{"id":23302,"date":"2011-12-09T12:50:20","date_gmt":"2011-12-09T18:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/?p=23302"},"modified":"2011-12-09T12:50:51","modified_gmt":"2011-12-09T18:50:51","slug":"carville-on-the-candidates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2011\/12\/09\/carville-on-the-candidates\/","title":{"rendered":"Carville on the Candidates"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

To be sure, this Carville guy<\/strong><\/a> is hardly unbiased, but he\u2019s got some points worth discussing:<\/p>\n

Is this the worst class of Republican candidates? Are they pandering? Or is Carville just biased?<\/strong><\/p>\n

(CNN)<\/strong> \u2014 As usual, Professor\u00a0Paul Krugman\u2019s piece<\/a> in the Monday morning New York Times is causing a great deal of chatter among the political types. Krugman points out just how inept the Republican field is. In some cases he takes a scalpel (and in others a machete) to surely the weakest field of presidential aspirants any party has offered in modern American history (see my earlier CNN column<\/a> comparing this field to 1980). I believe I can explain why this field is so inept. In order to proffer this explanation I am going to utilize Professor Krugman\u2019s field of economics\u2026.<\/p>\n

Even the most partisan Democrat \u2014 me for example \u2014 would concede that three months ago the Republicans had an excellent chance to win the presidency. So ask yourself: Why does this thing that appears to have so much value have so many low bidders? Why did people like Govs. Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour, Jeb Bush and Sen. John Thune, all look at this and decide not to raise their paddles?<\/p>\n

So here we wind up with the political equivalent of the Hope Diamond going for $99.99. <\/p>\n

I think that these guys were smart enough to see a big flaw in the process and it is this: The majority of the people in the Republican Party who were going to pick their nominee had been so overwhelmed by misinformation, unworkable simplistic solutions \u2014 e.g., electrifying border fences \u2014 and anti-science, right-wing pandering, that the potential candidates decided they just could not go through with it.<\/p>\n

We have watched GOP debates where audience members booed gay soldiers and cheered the prospect of someone dying without health insurance. We\u2019ve seen a candidate who wasn\u2019t penalized in the least\u00a0for not knowing that China has had nuclear weapons<\/a> since 1964 but had to drop out because of a consensual sexual relationship. We have seen a member of the House Intelligence Committee who apparently\u00a0didn\u2019t realize <\/a>that we haven\u2019t had an embassy in Iran for the last 30 years, candidates who\u00a0don\u2019t believe in evolution<\/a>, and a candidate that didn\u2019t even\u00a0know the voting age<\/a> in the United States. Maybe Bush, Daniels, Christie, Barbour and Thune figured out ahead of time what Fairleigh Dickinson University uncovered<\/a> just recently: that people who watch Fox News are actually more ignorant than people who watch no news at all. Could you imagine what they would have found had they studied people listening to talk radio?<\/p>\n

Perhaps the Republicans are getting exactly the kind of candidates that best match the intellectual composition of the majority of the people in their party \u2014 just a thought, but it\u2019s my only explanation of our low bidders. Looks like their chance at the presidency is going, going, gone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To be sure, this Carville guy is hardly unbiased, but he\u2019s got some points worth discussing: Is this the worst class of Republican candidates? Are they pandering? Or is Carville just biased? (CNN) \u2014 As usual, Professor\u00a0Paul Krugman\u2019s piece in the Monday morning New York Times is causing a great deal of chatter among the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nCarville on the Candidates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"To be sure, this Carville guy is hardly unbiased, but he's got some points worth discussing: Is this the worst class of Republican candidates? 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