that the conference organizer was accused of allowing his event to be infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
I am not making this up.

If, in fact, Muslim Brotherhood doctrine was responsible for inspiring any part of what I saw of the conference on C-SPAN this weekend, then forget about Islamists taking control of Egypt. Judging by this weekend’s events, they won’t even be able to carry the suburbs of Philly.

After CPAC, many Republican activists are waking up to a depressing reality. Absent New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s entry into the presidential race, most believe the GOP’s presidential prospects are dimming by the moment.
Four years ago this week, Obama announced his candidacy for president. Four years later, no serious Republican has dared to put a toe in the water. There are several reasons for this reluctance.

The 2012 primary season starts later and is less compressed than in 2008, so candidates can take a few more months to weigh their options. And there is the Palin factor. Despite her apparent descent into political purgatory, the very existence of the former Alaska governor still freezes the field. Sarah Palin’s rock star status allows her to wait longer to make up her mind than most conventional candidates.
There is also the issue of Fox News contracts to consider when looking at the GOP field. Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and John Bolton all make good money going on TV. They also reach a larger audience with a single appearance on Roger Ailes’s network than they would at 20 town hall meetings in western Iowa. Once a campaign kicked off, that highly profitable platform would cease to exist.
Still, the biggest reason prospective candidates are so reluctant to declare their candidacy in 2011 is simple: Most of them privately believe Obama will end up winning in 2012.


That reality may be hard for Republicans like me to digest, since many of us believe the president’s domestic agenda over the past two years has been a disaster. But Obama’s poll numbers paint another picture.


The most recent Fox News poll shows the president with a 51 percent approval rating at a time when real unemployment is above 10 percent.
Obama’s support among voters is hard to explain, but the impact of the reality is simple to explain. His popularity is freezing Republican candidates in their tracks.
Minority groups continue supporting the president in record numbers, and that won’t change in 2012. Since minorities will make up a higher percentage of voters next year than in 2010, the news for the White House keeps getting better.
The news for individual GOP candidates is not good. Public Policy Polling released polls recently showing Obama blowing all the GOP’s current front-runners out of the water. “If he stood for reelection today against one of the current Republican front-runners, Obama would almost certainly win the same number of electoral votes as he did in 2008, if not more,” the polling firm reported.


The fear of failure is paralyzing the field of potential GOP candidates. One Republican certain to be a front-runner told me he’s holding out because while he can afford to lose a primary, Republican voters would never forgive him for losing a general election to Obama: “It’s a war I won’t fight unless I know I can win. Anything less than a total victory in 2012 would end my political career.”
For its sake, the Muslim Brotherhood had better have more control over events in the streets of Cairo than it does over the Grand Old Party.

A guest columnist for POLITICO, Joe Scarborough hosts “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and represented Florida’s 1st Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001.