From Yahoo News, on the chairman of the upcoming Democrat Convention:
Is Antonio Villaraigosa poised to be America's first Latino president?
LOS ANGELES — When Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gavels the 2012 Democratic National Convention into session in Charlotte this September, his role as prominent cheerleader for President Obama will be clear.
It is less clear, for now, if Villaraigosa has designs on the ultimate convention role in 2016--taking center stage to accept his party's nomination on the final night.
I would think that a major downside in Villaraigosa's mind when he considers the pros and cons of being President is the age of the news reporterettes who would cover him in the White House. Villaraigosa can never keep his hands off the lady media types assigned to him, but in L.A. they tend to be young ex-Miss USAs who have day jobs in local news while they try to break into the movies. (And here's a previous reporterette who proved to be the last straw for the ex-Mrs. Villaraigosa.) But, in the White House, he'd be covered by veteran women who have clawed their way to the top over the decades, like Cokie Roberts and Helen Thomas. So, really, what's in it for him, hot babe-wise? As Pascal, or maybe Woody Allen, said, the little head has its reasons of which the big head knows nothing.
A reader writes:
The media is scared that Romney is going to crush Obama in the white vote, and that the slip in the Hispanic vote is going to be enough to hurt Obama in southwestern swing states. These articles are discussing two city mayors, who both have flaws, as potential POTUS candidates in 4 years, which would be laughed out of the building in another time or western democracy. These articles are code for literate Hispanics to recognize that they are Democrats and must get in line like other members of the coalition of victims voting party.
Another possible motivation for these two articles so closely released is that it can focus on their Mexican roots, and deflect the possibility that the GOP just nominated a Cuban-American Hispanic for Senate over the establishment white guy in Texas and might be nominating a Cuban-American Hispanic for VP within the next month. It would be bad optics for the Dems if the GOP has two, great success stories involving Hispanics this month. Our mainstream media wants to focus on the difference between the GOP Hispanics and the Dem Hispanics, kind of like calling George Zimmerman a white Hispanic. They do this with female candidates. "Sure, the GOP rewards Latinos, but they aren't really Latino". After all, no one mentions how the GOP has 4 female govs to the Dems 2. The identity game is all disgusting, but the worst part is how it works.
This is also a stretch but a 3rd motivation is this: the Dems have no bench right now for the POTUS race in 2016. I've seen articles mention Cory Booker as apotential 2016 POTUS candidate (he'll run for US Sen in 2014). Booker's problem is that he is single, in his 40s, and despite being an Ivy educated and wealthy black man, just hasn't found the right girl. That rumor is why black voters threw every rumor at him they could when he first ran for mayor of Newark because they couldnt publicly say, "we don't like him because we think he's gay".
No worries about Villaraigosa on that regard!
Booker is the mayor of Newark, which is an absolute hell hole. The Dems have few statewide office holders that have the gravitas for the POTUS position (Govs of Oregon/Colorado are weird) or that the media could plausibly argue has gravitas as they did with Obama. That is why there is a lot of talk about Clinton running at the age of 69. She is all they have, but I think HD TV would destroy her visually unless they give her the Barbara Walters filter.
Not quite, as they will have Gov. Andrew Cuomo sitting in the catbird seat as a two term governor with smarts, some lib bonafides, budgetcuttign bona fides and an aggressive attitude that his father never had. The Dem establishment doesn't like Cuomo, but they may have to run him. He'd be a Romney type candidate for the Dems in 2016 (only there because of his dad). I actually don't mind Cuomo, but he has a real big problem: he has a smarmy face you just want to punch. Smiling blank screen Latinos might be the way go to!
It's *never* too late for Jerry Brown to run for President.
ReplyDeleteOne area where the Democrats are genuinely different than the Republicans is that they have a history of nominating for president politicians that come out of nowhere, long term governors from mid-sized to small states with mediocre records, long-term Senators who haven't accomplished much of anything during their tenure, a first term Senator last time. These people were usually not considered to be presidential material five years earlier. The only real exceptions I can think of are when they are running the White House incumbent, and ex VPs.
ReplyDeleteSo if they stick to the pattern, they will either run Hillary or find some second tier pol that few people now have heard of, as usual.
