Two against one

by

Mike Huckster has been complaining about those observers who say a vote for him is a vote John McCain. He even said it was “voter suppression”. Well at West Virginia’s Republican convention today Mitt Romney won the first ballot with 41% to Huckabee’s 33% and McCain’s 16%. In the second ballot McCain asked his backers to support Huckabee and so Huckabee won with 52% vs. Romney with 47% and McCain with 1%.
So you tell me why Mr. Electable is so afraid of taking on Romney head to head without his wingman there to watch his six.
Triangulation, perfectly executed. Huckabee knows he is not going to win the nomination. He’s just there to run interference for McCain and unfortunately a goo number of Republican voters are falling for it. Today the McCain/Huckabee team proved that they are just that and validated Romney’s claims that a vote for Huckabee is the same as a vote for McCain.
Well here’s the thing. Mike Huckabee won’t be around after today. And McCain won’t clinch the nomination tonight. So we’re going to see that one-on-one match up because I don’t think Romney is going to get this close to give up now.

16 thoughts on “Two against one”

  2. If Hucksters on the ticket I will vote for him as the lesser of two evils.
    If McCain is I will hold by nose and realize that he is just liberal lite.
    If Romney is I will either write in or not vote.

  5. pototo, you’ll vote McCain and not for Romney? Mijo pa’eso vota for Hillary or Obama. At least they don’t pretend to be conservatives….

  6. Henry,
    That memo is not addressed to me. I don’t hang with that crowd. But I see it was a memo against McCain which I am as well and not for Romney as I am not. As I said Huskster would be painful, McCain very painful, Romney -IMPOSSIBLE.
    A McCain vote would simply be an anti-democrat party vote. Romney would be against my principles. BTW….can we have some Cuba news?

  8. Henry:
    The contributors to Babalublog are far more politically “savvy” than I. However, I worry that Romney seems to have far less a chance of getting elected president than McCain. For instance, McCain could take a large minority the Mexican American vote a matter that was so crucial in past Presidential elections. It seems that Romney would not get that.
    Still I my record in such is poor. Please tell me what you think in this regard.
    take care and be well
    Larry

  9. Larry,
    Obviously I only speak for myself when I post though I’m pretty sure George agrees with. Now let me address your questions. Ironically immigration is one of the few issues I agree with McCain on. I think our immigration problem is simply a reflection of supply and demand. We have a demand for younger unskilled laborers. If there weren’t jobs for these people they wouldn’t be coming. I think most illegals, who come predominantly from Latin America, tend to be social conservatives with distrust of government institutions. In other words they are a tailor-made audience for the GOP. President Bush and McCain were on the right track in trying to woo these people to our side of the political spectrum. Unfortunately, the GOP got sidetracked by a bunch of nativists like Tom Tancredo. What you see is that most of these immigration hard-liners are trying to pay lip service to the idea of “no amnesty” as if that were the biggest crime in history. I don’t think charging people $3000 to get a renewable visa is a crime, I think it’s probably a good idea. But the fact is that the damage has been done. The GOP has been successfully painted as the anti-immigrant party. McCain is not going to be able to attract the same numbers of Hispanics as Bush did in 2004 because even though he was a sponsor of the bill that would have given illegals amnesty he has since done an about face to appeal to the nativists.
    So while I agree with McCain on a path to residency for illegals (and by the way I also agree that we need to have a more airtight border moving forward for national security purpose) I disagree with him on far too many fundamental issues like the role of government regulation, freedom of political speech, taxation of companies for the purpose of combating a global warming that nobody can satisfactorily attribute to human activity etc. This last one should not be understated. The green left is attempting to do what the red left couldn’t, namely shut down American industry. Instead of being a defense against such actions a President McCain would be an accomplice.
    I’ve always been primarily an economic conservative. I want low taxes and less government interference in business. I believe free markets are the most effective way to distribute prosperity worldwide. McCain has been hostile to business and his rhetoric is increasingly hostile to it.
    Besides I think there’s a fundamental myth surrounding McCain’s electability. It stems from the fact that he’s a household name, since he’s been running for president for 10 years. People think because he has this “maverick” image and that he’s a media darling that he’ll win in November. Some polls seem to support that but 10 months out anything could happen. Romney could just as easily become well known in the next 10 months as the nominee. Also the polls 10 months ago had Rudy winning the nomination. I think McCain loses to both Democrat contenders but he’ll get killed by Obama. The contrasts between a young charismatic man and an old broken down Washington insider will be stark.

  10. Larry,
    Obviously I only speak for myself when I post though I’m pretty sure George agrees with. Now let me address your questions. Ironically immigration is one of the few issues I agree with McCain on. I think our immigration problem is simply a reflection of supply and demand. We have a demand for younger unskilled laborers. If there weren’t jobs for these people they wouldn’t be coming. I think most illegals, who come predominantly from Latin America, tend to be social conservatives with distrust of government institutions. In other words they are a tailor-made audience for the GOP. President Bush and McCain were on the right track in trying to woo these people to our side of the political spectrum. Unfortunately, the GOP got sidetracked by a bunch of nativists like Tom Tancredo. What you see is that most of these immigration hard-liners are trying to pay lip service to the idea of “no amnesty” as if that were the biggest crime in history. I don’t think charging people $3000 to get a renewable visa is a crime, I think it’s probably a good idea. But the fact is that the damage has been done. The GOP has been successfully painted as the anti-immigrant party. McCain is not going to be able to attract the same numbers of Hispanics as Bush did in 2004 because even though he was a sponsor of the bill that would have given illegals amnesty he has since done an about face to appeal to the nativists.
    So while I agree with McCain on a path to residency for illegals (and by the way I also agree that we need to have a more airtight border moving forward for national security purpose) I disagree with him on far too many fundamental issues like the role of government regulation, freedom of political speech, taxation of companies for the purpose of combating a global warming that nobody can satisfactorily attribute to human activity etc. This last one should not be understated. The green left is attempting to do what the red left couldn’t, namely shut down American industry. Instead of being a defense against such actions a President McCain would be an accomplice.
    I’ve always been primarily an economic conservative. I want low taxes and less government interference in business. I believe free markets are the most effective way to distribute prosperity worldwide. McCain has been hostile to business and his rhetoric is increasingly hostile to it.
    Besides I think there’s a fundamental myth surrounding McCain’s electability. It stems from the fact that he’s a household name, since he’s been running for president for 10 years. People think because he has this “maverick” image and that he’s a media darling that he’ll win in November. Some polls seem to support that but 10 months out anything could happen. Romney could just as easily become well known in the next 10 months as the nominee. Also the polls 10 months ago had Rudy winning the nomination. I think McCain loses to both Democrat contenders but he’ll get killed by Obama. The contrasts between a young charismatic man and an old broken down Washington insider will be stark.

