[Peace-discuss] Anti-war presidential candidates

Tue May 10 22:56:59 CDT 2011

Sandie Crosnoe has warned repeatedly about the validity of the Gingrich 
threat.
Gingrich is hardly anti-war in any sense
although like any foul liquid he could take
the shape of what ever bottle he is poured into.

I've heard Gingrich speak.   He sounds good until you start
to notice what he is saying.

On 2011-5-11 11:04, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> The anti-war movement should support Ron Paul for his consistent 
> opposition to the Obama administration's wars - or perhaps even former 
> New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, if he turns out in fact to be 
> anti-war. We've been fooled on that point recently.
>
> Although it's hard to believe that the Long War will be brought to an 
> end by electoral action - Vietnam wasn't - the antiwar movement should 
> be putting what pressure it can on other potentially anti-war 
> candidates - including Newt Gingrich - and John Huntsman. Remember 
> that Richard Nixon was (consciously and purposefully) the anti-war 
> candidate in 1968: the anti-war movement, properly, did not vote for 
> the Democrat - and of course it shouldn't in 2012.
>
> Unless perhaps Obama is driven out as Johnson was in 1968 and/or an 
> anti-war primary challenger emerges. As in 1968, two-thirds of the 
> populace today is opposed to the war (although two-thirds of our 
> unrepresentative Congress supports it) - and the Democrats are aware 
> of the parallel.
>
> The New Republic
> Why Newt could win.
> Walter Shapiro
> May 10, 2011
>
> The Republican presidential race is fast resembling World War II 
> baseball, when 4-Fs roamed the outfield, the ball lost its bounce 
> because of the rubber shortage, and sportswriters found it hard to 
> imagine that any team could win the World Series. But as heretical as 
> it seems today, someone is going to be bathed in lights and drenched 
> in confetti as the victorious GOP nominee at the Tampa convention.
>
> All this brings us to Newt Gingrich, who is going to declare his 
> candidacy Wednesday in clichéd 21st century disembodied fashion—with 
> announcements on Twitter and Facebook and a follow-up interview with 
> Sean Hannity on Fox News. Yet, for all of the missteps leading up to 
> this moment—including a mangled rollout of his exploratory campaign in 
> March—Gingrich remains a curiously undervalued stock in the Republican 
> presidential portfolio.
>
> Newt undervalued? I can hear the snickers and the stunned gasps. Yes, 
> Gingrich has more defects than a 1971 Chevy Vega and his liabilities 
> may seem more daunting than the final Lehman Brothers balance sheet. 
> The affairs, the three marriages, and the ethics charges that helped 
> end his congressional career after the 1998 elections are not the sort 
> of things a candidate boasts about on his Facebook page. Moreover, the 
> 67-year-old former House speaker will be a senior citizen among the 
> GOP contenders (granted, Ron Paul is 75) and Jimmy Carter was 
> president when Gingrich was first elected to Congress in 1978.
>
> All this helps explain why Gingrich—despite sometimes polling in 
> double digits during trial heats among GOP contenders—has become a 
> plaything of the conventional wisdom. Intrade, an online stock market 
> for political predictions that is a good gauge of elite opinion, gives 
> Gingrich a paltry 3.6 percent chance of winning the Republican 
> nomination. That puts Newt behind Donald Trump (4.8 percent) and 
> Michele Bachmann (4.2 percent) and (yikes!) just ahead of Ron Paul 
> (2.8 percent).
>
> In politics, new and shiny objects have the same allure that they do 
> in nursery school. This week, Jon Huntsman (running at 11.1 percent on 
> Intrade) is being portrayed as the most dynamic returnee from China 
> since Marco Polo. Even though Huntsman, a former Utah governor, 
> probably has better name recognition in Beijing than in Bettendorf, 
> Iowa, he is lionized as a top-tier presidential possibility. Somehow 
> it does not matter that in a national CNN/Opinion Research Corporation 
> Poll released last week, 64 percent of Republicans had never heard of 
> Huntsman.
>
> What Gingrich has going for him is that presidential elections are 
> about something beyond gauzy biographical ads and rehearsed debate 
> one-liners. “We’re in the personality phase of the campaign,” says 
> Republican pollster David Winston, who worked for Gingrich when he was 
> House speaker. “But eventually it’s going to move from personality to 
> policy. GOP voters are going to ask, ‘What are your solutions to fix 
> the nation’s problems?’ And that is the moment that plays to Newt’s 
> greatest strength”...
>
> Running for president involves more than running your resume up a 
> flagpole and seeing who salutes. That future-oriented part of the 
> conversation is what baffled candidates like Rudy Giuliani and Wesley 
> Clark in 2004 for the Democrats. But from the days that he was 
> over-enthusiastically touting what-comes-next thinkers like Alvin 
> Toffler, Newt Gingrich has always been about the future. The former 
> House speaker’s ideas may not always parse and sometimes have an 
> amnesiac’s lack of consistency, but more than any Republican running 
> (especially cautious candidates like Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty) 
> Gingrich is likely to ride the intellectual wave of the primaries...
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