Why does nobody ever mention that Andrew Cuomo is a dead ringer for Moe Szyslak, the phenomenally ugly Bartender on the Simpsons?
ReplyDeleteMark Warner's had 2016 circled on his calendar for the past decade. I'm not sure the Ds will want to go back to a moderate white guy after 8 years of Obama, though.
ReplyDelete"It's *never* too late for Jerry Brown to run for President."
ReplyDeleteJerry Brown. Guess at his age he will never come out of the closet. He went so far as to marry a few years ago.
Villaragosa seems pretty low IQ.
Interesting comment.
ReplyDeleteA couple of other points re Cory Booker:
1) It's a little late in the day for his "our children are our greatest resource" education focus. 10 or 20 years ago, maybe not, but now? Too late. No one believes that with the right education reform and copious federal dollars Newark schools will start producing little Zuckerbergs.
2) With his background -- Rhodes Scholar, Stanford alumnus, loads of connections on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley -- the appeal of the private sector might be too much for Booker to pass up. He'd walk into a seven figure job in venture capital or investment banking, and he'd have his pick of six figure board seats at a few Fortune 100 companies. Plus, no one would care about his personal life.
OT: Vivek Wadhwa asks America "Why are you so afraid of skilled immigrants?"
ReplyDelete@DaveinHackensack
ReplyDeleteIf it's one thing Indians love to do is bring in their former countrymen and break them in as slaves. Good lucking trying to compete with 10-20k/yr H1-B workers.
As far as the 2016 Dem bench iss concerned, Martin O'Malley seems certain to run, and he is punching all the buttons from gay marriage to immigration to make sure he is the absolutely OK white 'ethnic' guy to Dem primary voters.
ReplyDeleteHey, Moe may be phenomenally ugly, but he does have a hang dog charm that makes him a good bartender.
ReplyDeleteNow I have mental images of a President Cuomo getting phone calls asking for Seymour Buttz and Amanda Hugankiss.
I don't know Steve.
ReplyDeleteThe art-works wrought by Cro-Magnon man in the Aurignician age in France, such as the Lascaux cave paintaings were spectacular - and probably represent some sort of milestone in the evolution of human cognition and, dare I say it, the human psyche.
Opinion is divided as to the actaul purpose and significance of the cave paintings, which as we all know freature wild big game that is now long extinct in Europe, but the theory most advanced, that the paintings represent some sort of magical, shamanistic purpose - in that a succesful day's hunt was somehow 'pre-programmed' in a rance-like dream state using the painted imagesas 'guides', is probably the correct one. Perhaps this is the evolutionary impulse that drove representative art.
My money is on Mark Warner from Virginia.
ReplyDeleteWarner is moderate, was a successful governor of a red state, sits in the Senate, is filthy rich, and got his start in the Democrat establishment working for Chris Dodd. He also has middle-class roots that he can contrast with Romney's background.
Wouldn't Cuomoe's divorce (and messy at that) with a Kennedy tarnish his image?
ReplyDeleteOT: Vivek Wadhwa asks America "Why are you so afraid of skilled immigrants?"
ReplyDeleteWe are not afraid of the skilled immigrants. We are afraid of all their direct relatives in the old country, that should they be granted permanent status, would be allowed to chain migrate into America. That is what scares us.
Steve - Hi, thanks for posting my email I do want to comment that your commenters who are mentioning Sen. Warner are pretty smart. I did not want to go into a Dems for '16 ramble, but I did want to tie up the best resume liberal for '16 which is Cuomo. O'Malley in Maryland is making noises, but he isn't as savvy as Cuomo. It's Cuomo.
ReplyDeleteWarner is a good moderate. He is a technocrat, and with his campaign money from bankers, he may have a pro-Wall St stink on him. He could've run in '08 and taken the moderate wing of voters as Edwards/Obama/Clinton split the libs. He chose not to, just like Sen. Bayh. Warner will be on the edge of 'freshness' in 2016, as it will be 14 years since his win as governor of Virginia (1st statewide audience). His problem is that he is moderate, and the primaries do not reward moderates unless there is a backlash vs. libs after Obama or enough decent libs to split the vote.
