Forget the Liberals, the Republicans are their own worst enemy

Palin is road kill.. I doubt if the GOP will reach out to her again. SC's governor can't keep it in his pants (or in the US for that matter), so we can count him out. Jindal shot himself in the foot when he went after Obama giving the Republican's response to the State of the Union.

If Palin is the best the Republicans have to offer in 2012 then they are toast.  Her obvious ignorance (claiming proximity to Russia as a foreign policy credential was naive in the extreme) was her greatest liability.  If Republicans don't recognize such a blatant limitation then you are right, they have only themselves to blame.

So Mooch is there a split coming in the GOP? Will a third party candidate emerge who will be either Palin or maybe someone who is nearer the center of the spectrum. It will be interesting to see. Obama is losing some of his momentum but the GOPers are not exactly lighting up the skies either. It is a pretty small group that thinks the GOP is doing anything but backpedaling.

I almost wouldn't be surprised if there was a split in the GOP and a new party emerged, and that would be bad for Republicans, and good for the DNC, because the split would very likely divide the republican party even more.

they are rapidly loosing ground, and rapidly causing people to claim themselves 'independent'.

Mooch

The problem with the last eletion is that we had one progressive facing another.  You had a Left-Wing Liberal Progressive who managed to disguies his liberalism and a Liberal-Republican Progressive who tried to make himself more Conservative and failed.  Neither represented any major difference or a reduction in the size of government. 

Most Dems I have talked to said they knew government would expand under Obama, but NOT THIS MUCH.

Clearly Obama himself did not know that the government would "expand this much" under his administration.  Only die-hard ideologues view the "expansionist" actions relating to the economic collapse as doctrinaire policy originating with Obama's personal political slant.  It is a situational thing, forced on him by events that began before he came to office, and endorsed by the vast majority of economists from both the right and the left.  When the financial industry manages to get past its own toxic assets and stabilize, when the dust settles in the automotive sector, then we can look at what actions the government takes to either divest itself of its circumstantial holdings or consolidate those same holdings to determine whether or not this is truly a deliberate effort to expand the scope of government.

All statements to that effect at this point in time are mere hyperbole and fear mongering from a right wing that is stinging from the failure of its own policies and the massive rejection from voters that this failure earned them.

For men, Republican men, saying she suffered from Postpartum Depression is beyond misogyny.  Talk about shooting oneself in the foot.  I like Sarah Palin, and men hate her.  Does that tell you anything about men.

I think any woman running for the office of President is going to have a hard time, for some reason its viewed as a position for 'men', and its going to take a very special person to break that tradition, is Palin the one, I doubt it, but she deserves the chance if she wants to go for it.

Mooch

"I like Sarah Palin, and men hate her.  Does that tell you anything about men."  - *Carol ~ Bronx Southern Belle D.

What a ridiculous statement.  I would wager that men voted Republican in far greater numbers than women did in the last election.  Many of the breathless endorsements from pundits and analysts of Sarah Palin in the media during the election came from men (I actually cannot recall a female commentator who lauded her qualifications for the job).  There was the famous right wing analyst who talked about "sparks shooting from the TV" when she talked during the VP debate with Biden (and Keith Oblermann's hilarious dismissal of the fellow as having publicly disclosed his own sexual response to the broadcast). 

Palin's primary appeal as a candidate was, in fact, her gender and her physical appearance.  Obviously she brought no ideological depth to the campaign, made naive remarks on foreign policy, stumbled through interviews and was out of her element in anything but a tightly scripted and managed event. 

Women, it seemed to me, were far less likely to overlook these facts because of her sex appeal than men. 

Besides, women support the Democrats more than men do.

Republicans can debate the causes for the Republican's lack of victory ad nauseam and it will do them no good.  The fact of the matter is that Pain "helped" the ticket.  The fact is that the party simply didn't have much of a chance in the first place; the deck was stacked as it were by a number of very important factors.