  11. McCain hasn’t done a damn thing to help Arizona with its Third World broken border catastrophe. Those of us in the border states are living and watching the deluge each day and the deterioration that these asinine, ignorant policies have caused. We are not getting swarms of nice conservative young illegal workers, for Pete’s sake, we’re getting mobs of people who cannot read or write. Ask any adult ed teacher here; these poor people can’t hold a pencil properly — before they get English lessons, they have to get literacy lessons. And McCain, Obama, Billary, and the rest of the riff-raff liberals are going to continue to give us MORE OF THE SAME.
    Shame on all of them. It’s easy to pontificate and talk #$%*! while you sit in your a/c office in some urban high-rise watching the world from your perch. But come down to the border and then talk to me about amnesty (that’s right) and the idiotic, insane, and utterly false mantra of “doing the work that Americans won’t do.”
    Yeah, give them social security and Medicare benefits so they can drive the system into the toilet, give ’em licenses so they can keep driving and killing people on the roads without reading signs or getting insurance, let them send their kids to school to learn in their own language in OUR own schools on OUR dime …..
    the hell with McCain and Obama and Billary and all the leftist crap and scrap that keep running the country into the ground with their spending and pandering to ignorance in order to stay in power. Screw ’em.

  12. No licenses and insurance because they aren’t allowed. I’m sorry but I’ve talked to too many immigrants to believe they are here to do us harm. Certainly some are. But so are many natural born Americans.

  13. No licenses and insurance because they aren’t allowed. I’m sorry but I’ve talked to too many immigrants to believe they are here to do us harm. Certainly some are. But so are many natural born Americans.

  14. Not a question of harm. That’s a red herring. It’s a question of legality, of eroding the fabric that makes it possible for people to come here and rise. They are coming and not rising. And that because it’s a broken system, subsidized by greedy and ruthless employers (who don’t help the immigrants, by the way), and supported -at least in principle – by well meaning people who are not educated with the facts. It’s amazing to me how the same folks who object to the Great Society’s four decades of welfare that produced nothing but continued misery, are the same folks who turn around and get sympathetic with a policy that doesn’t work.
    I came from Cuba in a rickety boat when I was little — I’m the first to kiss the ground here and be thankful for a nation of immigrants. But illegal immigration is a black hole. It’s illegal and it does nothing good for the immigrant or the country. I live in a community filled with Koreans, Nigerians, Mexicans, Colombians, Salvadorans, Puero Ricans, Pakistanis, Indians (from India), Vietnamese, Iranians, and Guatemalans. It’s the most diverse I’ve ever seen. But save for the illegals (and we all know where the bulk of them come from across the river), a lot of these people immigrated at great cost; I see them driving cabs and busting their chops to get enough money to bring their wives or kids from their home countries; it costs a lot. They line up. They fill out the forms. They go through the hoops. To people like that, citizenship means something. To the rest of the riff-raff coming through, it has become an entitlement mentality. They march, they scream in our faces here, they wave their nasty flags, they yell at police. That’s what is driving a lot of “nativists” to their senses. If being pro-rule of law and fair means being a native, then I do hope that in the years ahead we return to being a nation of natives.

  15. “they wave their nasty flags”
    What does that mean? Can I have a list of which ones are nasty? Is it just specifically the Mexican one that bothers you, Gigi?
    How many illegal immigrants have you met? I live in Arizona, I know a lot of them. And the vast majority are here to work and make a better living for their kids, much like our parents did when they left Cuba.
    We are lucky LBJ signed that Cuban Adjustment Act or my parents would be illegal. No law would have kept them from giving their kids a better life.

  16. NO, most of my friends here are Mexicans who are legal, or 2-3-4th generation, and most of them do not favor the situation we have but can’t voice it because they get clobbered by the squeaky wheel minority that’s loud and obnoxious and wrong. My friends see what’s happening. I had never witnessed anything like it until my move here. And NO, our parents didn’t come here for the reasons you cite, they came over to flee oppression and totalitarian persecution, at least the first wave or generation from the 50’s and 60’s. I can’t speak to anyone else, although I spent months of volunteer work during the Mariel boatlift and by then everyone was jumping into the water just to survive. No one can blame them — it is the same situation that they have in SE Asia, where boatloads of Chinese and Vietnamese flee into Indonesia and die at sea.
    But that’s a side issue. The world is full of immigrants on the move. We’ve got one situation here that needs to be corrected, and reciting the mantra that people are hard working so that makes it ok for them to break the law just doesn’t wash; the initial Brits and Dutch and Germans who arrived here came to work too, and so did the Poles and the Italians and the Jews around turn of last century.
    I’m not biting your bait, trying to paint me as a bigot. Nice try.

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