Shot in the Dark

Batting Order

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

When I played beer league softball, the coach would announce the batting line-up for every inning. “Smith at bat. Johnson on deck. Doakes in the hole.”

Right now Trump is at bat, but he’s not eligible to run for re-election. Who’s on deck? Who’s in the hole? MAGA Conservatives need to get their candidate lineup in order lest we get stuck running another milquetoast Romney or mad McCain against media darling Gavin Newsom. 

Joe Doakes

 

That’s gonna be the problem. Whatever his faults and virtues, Trump is more a personality than a political movement.  The likes of 

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Mitch Berg

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6 responses to “Batting Order”

  1. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    Did something happen to JD Vance?

  2. SmithStCrx Avatar
    SmithStCrx

    I’ve been seeing stuff like this a lot recently. Joe isn’t the only talking about it on the national stage, and half the Garage Logic crew just went off on the MNGOP on Thursday for not being a totalitarian, top down, elitist run Party because we’ve got something like a dozen candidates running for Governor. Oh course, no conservative likes to think of themselves that way, but that’s what Joe and Joe are advocating.
    Currently, both the MN GOP and the RNC settle on their candidate through a more or less grass roots process. We get our Presidential Candidate through a survivor like gauntlet of various State Primaries or Caucuses and fundraising attrition. We get our Gubernatorial candidate at the State Convention after a series of other conventions, and, at least so far, that Endorsed Candidate has survived the State Mandated Primary that is open to anyone willing to pay the filing fee or collect enough signatures. And of course, fundraising prowess helps the winner succeed.
    Sometimes we get good candidates. Sometimes we get bad candidates.
    Sometimes we get successful candidates. Sometimes we get losing candidates.
    Especially in Minnesota, the current system gets a lot of hate because we haven’t had any successful statewide candidates in 20 years, and longer for a non-incumbent.

    So, what’s the proposed alternative?
    “The GOP needs to get their act together and not let all these worthless candidates run!!”
    Okay, how? More importantly, who makes that decision? The Party Chair? The Executive Committee?
    If that’s how things worked on the National level as a response to Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 Campaign, your 2016 Candidate would’ve been Jeb Bush. The “Establishment” by and large tried to stop Trump. And remember, John McCain got the nod in 2008 largely because he was the “next one up.” Dick Cheney wasn’t going to run himself, and McCain was the runner up to Bush in 2000.
    Here in Minnesota, do you want Chair Plechash to control who can run for the Endorsement? Maybe a Committee made up of Plechash, Bergstrom, and the 8 CD Chairs? And even if that could happen, ANYBODY could still run in the Primary because that’s the LAW in Minnesota. Also, who selects the gatekeeper? We’d probably have to a Convention.
    Or maybe we should do what the DFL does. The grassroots endorse and the Party Elite re-appropriate Party resources to tip the Primary to their preferred, ie “electable,” candidate.
    So, go back to 2022. A State Convention of primarily first time attendees that have more animosity towards the “establishment” than they have institutional knowledge, endorsed Dr. Scott Jensen. Despite having Matt Birk as his running mate, Jensen had no chance at winning against Walz. Jensen got fewer totals votes in November than Kim Crockett did for SoS, FFS. So, if David Hann was to act like Ken Martin routinely did, and he was presented with an un-electable yet endorsed candidate, what do you want him to do? Maybe he should get all of the Party’s big donors to support Kendall Qualls, the runner up for the Endorsement. But if we have to copy the DFL because what they do works, then Hann would be more likely to get the donors and the “Independent” groups to back outgoing State Senator and Majority Leader Gazelka.
    That’s what you get when you try to engineer and preselect candidates for the sake of unity. It works for the Democrats because they tend to fall in line by Election Day, but that’s AFTER they have a knock-down drag-out of a Primary. If we went back 7 or 8 years and looked at the Democrats’ field of 2020 POTUS Candidates, Joe Biden wasn’t at the top of the list. Harris and Warren were. Or at least, those were the 2 most likely candidates according to the Republicans commenting about that Race.

    The Republicans biggest problem is that we have large chunks of the GOP base that just check out after their preferred candidate loses the Endorsement or the Primary. (Our second biggest problem is that those infighting groups continue on for cycles after the candidates stop being involved.) How many Mike Murphy voters didn’t show up for Jensen despite Mike’s Convention Stage endorsement? How many Qualls supporters checked out after Rochester? Had it gone the other way, how many of the Jensen ideologues would’ve walked out if Kendall had won that endorsement?

    The GOP is a grassroots Party because we are a collection of individuals. We don’t need collectivist solutions. That’ll only drive more people away.

  3. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Probably the biggest problem with Trump is not just that he’s a personality more than a politician, though that is true. His biggest problem is that his cult of personality is actively destroying the “farm clubs” on which the future of the GOP rests. To work with Trump, you’ve got to accept all kinds of asinine ideas, and that is going to leave a mark when that person wants to run for office in the future.

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  5. bosshoss429 Avatar
    bosshoss429

    jdm,
    My thoughts, exactly.
    I have some friends that don’t think he’s going to be the one. Even though I’d love to see him as the next POTUS, I think there are too many members of the RINO faction that will sabotage him. A lot of those same people are happy to be subservient to the Dems.

  6. Bill C Avatar
    Bill C

    SmithStCroix,

    If only we could tell voters to grow the hell up and vote for the Republican even if it isn’t THEIR Republican… given the close vote totals, maybe we wouldn’t have had 8 years of Dayton and 7 years of Walz, and our state would be in a helluva lot better situation than it is currently. We criticize democrats for “voting for a pair of wind-up chattering teeth as long as it has a D after its name”. That’s how they win elections.

    The worst Republican is still better than ANY democrat.

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