Monday May 23, 2011

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the latest doings among Republican Presidential candidates -- Mitch Daniels out, Herman Cain on his way to a landslide victory.

I prepared a sidebar about Newt Gingrich's latest adventures, but had no room for it, so I will share it here with you, the real people:

Gingrich took a rightblogger beatdown last week for calling the Paul Ryan Medicare plan "right-wing social engineering," and went to great lengths to redeem himself for it, even calling Rush Limbaugh to explain. Rightbloggers didn't give him much credit for that, though, continuing to call him a RINO, a pinhead, and, most damningly, "the new John McCain."

DrewM at Ace of Spades described a better way for GOP candidates to approach Ryan's politically risky plan: "My advice would be… punt with a twist." That is, they should make "right respectful statements" about it, and then "honestly talk about reform in broad strokes and make it clear some sort of reform will happen," but refrain from producing "a thousand page draft bill in the name of 'specifics'" which Democrats will demand just so they can "have something to club the candidate over the head with… We should give our primary candidates some room for plausible deniability."

Pete Spiliakos at No Left Turns agreed: "If the Republican nominee is running on an unmodified [Ryan Plan]," he said, "they will be worthy of respect, but they will have missed an opportunity to give themselves the best chance to win and implement the change we need."

That's the ticket -- support the plan, but keep it on the down-low. And last weekend, Gingrich was allowed back on the Sunday talk shows to do just that.

Aaaand... scene. Do give the Voice column a look, though; there's plenty funsies in it, particularly having to do with Daniels' wife (that bitch!) and Cain, who must have Ross Perot wondering where all this pro-businessman support was when he was running for President.