Derb Radio is my favorite podcast. Sorry Ira and Stuff you should know. Here is a list of the transcripts of his podcast.
http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/RadioDerb/
From his coverage of the debate he says:
“I also concur with the opinion, which I have now heard three or four times from professional political insiders, that for all his undoubted experience and abilities, Tim Pawlenty is a bit of a jerk.
Mitt Romney is still way the most professional and presidential of the candidates, and all he has to do at these presentational affairs is avoid falling over or picking his nose on camera. He did avoid those things on Thursday and comes away no better or worse off than he went in.”
Excellent discussion about Obama’s beatability in The Corner, National Review Online’s group blog.
This all started with Ramesh Ponnuru’s Bloomberg column on Monday. Sample quotes from Ramesh. Quote 1:
Obama’s strategy will … be to make it a choice election. He is going to want the small number of swing voters to think: No, I’m not satisfied with how things are going and I have my doubts about Obama, but I’m more worried about the radicalism of the Republicans on Medicare and their fealty to big business.
Quote 2:
Since Obama’s honeymoon ended, [his approval rating] has moved in a fairly narrow range, never going below 44 percent and rarely going above 51 percent [on] average. It doesn’t put him in cinch-to-win or sure-loser territory.
End of quotes from Ramesh. Well, Rush Limbaugh picked up on that a couple of days later. Quote from Rush: “Ramesh Ponnuru who writes at National Review Online … had an opinion piece at Bloomberg in which he basically spelled out how Obama is a lock to win reelection …” End quote from Rush.
That wasn’t quite what Ramesh said, as Ramesh politely pointed out on The Corner. That fired off a lively discussion on the comment thread. The most forceful lines of argument on each side were as follows.
The political optimists said that a Republican victory next year is pretty much inevitable: that the nation’s in such a fiscal mess, and the indications for the next fifteen months so clearly pointing downwards, and the citizens so fed up, that the Republican Party could put Herbert Hoover’s exhumated corpse on the ticket and still win next year’s election.
The political pessimists, led by Ramesh, warned that Barack Obama has a big base of immovable support, bolstered of course by massed armored divisions from the liberal media, the universities, the foundations, George Soros, et cetera. Also that he is an exceptionally gifted political contortionist, adept at shape-shifting to meet the public mood. Also that the Republican field, for all its breadth and variety, lacks a candidate with irresistible appeal to the apolitical center of the electorate — the so-called “independents.” (Emphasis mine)
I’m over on the Ramesh side of the argument here. Yes, Obama is stronger than he looks. Even in these chaotic times, opinion polls of all kinds — asking whether people like him, or whether they approve his policies, or whether they’d vote for him — show a floor of forty or forty-five percent support. That’s a high floor.
And the Republican field, as lively and fascinating as it is to us Republicans, consists of people who can easily be spun as scary by Obama’s shills in the mainstream media. Newsweek magazine just got the ball rolling, with a cover story on Michele Bachmann painting her as a snake-handling holy roller who’ll bring back Hooverville and Jim Crow. Of course it’s ludicrous. I like Mrs. Bachmann and think she’d do fine as a President; but the media lefties know what they’re doing, and they’re going to be ruthless about doing it.
We conservatives tend to fixate on the general-purpose opinion polls that regularly show many more Americans describing themselves as “conservative” than as “liberal.” You need to be careful with that word “conservative,” though. The basic meaning is that people are wary of change. One manifestation of their wariness is a reluctance to dump a president after one term. If you don’t count accidental presidents like Gerry Ford and third-party spoilers like Teddy Roosevelt or Ross Perot, we’ve only dumped a president after one term twice in the past hundred years. Betting on Barack Obama joining the sorry company of Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter is not, in my opinion, a good bet.
On the bright side, things do change, and the school of fish can suddenly all reverse course all at once. I recall the 1976 campaign, when I was doing office work in New York. Among my office colleagues was one lone Ronald Reagan supporter, a guy who’d escaped from communist Eastern Europe. We all thought he was slightly crazy. We teased him mercilessly for supporting that extremist crank Reagan. Five years later Reagan was president. Stuff happens: but you have to fight, and keep fighting, to make it happen.
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