…but this one’s a little strong:
I was no fan of the Romney effort in ’08, but it was pretty main street, IMO.
As for the other juxtaposition, my personal guesstimaview is that, though Anthony Weiner is a committed partisan Democrat and so is concerned about the economy affecting O’s chances, he has had other things on his mind this last week.
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When I went over to DB couldn’t find the offending caption, altho the pic was there. Did he say something especially anti choice in NH?
I do think he is literally running against Carter, hoping the economy double dips and there’s some kind of foreign policy disaster. In the meantime I think he means to TM the “it’s night in America” rhetoric so he can do the Reagan thing at the right time. But I think at present the Romney campaign is simply pretending Carter is president.
@ bob:
The Daily Beast has a problem with their sidebar thumbnails, though I’ll miss them when they’re gone someday. This is like the one I pointed out a couple of months ago: https://ckmacleod.com/2011/04/16/t-paw-we-hardly-knew-yaw/
I guess I could have been more clear. Changed the main image. The Weiner image is off, too, and if you go to the Beast today, you’ll find it above a different wrong headline.
@ bob:
As for the political point, I think you’re right in a way, but that’s mainly because conservative Rs want to preserve that 1980 lightning in their bottle. In addition to being synonymous with “failed presidency,” Carter is synonymous with the failure and exhaustion of the entire liberal coalition from center to left, the same coalition that Clinton and now Obama have, of course, sought to restore. You could call it neo-liberal or New Democrat: It seeks to defend the “welfare state,” but remains committed to foreign policy machismo and cooperating with rather than upsetting Wall St, corporate America, and so on. Iraq helped a Prez with a further left profile get the nomination, and the financial crisis and general repudiation of the Rs under Bush and McCain – neo-conservative centrists compared to today’s R Party – helped O achieve significant progress on the historic liberal goal of universal health care coverage, though it had to be implemented along centrist/neo-liberal lines. As critics of the Rs never tire of pointing out, the main features of Obamacare were mainstream Republicanism up to the day before yesterday, and Romney, for all of his dodging an hairsplitting, stands for that fact.
So the conservative myth is that Carter proved that the whole center-left (everyone but conservatives) leads to global disaster, and that Reagan proved that a real conservative leads to global bliss, and, more important, can win if he stays true to the wondrous ideal. If you believe this stuff, then every Democrat president must sooner or later be Carter, is for all intents and purposes always already Carter or Carter-in-becoming.
And, if you’re a true, true believer – a Beck, Levin, Palin, JE Dyer, type – then Carter and Clinton and Obama and anyone not ready to excise the progressive cancer are also just about practically indistinguishable from Stalin in the final anal anyway, since any Democrat is a socialist Martian in American human being’s clothing, marching us to the Great Gulag…
That’s a surprising shallow understanding of what is thought, Romney
for instance, would certainly be regarded as the counterpart to the wet Tories, like Heath and Heseltine, and company,
@ miguel cervantes:
“What is thought” by whom?
Apparently, you believe that the Republican talkradio base is spending the livelong day debating the relative merits of Heath and Heseltine, or even much knows what a “wet Tory” is. A dessert? An unspeakable sexual practice?
the “non-compassionate” conservatives, the ones mourning the closing of the workhouses, the lack of public floggings, and believing that the Saudis have the right idea about how to treat servants.
You forgot the top hat and the pince nez, Lagushka, I am if you’re going to go for the full caricature,
no top hat. the wets prefer the black cap o’ertop the peruke.
I’d say ‘Kamikaze scotsman’