If you had told someone in 1994 that Hillary Clinton would run for POTUS and be outflanked on the LEFT, they would've laughed. That is how far to the left the Democrats, as well as their primary process, have become. While Occupy Wall St. flamed out, if the economy is still in the dumps (most likely), and the bankers haven't been sent to jail, the Dems might look to a fire breathing 'hang them all' liberal for their candidate.
PS - As long as we're naming names: wasn't Bill Richardson a potential 1st Latino POTUS? ...and Ken Salazar?
"It's *never* too late for Jerry Brown to run for President."
ReplyDeleteI heard Jerry give a speech in 2001. It sounded almost completely incoherent, but it appeared to me that what he was saying in his own meandering, quasi-incomprehensible way was, in so many words: "You know what I've discovered since I've been mayor of Oakland? Poor people suck. We've got to stop subsidizing them." I eventually obtained a recording of the speech and laboriously transcribed it, and, yeah, that's about what he said. But it was so verbose and inarticulate that it was unpublishable.
I have no idea whether Cory Booker is gay or not, but looking at how light-skinned he is and given his stellar academic and professional credentials, is it possible that he's attracted to white women, but can't marry one (or date one publicly) because it would be a political death knell for him as the mayor of overwhelmingly black Newark?
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Cokie Roberts... she just caused a bit of a stir by suggesting that Romney's recent visit to Europe was racially motivated to appeal to the "[white] folks at home, the "descendants of the people that he will be speaking to in Poland".
ReplyDeleteThe neocons are jumping on this with fervor, since of course we know that any form of white solidarity is the worst thing in the world. They're almost as bad as the casually self-abnegating Roberts (heard her real name is Robertstein).
But no one's mentioning how comical it is to refer to Polish-Americans as the descendants of people currently living in Poland, as if Europeans existed in a perpetual pre-20th century state as the sires of future Americans and had no present-day existence of their own.
Warner has the charisma of a dead fish
ReplyDeleteAndrew Cuomo sounds like Christopher Walken.
ReplyDelete"
ReplyDelete"Anonymous Anonymous said...
I have no idea whether Cory Booker is gay or not, but looking at how light-skinned he is and given his stellar academic and professional credentials, is it possible that he's attracted to white women, but can't marry one (or date one publicly) because it would be a political death knell for him as the mayor of overwhelmingly black Newark?"
Steve, I have a great idea for you:
Charge psychics $1 a month to leave comments on your board. By my calculations, you wouldn't have to worry about college tuition anymore.
Anon:
ReplyDeleteCokie Roberts was born and raised Catholic, and is apparently still Catholic. She married Steven Roberts, who is Jewish, and they coauthored a book on how they make their interfaith marriage work.
My guess is that Roberts is just going along with the previous talking point about Anglo-Saxon identity. These are the sorts of smears intended, as best I can tell, to poison Romney for a certain subset of liberal voters who are probably pretty unhappy with Obama for not actually being much of a liberal.
Among other things, this kind of silly smear can only work when your audience already basically wants to believe bad things about your target. The most anti-racist or anti-white-ethnic-identity Romney fan in the world would never be affected by this smear, because it has no content. It's like that weird smear about Obama being a Kenyan anti-colonialist--it never really made sense, but since it was being sold to people ready to believe any bad thing about Obama, it worked out well enough.
The really depressing thing is realizing how little politics actally has to do with any differences in policy. The actual differences in what Obama and Romney will do in office, if elected, ae best measured with a micrometer. Romney will no more radically simplify the tax code or massively downsize government than Obama will end the wars on terror and drugs. Romney isn't going to balance the budget. Obama isn't going to send any big bankers to jail, even if they did violate a few laws and enrich themselves by millions in the process.
The partisan shills and media talking heads *have* to talk up the differences, invoke identity politics and racism and socialism, spin up some kind of mini-scandal or gaffe. Otherwise, they'll be like reporters trying to drum up excitement over the Iran-Iraq war, where the only pity was that one of them would probably eventually win.
Ed:
ReplyDeleteI don't think that's right.
Reagan and Bush Jr were 2-term governors.