• The outright bias of the MSM resulting in all out attacks against the Republican candidates.  Sure Palin didn't do well when faced with the finely edited attacks of the press but then again, I don't think there is a politician who would not have come out looking like an idiot under that attack.  (Conversely if the press did the same thing they did to Palin to Biden, the results would not have been pretty.)
• The untouchability of The One, especially in terms of his character and background but more so in terms of his arguments.  This wasn't a problem of the Republicans, Hillary lost in part because of the ability of Barack's team to attack her character while deflecting as "racist" any attempts to respond in kind.  McCain's disability was blatantly mocked and outright lied about.  (The fact is that McCain in 2000 won praise from all sides for having the most internet savvy campaign but the allegation in 2008 was he was a technological cave man out of touch with the 21 st century.)
• The inability of the McCain team to run a "Reagan" style campaign.  In other words, it's the message, stupid.  You can't win an election playing defense, responding to the fine points of the opponent.  Obama had "Hope" and "Change."  He also did something that McCain didn't have, he blatantly lied.  Who wouldn't vote for candidate Obama?  I'd bet good money that if you pulled candidate Obama from 2008 and set him to run against President Obama in 2012 he would win against himself by a wide margin, considering on how many campaign promises he has already broken from almost day one.

It really is the message, stupid.  Government is not the answer; government is the problem.  The economic mess we are in now was a direct result of government intervention in the markets, both in terms of regulation and in terms of the lack of it.  The simple fact is that those who are causing the problem are often not aware of the problem because they can't see the forest as there is a large tree in front of them.  Fortunately there are others who are willing to guide the GOP through this wilderness.  They are not dead yet.

You could have left everything else out -- that last bulleted item was PERFECT!

Chris you are following that tired old GOP drumbeat to nowhere.

Palin needs to get her act and message together before she'll even be able to debate with other Republicans who she would be competing with for anything.  She did awful in her vice president interviews because she was awful and didn't do it enough to get good at it.  To blame the press for her not being able to give an intelligent interview is so utterly stupid.

No, Peter, she did awful because:

• It was edited that way
• She was facing a hostile press
• She was not used to being so vilely attacked
• She trusted (at first) the McCain camp (bad move IMNSHO)

I would really love to see what would have happened if the press did to Biden what they did to Palin.  More laughs a minute came from his lips but the MSM reported it not.  No, they were simply shocked that you can be a good looking woman and pro-life and they wanted her blood.

Christopher, you forgot the number one reason the outcome of the last election was decided long before election day:

Republicans had broken the country with their misguided policies that see government not as a useful tool for effecting good societal evolution but as an enemy and by the duplicity, incompetence and shortsightedness of their leadership.

That's nonsense.  Basically speaking the Iraq war is really the only thing you can pin the Republicans on and even then a good speaker can shift the question back to congress.  Most of the problems of government were (and still are today) highly bipartisan.  Republicans spend too much; Democrats spend too much.  Republicans and Democrats shielded the loan companies and forced them to make risky loans.  There is an old saying about corporate behavior; Search for the Guilty, Punishment of the Innocent, Praise for non-participants.  Obama won praise because he wasn't in the Senate at the time of the Iraq war declaration.  Clinton, who clearly wasn't "guilty" of the war, was punished.  McCain was clearly guilty, although no one was quite sure of what?

I will still insist that J.C. Watts could have mopped the floor with Barack Obama, but as he was in virtual hiding during the campaign we could not draft him into the position.  It was not a "done deal" but the deck was stacked against them.

You are right, Christopher, that many of the problems the USA has today are of bi-partisan origin or were allowed to get out of hand as a result of mistakes and poor policy, planning or management on behalf of leaders from both parties.

Still, in addition to the war in Iraq (which congress may have rubber stamped ~ a Republican led congress ~ but Bush et al initiated and told all the big lies about) the Republicans must take ownership of the enormous deficit that Bush brought in on the heels of the Clinton surplus.  They also must take ownership of the decline in American prestige as a result of squandering of widespread international goodwill in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 through illegal declarations of war and the deliberate deceptions they carried out to push that agenda forward.

That, at least, they must own.

Oh, PLEASE run Palin in '12... please, Please PLEASE, PLEASE!

I don't think Palin running in 2012 will happen with her resigning...........I'm not sure what her political ambitions are, but I have a feeling her resigning might have ended her political dreams of president.

We will see what happens in 2012.  If Obama keeps going the way he is (similar to Carter)  the GOP could run anyone and win.