It's pretty obvious that many Republicans are not exactly jumping for joy at their prospects for 2008 presidential candidates. It's fun watching the current crop trying to outdo each other for the Religious Reich and their support for the Quagmire. Some of the smarter birds are trying to fly off the Bush Admiration Ranch they have been building nests in for so many years. It's looking more and more like Jonestown every day.
So when I read this article in the New York Times today, it was actually seeing it all laid out in words:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/us/politics/11repubs.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin(log in needed)
Some in G.O.P. Express Worry Over ’08 Hopes
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON, April 10 — Republican leaders across the country say they are growing increasingly anxious about their party’s chances of holding the White House, citing public dissatisfaction with President Bush, the political fallout from the war in Iraq and the problems their leading presidential candidates are having generating enthusiasm among conservative voters.
In interviews on Tuesday, the Republicans said they were concerned about signs of despondency among party members and fund-raisers, reflected in polls and the Democratic fund-raising advantage in the first quarter of the year. Many party leaders expressed worry that the party’s presidential candidates faced a tough course without some fundamental shift in the political dynamic.
“My level of concern and dismay is very, very high,” said Mickey Edwards, a Republican former congressman from Oklahoma who is now a lecturer in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “It’s not that I have any particular problem with the people who are running for the Republican nomination. I just don’t know how they can run hard enough or fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of the Bush administration.”
“We don’t have any candidates in the field now who are compelling,” Mr. Edwards said, adding: “It’s going to be a tough year for us.”
The Republicans made their comments a day before Senator John McCain of Arizona, once the party’s presumed front-runner, is to give a speech intended to revitalize his troubled candidacy. In the speech, focused on Iraq, Mr. McCain will warn against making policy about the war based on “the temporary favor of the latest public opinion poll” and assert that the administration’s strategy for securing Baghdad is the right one, according to excerpts released Tuesday by his campaign. The other two leading presidential contenders are Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.
Further into the article, this sentence nearly slapped me across the face...not out of surprise, but how the current Republican attitudes toward a lackluster 2008 prospect suddenly could turn widely into the opposite:
...Katon Dawson, the party chairman in South Carolina, expressed confidence that the party would recover from any internal damage it suffered as its candidates took shots at each other.
“We don’t do well until we have a common enemy,” Mr. Dawson said. “Right now, our enemy is ourselves.”
Given my suspicion that a certain Senator from New York running for President would do nothing better than to unite the Republican base more with being the Democratic nominee, this struck me pretty hard into why I back Barack Obama, if only because he tends to have a lot of crossover appeal with those outside the Democratic Party.
Let whoever wants to run...run. Let whoever wants to back whoever back their candidate and take it to the streets and participate in grassroots efforts. It will all play out months from now. But take heed of what will happen depending on who is the nominee. The Republicans need a "common enemy" to unite.
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