Bush Sr was VP and a senator
Dole was a senator
McCain was a senator
Carter, Dukakis, and Clinton were governors
Mondale was VP and a senator
Gore was a senator and VP
Kerry was a senator and governor
Obama was a first-term senator
Obama really does seem light on experience, and Carter did, too, though one term as governor is probably worth more than one term as senator to prepare you for being president. (And Carter was a special case, coming right after Watergate.) Otherwise, they seem rather similar--either multiple-term governors or long-serving senators. Kerry and McCain were also war heroes, as was Bush Sr and Dole--that might help with presidential standing, but is probably less valuable in terms of preparing you for the job.
NOTA -- there are big differences between Romney and Obama. Obama will flood the USA with as many Mexicans as he can cram in, Romney whatever his faults can read a spreadsheet and knows the politics and future are bad for him personally and his family. Yes he's an Evangelical type Christian with a universalist bent, that's Mormonism for you.
ReplyDeleteBut he's unlikely to do much but follow the Sailer Strategy. HE's a numbers guy.
And for the Dems, I think Obama is the watershed. I don't think we will EVER see a White guy or even White woman be the nominee from the Dems again. They are all in their coalition anti-White guys. Non Whites particularly BLACK and then Hispanic pull in Blacks/Hispanics, coastal anti-White Whites (basically White unmarried women who get SOME AA and HATE HATE HATE Beta White males like a Twilight Fan hates Kristin Stewart), and moneyed radical elites, the aristocracy determined to pull down the remnants of a Republic.
That means in the Primaries, BLACK is your best bet. Probable nominees would be MICHELLE OBAMA, OPRAH WINFREY, and Hank Johnson. Yeah the Guam tipping over guy. He's BLACK. And that means a LOT. That was Obama's key to victory. Don't think every other Black guy won't copy it, the whole point of the Democratic Party is a race to cook and eat the goose that lay the golden eggs (the White middle class).
Aided by a White Aristocracy that burns with hatred for the remnants of the Republic and wants a "Red Monarchy" basically a socialist crony capitalist system like the semi-monarachy/oligarchy in France facing a Muslim/Black meltdown in the cities. Same process.
Cory Booker has been linked to a thin white woman who was VERY high in the Corzine administration. They have never been public, but it is an open secret.
ReplyDeleteThen again Ed Koch was linked to Bess Myerson, which reminds me of a great political slogan...
When Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch ran against each other for NYC Mayor in 1977, Cuomo's unofficial slogan was: Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.
"The art-works wrought by Cro-Magnon man in the Aurignician age in France, such as the Lascaux cave paintaings were spectacular - and probably represent some sort of milestone in the evolution of human cognition and, dare I say it, the human psyche."
ReplyDeleteHave you ever wondered if they were forgeries?
I for one become skeptic, if something survives 30.000 years unharmed, and then deteriorate within decades after it is found.
"slumber_j said...
ReplyDeleteWhy does nobody ever mention that Andrew Cuomo is a dead ringer for Moe Szyslak, the phenomenally ugly Bartender on the Simpsons?"
I thought he looked like Virgil Solozzo, or rather the great character actor, Al Letieri, who played him in the Godfather.
"... no one's mentioning how comical it is to refer to Polish-Americans as the descendants of people currently living in Poland, as if Europeans existed in a perpetual pre-20th century state as the sires of future Americans and had no present-day existence of their own."
ReplyDeleteIt's even more comical when one considers that Poland didn't even exist on a map when many of the ancestors of today's "Polish-Americans" arrived on U.S. soil.
"Andrew Cuomo sounds like Christopher Walken."
ReplyDeleteCooking with Christopher Walken
Incidentally, re Cory Booker: it's worth following him on Twitter (https://twitter.com/corybooker) just to see the jarring dichotomy in the tweets he responds to or retweets. On one end of the spectrum are fawning messages from fans in Silicon Valley and elsewhere (e.g., praising his recent Stanford commencement speech). On the other end of the spectrum are messages from Newark residents chastising him in Ebonics about local crime, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe first Hispanic president of the USA was of course Martin van Buren, whose great-great-great grandfather emigrated from the Spanish Netherlands.
ReplyDelete