[Peace-discuss] Anti-war presidential candidates

Tue May 10 23:20:32 CDT 2011

I'm sure you're right, but he's clearly no more unprincipled than the incumbent.

Steven Wagner adds a good comment on fb:

1. If you can stop business as usual, the candidate is pretty much irrelevant.

2. If you're not in a position to stop business as usual, you're pretty much 
irrelevant. [So far, lessons from the Vietnam days.]

3. If you don't like those alternatives, too bad. [Ditto]

4. Regarding presidential candidates, ~4 years ago the excellent peace warrior 
Stan Goff (feralscholar) said something like, "I would support a dead armadillo 
who was going to end the wars over the combined reincarnations of Debs and 
Luxemburg who weren't." (Yeah, he knows incarnations of that sort *would*, but 
anyway.) Nothing has changed. From that viewpoint, which literally billions of 
people on the planet share, people like Nader and Paul are the only ones with 
credibility.

Ipse dixit.

On 5/10/11 10:56 PM, "E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森" wrote:
> 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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